It is very important that you do not over-leverage yourself and potentially bite off more than you can chew because the mortgage (principle, interest, taxes, & insurance) & utilities will be significantly increased, but at the same time is also decreasing your risk because you have more tenants paying rent & utilities before it hits your pocket if they stop paying/etc.You are in a great position, especially working towards squaring away your housing expenses for potentially the rest of your life right after college!

This will require us to move to another state where my annual income could decrease by 10%, since job salaries in this state are lower.Another idea we had was to rent out our primary home and rent for ourselves, as long as our rent cost is less then our current mortgage.

However the lender was able to keep the deal alive, by buying down the interest rate and decreasing the monthly home insurance premium (by increasing the deductible)... which was able to drop the mortgage expense just low enough to meet the self-sufficiency requirement.That same appraiser gave the property an as-is value of $456,000, so all told I walked into nearly $50k in equity.How did you add value to the deal?

The point of this question is what are real world solutions to this to decrease time between purchasing? 

If you have an obsessive focus on it and give it all of your time and energy, you have a great chance to win.However, if you do it part time, especially in this highly competitive market, it’s a great way to increase your stress, decrease your life happiness index, make less at tour main job, and not make the profits you hope for.

He did negotiate a raise because San Diego wanted him and he indicated he was not going to move for that much of a decreased income to cost-of-living. 

Detroit Proper has seen a slow decrease in past years.As for jobs,Metro Detroit does just fine.

But the financial engineers have made it so prices increase even when there is a decrease in production. 

As @Greg Scott said, the value of the dollar is decreasing, so it's best to put it somewhere if you have the chance to. 

There are some other ways to make create income, or decrease expenses verse just buying a multifamily.For instance, there are people I hear their spouse does not want to partner with anyone except for using their own money (personal money), and there is a lot of money that can be created by putting it all in together.