@Anthony Catoni My plan would be use the VA loan to house hack, put every penny of the money you're saving on living expenses and stash it in your investment fund, plus what you were already saving there.

A stash of tea bags or coffee is much appreciated by most travelers and is kind of a bare bones minimum.

So I ran my little smuggling business, paid $5 chits for 50 cent Doritos, and stashed all the cash in a big manila envelope that I wrote my mother's name and address on (they weren't allowed to look at your mail).

Here are some excerpts:"All-cash transactions have come to account for a quarter of all residential real estate purchases, “totaling hundreds of billions of dollars nationwide,” the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – the financial crimes unit of the federal Treasury Department, also known as FinCEN – noted in a 2017 news"also from the article:“It reminds me of Moldova after the fall of the Soviet Union: oligarchs running wild, stashing their gains in buildings,” James Wright, an attorney and former Treasury Department bank examiner, told me.

I would focus on making sure the deal is gonna cash flow or at least not be negative cash flow with a 15%(of gross rent) margin for CapEx but you do need to have some $ stashed in case that big expense happens on Day 5 of owning it.

I'd keep saving, and stashing away as much $$ as you can throughout 2021.

Sit tight and let the levers of house hacking + real estate investing work for you.To optimize your house-hack experience to better achieve your goals, I'd recommend pretending like you have a standard mortgage payment for your area and stuffing the savings your realizing every month into your investing account, sock drawer, or other preferred method of stashing cash. 

Never a bad idea to continue stashing cash until the best property arises.

in the day it was joker brokers and everything that went with it.. 

The only joker in that line of thought is that it may be worth hanging on to a low performing property if the potential appreciation is there.