Need Advice: Frustrated and Stalled on Starting Again

[Mike Stillwater]

Hi everyone.  Just some quick background on me, I'm a former investor who successfully house hacked 2 SFRs and cash flowed them for around 10 years.  I managed them myself and have a good agent who always found us good tenants that left our properties without vacancies for the time we owned them.  At the time I owned them I mainly used them as supplemental income and unfortunately didn't really see it as something I really wanted to expand on.  I've been successful with my career and I really didn't realize that I actually had a passion for investing in real estate.  To make a long story short my wife and I decided to sell them at the top of the market.  We used the money to purchase a better primary residence.  

It took me a year here at our new house to realize I wanted to start my own investing business.  After a lot of research and learning a lot of the things I didn't know about purchasing and managing the cash for the rentals I came up with my criteria and plan.  The frustration I ran into is I came up with a plan to use our large amount of equity in our primary as down payments for some rentals.  My wife ended up being completely against the idea and that left me with the inability to fund down payments and cash to close.  I've been spinning my wheels now for several weeks trying to come up with some way to come up with the money other than old fashion saving up which would take me several years.  Any advice would be greatly appreciated.  I've looking to buy multi-unit properties with the goal of buying apartments.