First Time Investor: Planning on House Hacking, Questions/Advice

[Timothy Hildebrandt]

Hello Everyone,

I have been through the forms and listening to the podcasts and believe I am ready to take the plunge into real estate investing. I will start by explaining the situation and with that hopefully someone out there can point me in a direction or give me advice. Its not that i don't trust my realtors advice i just know its great to get multiple opinions. 

Currently we own a 4 bed 3 bath single family in MN, we bought at a good time and made some major updates and after closing costs and realtor fees should be able to clear 100K  (which is being very conservative) We have lived in the house for over 4 years which means no taxes on the sale. 

Because my wife is amazing I able to get her to agree to house hack our next home. The goal is to purchase a multifamily that hopefully needs work, as I am a handyman on the side and can do most all of the fixes myself. We plan to live in it for a year and then move out. We are hoping to purchase our forever home the year after so not house hacking continually.

We are selling our house as it seems that it is the top of the market here and we don't want to live in it forever.

I suppose my questions would be as follows:

1. Is this a good plan?

2. Should we use the VA loan to purchase one multifamily that we live in and our other money to put a down payment for a 2nd?

3. Is it worth buying a turn key or getting ones we fix up to re-finance and gain capital?

4. Should we be buying single family instead of multi-family

I guess what I am really looking for is, those of you that have done this before or are investors//flippers, what would you do in my situation?

Thanks,

Tim