Should I House-hack to start Real Estate Investing?

[Stephon Broughton]

Hello BP! I am currently a college student and I live at home in Toledo, Oh to save money from those heavy college expenses. I make decent money for my age (Around $30,000 earned income and $8,000 in school refund checks per year) and I've been wanting to get into real estate since I was 16. Well, I made a goal that I would save $15,000 this year and get started in early 2019 unless a deal came up I couldn't let go. Well, some things have changed. My initial plan was to get an FHA loan and either house-hack or rent it out and continue to live at home but now my girlfriend wants to move together and we agreed on late 2019 but then we moved it up to late 2018! This will throw me off course because now instead of saving for investing I'm finding myself saving to pay someone else to live. Now at home, I help my mom out a lot but I told her I'm going to have to scale back because I have these goals. She's fine with that but now that I have these expenses coming up I'm not sure what to do. I've talked to her and let her know that a smarter investment would be to buy a home rent out the basement or something. Nope, she feels we're not ready for that. I feel like if we lived in an investment property we could do it and handle the expenses with both of our income. Our household income together would be $55,000 per year plus an extra $10,000 in school refund checks because we both were fortunate enough to not have student loans. This is way more than we need to live because this is about $20,000 or more more than we lived off of last year because of promotions and pay raises at work.

My options: 

Buy a house (multi-family hopefully) before this goes down and force her to live with me because I would have this house?

Just rent for six months somewhere and try to find a house once the lease is up?

Push my plans back and wait for the market to crash and then invest?

Not move at all and continue with goals?

Leave the country and everyone in it? (This one is a joke)

I just would like to get some insights from people and what they would do in this situation. Any comments and advice help!