All Forum Posts by: Laura Romaniello

When house hacking with an FHA loan, is there a certain timeframe that the FHA dictates you to be moved into your property within after making the purchase?

Say I purchase a duplex with an FHA loan and plan to occupy of the units as my primary residence, but I have five months left on my current 12-month lease. In order to avoid breaking my lease early to move into my new duplex right away (and to avoid paying the fees associated with breaking the lease), my idea is to allow the current tenants in my duplex to stay for the next five months and collect their rent for both units, all while continuing to pay my rent for the rest of my lease term. Then once my lease is up, I'd take over one of the units in the duplex.

Basically my question is this: does the FHA require you to use the property as your primary residence right away after purchasing, or could I wait the five months until my current lease is up and am able to move? 

So, I've been doing a lot of research on house hacking and rental property investing as a whole. My plan is to house hack a duplex or triplex in the near future, and in doing research I'm finding a lot of emphasis being placed on ROI and Cash on Cash return, but from my understanding those are most important if you're analyzing profitability on a rental property that you're not planning on living in and are planning on solely using as an investment/extra income.

My question is this...when house hacking, would you say that the most important factor is cash flow since the goal is to essentially just live for free and have your tenants pay your mortgage while potentially making extra cash on top of it? Or would you say that ROI and Cash on Cash return is most important even though the calculations will amount to a lesser percentage if you're only calculating with the rent collected from the other unit(s).

I'm wondering which calculation should be top priority to figure out if a property will be a good investment for a house hack or not. I understand this is all relative to my personal goals, but let's say that my goal is to just live for free and get my mortgage paid for by my tenants (and make a couple hundred in cash flow on top of it). I just don't know if I should be focusing on ROI & Cash on Cash Return or Cash Flow in my decision making process.

What are your thoughts? Thanks!