With more capital at your disposal you are on a path to buy long term cash flowing assets, like rental properties or notes that will supplement your returement income, invest in hard money loans to fund others.  

You can use the cash flow to help supplement buying new investments or what not.

My question: can private money or hard money be used to supplement the capital I have to deploy for the down payment?  

I'll have paid off the mortgages on the two properties much faster than the 1 expensive property since I have cash flow to supplement the mortgage payments if needed.

I've done some analysis and so far, even with retail prices, it looks like we have a good chance of cash flowing there.My partner hasn't moved to Houston yet so I wanted to supplement my market research with some questions for Houston natives here first.Our target market is single family homes under $100,000 in B class neighborhoods.

My properties gross about 4,000 monthly and I expect half of that after expenses to supplement my pension and small 401K. 

We rented out the 2 rooms using air bnb and craigslist to supplement during that time. 

I currently work as an engineer with the FDA but after a discussion with one of my friends, I have decided to try and become more knowledgeable about REI and it seems like a great tool to provide supplemental income over the long run.I'm coming from literally ground zero, my only "experience" (if you can even call it that) being watching a few TV shows where they flip or repair houses haha.

We are approaching the level of savings where we feel comfortable investing in our first property, an owner occupied multi-family property, where we can begin our real estate investing and, hopefully, grow primarily as low to mid level rental owners to the point where we can purchase a dream home in 15-20 years, as well as have a good set of rentals to supplement our retirement incomes 15-20 years beyond that (we're on the younger side, if you can't tell by the timeline). 

I was planning on signing up for the city course first and supplementing with the other landlord course.