Feeling Conflicted

[Tom Howard]

Let me first introduce myself. I'm Tomas and I finally decided to become a member. I was a very active reader here but I decided to try and engage in conversation here. I feel like I'll feel a lot more confident with the helpful community of BP.

So, most of what I've been doing is just listening to podcasts and reading books before I joined here. I always read the forums a lot before joining. I got to the point where I felt confident enough and I was going to close on a house in mid August. (writing this it might seemed that I rushed into that but I've been doing my hw for over 7 months, I just don't want to drag on with how I've been studying) I don't have much money so I wanted to build up a little portfolio of sfrs. Once I've gotten a fair amount and I have some income coming in every month I wanted to go bigger and invest that into apartments. The reason I feel a bit conflicted is because a buddy of mine told me "no man, listen to this." and pointed me to a few Grant Cardone videos haha. You probably all know where this is going. Obviously Grant is killing it. But whenever someone talks about a sfh he hates the idea. Always saying sfhs is dead. It's a terrible idea. 

I know I'm not going to get rich off of sfhs. I just wanted to get some income rolling in so that I can then move into multi family. Is that so bad? I wanted to get maybe 20-50 sfhs to get some good income then start investing in 10-30 unit complexes. After watching a lot of his stuff it just worries me that I really shouldn't head down this path. But everyone's different. There's different ways to build wealth. I guess since I'm a newbie, info from someone like Grant can really impact me. Any info at this stage really can. I'm just feeling unsure now about closing on that house now because I feel like it's such a bad idea. The way he talked about it just made me feel terribly unsure. Say you're in my shoes, what would you do? Still close?

[Joe Splitrock]

@Tom Howard there are lots of people that have made good money investing in SFH. The majority of SFH investors are smaller mom and pop operations. The advantage of SFH is very low risk. Buy a home in the right neighborhood and you can sell it at any time and walk away. The advantage of multi-family is better returns and you can scale to larger properties. That doesn't mean there aren't larger SFH investors. Ever heard of Dave Ramsey? He owns a large portfolio of SFH and is completely debt free - that is his claim to fame. Obviously Gran has a better head of hair and arguably much more flashy than Dave Ramsey. I guess my point is just that there are multiple paths to success. I think starting out buying a couple SFH is a great idea.

One final question, this buddy of yours that is giving advice - how big is his rental property portfolio?