First time investor question

[Nathan Smith]

Hello,

I would like to ask everyone's advice on something. My name is Nathan and I am a new member to bigger pockets. My wife and I started listening to bigger pockets podcasts within the last two months after reading Rich Dad Poor Dad and changing our thinking on money. We started looking into real estate as a way to invest because it made the most sense to us, and also partially because my wife's dad is a real estate investor and is able to mentor us. I am still in physical therapy school (I graduate in May), so we have not actually started investing yet (we also only started really learning about 2 months ago, so we are still very new). After school, the plan is to travel for a year doing travel therapy. We have been trying to figure out how soon we will be able to get into investing. We originally thought we would have to wait until after travel therapy, but we had an idea that we wanted to post here and see what people thought.

Instead of waiting until we are done with travel therapy, we thought that maybe we would have the opportunity to start investing in the gap between when I graduate in May and when I take my licensing boards in July. We were thinking of finding a multi-family (duplex, triplex, or fourplex) to try and buy and then rent out while we were traveling. We would house-hack and use one of the units as our home base (since during travel therapy you have to have a permanent residence to return to for tax purposes) and rent out the remaining units to pay for the other expenses. We are planning on settling in the same area as my father-in-law (Iowa), so we were thinking about asking him if he could be our property manager while we are away on assignments. The alternative is renting a place and trying to put it up on airbnb in order to recoup our expenses, and then getting into investing a year or two later.

As for financing, we are poor students and don't have a lot of cash. So what we came up with is this: we could ask my father-in-law to cosign the mortgage for us since my W2 job won't be permanent until I pass my boards. Until then, I have to be part-time during school or seasonal during the summer between graduation and boards. We also don't have much of a credit history. For the down payment, we could take out extra on a student loan at an 8% interest rate (we will be having to take out another one for next semester anyways) and use that. If we get a good deal and are able to get a property, then the renters will be paying it off. If we are not able to, then we can repay it in a matter of months and only owe whatever interest accumulated on it in the months we had it.

Here are some of the pros we listed out:

• We make the first step towards investing.
• We have a home base where we want to settle, and other people are paying for it
• We start gaining experience
• We are able to focus our savings during travel therapy for future properties we might want more efficiently
• We have someone close who we trust to manage the property while we are gone

Cons:

• Relying on the father-in-law to cosign on the mortgage... risk on his part
• We are still fairly new, although by that point we will have taken about 6-9 months to educate ourselves
• We have no cash, we will have to get creative with financing
• Between this and student loans, we will be up to our eyeballs in debt
• We will be absent landlords most of the time

So we are trying to decide whether or not this is worth the risk. Should we wait until we have some cash reserves we have saved for down payments and are settled in the same area? Or do you think this is a good plan, and now we just have to educate ourselves more and find a deal in a few months?

I know this is a long post, so if you made it this far, thanks for reading! Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!