Seeking Advice for a newcomer

[Rafael Morales]

Hello everyone, my situation is as follows:

I'm moving to Texas for my job after graduating college and the job I landed as an engineer will be paying 80k/year + some bonuses, which is pretty solid for a first job. The reason I give my salary numbers was not some kind of weird flex, but just to show my financial situation and hopefully give you guys a better idea of where I stand and where I should go next. The goal however, is to create financial freedom via multiple income streams and thus I've been looking to get into Real Estate investing, particularly rental properties since that line of investing interests me the most. 

I should add that in terms of "theory knowledge" about Real estate and analyzing deals, I've been reading/studying a lot from Youtube/Podcasts/Articles etc.. So id say I'm mentally aware of the whole process and what's to come, but naturally I don't have actual experience until I start and that's never changing unless I do.   

when I move to Texas (Austin specifically) I'm gonna be paying some pretty absurd rents since rents have gone up in that area. So my line of thought was "wait, why don't I just pay the same or less in a mortgage payment?". What I mean by that is, why don't I get into Real Estate right now instead of paying rents and "get my feet wet" with the business to see if Its for me?

Worst case scenario, I might not like it but financially speaking I should still be able to handle 1 property until I'm able to flip it to someone else.  Middle to best case scenario, things go well and I want more + I got some early experience (Im 24 so maybe not super early but you know).  

The idea was to find a multi-family (duplex or more) a bit away from Austin (Looking at San Antonio area where housing is slightly more affordable) and use FHA financing with a down payment of 3.5-5% to set myself up in the business. This also satisfies my need of needing a place to live since I HAVE to move anyways. The logic of a multi-family is of course to house hack while I live in one of the units and reduce my expenses, and after I move out later on, I can work with a property management company for the rest.

You might be asking why don't I just rent in the San Antonio area in the first place? Well, I could but, if I'm gonna go the easy route I might as well rent closer to some friends I have in the Austin area. However, if its something that's gonna head start me into my future of Real Estate investing then I'm okay with some extra work and looking a little bit farther away from Austin.

I guess the whole point of this is to ask if my train of thought makes sense or if I'm being overly naïve and I should just rent. Who knows, maybe some of you pros out there started from a similar situation to mine? Id love to hear some thoughts, thanks!