Some of the obvious pros to buying new are the warranties and life span on appliances, roof, garage door etc.  

This is not correct, because its effects on the mortgage payments are occurring over two different time spans (15 years vs 30 years).

@Jorge ContrerasIt might be a lot of time and paperwork to move your 401(k) multiple times in the span of 12 months.

My attention span is far too short to get though that many.

The paradigm shift has been so successful in the span of a generation that governments now find themselves with reduced tax revenues as a result of a situation they helped create.

The IRS tends to invoke "spirit of the law" in addition to "letter of the law" when reviewing these types of scenarios under audit.While this certainly abides by the letter of the law, it clearly breaks the spirit.The IRS would untangle the various agreements and as soon as they see that it is a reciprocal arrangement with the exact same terms and transacted in a short time span, they would correctly determine these to be two prohibited transactions.

When I first started out this helped me a lot as I'm sure it did with a lot of peoplehttps://www.biggerpockets.com/real-estate-investin...Spend a month getting to know what you want to pursue and how you want to do itI know it will all change that's why I say give it a month, it won't hurt to at least learn some things at the start.When I wanted to dive in I was thinking SFH then it changed to flipping, then to wholesaling, vacation rentals, and that was all in the span of about 2-3 weeks because I would listen to the podcasts and think "Oooh that sounds cool!

Many may believe that I am being conservative but I believe my numbers to be more accurate than most other San Diego RE investors primarily because I have taken the time (a few years ago) to fill in a spreadsheet with life spans and expected San Diego costs. 

It really depends on the size of the opening or the span.

If the market slows or falls the time span simply increases.