With that said, what is your savings like and what is your consumer debt situation like?

Because reality is most consumers in the TK space come with an assumption that one presenting as a TK company is the one who own's the property, did the reno, did/does all the things, internally, no affiliation etc etc.

Millions upon millions of jobs lost "forever" ("exported" to the "third world"), more millions lost half or more of their retirement accounts, creditors slashed and burned consumer credit to the point where, by the banksters' own numbers, some 74% of Americans wound up with "bad" credit (it was only 47% before they did that), ...Now, add in the knee-jerk responses in the lending industry and you've got a situation where only the elite of formerly middle-class wage earners can even hope to qualify for new home loans.In fact, the given the current housing shortage (yet more fallout from the crash), it is ONLY the dearth of lending which is keeping home prices from launching into interstellar space by suppressing demand.

Your vacancy expense could be quite significant and consume all of your profit and even get into your principal.

And it seems baffling there are no construction or architecture firms dedicated to the concept.There is no convention in shipping container construction, therefore every step of the process is clunky, i.e. time-consuming, i.e. expensive.This is why, I believe, it hasn't (really) worked, which is definitely not to say that it won't work.

We have used various methods to save up for down-payment funds: we set aside pay raises instead of consuming them, re-enlistment bonus sums, tax-free income from deployments, an inheritance check, the tax-free savings account while deployed...And so forth.  

This issue is still being resolved I believe.A L/O that is with an occupant and where rental credits are applied is a financing agreement, you need to follow Dodd-Frank and Predatory Lender Laws with consumers (your tenants). 

Let's say you can consume 2 hours a day of podcasts.  

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleges that ITT also misled its students—a charge the company strongly denies.

There are certainly issues including how many and what types of properties you can sell with these methods and to whom, but most of those are consumer protection issues.