Hi Emily, I would recommend talking to your real estate agent and your lender about your plans and letting them know what you are looking for.

You could invest that same $100K to generate $30K over time, run a NPV for whatever you plan on spending the $70K on to see if it's better than what you could use the $100K on measured over time. 

I am willing to learn as much as possible so please suggest materials and conferencesThank you Just a word of advice, if you ask for advice to be honest most people are gonna try to sell you on their market and ultimately their service or course, you need to figure generally the direction you want to go, your risk tolerance, the area, the trade offs between appreciation and cash flow, understand, it’s going to be hard to get much if any cash flow in this market, brrring & flipping are close to dead with the exception of a few areas in dc and a few rural markets, even there it’s difficult, come up With a basic plan than go into a conversation with whoever you work with and at least understand the right questions to ask, the best comparison I can make is my mom always makes me go to the mechanic with her, even though I can’t actually fix the car, I can at least talk the same language as the mechanic.

@Pedro Magallanes depends on your strategy of what types of property Class you plan to invest in.

I have 20k saved and plan to use an FHA 203K loan and house hack to net zero/cash flow minimally on my first investment.

Personally I would just buy an umbrella insurance policy and skip the LLC portion of your plan.

What happens to your plan if the home price trend turns negative?

Since you self-manage, create a shell property management LLC and run your rentals management through it, charge yourself pm fees, thus generating self-income, thus being able to open Solo-401K where you can contribute 56K+/year tax deferred  (you will have to pay self-income tax, but might end up better than paying full tax on rental income...check with your CPA as this requires planning).

I have 20k saved and plan to use an FHA 203K loan and house hack to net zero/cash flow minimally on my first investment.

great idea...i should be more specific on the terms with what i plan to rent to see what can be worked out by the lender