The trick is finding a market that has future growth along with a high rent to price ratio.

Any tips / tricks anyone uses when looking at furnishing designs?

This single trick allowed me to exponentially save into my next real estate deal and so on and so forth.I also agree with @Steve Vaughan's sentiment above.... agree with about 99% of Remit's advice EXCEPT him saying that renting is cheaper than buying. 

Based on my very limited understanding I would want to leverage my first time home buyer to buy at least a duplex though i would really like to get my hand into a triplex to increase the cash flow while living in 1 unit for a year (lot of tricks and tips here to not have to live in there for a full year which i would like to learn more as well) and lease out other unit(s).

If so any creative tricks to get financing on them?

Good thing about RE is since we are the owner of real estate, I can do lot of tricks to make the investment work with less headache/risk.

It’s no longer a matter of doing a correct financial analysis; it’s now tied in to banks tricking you with “front loaded interest”, the evils of tying you in to “30 year mortgages”, being a “debt slave”.

Currently have a 1/2 acre in Bastrop, TX, and I am looking to build on it sometime later this year. The goal is to build a single family home but I have never done this before, and I am looking for some advice/tips on...

A good trick to achieve this is the return on equity calculation.

Yet, all the members would need to do would be to go look at their archives and look at the predicted gains and check if they occurred in reality and they'd find out easily that my example above is typical.There are countless people in that same situation situation and, in my humble opinion, it's about time that they swallow their pride (for having fallen for their marketing tricks) and speak up so that other people don't have to experience the same situation in the future.