Looking for some advice on financing future real estate (buy and hold) business. I am a full time police officer set to retire in 2.5 years. I bought and completely renovated a rental house in 2019 and I was a great experience. I would love to buy and fix more houses in my retirement.

I currently own my primary house free and clear worth approximately $325,000.00 and I own the one rental property worth approximately $100,000.00 and I owe $20,000.00 on this house. My current credit score is considered excellent at 826.

I guess my question is should I do a HELOC loan? Or is there better options out there to continue my real estate goals.

@Scott Champion A HELOC is an amazing tool. Sounds like you have excellent access to capital. There are a few different ways you can go, but I can't imagine one that will prove more advantageous than a HELOC. And congrats on retirement!

@Dave Spooner thank you!! I sure appreciate the advice!!

If you are not adverse to using leverage, I'd be buying as many homes as possible with the very low conventional financing rates you can get today - and this is important as you still have W-2 income to qualify. You can utilize the HELOC for down payments as well. Having a few more cash flowing properties will be a nice bump to your retirement income.

I concur, a HELOC would be your best strategy to deploy. The advantage is that after you have rehabbed the houses, you can do a cash out refinance to pay back the HELOC. When you have no money out off of the HELOC, you have no monthly payments. The HELOC allows you the advantage of speed and ease of closing on the new property. That is important in this heavily competitive market.

If you can close as fast as title can be done and ready for you to close, that is a huge selling point to sellers, you versus the competition who will either need cash, or a Hard Money loan to be able to compete with a guy like you that has a suitably sized HELOC. In most cases you will win the deal.

If you get to the point where you can no longer draw on the HELOC (10 Years) but you still want the draw feature to continue investing, no big deal, just replace your current HELOC with a much larger HELOC to get a new 10 year draw period. It will be much larger, because the value of your primary should have doubled or more since you took out the previous HELOC 10 years prior.

I hope this helps?