I closed on property #1 yesterday. Very exciting day for me!
The previous owner replaced the roof, new furnaces, new plumbing, etc, in the last 2 years, so hopefully maintenance costs will be low for a while. I plan on fixing things as they break. The variable nature of rental income could make it harder to FIRE, because it's difficult to count on monthly rents due to repairs, vacancies, etc.
I wonder how much income I can actually count on to live off of when costs can vary so much due to property maintenance, vacancies, bad tenants, etc.
We're not quite sure yet either since we're very early in the journey. Ironically, once we have enough real estate income to support a family, I'm pretty sure our family will be grown and moved out on their own! More realistically, we could probably get to replacing 50%-100% of one of our incomes and rely on that in case of job loss. Though our kids are pretty old...if you have no kids yet or very young kids this would be a different story.
The larger number of units you have, the more smoothed out vacancies will be. For example, if you have 3 units, one vacancy is a big deal, but if you have 20 or 40 units, probably at least one will be vacant all the time (or for some period of time) during a year.
My super super rough calculation that I do sometimes is to take a number (representing equity in leveraged properties or fully paid off properties), say $500,000 and multiply by 1% (amount of rents we will collect each month if we stick to 1% rule when buying properties) and multiply that by 50% (rule assuming 50% of rents will go towards expenses: taxes, insurance, repairs, maint), and that what is left is what we would keep.
So:
500,000x.01x.5 = $2500/month = 30,000 /yr (could go a long way toward supporting a family, easily support an individual)
$1,000,000x.01x.5=$5,000/month = $60,000 yr
The goal is to of course find properties renting for better than 1% if possible and to try and keep expenses low (without counting deferred maintenance as profit when it's not). I think the calculations above would be pretty conservative, and I'd be interested on hearing others thoughts on them. I think they would be a rough guide to the income you can "count on".
Then the question becomes how long will it take us to get to $500,000 in equity? (or whatever your goal is that you have backed into.)