First time home owner regrets. Need advice!

[Mitchell Lawmaster]

Hey everyone my name is Mitchell and it's my first time on bigger pockets forum! I'm pretty new to learning about real estate and man have I been missing out! I recently read Brandon Turner's Rental Property Investing book and it's great. But the more I learn about real estate the more I realize all the mistakes I've made. I rented an apartment for 6 years, and then recently had a house built because of acreage passed down to me not realizing the cost and being taken advantage of by the contractor because of my naivety and loopholes in the contract. My wife and I had to use a big portion of our savings and a lot of our IRA for the down payment. Now realizing I could've used all that money to potentially house hack and not use our IRA at all it sucks. I don't know how I'd be able to get into real estate investing now with having a big mortgage payment. The only idea I have so far is renting out our house and buying a duplex using the house hack rule. Just wondering if anyone has other ideas. Thanks!

[Larry Turowski]

@Mitchell Lawmaster we all make mistakes, even after many years of investing.  The more you do the more mistakes you’ll make. You’ll recover from this. How? If nothing else, with time. You sound quite young. You are in a much better position even with your mistakes than I was in probably into my late 30s. And you’ve got options. Sell. Rent and buy a duplex as you suggested. Sometimes it is a combination of those time and other options, like saving up more money, maybe even taking on a side gig to generate savings to use moving forward.

Don’t let the fact that you are not doing as well as possible or as you want to be distract from the fact that you are doing well.