All Forum Posts by: Isabel Anness

It also depends on what you are trying to do to get started.  Are you ok with house hacking? If so, you might be able to get away with a smaller downpayment as it will be your primary residence.  This way you can get a tenant to help you pay down your loan and allow you to save additional cash.  You'll also most likely get some appreciation which will help you when you want to do property #2.

@Isabel Anness This is an excellent question and something I wish that I'd thought more about when I bought my first house. I know you probably want to pull the trigger and just jump right into things, but I highly recommend building up a nest egg first.

Start by saving about 6 months worth of expenses. Think about what your mortgage would be on a home without renting it out and the expenses you currently have to be as conservative as possible for a worst case scenario.

Then, save up for your down payment and closing costs. If you want to expedite this, you could consider a side hustle or find a way to increase your income. That way, you can put more away each month and get to this point faster.

Even though you aren't at your desired savings yet, start educating yourself (you're in the right place) and learn your market really well so you can act decisively when the right time comes. 

Happy to discuss this further if you need any help. 

You don't need any extra savings to get your first property. You just need to buy the house, any way you can.....

I just begged, borrowed and stole my way into my first house. Had zero savings after I was all in. Just made it work. The 3 year balloon was the real killer. But you just do whatever. it. takes.

You do need some money, but when I started I did a lot of networking and found many investors with money looking for deals, so I found properties and joint ventured with them.

I had about $20k available in addition to the money I used to buy the property. There's not a lot of problems that can happen to a property that would cost more than $20k. 

It really depends on how much the property you're trying to buy is. From there you can calculate your mortgage and how much you'd have to set aside for a down payment and misc expenses.

I would start with 10K at least. Things pop up. However, if you can get into a home now, do it. Buy now, even with as little as 5% down, and in a year buy another. That is the way you can quickly (relatively) grow your portfolio for low down and at lower rates. We moved to Central Virginia a little over a year ago and are now looking for a duplex. We will probably move one or two more times while we are here. Take care and let me know if you have any other questions. 

@Isabel Anness

Hi Isabel, I normally tell my clients 50k is a good amount of safe money to have to invest with. Anything more is icing on the cake, in case the worst happens

You don't NEED this much to start, that is just what I tell my OOS clients. 

@Isabel Anness

wow, great question.  do you have a 401k that you're contributing to and getting a match on?

you could decide "i want to start making offers in X months in this price range," and then save up for the down payment and reserves it would take to get there.  you're not likely going to have an offer accepted on day 1, so you might have a month or a few months more to save.

are you renting now?

I bought my first house in 2011 at the age of 25. I had around $10,000 in my bank account. I used an FHA loan and my realtor chipped in some money towards my closing costs. I ended up being around $7,000 out of pocket to do that first deal.

It was frightening to buy my first house with basically all of the savings I had to my name. Didn't help that I was also living paycheck to paycheck at the time. If 1 major expense came up I would have gone into credit card debt (which did end up happening lol, but that's another story).

Anyways all that being said I sold the house 5 years later and walked away with $130,000 tax-free profit in my pocket.

So would I do it all again? Yes. But would I recommend others to do the same? Not sure.