Ready to purchase our first deal!

[Ryan Strickland]

Hello everyone,

My Girlfriend and I are finally ready to purchase our first deal. I would love to get some opinions on the different approaches to this. 

Currently we have a home we own with a mortgage that is less than half what it will rent for. We are working on finishing some repairs to get it rent ready and we will be using my VA home loan to purchase a duplex-fourplex (to live in) if we are able to find one that will cashflow. We also plan to use the $40K on a home equity line of credit from our current home to purchase another duplex-fourplex.

This will be our first set of rentals so I wanted to see if this may be a bit to much for us all at once. We both have full time jobs and I work a lot of overtime since I am in IT. We will have about $10K is emergency money left on the home equity line of credit after the $40K. 

I had also thought about trying the Brrrr strategy and using my $40K for the repair and holding costs but i dont have a contractor to work with at the moment that I know. If anyone has a contractor they work with on a regular basis they would like to recommend that would be fantastic. 

We do not plan to pull any money out of any of the properties for about 5 years so we can build up a large buffer for each. 

Any recommendations or opinions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!