It is much more efficient to spend some time up front to really understand the market.

I do potentially have access to private money if needed, and a 401(k).

The successful wholesalers I know spend $8,000 + per month on online marketing, SEO, SEM, landing pages, lead conversion, etc.  

Yeah they will spend thousands of dollars to fight $1000 claim.

Spend your time on your contracts, insurance, and operations.Contracts-  copy, borrow from someone else as a starting point.  

Real estate, by default, is passive and the primary way to avoid the passive loss rules is to qualify as a real estate professional.Full-time employees and non-real estate business owners cannot qualify as a real estate professional (aka REPS status) because one of the tests is to spend more time in real estate than anything else (and it’s unlikely that you can convince the IRS or Tax Court that you spent more time in RE than your day job).

Do they have the necessary resources to stay on top of all the tax issues such as 1031 exchanges, 754 Step-Ups, etc.Feel free to send me a private message if you have any questions here.A couple articles you can read that will be helpful:https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/51/topics/1206189-cost-...https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/51/topics/1204912-how-t...

Good to see public and private on projects like this.

Using your own funds to pay down your loan so you get a bigger loan sounds like a zero sum gain (aka IE using 1 dollar to pay down loan so you can net 1 more dollar from the new proposed loan) So how are you going to net more cash when spending 1 dollar to get another 1 dollar ?

But due to spending so long in grad school and having one income and a much lower salary for most of my career, I feel behind on retirement.