My goal is to work for myself and stop my 8-4 job at some point.

Learning NEVER stops. 

I work with a one stop shop brokerage and we'd be happy to help you with anything you could need! 

I hope you dont stop here with RE, go get the second one and break even .

Or you stop hearing from them.

Stop going out to eat, make as few trips to pay less gas, cut expenses drastically.

They're offering 3.99% interest rates (covering 6% of the home cost to buy down the rate), $10k in bonus money, plus a fridge, washer, and dryer.Because they can't stop building, they have to offer extremely good incentives to keep the product moving in this buyer's market.

It's okay if you're not going to become famous overnight.

I stopped buying in 2021 but when I was still actively submitting offers around 2019-2021 we were getting blown out by a wide margin.  

Or they could do their own strategic foreclosure stop paying rip the rents as long as you can and hand he keys back you will see lots of this coming up.