By living in one unit and renting out the others, you reduce your living expenses and generate income.

He talks about how you can purchase a rental property, manage it as a short term rental during the year you acquire it, do a cost segregation study, use those "losses" to significantly reduce your taxable income that year, and then turn the property into a long term rental in the following year. 

The actuaries realize they have too many policies in one area and the insurance companies want to reduce risk and spread risk. 

If you ever found your self in trouble you sell a property and reduce your debt load and obligations. 

Without knowing your exact situation on time, energy, and capital it's hard to limit down to a market. 

I should look at house hacking as a way to reduce my living expensesAll of that makes sense to me but in my personal situation, I live with my parents for free.

Direct marketing can be pretty time/energy consuming, have you considered buying directly from wholesalers?

But at this point I am going to reduce it to 2 questions so I don't give you a headache. 1) if a property is being sold as is, is that an automatic disqualification?

I thought about doing a partnership return with my wife since partnership returns are audited less, to reduce the size of my 1040, but my CPA said it was not worth worrying about. 

The methodology of the study would not have been able to capture that nuance.Unfortunately, for the last few years, there has been a missed opportunity for Ogden to take advantage of the comparatively lower price points and really cater to smaller pocket books with energy to rehabilitate the old houses.