You can make great profits flipping houses, but you can also lose a ton if you don't do it right.That said, I encourage you to be in touch with an investor friendly agent in Indy.

However as you correctly point out this is far more risky and or its risk capital compared to buying a income property.. but the reward can be strati-spherically higher .. not just a little bit but it can be life changing profits on some of these deals.

@Alecia Loveless Only thought I have on how to generate real income is if you could do weddings.

Flipping is probably a little more intense, but can still be done with a day job, but again, my average flip versus my average rental: flip has made much better returns.And as for generational wealth and handing down something to your kids... well, I guess I view it as: if I can hand my kids a $10mm trust fund held in public securities, or $10mm real estate portfolio, they are going to be pretty set either way, but a real estate portfolio will continually have costs and work, a brokerage account is a bit more set and forget, with some periodic rebalancing.

Appreciation is not a bonus or luck, it is literally the number one wealth-generating force in real estate.

Consider a bigger cabin if you want to try to grab a huge equity capture over the next 2 or 3 three years.  2,000 sq ft cabins that were generating 120k a year gross and selling for 850k to 875k are now hitting 85k to 100k and going for 675k to 725k. 

Give them a portion of the profits from the STRs and have a buy-out clause when you have the funds to refinance.I am sure there are many other potential options for you to look into, but just off the top of my head these 5 came to mind.

I'm not a real estate professional in the IRS sense, so if I take money out of my real estate investments as profit, I'm paying ordinary income.

Quote from @Evan Polaski: @Jay Hinrichs, while I wasn't going to call them MLM, I did attend an Armando Montelongo (A&E's Flip this House from mid 2000's) seminar at a hotel conference room in 2007 or 08, which was the free funnel to spend $1,500 for a three day seminar or $25,000 for an in-person mentorship.I have seen similar promoted with Christina and Tarrek from Flip or Flop more recently.I didn't start realizing how profitable education can be until the last 5 or so years.  

While you might lean towards long-term tenants for stability, short-term rental platforms like Airbnb can yield higher profits if the building allows it.When you get to Miami, I’d recommend visiting a few meetups hosted by South Florida REIA.