How would you approach REI if you were in my specific situation?

[Eddie Woodside]

Current REI: 1 single family unit & 1 quadplex (pending) was

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Goal: Enough passive income to sustain my current and future lifestyle (whatever that may be).

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I'm new to BP and to REI and I am curious how seasoned investors would approach REI from my current situation.

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I currently live and work overseas as a logistics contractor and make close to $4k a month after taxes. Not an exceptional amount but I literally only have about $200 in monthly expenses so it feels like more.

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Ideally my strategy would be implementing the BRRR method but I'm not quite sure if that's feasible from overseas with no connections to contracting companies.

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Would turnkey properties be a more rational strategy for an unseasoned investor investing from overseas?

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Could you also share any and all tactics/rules of thumb you use to evaluate if you‘d be interested in a property you‘ll likely never see in person? This will be my first year filing taxes as a rental investor, anything you wish you knew about taxes when you first started investing?

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Also, fortunately for my single family unit and my quadplex (pending) I was able to purchase them with no money down using a VA Loan, so I have $0 of my personal money invested in real estate. But moving forward how much capital would you recommend having saved before investing in rental property? $100k is the magic number I hear from many people which would be difficult for most people but I could save $100k in about 2 or 3 years, would you wait or start with less than $100k saved?

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I’m only 24 so the good thing is I do have time on my side. Glad to be apart of BP Community and I look forward to hearing how you’d approach investing if in my situation.

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P.S. I plan to expand my portfolio in the Biloxi, MS and Clarksville, TN surrounding areas so any lenders, contractors, agents, investors, wholesalers..etc in the area feel free to connect with me.

[Lee Ripma]

@Eddie Woodside

Sounds like you are off to a great start. The amount of capital needed really depends upon what you are doing and what price point you are buying. My brother just asked me this question and I told him about 40k to get started with a small MF (duplex) in Kansas City. I have no idea what things are going for in your local market but there was a recent podcast with @Alexander Felice , think about using his methods in your target market! 

It's awesome that you have a great savings rate and money will pile up quickly. Maybe you could find a local partner in one of your target markets so you could do value-add projects? Maybe you could find a PM willing to do these with you? 

I'm not a fan of turnkey because there is no value-add. If you're not going to do value-add then I would just be a passive investor in a MF deal where someone ELSE will do value add. In my opinion, value-add is really where the returns are unless you are investing in a market with MASSIVE appreciation (hard to predict, and usually those markets have high prices). 

Your income is low enough (under 150k/year) that you can really benefit from taking losses on your W2 from RE projects that have value add. I didn't understand this when I got started and I think a lot of people don't know about it. 

You can actually save more on taxes with this strategy than saving in a 401k so it's crazy that no one knows about it. The returns on not paying taxes (legally) are very good! 

Good luck and keep us posted on your progress!