My long term goal is to take early retirement from my company within the next 2 years, and buy a couple of multi family properties to supplement my income.My situation is that I currently live in CT and have a get-away place in New Hampshire.

Also to retire he needs the income from the rental to supplement his pension.

You have to ask yourself, do you want to be some real estate mogul with 100+ rentals or are you just looking for something simple to supplement your retirement?  

Mathematically if you can make a greater return than that 3% then you should pay the minimum on the loans and invest the extra cash, which will enable you to keep the difference between the interest on your investments and the interest on the loans.

Thank you for the article. i do not see a negative in accepting those sources as proof of income, if you look at and think about the list of incomes, they are pretty much all guaranteed sources of income and supplemental, so why wouldn't you include them. usually you can base that as a percentage of their income, if they fall short and do not pay, you can usually evict them saying they didn't pay based on the other percentage of the income that they are responsible to cover.

The appreciation on this duplex has been enough to be able to retire (or supplement a deadbeat siblings "retirement").  

You’ll also need some relationships with those that have money, whether they are hard money lenders or your or dentist.You might also consider using an established hard money lender for your first few deals to enable you to learn the ropes.

Depending on how good a deal you did, Harjeet is correct: that 70% of their valuation could get you all your outlay back in your pocket, enabling a BRRRR Repeat!

That would enable you to save up for your house quicker.Just a thought.

We buy properties that need work, fix it up (forced appreciation) then get a LOC on the house which enables us to pull out our down payment and buy another one.We've done that with 3 properties but now we're tapped out, mortgage wise.