<prompt> Human: I am 17 with about 25-30k in stocks right now, I recently started planning to invest that money in a different way as I look toward going to college. I wanted to see if I could get a mortgage and maybe put a 20 down payment on a condo or a house to rent out. After doing a bit of math and assuming that i might have a 20 year loan or something similar I realized that I would have low, but stable income after everything including renters insurance, power and everything else. What do you guys think would be the best?  <response>: To get a decent mortgage youre going to need substantial credit history, and at 18 you simply have not had enough time to build that. You will also need to show sufficient income to justify the mortgage payment, and the bank will not consider your hypothetical rent income as part of that, and neither should you. If youre not in a situation to be able to make that mortgage payment every month with your own money, then youre not ready to be a landlord. If youre college bound focus on that, and get into real estate later in life when you have a good job, good income, and time to deal with being a landlord. Assuming that you did go this route and actually became a landlord, heres the worst case scenario. Tenants will be shitty, they will not pay, they will do damage. You have tenants that do not pay rent. It usually takes around 90 days to evict someone after you file the eviction. So youve got no rent for the one month that caused you to start the eviction, and no rent for the 3 months it takes to evict. Youve now gone 4 months with no rental income, you finally get them out of the house, only to discover that they did extensive damage that will cost 10,000 to fix, and must be done before you can rent out the house again. Assuming that you have the 10,000 on hand because no one is going to loan you that extra 10k, it takes one more month of no rent to complete repairs, and then it takes you another month to find new tenants hopefully they pay. All told youve gone 6 months with no rental income, and had to pay 10,000 out of pocket. 