Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

Family suggests my first real estate. Advice?
Living in one unit of a multi-family while renting out the others, although not without its risks, can be a viable (if gradual) way to build wealth. It's been rebranded recently as "house hacking", but the underlying mechanics have been around for many years (many cities in the Northeast in particular remain chock full of neighborhoods of 3-family homes built and used for exactly that purpose for decades, though now frequently sub-divided into condos).  It's true you'd need to borrow money, but there are a number of reasons why it's certainly at least worth exploring (which is what you seem to be asking -- should you bother doing the homework -- tl;dr: yes): And yes, you would be relying on tenants to meet your monthly expenses, including a mortgage bill that will arrive whether the other units are vacant or not. But in most markets, rental prices are far less volatile than home prices (from the San Francisco Federal Reserve): The main result from this decomposition is that the behavior of the   price-rent ratio for housing mirrors that of the price-dividend ratio   for stocks. The majority of the movement of the price-rent ratio comes   from future returns, not rental growth rates. (Emphasis added) It's also important to remember that rental income must do more than just cover your mortgage -- there's lots of other expenses associated with a rental property, including insurance, taxes, maintenance, vacancy (an allowance for the periods when the property will be empty in between tenants), reserves for capital improvements, and more. As with any investment, it's all about whether the numbers work. (You mentioned not being interested in the "upkeep work", so that's another 8-10% off the top to pay for a property manager.) If you can find a property at an attractive price, secure financing on attractive terms, and can be reasonably confident that it will rent in the ballpark of 1.5-2% of the purchase price, then it might be a fine choice for you, assuming you are willing and able to handle the work of being a landlord -- something worth at least as much of your research time as the investment itself.  It sounds like you're still a ways away from having enough for even an FHA down payment, which gives you a great opportunity to find and talk with some local folks who already manage rental properties in your area (for example, you might look for a local chapter of the national Real Estate Investment Association), to get a sense of what's really involved.