The Plan

Everyone needs a strategy to succeed. As the old saying goes, "if you aim at nothing you'll hit it every time". My ultimate goal is to be a buy and hold investor on a fairly large scale and reap the rewards of passive income. This all sounds good in theory I guess, but I am a pretty conservative investor and would prefer to buy with all cash and stay away from debt all together. This however is not realistic at the moment and I have to take action or I may never get started. 

So, how to proceed? I have access to 401K loans and hard money, but they won't do for long term buy and hold since the interest will eat me and my profits alive. I also don't want to risk my 401K returns long term. I would just be trading 1 form of portfolio growth for another. This means that my first deals will need to be quick so that I can get in and out of debt with as little interest and risk as possible. For me this means either house flipping, or wholesaling. Being an engineer, I have the project management experience to flip a house no problem. I also prepare estimates weekly for large multimillion dollar projects so I'm pretty confident that house flipping will be in my wheel house. I like the idea of taking something ugly and making it new again, I do this with cars, boats, and tools so why not houses right? I also like the large potential profits of flipping, but on the other side of the coin is the risk of what the market will do and unexpected problems with the project. Wholesaling on the other hand is very intriguing. You don't make as much per deal, but your risk is minimal and you can turn deals over super fast for a decent cut of the profit. These I think are going to be my initial strategies to build wealth so that I can venture into buy and hold with a bigger war chest to help ensure success.