Trim away as much fat as possible (like trading down in automobile if at all possible), stop dumping money into the 401k for a while, and try combining your desires to buy your own place and invest in real estate by "house hacking," where you live in one of the units of a multiplex while renting the others.

Or just go for the fat cash flow, which one can verify with a simple spreadsheet formula can work out comparably well.

Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. $190-195K looks to be the range IMHO. 

Pigs get fat hogs get slaughtered your number one goal is to find out what your nuisance value is and go home happy before you seem to greedy and they just decide to go another route.Contact the county recorder and see if the home is still in your name or look on Realtor.com and see if the home is listed for sale as a short sale.

Solution:oStop dipping your toe in the water and go ALL IN on one marketing channel (in case you are wondering, Direct Mail is my bread and butter when it comes to finding motivated sellers).oMake one channel Fat, Healthy and Producing Leads first.

I'd like to give you a big fat chunk of equity for doing nothing.

We can be fat, skinny, short, tall, multitude of skin colors and nationalities, and have all kinds of things against us and yet still succeed.

:Starting in 2011 when DH went on sabbatical from his horrible day job, I started to read this forum, fat wallet's property forum, the MMM real estate forum and I even bought a couple of property investing books. 

Like I mentioned before........I love good marketing campaigns..Someone made out like a fat rat from this thread...I can't be mad at them...It was an awesome topic to feed the frenzy.Those who understand the business know its just show...LOL...................Feed the frenzy!!!!!!!!!!!!

So over time I learned not to chase deals, I chase good conversations and let my personality shine and put my salesman skills and pitches on the back burner because if you have a great conversation you will in the course of that conversation discover their true motivations for selling and build a bond and relationship with that seller.