I'll drive her until she's dead.Its hard for me to rationalize spending so much money on a car when I know that they are such bad investments.

Your thinking is your issue, nothing else.Go to the library and read anything by Tony Robbins.I am getting a headache hearing your rationalizations and excuses.Quotes:The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you.

Anyone can read secondary market guidelines but that's only half of it, there is the application of compensating factors in a prudent manner and judgment that can be defended.As an example, say a borrower has a total debt ratio of 47%, outside most guidelines, but if a debt is dropping off in 8 months (6 months is the limit to disregard the debt) and the ration will then drop to 34%, I would justify that if there were other strong factors of income and credit was decent along with good employment history.

I also plan to rationalize why I think their asking price was unrealistic and why my offer was fair.

I tried to rationalize it when I first started too.

Having an unclear vision (third mistake) of the final product caused many changes in scope with significant cost creep as we rationalized along the way. 

Off the top of my head I would like to see the following in the "New World Underwriting" and looking for:- Operator experience, reputation and character (always the most important at any time)- No class C- calculating in worse occupancy rate- acceptable cap rate reversion- property expense ration 5-10% less than what I was looking for (Not much more than 45% now)- Break Even occupancy closer to 55-60%- better DSCR, LTV- Better reserves- No Bridge debt (or at least bridge debt that converts to fixed rate)- no planned rent increases for 1 year or very little- Value add on hold for 1 year- Area employment diversity and not dominated by toursim, hotels, or one industryAdmittedly, these are high standards and I am aware it may leave me on the sidelines for some deals but I am ok with that, I can be patient.

Nice contribution @Jason Smith -- a rational approach and great insight.For the rest of us, the reference to the source article is here.

C'mon man, you are rationalizing.

I was able to look at my spreadsheet to quickly see that the project was running underbudget and I was almost done, so I rationalized spending the extra amount to really make that part of the kitchen pop.