Originally posted by @Tim Y.:
Matt - Thanks for sharing that.
My goal is to find the best way (for me) to create a portfolio that produces $4,000/month in NOI. I have about $300K that I'll be able to put toward that. I'd rather just use my money and pay cash rather than mortgage, but not sure if that'll be possible to get to my goals with cash alone.
I don't mind playing the property manager role for the next decade if the properties are close enough. Right now my head is just swimming with the different strategies. One day single family sounds great to me for ____ reasons, the next day duplexs/tripliexs sounds great because ____, then the next day a small apartment building does. I just want to nail my strategy before pulling the trigger; normally I'm the opposite as I'm more of a ready, FIRE, aim person.
It sounds to me like you are not 100% on what your priority is (debt free, monthly ROI, end game) and that is why you aren't certain of what strategy you want to embrace. It sounds like you are persnickety and that can be a great thing when managing a fairly large sum of money but it seems that trait comes with a load of worry thus you are reluctant to pull the trigger until you have all your ducks in a row. Your disposition reminds me of an analogy from some military experience: Let's just say I was a warrior in the US military and had some close encounters with not so friendly folks, we trained for a multitude of scenarios constantly, rehearsed over and over, ran drills for various tasks, planned and analyzed, and even agreed on what specific preparations would be made as well as form a consensus on how to strategically maneuver and react to the mission ahead, we over-prepared often, almost to a frustrating level; nearly every single mission we conducted (99%) all the planning and preparation was seemingly useless, as soon as any action stimulus began, chaos ensued, what I like to call organized chaos on our teams part, yet it wasn't the planning and strategic efforts made prior to the mission that enabled us, we always worked through the chaos with the fundamentals, the core efficiencies we had learned and trained, it didn't matter what rehearsal and plan we chose, it was the fundamentals that afforded us the opportunity to weather the chaos and react proficiently. For you, it doesn't matter where or what you invest in as long as you follow principled measures to substantiate the quality of your investments (good cash flow, plenty of reserves, property equity, plethora of information out there for what a quality investment is). Ultimately only you can determine what the "best" way is to invest is and that will be based on what your priorities are. I would ask myself what is my end game, is it really just $4000 NOI? Why that figure what determined that number? Once you arrive at 4K NOI what then, what will you do? Also consider what your exit strategy is, is 4K NOI the number you need to retire? What is your retirement plan? What will you do with the assets at retirement? My point here is that someone like you who is seemingly analytical, needs to determine the end game and reverse plan from there, I think right now you are reverse planning from 4K NOI and that is just a number target you derived for unknown reasons and isn't far enough in your future to reverse plan from to form a long term strategy. I would focus less on the number of 4K and develop a system that allows you to embrace and stick to your desire to stay debt free, that is the one thing I can derive from your posts is that you lean toward debt free; I can guarantee that nearly everyone in real estate during the 08' fallout was wishing they were debt free or close to it, while everyone was pulling their hair out losing their retirement or everything they had because they were over leveraged, a guy who invested debt free was sleeping like a baby and scooping up discounted investments left and right. The best book I ever read put it like this "the borrower is servant to the lender"; which do you wan to be John?
