Then spend a LOT of time analyzing deals from the MLS in your preferred location.

Overall, you're spending $25k in extra costs and a monthly pmt that's $500 higher to keep $50k in your bank account. 

Quote from @Mary Jo Carruthers: @Albert Hepp Did you know that there are quite a few non profits and also the city of Austin in the austin texas area that provide down payment assistance for first time home buyers?

My immediate goal is to acquire our first property and spend the next two years mastering the basics of real estate investment. ( Refining the Go and No property search criteria/ Learning the value of taxes and avoiding them as much as possible/ 1031 exchanges) Depending on my wife’s career orders, we may remain in Baltimore for 1-2 years, but I’m also exploring opportunities in West Texas, Sierra Vista, AZ, and Houston, TX.

You could put in a range of numbers for purchase price and closing costs, renovation expenses, and expected returns and you could very quickly get a range of projected return on investments (although an excel spreadsheet could easily do this as well), but I'm sure as technology develops we will see even more sophistication in AI's ability to assist in deal analyzing.

Read "Long-Distance Real Estate Investing" by David Greene, then spend some time reading through the forums.

@Heather Bailey Wow thank you so much for spending your time to help guide me!

Lack of down payment, lack of entrepreneurial personality, low tolerance for risk, looking for the magic key that fits their desires, just want to learn, sold "Castles in the sky" with a gibberish of disconnected statements that while true in a plethora of instances do not add up to truth in any one instance, fear of failure meaning not able to take a financial loss without going into poverty, never told up front how much money they will need to spend to buy the investment in addition to paying for the class.

I'll share first: I plan on spending the first bit of the year saving for my next deal--I'm looking for a SFH somewhere in the midwest to long-term rent.

You can rely on the experts to assist you.