Also, you will likely only be able to use the rent to offset the mortgage pmt debt on the rental property to $0 since you dont have any Sched E history yet. 

Well, a lot of life happened and now I am getting back to zero no debt and I'll be renting for now and I am considering a duplex to buy cash or maybe land and some sort of unconventional home but still purchasing cash.

Additionally, we are approved with the Better Business Bureau (BBB).

With this in mind, if you intend to leverage short-term debt (hard money), it's even more vital that your underwriting is thorough and that you have the correct systems in place to tackle potential issues.

For instance, if there was a total of $250K of debt on those properties that woud leave you with $350K of proceeds to use to purchase $600K of real estate.  

I doubt many are going into credit card debt or if they are that's kind of crazy.. as this part of real estate has no smoke and mirrors generally. 

While I doubt I'll be investing here (terrified that property taxes and the pension debt will ultimately cripple property values), I'm always interested in meeting new people.

You divide that $20k by .075 and you get a boost of $260k to the valuation.Allowing you to take the property back to the bank, get a new loan with $208k of additional debt on the property, pay yourself back that investment and now you have enough cash to buy a $1M deal and use that strategy over and over while scaling exponentially.

A less then full investigation may result in one thinking that the house and or the house and tennis court lots were what was being sold.As I later found out, a newbie tax lien investor thought they were getting a great bargain by outbidding other misinformed investors and paying the back taxes, legal fees, and an additional $34,000 (overage) which the county forwarded to me.  

I'm at the beginning of my investment career, fresh out of college and pretty heavy in debt at 7% interest.