Hello everyone!! My name is Travis. I've been browsing these forums for a while as well as doing my own reading/research about real estate investing for quite a while. My wife and I have decided to do this as a side venture. Our goal obviously is to make some money, but more specifically we'd like to grow this business to the point that it will replace 50% of our monthly net income. I know this will take a while. We fortunantely have good paying jobs in healthcare and have a fairly large discretionary income. Neither of us want to work until uncle sam says we can retire. I'm 28 and my wife is 27. We have been talking and planning alot over the last few months about our goals and finally decided to take the plunge. Realization of our current tax situation spurred us along a bit. This year it isn't too bad but next year we will get hammered by uncle sam and we need to create some tax shelter. (My wife only worked six months last year as she just finished school so that helped us this year as far as taxes are concerned). In any case, we just got started and are closing two deals on march 11th. I willl outline below:

Deal 1:

2 bedroom, 1 bath SFR bought as a short sale. Fairly small (800 sq ft or so). Purchasing with cash, no financing. Original listing price 34k, Paying $14,750. Should rent for about $450 at minimum. Taxes are low around $150 per year. Realistically should be able to sell for around 50k when rehabbed, but plan to keep as a rental. Estimated fix-up cost around 5k.

Deal 2:

4 bedroom, 1 bath SFR bought as REO. Asking price was 39k and was on market for a couple months then dropped to 29k. Purchasing for 23K. Yearly taxes about $600. Should rent for atleast $700 maybe more. This one will be financed with a 25% down payment, 30 yr mortgage.

We have put both of these deals together in just a couple weeks. Just waiting to close now and get in to do the rehab. Hoping to aquire 1 new property every three months or so and just allow this income from the properties to build up. Should be able to put down a 10k down payment on a property every 3 months or so. Now I just need to figure out whether I should create an LLC, how to keep financing new properties, etc. etc. I should have financed deal #1 as well and saved some cash but the sellers lender wanted a cash deal...

Sorry for the long post... just thought I would post this to see if I could get some pointers and see if everyone thinks I've made a decent deal here as a newbie.