Not sure if you've checked it out yet or not, but The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Wholesaling is a good place to start as it takes you through the ins and outs.

The ultimate goal would be to acquire or flip, but inevitably circumstances will likely end up presenting themselves as opportunities to either wholesale or list properties as an agent. 

Ultimately would like to create passive income but think a flip may be the best way for us to get into the market.

I would start with the ultimate beginners guide to REI, and go from there

I figure I have a few months before I'm ready to buy and so that gives me the perfect amount of time to start finding those realtors, contractors, and brokers that will email and text with me and ultimately become my go to people.

I highly recommend going through The Ultimate Beginner's Guide and joining your local REIAs to hit up what you're looking for.

It was only after reading "The ultimate guide to real estate investing" that I learned about this website.  

Ultimately only you can decide if you prefer to continue doing the same thing or look at bigger properties. 

Ultimately, any money I saved was wiped out from city violations from an un-kept lawn.But above all – Alex’s comment above says it perfectly. 

You could look more into a Lease Purchase or Land Contract instead where you are doing a seller carry scenario of sorts, then you could re-rent the property and ultimately re-sell the property.