44 Years Old w/ $250,000 to Invest

[Kasey Libby]

I am a 44 year old lawyer who is seeking to transition to real estate investing with a goal of retiring from my legal practice and making a living on income from real estate. I have $250,000 to invest and am interested in different perspectives on how I should start given my goal of replacing my income (or at least getting a significant start on replacing my legal practice income). A motivating factor is that I am not satisfied in my legal career and enjoy many aspects of real estate. I'm a 100% green newbie though, and am at least aware there are a lot of things I need to learn before I start throwing money at any projects. My primary question for this post is, with the money I have in hand, what would be the best types of investments I could start with to get a significant start on real estate as an income source, and what could I reasonably expect in income if I succeeded on any given project suggested. I live in the City of Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia and would be interested in any community in the metro-Atlanta area, but preferably north of I-20 since that is where I mostly travel for other reasons (including extended family - it'd be kind of nice if I could invest in or near an area where my folks live so I could drop by to see them more often while also looking for and managing real estate). Thanks for any help.

[Ryan B.]

Kasey,

I'm a retired attorney (44 years old) and it sounds like I'm where you want to be.  As you will find, there are tons of different niches.  What I did was I bought single family homes to rent.  I bought them all to be located on my typical drive to work so that I could stop by on my way to or way home from my legal job and self manage the rentals.  Eventually, I acquired enough to quit.  It didn't fully replace my income, but it was enough.  

With that seed capital, I'd buy a house using the cash (if you can do so in your market), do any needed repairs, and then I'd use delayed financing to get a significant portion of the cash back out.  I am married, so I put a number of houses only in my name and then a number of houses only in my wife's name.  That way, we could get 10 conforming loans each.