All Forum Posts by: Leenie Fo

Snapshot - Live in SFV/Southern California; Married with 2 young kids, live in an apartment with rent control, have student loan debt (on plan for forgiveness), car loan and some cc debt, make decent income and in process of paying down debt. Hubby and I are trying to decide what makes most sense, buy a place further out such as Palmdale to live in where it's cheaper and hopefully we can build equity and commute to San Fernando valley for work or buy a rental out of state. We feel that by renting with are just wasting money and want to start on the path of real estate investing. Our goal is in 10 years to have several units that we are renting out and are unsure wha makes more sense, moving ourselves, building equity and then having more to invest or just trying our luck out of state. Have about 5k saved and can pull about 10k from IRA. Ideally we'd love to get a duplex/guest house but they are not in safe areas out there or are out of our price range so that and house hacking also wouldn't work as we have small kids. What would you guys do??

I’d say a few things are holding me back. I live in So Cal and prices are very high here. Looking outside of CA as an investment property, I’m told that we need 25% as a down payment and closing costs. More affordable places that we could house/hack or invest in are over an hour away without traffic from our jobs & we plan to stay with our jobs for a while. We don’t have partners or a team of contractors/property managers. We don’t have a huge amount saved so right now we are focusing on education and saving.