Buy or inherit and hold all their lives while working the properties for income.I've seen teachers, firemen, software engineers and all sorts of people utilize both strategies successfully.

There's a tool called Depreciate'Em that is listed on BiggerPockets Software page(http://biggerpockets.com/software.html)I have found the DepreciateEm.com site to be quite useful.

You can pay a lot of a software... or you can do the following: - Assume you are handed $2.5M in cash in 10 years (pick your number). - Take a blank sheet of paper, and a pen/pencil. - Draw a big circle on the paper.

My leases all require tenants to accept notices by email and text, to "opt in" for text messages from my property management software, and to maintain a current email and phone number in my system for the duration of their tenancy.

You can ask them how to best track your finances and get suggestions for software, spreadsheet, etc.

I have been in the industry for about 7 years now, and I have tried a lot of different pricing software.

My 9-5 is in IT but I also dabble in software development and data analysis.

I would like to use an AIO software like Stessa or Turbotenant for my bookkeeping, looking for opinions on those.

Be sure to have a written business plan and run your comps through a reliable software program before placing an offer on a property to make sure the numbers match your goal for the investment.

There are a couple tenant screening tools smartmove, keycheck and some pM software have screening.