New Member - Accidentally ended up with rentals looking to expand

[Jeremy L Gunn]

I am 36 years old married with a wife and 2 boys ages 2 and 4. I have a job as an engineer make a good salary. When I met my wife she had a condo (worth around $90k) she purchased and was living with a roommate. When we got married we bought a small house for $75k. As soon as we bought it, we did a few minor upgrades and replaced AC (unexpected expense).

Within a year of being there she had our first kid and got pregnant again shortly after that. So we decided to to buy a larger home. We bought a 2100sq ft home for 175k on a 15 yr mortgage. When we left her condo we kept renting it to her roommate. When we left our 2nd home we had just invested 8k into and wanted to recoup some of that money.

Move forward 3 years and we now are still renting both of our old homes. Every penny we get over in rent we apply towards the principal of her condo. We also use the same philosophy with our personal expenses. We only keep around 6-10k in savings. The rest goes towards our mortgage or vehicles and we carry no credit card debt with a combined $14k we owe on both of our vehicles.

We are now looking to start purchasing rentals to expand our portfolio. We sort of "lucked" into the first ones but now we are actually having to plan out purchasing our first true investment property. We do not have a lot of free capital, but have roughly 60k in equity in our personal home and a 401k with funds available for a loan. We have researched every way possible to finance investment properties and I have over-analyzed it to the point where I am tired of thinking about it.

I have been listening to Bigger Pockets for a while as well as Clayton Morris. I would be scared to buy a home from him but do think he has some good tips on financing. I would really like to find someone locally to bounce ideas off of, but really feel like I just need to do something after 2 years of over analyzing. I am considering using a HELOC as a down payment at this point. I am aware that the interest is no longer deductible but not sure what other options would be best suited for my financial situation.

Thank you for any advice and I look forward to participating the forums.