My wife and I bought five rental properties in five years.
But this is how we bought the first one.
When we bought our first rental,
we actually moved into the house
because that was the only way
that we could afford to save up for the down payment.
And this is why if you go to purchase a home as a primary residence
on a conventional loan, you only need 3 to 5% down.
There’s also a ton of banks that offer first time home buyer programs
where they give you a grant of some sort.
At that time, my wife was just becoming a stay at home mom
and I was only making about $35,000 a year.
So we really could not afford that much of a house.
So we looked and we looked
until we finally found what I would call Grandma’s house.
It was this single story crawl space underneath carpet in the kitchen.
Three bed, one bath house.
We were also able to offer $2,000
more than the asking price of $90,000
to get the seller to pay the closing costs.
This meant that all in we only had to have 3.5% down on $92,000.
Plus we got a first time home buyer credit of a thousand bucks.
You guys, at that time,
this was the biggest check I had ever written.
But it was for less than 25 dollars to close.
So what did we do to grow from there?
When you purchase a Primary residence on a conventional loan.
You can move into another primary residence on a conventional loan
after one year, unless there’s extenuating circumstances,
in which case you would need to talk with your lender.
But that meant that we had one year to make this property nice again.
So we spent that time saving and then spending on repairs,
and then saving and then spending on updates.
And we did this until we had a nice property.
Then after that first year,
we moved out of that house,
we bought another primary residence at 3.5% down.
And then we rented out that first house.
And a year later, we did it again.
And a year later we did it again.
We did this five times in five years
until we had enough cash flow to just stay put
and then put 20% down on rentals going forward.