Buying property & not having enough money for the rest.

[Alex Ascencio]

Rookie in Aurora, IL (Chicago suburb) looking for my first SFH or multi-family home to buy and hold. The issue that I am running into is that I have enough funds to put down the 20% for a conventional mortgage but it will pretty much leave me with limited funds to do any repairs, or just have emergency money in general for emergencies.

I have been hesitant to buy my first investment property due to this. How do people do it? Should I just take the risk and hope my analysis and all the due diligence will pay off, or do I look for a private lender or even possibly a HML?

Unfortunately I already have a primary home, so I can't do an FHA, live in it for a year and then rent it out.

Any advice would be much appreciated. 

[Kerry Baird]

Or, chiming in on the post above mine, even if someone won't finance the entire thing, they may be willing to carry back a second mortgage of 10%.  I like to get a lump sum of money plus a stream of money when selling.  That can get you into a property for the 10% and then use your own funds to improve.  

I've bought a number of rehabs, haven't yet used hard money, but have used cards.  When I was doing a number of rehabs, we'd have a Mohawk carpet card, and get the same flooring in each house.  And a Home Depot card for certain items, and a Lowe's card for the maple cabinets I liked, etc.  I was young and didn't have high balances available, but it worked to get the repairs done until we could turn the house.  When we were doing more fixers (3 a month), we used Wells Fargo and Countrywide with their slow approval process, and high closing costs.  We'd buy a house, fix it in a couple of weeks and sell in three months or so.  I have realized that the quick money of HMLs enables folks to do more deals, at similar costs.  Sometimes it is better to pay more for the short term use of money.  :D