Complete newbie from Gilbert, AZ

[Kurt Granroth]

Hey y'all.  I'm Kurt and boy do I understand the phrase "you don't know what you don't know" because, well, I know so vanishingly little about real estate investing that pretty much everything is a recursive "don't know".  Gotta start somewhere, though!

I've lived in Gilbert, AZ (suburb of Phoenix, in its East Valley) for about 20 years and while I've owned a few homes as primary residences (and truly own my current mortgage-free home), I've never really considered investing in real estate in any real way until very recently.

My wife and I are both software engineers and have been blessed with notably high income as a result.  We got enamored by the FI/RE philosophy (Financial Independence / Retire Early) a few years ago and have committed to investing some 75% of our net income into the stock market.  The goal was to get to roughly $1.5M and then retire, since all of the math says that we could safely withdraw (the SWR) 4% of our investment pot every year ($60k a year) and be able to sustain that indefinitely.  We're about 75% of the way there, with $1M already working for us.

But even though the math all works out and all of the simulations I run seem solidly in my favor, I'm still very concerned about having all of my money in a single basket.  Yes, the stocks are thoroughly diversified... but the stock and bond markets still feel like one entity to me.  That's why I (very) recently started eying the possibility of diversifying even more dramatically by also investing in real estate!

I am a pretty handy guy.  I've built an addition to my home (everything but plumbing and concrete-work); a garage (sans concrete); and a home theater (everything).  Plus, I have a DIY YouTube channel ("granworks").  All that to say that it may seem like the Flipping option would be a good fit, since I'm confident I could remodel any part of a house.  But... there are a lot of people flipping homes in the Phoenix area and I'm just not sure I'm aggressive enough to compete in a market like that.

So what I'm mostly eying to start is the Buy-and-Hold model.  Maybe get some mildly distressed properties and then rent them out?

I don't have dreams of riches or anything resembling that.  My tentative goal is to be able to sustainably earn $2k-$5k net a month from whatever real estate investments I have.  So what will it take to do that?  I have no idea.  See above for the "vanishingly little" that I know.  Could I get there by investing just $250k of capital?  Would it take a lot more than that?  I guess I'll find out.

That's where I'm at.  Just starting my real estate journey and learning something literally every day.  Glad to be here to learn from y'all!