"House Hacking" vs BRRR Duplex

[Jordan West]

Hello everyone!

So, I've been studying up on real estate for roughly 4 years now, back when I was working part time and focusing on increasing my W2 wages. As time has gone on, it has always been an undercurrent on my motivations. Recently, I was lucky to achieve a truly massive (for me, cute to others) salary jump allowing me to comfortably save 60% of my income. I consider myself to be under one year from beginning to obtain my first property, and therefore a complete and utter newbie somewhere in the beginning of the dunning-kruger graph. Now, heres the conundrum and I am hoping I can get a little bit of help in deciding either/or:

My current rent is nearly 900/mo, everything but internet included. I split all household costs by percentage-of-income with my live in girlfriend, so I pay about 70% of everything. For the style of complex, care, attention and luxury I consider it an incredible value. My options as I see them for starting out are as follows:

1.) Studiously chase a Duplex in a less than stellar condition, get it to an acceptable level and rent it out. Drive a bargain on the buy and if the deal fails, c'est la vie theres plenty of fish etc etc... until I have it one my hands. Fix it up using my experience in such matters from working in my families live-in shoestring budget 5plex from my younger days and rent it... using the rough and inaccurate "napkin math" of rental prices vs average mortgage cost of the listing price, most are worth taking a closer at look to see if they make sense at the micro level. This gives me a property with a comfortable net cash flow of around 500/mo with the rough estimates, but not enough to outweigh my 900/mo rent.

2.) The rote FHA house hack of living in a unit of a fourplex. Of all the ones that I've seen, none of them give a positive cash flow at 3 units with napkin math. At best, I have a -200/mo cash flow. Very best, listing price. This, however, correlates to a 700/mo savings compared to my current living situation. However I will be MUCH more leveraged with a FHA 4plex compared to a duplex. I would be taking on more than 5x as much debt for an increase of "income" over a duplex of about 40%, and if I make any improvements they will likely not increase my equity to debt percentage to a level that will allow me to really get money out of a refinance, compared to a duplex.

What are your opinions on this, if the house hack is still worth it in your eyes, at what level is it less worth it?

Thank you!

Edit: I apologize, I should clarify my math. Though I have seen it alternately praised and denounced, the simplest for me to wrap my head around is to take the average local rents, multiply by 2 (for duplex, obviously..), divide in half and subtract the mortgage rates.