If you buy it with cash, you get your best cash flow, but it's somewhat specious because your cash on cash return is awful in this case. For instance, you buy it with cash, it needs zero work, and you pay 100k. Your income is 850/mo (10,200/yr). Let's assume 10% vacancy and another 10% PM costs. Then we have 1k taxes, condo fees (1800/yr), insurance and maintenance expenses (easily another 10%), and your net profit per year is ~4k. COC return of 4%, which I'd imagine you can easily beat with another investment.
Now, of course, this isn't strictly an investment, since you want to live there, so maybe you'd prefer to just purchase in cash, not really get great returns, and then sell your current place to move in there in '16. Alternatively, you could finance it. This keeps more of your cash free for use somewhere it can hopefully do more work for you, but it probably also makes the property cash flow negative. Since it would only be for a short time, if I were me I'd probably do that. Except that I can't imagine ever buying a condo, since I hate HOA fees.
