When analyzing a luxury short term rental (STR) vacation home for investment in today's mortgage rate environment, the ROI & margins can be extremely tight. 

@Danielle Daly does this extremely well in Denver, CO and I'm sure has a few golden nuggets on how to mitigate a few of the cons I mentioned by being a very good operator. 

I really see Columbus Ohio as an extremely safe bet for the next 10-20 years.

I recommend people enter RE at this time only if it is a passion and they are extremely motivated and hard working.  

Go to Etsy and search for "rental property tracker," and you will find hundreds of nice spreadsheets to track 10-20 rentals, usually for under $10.Software has extremely helpful features like online payments, marketing syndication (click a button, and your property is advertised on multiple sites), electronic document review/signing, maintenance tracking, and owner reports.

I vividly remember the countless hours spent driving to and from remote locations in rural Manitoba, alternating between early BP podcasts and Jim Rohn recordings.Over the next two years, I adopted an extremely frugal lifestyle, enabling me to achieve a 75% savings rate, sold my custom truck for a used Toyota, traded my new home in the burbs for a duplex (house-hack) in a challenging neighbourhood of Winnipeg where attempted break-ins were commonplace.

Go to Etsy and search for "rental property tracker," and you will find hundreds of nice spreadsheets to track 10-20 rentals, usually for under $10.Software has extremely helpful features like online payments, marketing syndication (click a button, and your property is advertised on multiple sites), electronic document review/signing, maintenance tracking, and owner reports.

Verifying last 2 years of rental history and income extremely important to find the “best of the worst”.Make sure you understand the Class of properties you are looking at and the corresponding results to expect.

The argument that it is 1 extreme or the other is a false narrative.

So Basically I am with you guys @V.G Jason best way to get to a point to live on rental cash flow is to absolutely keep your day job .Now some folks pull it off in the less expensive markets of the country were cost to acquire is in many instances less than 50k a door cost of living is much less than other areas and they are as stated  extremely frugal.