Buy two MF homes at once? Possible?

[Sara Furlong]

As I've said before, we're totally new at this.

We're in the process of selling our single-family home to buy a multi-family we'll owner occupy.

So far, we're interested in two properties:

-A triplex that is full of happy tenants that would make us at least $1,000/month. (Priced at $134K, we'd hope for at least a $10K price drop)

-A duplex that is near my sick parents, that we actually want  to live in with our children, and that seems very easy, solid, and manageable. (Priced at $75K, but we again want a good price drop because there's an exterior staircase we'd need to fix that will cost us $15K.)

I would love to buy them both at the same time. In my fantasy, we'd buy the bigger one first so we could do 3.5% down with an FHA. And then do the smaller one because the 20% we'd have to put down would be smaller.

Background - we're not wealthy! We have a small emergency fund of about $10K and about $25K equity in our home.

MY QUESTIONS;

-Is this even possible?

-What could keep this from happening?

-Is this idea stupid? Since we're new at this, should we just buy one property as we get our feet wet with land lording? Should we wait to make sure we don't have any big repair surprises? Other reasons to wait?

-Other thoughts?