I have to agree with @Erik Hitzelberger. Too often people have "make money" as their goal. While this is a good goal, it's not specific enough. One approach that worked well for me is to define the income level I need to have in retirement. When we get to retirement age, we want recurring passive income rather than the type of income we have to work for every day. In other words, we want our capital to do the work for us so we don't have to. With that defined, one can lay out a road-map to get there.
I think it is helpful to separate REI activities into two categories; those that generate a one-time cash payment quickly with a lot of work on our part like wholesaling and flipping, and those that generate passive recurring revenue like rentals and notes. When we reach retirement age, we want to have enough of the second category to provide the income we need. On the way there, we want to be consistently adding to these types of assets.
If you invested all of your assets in income producing investments like rentals and notes today, would the yield fund retirement? If the answer is no, one option is to start engaging in some flipping and/or wholesaling to generate additional capital that can be used to start building up these passive income investments. One thing you don't want to do is tie up all of your working capital to purchase a passive investment and leave yourself out of position to make your next move. Regardless of what the gurus say, it is much easier to do REI if you have capital to work with.
