.$2400 in the green after making the housing payment is actually a lot BETTER than most traditional 'house hackers' do on year 1, and since most students are going into debt to go to school, I came out ahead relative to them too.

Going straight to a traditional lender for a mortgage may seem simple, but this approach will not always guarantee the best loan terms.

Haven't done it yet because at least in my area, building with a shipping container is more expensive than traditional stick frame construction.

If that is something you are not interested in, the next route I would recommend is traditional rental property investing.

What makes it more difficult is that traditional metrics like ROI or cash flow are only snapshots in time.

Most likely you'll be best served to find someone, possibly a parent, that could cosign for you if you are looking at more traditional loans.    

In the deal we are investing in, the difference to most other deals is the ability to benefit from the difference in the building costs and the actual value at the point of completion.If you think of the traditional turnkey model, you will see that the TK provider will find the "ugly duckling in a nice B class neighborhood", let's say for $40K, put $60K into it to renovate it to a really nice standard and then sell it to you and me for $135K.

CA is traditionally soft Oct-March anyway and the midterm election uncertainty just ads to that softness.

Your credit score is high enough for any traditional mtg.

Sugar used a HELOC + traditional financing to cover 100% of the purchase price and the property still cash flowed then the HELOC would be "free money".