Need Your Advice Please!!!

[Wali Rahman]

Hello everyone, hope you are all safe and well. I got a question that I wanted to get peoples thoughts on and would greatly appreciate your ideas, opinions and advice:


Quick background of what I got going on. My wife and I both are working, we don't have kids but are expecting. We both live with my family. Our expenses are very minimal since we all share the bills in the house. Due to this my wife and I save a decent amount of money. We put away around $55k a year. We want to get our own 4 walls especially with a baby on the way. We are expecting in April of next year. We both plan on working even after having our firstborn. We would like to stay near by to my folks so they can help out with looking after the child. Fortunately my uncle has a near by property and is willing to rent it out to us. I've calculated the rent amount and expenses if we were to stay at my uncles place and our annual savings would come down to maybe around $40k-$45k/year.

Over the past 5 years that we have been together, we have saved up around a quarter of a million dollars in cash. I was thinking of starting to invest and buy properties as rentals (single families and if the deal makes sense buy a multi family). I would like to use our savings and buy 1 property per year. I figured if I use $80k-$100k per house for a down payment+closing costs etc then I could potentially do 2 properties (buy 1 house per year for 2 years) and I would like to make around $500-$1000/month from each house. While those 2 years go by we would continue to keep saving and every two years we would save close to $100k and then get our third place. Buying 3 properties I would hope we are making $1500-$3000/month in cash flow . That would mean that our annual cash flow savings would jump to $58k-$81k per year. 


We want to keep doing this for about 4 years. By this point the baby is 4 and around that time we may want to have our next child. By staying at my uncles place, per year I'm spending $19,200. My question is should I go along this route or should I instead get my own place? My expenses shoot up PLUS id eat into a chunk of our cash savings for down payment. On the other hand that almost $20k per year goes to paying down my uncles rental and doesnt do anything for me other than keep our annual savings high. Please advise and let me know what you guys thinks. I would greatly appreciate it.