They had nice cars and car payments, did vacations, had nice clothes and ate out all the time when they were younger. 

The other ways have been too slow for me and we've had some expenses that ate into the savings I built up, limiting the types of decent properties I could buy to... basically nothing.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations already ate up like half of it.Another poster asked about this so on the blog, so I won't belabor the point - and certainly don't want to pour cold water on your very evident enthusiasm!

I ate Ramen for 10yrs so I can eat Sushi now. 

There ate thoughts that investing during a recession can become very lucrative.

I've survived a few "end of the world" panics (viet name war, cold war, 87' crash, noro virus, dot com bubble, great recession, 2008 real estate market crash, SARS, Ebola, bad raccoon I once ate, on and on, you know the drill, been there done that and the world still goes on.)

But the truth is, if you have your buying criteria and fiscal fundamentals down to a tee: for instance, BUY FOR CASHFLOW and set your BREAKEVEN OCCUPANCY threshold, then you should just buy Real Estate. 

For good deals with reputable wholesalers, there will be lots of savvy, well-capitalized buyers that know their numbers to a tee.

We went ahead & ate the cost of this one as it's a multi unit building.

Don’t buy the first thing you ate shown.When they found out I was a “California Investor” they initially were trying to show me SFRs going for $175K that had a gross rent of $925/mo and I was being told this is phenomenal compared to California