I'm new to this, young, and I want to start a snowball. Advice appreciated!

[Chris H.]

Hello all.

So, I'm young (early twenties). I work a professional job and have a very respectable income. I live in a low-cost-of-living region in Washington state. My parents were active real estate investors (my mother a former realtor, my father going over to full time land lording after retirement).

Over the past year, studying investing in my spare time has become a very active hobby; I day trade forex in small amounts, buy and hold stocks (dividends + selling occasional covered calls), and have been trying to in general be very frugal and conservative (no cable TV, negotiated down all my living costs, got a roommate in to cover the mortgage) and put away a very large percentage of my income. Before I started really crunching numbers and embracing the concept of investing, I thought the best thing I could do would be to pay off my mortgage, so a lot of money got funneled that way. I bought a foreclosure two years ago (conventional, 5.25% interest), fixed it up, and now have well over 50% equity.

I'm rather enamored with the idea of living on as little as possible, taking my sizable professional income, and creating a snowball of investments (re-investmenting all proceeds year after year in more investments), until I can eventually retire and take on projects that interest me in my free time, or study, or travel.

I just discovered BiggerPockets and watched some video interviews. I was hoping I could bounce my ideas off of some of you more experienced professionals. I don't know how some of this will be perceived, and I imagine there are lots of young eager investors who come in here excited with silly expectations only to get shot down. So, have at me!

I will first outline my situation:

My biggest issue is this; I have the money, but not so much free time. I do value preserving time above all else at the moment, as a result. And maybe that's fundamentally incompatible with land lording, and maybe you'll tell me that. I'm currently intending to use property managers, realizing that'll cut in to my margins, but at least might enable me to maintain my 8-5 career while adding properties to my collection. If I ever leave my day job to do this full time, a property manager would obviously go.

As to the money; I have a decent amount in savings, an even more decent amount in my stock account, and a HELOC with 40k available. I was thinking of (since I've fixed up my house) refinancing my home FHA to cash out ~40k less ~3k in closing costs, and get my interest rate to the 3.8% range. Altogether I could probably raise ~$55-60k.

I have good credit. As of yesterday it was at 705; however, I just bought my second house and signed up for a half dozen credit cards (I churn; get them on promotions all on the same day, put my spending on it to get rewards, pay them off every month, call and downgrade the card to a no-fee one before the annual fee comes around. Collected about $3k in rewards this time around) in the last 90 days, so my report is full of recent inquiries that'll drop off and I'm sure it'll go back up to the previous value of 740 soon enough.

So as I mentioned, I just bought my first investment property (second property). I got it for $55,000 conventional, 20% down, $3k closing costs, fixed it up for $5k and am interviewing tenants for $850 a month. I've run the math and am expecting an annual return of over 20% of what I paid in cash after property management costs and principal/interest/insurance/taxes (counting principal as losses). I imagine my real return (with potential vacancies, repairs, bad tenants) won't be near that over the long term, however.

So, I like this idea. Buy foreclosures with a conventional loan, only take the deal if I feel I can get a ~20% annual ROI (with repairs and 20% down payment figured in), and I can buy maybe two more right now while maintaining an emergency fund and 1-2 a year.

This was what I was going to do.

Maybe I can do more?

I'm looking for ideas and options to explore. I feel like there is a huge opportunity for borrowed money at the moment because of the historic and artificially low interest rates. Leverage. Can I do better than 1-2 houses a year?

I don't know the slightest thing about owner financing. One of the interviews I watched talked about finding people who can't meet their monthly payments and taking the mortgage from them. Can anyone point me towards resources about this? Can I do this, fix the house up, and then refinance to get a lower interest rate?

What about hard money? The interest rates look too high, but are there perhaps any tricks to it? (Borrow hard money, buy a house, fix it up, go to a bank and get a conventional mortgage on it to pay back the borrowed hard money?)

What other ways are there to get in to a house with little down so that I could pick up multiple? Or am I off my rocker?

Finally; if anyone here has read Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, I am a stereotypical Maven. In other words, I tend to obsessively collect information about topics, almost to a fault, and love numbers. (Totally new to real estate, of course)

A friend of mine is a true Connector. He's the type of person who "collects" people, and has friends and contacts in almost every field. We've had discussions about the idea of starting a business of some sort for a while, but without a clear direction. Would there be a use I could have for someone with this particular talent, that would be worth some sort of commission or cut? Perhaps if I'm going to be contacting people for owner financing deals or working with lenders to try to find these types of people? Or would it not be worth any additional cost to my margin (keeping in mind that time constraints will be my biggest limitation)?

Thank you all so much for reading through my little novel and offering me any wisdom.