Investment with Duplex,Triplex,Fourplex

[Ryan Ramsay]

Hi everyone I'm 19 years old renting an apartment as of 4/23/25. I make around 70k a year and have 25k saved. I currently own outright a cabin and a piece of land in Idaho but currently live in Oregon. I want to start getting into the rental business and buy a property. I have a trust fund that has a good amount of liquid cash. My main question here is should I spend most my capital to put 20% down on a property around 500-600k, should I use some equity in the paid off properties to buy another few properties/one big property, should I spilt the money between 2- 250-300k properties or should I utilities the FHA loans and house hack with a rental property. Any advice is appreciated thank you.

[Chris Watkins]

Money down is the same between conventional and FHA for 2-4 units. The limitation you're likely to run into is the debt-to-income (DTI) ratio. Essentially, you can only have a total debt level of 50% of your total monthly income (55% for FHA). Your work income + any rental unit income (x 75% for expensese) = total income.

If you have $70k work income and $60k rental income (3 units of that fourplex on Powell), that translates to ~$9600/mo. 50% of that is $4800, so that's the max debt you can carry between your housing, credit cards, student loans, etc... so if you have no other debt you can qualify for a $4800/mo mortgage payment. Subtracting insurance and a guess at property taxes, your maximum principal & interest payment would be ~$4200/mo. 

At an interest rate of 7%, that get to roughly $630k maximum loan amount. If you had 5% for a down payment, you could buy a $655k property. But that Powell property costs $890k, so you'd need $260k to buy that particular fourplex. 

Buying a multi-family property brings a few extra variables, but the first part of any search is to figure out how much loan you can qualify for based on your income, cash and credit, and how much you can afford (they're not the same thing), then figure out what properties fit into that budget. 

Hopefully this is more clear than my original post. Reach out and we can dive deeper!