If you put a tenant in there and they are rough on the place then you just have to deal with that extra hassle next year before selling again.Yes you may not be walking away with a fat check like all of the success story flippers will, but you will likely at least be at a break even, PLUS all of the experience you got.

I am such a NOOB right now, but I'm reading and listening to all I can in an effort to speed up my learning curve and have been for a while now.

At the very least I'd make sure I had a big, fat, enormous reserve fund as it could take a little while for the property to stabilize.

@Rahul B.You can, in a certain sense, have the best of both worlds.A Solo 401(k) plan is a great vehicle for new contributions and the tax savings you receive.  

My first local flip was very successful but that was in the good old days when finding fat deals and then selling them was easy.

That is not to say it still can't work out great for you, just that you need to be aware of both the upside and the downside and carefully craft and execute your strategy to maximize the upside and hedge your downside ... and if you can't or don't know how to do that, then you need to be honest with yourself and have the discipline to NOT buy anything until/unless you can. In

If a lowly paid teacher with combined w2 income of $80,000 can,  in a short 7 year period starting with one little investment condo can now have 86 front doors and soon to be 109 front doors, anyone can."

I'm a newbie at REI and right now I'm learning everything I can in all aspects of real estate, in wholesaling I would like an advice on  what are you looking for when analyzing a property?

That said, I'm sure you hope to live to be 59 and older, and having a big fat pile of tax sheltered income to draw from at that point in time would be a benefit, even if you have done other things to allow you to leave the rat race at an earlier age.With a self-directed IRA, you can diversify any existing savings into real estate and potentially get better results than investing in conventional financial products.  

I am currently trying to market as much as I can in order to find as many motivated sellers with equity as I can in nice areas to wholesale.