New Member Introduction (Rental Investor Wannabe)

[Andrew Barrios]

Hey, I'm Andrew. I'm 27 years old and married with no kids. We're trying to get our foots in the door investing in our first rental property. We live outside of Ft. Worth, TX and before doing a bunch of homework I thought I needed to invest locally, but now my eyes have been opened to the advantages of using property managers in order to unlock more markets. So here's our story...

My wife and I built our own house from scratch and are about to close on a cash-out refinance in order to finish some of the house along with paying off a personal loan we used to help fund some of the building process. The refinance is going to leave us with about $20k left over, after the improvements. Originally we were going to out it back into the principal to pay the house of quickly (like 3-4 years) and eliminate our debt to fund retirement savings faster. Now we're looking at real estate investing as an alternative... We're hoping to use this cash as a down payment to get our first rental property and since we built the house to ourselves, nail by nail, we have another $70k in sweat equity that we could probably use for a HELOC to use as down payments for additional properties. This way we could probably get properties that don't need a lot of work (even if we have the skills to do the work ourselves) and we wouldn't HAVE to use the BRRR method to get a few properties rolling. Although it's a bit scary to use a HELOC, since we'd be leveraging our primary residence that we've put so much time, hard work and emotion into.

At the end of the day it boils down to this... We want to get a property (or a few) to generate multiple income streams in order to more aggressively fund our retirement (especially in this downed market) and then hopefully be able to quit our day jobs. I've got to admit though, it's very intimidating to take that first step without guidance.