What is the fastest way to become financially free?

[Mary Jay]

Hi guys!

You have helped me a lot already to understand things about real estate. I have realized that I have been doing things wrong...(Like negative cash flow on my two rentals, etc) ...So I figured that may be you could help me out to figure out what is the best way to get financially free? Everybody probably has different meaning of what financially free  means to them. To me being financially free means  to be able to quit my job, which I am really, really, really tired of...

Once I quit my job I probably will need about 6K per month for my expenses from the cash flow...

How to achieve that the quietest way and the way that produces the lowest risk? 

Disclaimer: I am not very good at saving money ( being a single mom of a teenager son who needs a car and will go to college in 3 years is not helping my savings either). I think at current condition I can save about 10-12k per year for downpayments...I doubt I will be able to save 20K per year...

Here are few options that I thought of:

1) Option number one: If I focus on cheap single family houses. For instance, if I buy one cheap SFH for 20K somewhere in the Midwest and it will bring me about 400-500$ per month in rent. IF I have 12 of those, there is my 5-6K cashflow per month... If I pay cash for them, cash that unfortunately I do not have. So I would have to finance them. If I finance them then my cashflow goes down, so I will have to do probably 20-24 cheap houses in order to produce 6 K income ...

Positives: easy to pay them off and be debt free... So 12 houses will cost me probably around 240K if I buy each house for 20K. If I finance them then I will need 20 houses so it will be 400K leveraged to produce 6K income after mortgages are paid......

2) Option number two: Buy multifamily. Lets say a fourplex brings me anywhere from 800$- to1K per month in cashflow. Then I will need 6 fourplexes...Fourplexes cost more money than single family...It can cost anywhere from 50K to 200K per fourplex... So 6 fourplexes probably will be anywhere from 300K- 1.2ml....So I probably will be in debt longer and means the risk is higher... I do not really like debt, buy I understand that it is a necessary tool.

3) Option number 3: While I am working at my W2 job I will qualify for financing. So may be I should buy those 6 forplexes and then when I hopefully quit my job in 3-4 years, I will be paying off those forplexes while also buying one cheap single family per year with cash? (Hopefully I will be able to save some cash from the cash flow to invest) 

Which strategy would you chose and why?