I just graduated college in May and started work at a new job. My fiancé and I were able to buy a foreclosed house in Hanover, PA in April for $135k that needed about $10k-15k worth of work. We bought it with conventional financing in her name since she was the only one working at the time while I was in school. My fiancé's mother has a heloc out and agreed to use it to pay for closing costs ($12,000) and down payment ($7,500) and fix up costs. Our realtor estimated that after the work it should be appraised for around $190k, in which case we plan on refinancing so that we can put the money from the heloc into our regular monthly mortgage and free up her heloc since she does real estate investing as well.
Now the house is divided into two sections. A bigger section where my fiancé and I will live (after we get married in August) and a smaller in-law suite section. When seeing the house we learned that that portion could be made into a rental unit with relatively little work. That is what made it a worthwhile investment to us. But I don't want to stop at just this one rental unit. We have about $30k in savings but do not want dip into that for real estate. I want to starting investing in multi-family units but do not know how to go about doing that without looking at $30k-50k needed for a down payment. Do you have any suggestions about a way around this or a place to start? I did not particularly want to wait until we had saved up another $30K. I also don't want to use my soon-to-be mother-in-law's heloc for the downpayment since it would take some time for us to pay her back.
