Buying now and selling in 4 years, you will probably have to take a loss on the duplex if that is your strategy.

If anyone has any advice to make this process easy with minimal risk, I would appreciate the info. 

Keep in mind you will turn this list every few months.If you're main focus is fielding the requests to minimize your involvement there are services that can handle that for far less. 

Or can we just distribute the profits and losses to our returns via a schedule E without the partnership returns?

Or can we just distribute the profits and losses to our returns via a schedule E without the partnership returns?

Make sure your deductible is affordable should you have a loss. 4.

As a brand new investor, you want to minimize your risk as much as possible on your first buy and what you are looking at depends on your strategy.

Basically, you need to budget in for a month of loss of rent.

With that math your profit is $140k, again less than you had in equity with the old house ($790k-$525k-$125k=$140k).It looks to me you did well with selling your first house, good with the second house, but still an overall net loss to wealth after all is said and done.

Im starting out and would like to keep my costs to a minimal so I can save $ for the actual investments.