There is a huge imbalance for supply and demand, with demographics of young couples looking to build a nest.

.• Marble quartz countertops in kitchen & laundry• New handscraped espresso birch floors throughout• Wood-look ceramic tile in bath & laundry (and as backsplash behind the range)• New stainless steel appliances• Remote control LED lights under kitchen cabinets• Nest thermostat• New windows• New roof with architectural shingles• New horizontal cedar fence• New cedar deck• New custom exterior shutters• Generous setback from main road• Xeriscaping provides added privacy & noise reduction• Carport & enlarged parking pad for easy turnaround• Prewired for Google FiberRenovations took right at 100 days and cost approximately $60K (versus the 45 days and $40K the original GC promised us, but that's another story for another time).

Keep in mind even if you can get a deal done with no money you still need some cash reserves for vacancies, repairs etc.Sometimes the best way is learn to live well within your means and save a nest egg.

For once in my life, I'm going to take things slow and build out my portfolio over the next 10 years so hopefully I can retire early with a nice nest-egg.

I generally max out my IRA in stock market every year just for diversification and nest egg...Anyhooo... 

If you have a nest egg of $25K to start and it takes 2-3 trips to find a suitable property at $2K a trip (not that hard to do) you could end up spending 20% of your investment budget just on looking for a property.  

You would end up easily spending $1,500 (or 15% of your nest egg) on a round trip flight, hotel room, car rental, etc.  

The contribution portion of your IRA quickly becomes the smaller part of your retirement nest-egg.The founder of Paypal, Peter Thiel, used his Roth IRA to execute on his Paypal options, made tons tax free, then used those gains to invest in Facebook.  

Using  a Roth solo 401k to invest in real estate is a very lucrative way to grow your nest egg tax free because all gains grow tax free.

If you start to budget $2K (for round numbers) for a round-trip flight/car rental/hotel/etc. you can eat away (on a percentage basis) at the nest egg pretty quickly.