Working Toward the House Hack

[Christopher Randall]

Hello all. Let me get started by saying that house hacking is the best early investor living opportunity I have ever come across. I absolutely love the idea and am planning to use this method as my start in the REI community.

Here's how I'm working towards it right now. First of all I took a look back at my spending for the past half year to get a good idea of ways I could optimize it. Then I built a budget around putting me on the fast track to getting into my first owner-occupied investment property. Fast forward to today and I am saving $1k a month towards a down payment and have kept up this budget for four months. This gives me $4k to work with. I could do a FHA loan with the $4k but I want to have a bit of a cushion to work with when things go wrong such as various capital expenditures. All of that being said, I am planning to save $10k to start.

Now my question to the BP crowd. Am I going a little too far with my startup amount? It seems like a safe figure to me, but I could also try to get started with what I have now and let my tenant income build my cushion. What are your thoughts?