Learn to control your spending and pay off debt.

There's tons of options and even free options for landlords. 95+% of ours pay online and we have 3 tenants that drop payments off at our office.

Taking these two pieces of info will tell you how long you will take to get an offer, so if you go past that you should lower the price, and then the other action item would be to starting off lower than all the other properties if the condition is better than your condition.

Off course the rates were hiked 2 times since the post.   

for me I would have been better off donating that 75k to habitat for humans would have got more out of it than a tax write off !!

I would suggest coming to some investing meet ups and just start talking to others and form a plan based off of that.

You must be pretty good friends - most veterans (including myself) would never let a non-veteran assume their loan b/c the VA loan entitlement is not restored until that loan is paid off.  

Would you partner with her on a deal where you were buying the property off the MLS?

The US Tax systems, when compared to the EU, seems to be setup for capitalists. 1031 exchanges, write-offs, etc.

I have many investors with the same goals and want to be hands-off.