Newbie passive investing strategies

[Kathleen DeNault-Ridge]

I would like to get involved in RE as a retirement strategy. I am more interested in long-term investing rather than cash-flow. With my full time job, my young family, and limited available time, I have been recommended to explore passive investing options at least for the time being. The creative part of me would live to buy low, rehab, and flip, but I just don't have the availability at this point in my life. Brandon's "no-toilet" investing certainly interested me! What I do have is a good job (unfortunately with no retirement planning or tax sheltering options) with the option of taking on some contract work to raise monies for RE investing (maybe setting up a Solo 401k from the 1099'ed contract work). Right now, I've got about 5k saved for investing. I do have equity in my home but don't want to touch it....to risk-averse at this point.
I have read about raw land investing, tax liens, mobile homes, becoming a very small-scale private lender, notes, etc. I don't know enough about any of these to have any comfort level with them. Would anyone have insight into passive investing strategies that are newbie-friendly?