Conservative Scaling for House Hacking

[Matthew Posteraro]

Me and my wife are aiming to start our real estate investing journey with our first house around June/July in the Lehigh Valley area. We are planning to live in one unit and rent the other half out of a duplex, then rinse and repeat this process as many times as possible over the next 5-10 years. We are both nurse and plan to travel for a good portion of this time, so 'living' in the small 1br or studio apartment for residence purposes will not be a major issue for us since we will rarely be there.

After this 10 year period we plan to stop buying new properties and aim toward paying off current mortgages to help increase our cash flow in retirement. I am looking for any recommendations on how to properly scale this idea over the first few years conservatively and not wanting to over use leverage and debt by starting small in duplex and being open to triple/quadplex in the future if the right opportunity presents itself. Any helpful advice or pointing toward any resources would be greatly appreciated.

[Sofia Komrskova]

Sounds like a great idea. Start with the 3.5% FHA and then do the 5% conventional every year afterwards. When applying for loans, do not list your wife as the co borrower and vice versa. This will negatively affect both your DTIs and stack your conventional loan limit(10 per person). Only other advice I have is to try to find a quad, not a duplex, in the nicest neighborhoods you can afford. A quad will cash flow much better than a duplex and that makes it less risky in my opinion. To further improve cash flow, look into doing MTR(travel nursing) or if possible STR(more risky). I would personally put as little down as possible, but if you make a substantial income and your goal is to start paying them off after a decade you can put down more.