CA has very high annual fees to maintain an LLC and that could eat a substantial chunk of your cash flow.

The coordinator was making chewing noises when talking to me and I told her to stop eating, get out of the chair and make phone calls or go to the listing agents office.

As Greg said, at 5 rooms it wouldn't be worth it to hire someone to run it, it would eat up all your cash flow.

Cut down on living costs, like cable, eating out, buying coffee, buying expensive clothes, getting rid of that $400 car payment and buying one outright for a couple grand.

Closing costs will eat some of that cash out money up (that is one area you save on a HELOC), but you might make that up with a longer amortization period and potentially better rates with the 30 year refinance. 

While we are not eating on beans and rice now, we are curious what people's thoughts are on "Starting Out" while having student debt.We currently have a plan in place that we are following to get out of SFH and into four-plex to house hack then do our debt snowball.Would love to hear if anyone else had similar stories or their PO.Mike

They look at me and say they are eating their words.

You would incur holding costs and other costs that would not be in your rehab.Paying for two sets of closing costs on traditional mortgages would eat heavily into your numbers.

. $50 a month) and the rental market tanks so you start operating a negative cash flow which means you're eating into your ability to save.If you have buy weak, a downturn will affect you.

But if you're trying to retire in 5 or 10 years, that's a GOOD thing, and if the only thing getting in the way of retirement is those pesky mortgage payments eating up so much of your rental income, go for it.If you want to imagine a simplified model to retire on rental income, it would start with a higher risk higher leverage acquisition phase early on, a middle phase of optimizing -- 1031 that "meh" property for something good, stuff like that -- and then it would end with you ceasing proactive acquisitions (unless some great deal falls in your lap) and paying mortgages off to maximize cashflow as you ease into retirement, probably paying them off lowest balance to highest balance.Unlike 401ks and IRAs, the government isn't in charge of when you do this, so no reason you can't do it in your 30s to 50s if you can pull it off.... there are people who post on these very forums who are in their 30s and could enter that end-phase if they wanted to.