Buy a primary residence to house hack vs. continue renting and buy investment rental?

[Davina Sanchez]

My husband and I are both physicians and qualify for a physician mortgage. This means that we can essentially put 0% down with no PMI on a mortgage. We live in NY and unfortunately cannot leave the area due to work + family/child care availability.

Right now we are at a crossroads - we are deciding whether we want to purchase a primary home to house hack (while understanding that in NY, we would NOT cash flow from house hacking, but simply decrease the burden of our monthly mortgage payment), or if we want to continue to rent and invest our money towards buying our first out of state rental property.

Buying our primary home obviously has some benefits; the most important being that we would be putting money that we would otherwise be paying for rent towards equity on a home. The downsides are that buying a house = buying all the things that come with a house, which may end up costing us more money, and may delay our ability to purchase rental properties otherwise. On the other hand, starting off with buying investment properties means that we would have to continue to rent for the next few years, which to me feels like throwing money into the garbage.

Anyone have a similar situation?