Originally posted by schnugg
How many IPs do you need to start managing those as a full time job and have enough to live on?
This is kind of a "how long is a piece of string" question - it really "depends" !
The best thing for you to do is to work out how much it costs you to live with your current lifestyle. Your goal in moving to full time investing is to get your passive income from your investments to the point where it is covering all your living expenses, with enough left over to invest some more.
You should also work out how much money you will need to live on with the lifestyle you want to have in retirement - that should be your long term goal... to have a never ending passive income stream which will be enough to maintain your expected lifestyle until you die !
Now if you don't know how much money you spend on living at the moment - then I suggest that the very first steps you should take is to: 1) find out ! work out a way of tracking your living expenses - use something like Quicken... it's perfect for the job. 2) work out a budget - make sure you know how much money you will need to live on in the future so that you can work out how much you can save and how much you can invest.
As for how many houses you need to get this level of income... that really depends on the yields you get on your properties.
Have you read Jan Somers' books ? I suggest you do - "More Wealth from Residential Property" and "Building Wealth Story by Story" are must reads... they tell you pretty much all you need to know with some very good examples. You can find more information on them on the
Somersoft website