How do I drive growth?

[Rick Novotny]

I am 30 years old and doing decently well. I have a W2 income of about $140,000 and own 11 rental units as a side gig with a business partner. We own a single family, three duplexes, and a 4-plex. My partner makes roughly the same amount as we work at the same company. The goal is to quit our jobs and live a completely free life in just a few years from now. We outsource all of the day-to-day operations in our business via property managers so we can focus on creating income through our jobs. We only do the acquisitions and we buy long distance.

At this point we think I'm going to move into his house with him and his wife in a couple months. Then we will take a HELOC out on his house (probably $150,000), add that to capital we can create from the jobs, and buy another property with about 20 units. The goal is to scale with less closings. We will snowball the HELOC with all property profits and job savings then do it again. At which point, we should easily be able to live off the real estate rents. We can probably make this happen in 2 years time.

Is this an acceptable plan? Are there some options we haven't considered for faster growth?

I personally save $5,000-$6,000 per month from the job alone and have no personal debt except for $27,000 on a 2018 Lexus IS300. I recently sold my personal residence and walked away with about $50,000 cash. I could pay off the car easily, but the interest rate is low. So I would almost rather use the cash to buy more rentals.

Thoughts? Thanks!

[Rick Novotny]

@Michael Glaspie We just closed on the 4-plex about 3 weeks ago with a portfolio lender local to our investment market. Traditional lenders were becoming more and more difficult to deal with every time we closed on something. On paper we should be really easy to lend to, but the fannie/freddie lenders are ridiculous. The portfolio lender made the process incredibly easy and he's ready to scale with us.