Newbie from Kansas City Metro; I'm thinking House Hack

[Gabriel Jordan]

Hi Everyone, 

My name is Gabe Jordan. I am a Kansas City native and new to real estate investing. I'm 29, never bought a house before, going to get married in 2020 and want to plan this out so I can "House Hack" our first property then grow it from there. I'm thinking a multi-family home that we can take advantage of our first time home buyer loan, camp out for a year or two, refinance and go from there. 

I currently work full time for a marketing agency, and specialize in search engine optimization, paid advertising, & analytics. I guess you could say I am very familiar with "digital real estate", but am not sure how much crossover there is with "physical real estate".  Agency life is extremely busy, hence why the passivity of physical real estate is so appealing. I am fully intending on outsourcing as much as possible, and am even considering turn-key solutions to get my feet wet (although I really do not know if they are a good deal or exactly how they work).

Right now, I am focusing on (and please tell me if I am missing something)

1) How to locate a "good deal"

2) How to evaluate if the deal is actually good or not

3) Find like minded people in my city that I can learn from or bounce ideas off of (mentor?)

4) Saving as much cash as possible for down payment/ repairs

5) Figure out the details of how the loan process works

6) Determining my "Freedom Number" and seeing how many properties it would take to get me there

Any advice from the vetrans in the group would be appreciated. If you a KC native give me a shout!