I would keep it in a high interest bank account might as well earn as much gain as you can no matter how small it is.However I think some debt pay down would be great not to the point where you are not liquid enough to Jump at another opportunity or can’t make a major repair when it arise.

At that time, I was balancing a new family and trying to make ends meet.

As for your ques if to wait, well, it depends on the market, in some parts of the country prices are still going up, slower, but still going up, other parts the prices are coming down, you know that area, what is happening there? 

Use tools like the VA loan for house hacking and your Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) to cover living costs while building equity.

However, as curiosity prodded, I looked into the degree that it is prohibitively expensive to consider just filing as a security anyway, irrespective of the pros and cons.Basically, I searched for "what are the costs for registering a security with the SEC" as well as "what are the costs for registering a syndication as a security with the SEC"Most the results produced explained something to the extent that the fee was about 150 bucks per million offered, without any other information on what would validate the explanation that filing a syndication as a security is prohibitively expensive.

If you want to defer taxes, a 1031 exchange allows reinvestment into another investment property, but the replacement property must be held for investment purposes.

I also agree that Akron is a viable area as well, but Im still finding the best deals in and around Cleveland.

Forced appreciation allows me to build equity from the beginning of the investment, so if I need to firesale for an unforeseeable reason, I will not be underwater.

I completed an internship in commercial real estate, and I also attended a couple of local REIA meetings/networking events before moving to Northern VA.I was able to narrow down potential strategies, and I figured both BRRR as well as wholesaling don't seem to be the best strategies for me.

Companies know where they will be treated well and where they are not wanted.