Are San Diego and Orange County too expensive for a beginner?

[Bernard Royal]

Hello! First and foremost I want to say how much I appreciate all of your advice ahead of time. It has been about 2-3 months that I have been obsessing over the knowledge and practice of real estate investing. Basically to make a long story short I recently just moved from San Diego to Irvine California for a new job opportunity in which I will most likely be making lower six figures at start, and at the moment do not have any capital to invest. In a years time I'm hoping to have a decent down payment to invest into my first place to live which I have been extremely interested in perhaps a duplex or triplex using an FHA loan as a start to my long term investment career. Now a lot of the books and other material I read, when showing examples of situations of certain purchases I easily know they are not speaking of these purchases in San Diego or Southern California really in general as the price is dramatically different than the price point of many So Cal real estate. I mean many duplex, triplex, foreplex in my area are easily 600k-2m which is almost discouraging for a beginner investor as myself. I mean I'm not to sure what to even do at this point. Not that I wouldn't be able to afford it but that would take much time as well as pretty creative financing to even begin to my understanding. Any advice PLEASE would be absolutely great THANK YOU. (Excuse spelling or grammer as I am currently squezzing this post in while at work on my phone)