Stop hanging out with your deadbeat buddies who spend all day drinking, talking sports, and otherwise wasting away.

There are good deals in all of them

There are many reasons why I haven't pursued the arbitrage model, but mainly that it takes too long for the ROI after investing all your time and effort into buying furniture and renting and paying utilities.Let's say you rent an apartment for $1500 and you spend $7000 to furnished it.

-While rent would be more expensive month by month, the idea of being able to take my equity out of my home and also being able to reduce annual repair costs, property taxes, etc. does seem appealing to me. 

I’m fairly new to real estate investing and looking to take action.

That would take 2.5 years just to break even.

It's just going to cost you quite a bit of money to have your accountant prep all of them.

All well and good.

For house flipping, consider an LLC taxed as an S-Corp to reduce self-employment taxes by taking a reasonable salary and the rest as distributions.

All the stuff you need to dig in to.