Just kidding about the Donald, but some other successful investor (see classified ads) might consider taking you under wing in exchange for your time stuffing envelopes or distributing flyers.

Credit isn't as important if your interested in creative financing techniques, I would highly recommend spending that money on more advanced education and or marketing depending on which strategy you end up choosing.

It does not matter how I work a short sale or what techniques I use.

Assuming one of the deals go under contract, I will act as the sponsor and syndicate the transaction for the down payment and repairs under market terms.This may be a dumb question, but I'm wondering whether there is a tool that syndicators use to keep track of investor contributions, ownership interests in the deal, Sponsor distributions to investors, or just to play around with different scenarios? 

A loan greater than the property value can be risky, if nothing goes wrong everything is fine.If the money is going through a title company (a good idea) the money will be distributed to the owner of the security property, likely the LLC in this case.The borrower/property owner should be LLC to avoid being a consumer loan.

For example, if you end up having excess losses that carry forward from year to year, and then you sell one of the properties - then the allocation of overhead expenses will matter.That said, if you want to simplify your bookkeeping - stick with #1, even distribution.

As I understand the requirements (in Georgia at least), deposits just have to be in an account (not necessarily segregated by tenant), and if I have more than 10, it has to be interest-bearing and I distribute the interest annually.   

In the future, I will plan to use the pre-screen technique shared by Max.

I imagine a lot of the pushback on the seminar is a result of creative techniques that “ they don’t want you to know!

Since you are over retirement age, you can choose to take distributions of the income your investments produce and will pay taxes only on what you take out.