This metric includes the energy I have devoted to actively managing a pretty complicated business.  

From what you have written and what you have shared about your family's interests there simply is zero reason to devote any more of your scarcest resource (your time) to pursing additional sums of money.  

I would say from early 20s to mid 30s do real estate and safer investments until you have enough safe income to survive without a job.Then from mid 30s devote your full time to look into riskier investments like betting on a certain stock or opening a business or funding a start-up. 

It's hard to the point of ridiculous and certain people's faith-based devotion to "science" rivals the most fanatical of religious zealots.

It will be your fanatical faith based devotion to atheism as a more hard core fundamentalist than any person of faith who has posted here.

My goal in real estate is to create sufficient passive income from rentals to cover living expenses to allow me to work in real estate full time and devote 100% of my time building my realty company.

having five rentals allows me to save money and build a retirementwhile still being able to have time to practice and do my ministryI live on my church money and i save the rental income (I may use little for things here and there) but the idea is to save as much as possible.I dont pay mortgage or rent so my overhead is low.as far as return on investment my thoughts were as follows I buy properties based on what they were worth prior to the housing boom. so for example if a property sold for 98,000 in 1990 and I can buy it on foreclosure for 20k I feel I have a flippable housebut since I am renting it I consider it a flipable rental, I consider my R.O.I to be what I will be able to sell the property for 10 years from now. the money I get now is helping me generate more capital to purchase.other properties later.I am originally from NYC so I have grown up watching people be landlords turning single homes into two families or basement apartments I have grown up crunching numbers in my head watching basements apartments being built spending the nights in themand calculating the costs of doing a business like this.This is now my second job my church job being the firstI work at church 5 hours a week the rest I can devote to this.

You also have to take into consideration that those jobs are going to keep you from devoting time to the business, so it will take you longer to get out of your job.

You're basically saying no title search was done, then when you sell, no real estate agents were used on either side, again no title search performed, no taxes paid.Regarding etiquette and post length, some people may not read long posts, but I tend to take them more seriously because if they're devoting that amount of space to responding, that means they probably feel pretty passionate about the subject or have some experience. 

I'm not going to ramble about pro/cons partly because I'm new here, but mostly because I don't understand why people are trying to bash others about their opinions when this is a RE-devoted forum..(?)