Your better off if willing rent the smallest cheapest apt and then using the DP to invest in syndications to pay for your apartment and then some. I modeled it out and it produced millions in net worth more lol. I will be doing this srategy bc i could care less about owning a house as there really just things to ensure you depend on your job more jsut like student loans and now college for most jobs is pointless i feel like it puts you in debt most of the time to get a job that wont pay it off for 20 years your better off working at a tipped job like a bartender and investing and living cheap until you get enough passive income to cover the gap and then keep going and if you start young you will be in great shape bc by time most graduate college you would be already likely at there starting salary while you sleep lol. Then you would just spend a % of it and reinvest a % to keep growing it and you eventually would have such a large amount of cash flow you could do anything like just travel around and not worry as well as have a bunch of properties that when you pass would step up to FMV for heirs and they deduct them all over again lol. If you eventually owned the complex or whole thing you could keep it in the family for generations and each generation would get to deduct it again when they inherit it lol its the best thing in the world shields so much tax. I had a client who owned mhps who hadn't paid tax in 20 years legally and made 5 million a year cash flow lol. Going the traditional route is deff not the best way to make your self financially free the fastest and also get the modern day slavery chains off. School teaches you to be a slave and not how to be free. They want ppl who do what they are told don't question and cant ever pay off the money they owe so they work for scraps compared to what you could do forever. Even retirement accounts can keep you working longer if you don't prioritize getting passive income outside of it bc if you did syndications and kept reinvesting you would pay taxes anyway and they grow at 15-25% IRR much better than public funds usually and provide usually 7=12% preferred return distributions then the remaining returns on the sale in 7-15 years with refi distributions all not taxed if refi or reg distributions usually in between so you can get serious cash flow to live off of while not increasing taxes or paying them at all and being able to have the power to not be chained to a job that you don't like or do anything you don't want to do. If you really start young you can become insanely wealthy and not even make much but just need to invest it all almost from 15-16 and on and keep to it and when others are not even done paying anything off and stuck you can do what ever you want if you want to try businesses you can or just travel etc and not worry about losing a job bc you get paid by all your tenants jobs and you would get a piece of many of them from owning alot of investments.