But I'm fairly confident that if I hadn't had a "just do it" mentality and bought that first property, I might not be an investor today.I totally agree with @Joe Villeneuve about being careful with your home equity, and I think Sam J. proposed strategy is a great one too.

Keep doing your investing on the side until you can replace your full time income.Keep reading and learning to build your confidence and take action despite any fears you may have.Good luck.

We would also love to be able to travel more than we can right now, but even so we do a fair amount.

first of all, this is my first post, i am from argentina, after looking many ways to where to invest my money, i think the only one that i felt confident was purchasing a property in USAi purchased 2 apartments in Miami 2 years ago (115k usd total in that time), in the bottom of prices i think, now they worth 20% more, plus the rent (with a few extra costs, fixes and had to fire a tenant due non payment and pay sheriff stuffs).the process that we do for non united states residents is form a LLC and purchase the properties as a LLC, we paid some extras at the end of year for renew it but its ok.the overall experience was good.but after reading and reading and reading, i became to this great forum, and figured out that could have been even better.i could had purchase a multifamily property, a big one of 400k usd and do a 25% downtime payment with that 100k that i invested. but i think that i couldn't did that because i don't have credit score or history as foreigner.  

I feel confident this would be a good investment.

As far as my needs go: After 1 year: I would like to be making at least 75k per year, not work more than 35 hours a week, maintain enough mobility that I will be able to travel from my workplace to another city for up to 2 weeks before returning to my workplace. 

At that point is where the true rapport begins: you're confident, you know your stuff, and you solve the problem.Maybe check out this BP Blog spot:  http://www.biggerpockets.com/blogs/1378/blog_posts/28030-youve-done-your-marketing-the-phone-is-ringingnow-what

I think at this point I'm ready to get started looking for potential sub2's I just need to be confident in myself and take the plunge.

I am confident that my start-up plan will work (I plan to buy a duplex and live in one unit while renting the other), but if I hadn't found BP and read so much wisdom from other members regarding this same approach, I may have bought something way too expensive just because I liked it. 

I've watched a bunch of videos on the subject and I'm pretty confident I under stand the process.