Of course you can never have control of the money and you must have your QI in parcel before your sale completes. . 

Joint ventures entail utilizing your own money to buy properties with others.

That’s great advice Taz, I’m currently working on saving enough money to get started, house hacking is hard for me at the moment because I just bought a house 2 years ago, I would have to sell my house(which is in a great neighborhood great location) and use that money to fund the duplex which isn’t totally out of the question, I would like to keep the house if possible but also would like to get real estate investing more.

If you can get a better primary residential HELOC rate than you can a hard money bridge loan I would say yes.

Did you close this with a hard money loan?

LLCs tend to be beneficial for financing options if using hard money as it can be required depending on the program.

I have the money to buy now but I would rather do creative financing and use as little money as possible out of my own pocket. looking to start with BRRR method but maybe should start with a wholesale first to fund that?

Any good resources for learning about hard money loans?

Once your emergency account has a reasonable amount in it, whatever that means to you, you might want to think about steering that payroll money into the investment savings account from each pay check and leave the emergency account money as is.

Use that sales money to buy more stock.