I want to offer on a duplex, as my first investment property, and the city has it zoned as single family, although it is registered as a duplex and a rental and I can continue to rent it as a duplex.

Since then, I've been educating myself with real estate in general and have narrowed my interests to buy and hold multifamily rental properties. 

Stay with it and look to other's on here for encouragement.Do your research, make education a priority, set the right goals and it will all be worthwhile.

I've also run through scenarios for house hacking in LB vs continuing to rent & buying out of state with numbers from Zillow and I think the best option for me is to invest in rentals out of state to take advantage of better cash flow markets.

I don't foresee myself having enough money to make a down payment on a property for at least another 6-12 months, so in the meantime, I feel that probably the best thing I can do is educate myself as much as possible. 

If you plan to do that it is okay but remember to run your numbers with that scenario.Brandon has said many times the first property you buy won't make you financially rich... it's the education and confidence that will lead you to the next deal and the next deal and the next deal... that will.

The education was quite expensive!

From this point, we will build our cash emergence fund and continue unload bad expenses.

This will continue to work until it doesn't and then I think it will get ugly.So, to help us BP members, investors and syndicators alike I would like to encourage everyone to look at this metric.It's a bit hard to calculate because it's not just the amount you are paying on your bank loan but rather that plus the amount owed to the investors on a syndicated deal.

Here are a few ways to start:1) Educate yourself.