Personal Finance insight

[Sam Tatum]

Good evening all,

I recently posted in the pro forum about getting started as a first-time investor and got a lot of helpful feedback. I really appreciate everyone who took the time to respond.

I wanted to back up a bit and give more context on my current situation. Over the past year, we hit a pretty rough stretch. My wife and I both worked for the same company in a rural area, and when we unexpectedly lost those jobs at the same time, there simply weren’t many local opportunities to fall back on. Without that income, we couldn’t keep up with the mortgage, and we ended up having to move quickly and stay with family for a while.

My wife was also out of work recovering from knee surgery during this period, which made things even tighter. As you can imagine, that stretch did some damage financially. We missed payments across several loans, primarily the mortgage, and our credit took a pretty hard hit as a direct result of that situation. Our savings were also completely depleted just trying to stay afloat.

Things are stabilizing now. We’re both working full-time again and currently making about $59k combined. Our credit isn’t great at the moment (mainly from the missed payments during that time), but we both start new positions on March 1 that should roughly double our income, so we’re finally heading in the right direction.

Based on the advice from my previous post and some DMs, I’m leaning toward starting with a small, inexpensive property to house hack. I’m a carpenter and my wife is a professional painter, so the renovation side doesn’t intimidate us.

That said, I see a lot of information about how to invest, but I’m struggling more with when it makes sense to realistically take that first step. Rebuilding credit and savings will take time. My tentative goal is to be in a position to buy toward the end of 2026, and for now I’m focused on learning, planning, and stacking cash.

My main questions:

• What kind of credit score should we realistically aim for before talking seriously with lenders?
• Is it worth exploring self-financing/owner financing in a situation like ours? If so, what does that actually look like in practice?

I’m open to any advice, perspectives, or things you wish you’d known earlier. Happy to answer any questions if more context would help.