I barely have anything as well.. .. bankrupt and looking for work.

I had a tenant go bankrupt and I had to pay the bill to get the water released to the next tenant. 

Investors can bankrupt Agents by abusing their time, so I appreciate your concern for your Agent.  

Some houses I bought for $5K I ended up putting at least $10K in rehab plus the rediculous property taxes in Wayne County nearly bankrupted me.Glad I got a fresh start investing here in  the Bay Area.

The only real risk is that the qualified intermediary holding your funds goes out of business or bankrupt or whatever during the process.  

I'd be a horrible mentor because I'd question all of your assumptions and tell everyone why their deal would bankrupt them :-) But I do think it would be extremely useful for people that are starting out but want deeper help than answers on a forum but short of plunking down $50K for a guru course.

You may want to do some more reading here about "private lenders".I don't rain on parades for the fun of it, I'd rather have more constructive conversations, but you need to stay away from a mortgage broker running a pool, while they have a sales pitch for your money, you don't have the security you may think you do and most try to fly under the radar, that's because they are not compliant with federal laws.The broker who ran a pool here had a great spiel and swore he was up on everything, one of his investors had an investigation done, the guy couldn't cover the debts owing, went bankrupt, then the FBI moved in, hammered for everything from selling unregistered securities to mail fraud (he used the mail) and today be will be having his lunch in a federal prison dinning facility.

And the investment world is littered with paper millionaires who end up bankrupted when caught flat footed in a down turn. 

Now up to 68 banks including another Billion dollar bank (almost $2 billion)....from a book I recently read, the author intimates that Citicorp was nearly bankrupt at about the same time that Lehman's closed (failed).I doubt if we will ever hear that B of A "failed" until well after the fact.

Many of them have the same owners as previous ones that went bankrupt.