Passive income generation and retirement ?
I am a former home builder (thanks 2007- 2008) married to an active real estate agent. My wife only sells new homes. During the down turn I took a job with a large insurance company as a large loss (fire, tornado, hurricane, etc) residential property adjuster. I am always travelling and that is getting pretty tiring. The job is nice and pays well but I am an entrepreneur at heart.
We have been discussing getting back into the real estate game as investors this go-round but I am still a little gun shy about getting too leveraged. We have already lost EVERYTHING once. We did retain our credit for what that's worth.
I am interested in generating a passive income to carry us into our old age. I was thinking that a $100k/yr income would be sufficient to allow for spending and saving. Based on what I am reading it seems that to generate a personal income of $100k we would need to be bringing in near $200k in rent. At a rent of $1000/month (way outside the range of mobile homes that I was originally considering) we would need 200 properties. That seems crazy. There must be something I'm not thinking about.
This passive income is a future goal and I understand that it will take many years to achieve. I have no immediate plans of leaving my job but would like to perhaps change jobs in the next few years to something that will keep me home a little more and allow more focus on REI. In order to do that I will need to generate a secondary income to off set the likely pay decrease. Who knows what will happen by then though, maybe we find that we have a knack for REI and go full time. It seems that flipping would have to come into play then just to generate a decent yearly income.
Any advice or insight would be appreciated.
Sorry for the long first post.