What's the REI lifestyle like?

Question

I'm considering quitting my day job and becoming an REI. I've found a bunch of resources on the site on how to do it and feel confident that I can learn enough to make it financially viable.

What I haven't been able to find is a description of what the lifestyle looks like. I currently have one rental property, but I doubt that experience scales to what life would be like if I had a 40+ unit apartment complex. Anyone able to share what your day-to-day looks like? Am I going to be answering calls 24/7 and fixing holes in the roof all the time?

Dell Schlabach · Answer

If that is how you set it up, that's what it will look like.

You get to choose what your lifestyle looks like based on your income, assett, knowledge skills etc.

My lifestyle probably looks radically different then most posters here.

I unless you have a year of reserves to live on, or significant experience in generating income with real estate, I suggest you keep your day job until your real estate generates enough income that you can live off it.

What is it you want to do with real estate investing? Buy rentals?

Have you figured how many rentals you need to support yourself financially from rental income.

For example if you have 200.00 a month cash flow per unit, after all expenses and reserves. If you want to make 100,000 per year, you would need

100,000÷12=8,333 month @ 200 per unit = 41 units, say they cost you 75,000 per unit, that's a little over 3,000,000. Are you in a position to borrow or manage that.

If you have 100 per unit cash flow, you would need to double the units. If you can live on 50,000 at 200 per unit you would only need half as many. You can do the math, but make sure you think through and have a solid plan before you quit your day job to go sit in the beach sipping fruity drinks and map out your plan to get rich investing in real estate if you don't have a LOT of money to invest.