Plenty of ways to make money in RE and different strokes for different folks.If it were me?

Our lives fell apart in September when my father-in-law had a stroke and everything was put on hold.

Not only that, but lending to the poor also became a qualification for take overs and mergers, if you had not lent enough to the poor, then a take over would be blocked.So in one stroke, ability to repay took second place to other things.Mortgages were then made, packaged up into so called bonds and sold to investors (not re investors, but people like pensions companies etc).In 2006 a lot of these packaged mortgages were found to have deficiencies, eg people not repaying, and the investors holding these investments started disposing of them.Banks were asking accountancy firms in the City of London and Wall Street to start unpacking each one of these instruments to redo e paperwork and pull out the bad loans and then repackage them.The Banks were offering in London £50,000 to redo one of these bonds (for a better word) and offer insurance on the bond after it was repackaged, the auditing and accountancy firms asked for £250,000 per bond and no insurance. 

@Jerryll Noorden, this is what you may call different strokes for different folks.

May I ask for a broad brush stroke numbers?

My brother in law did nothing but save for the future, and he was great at it unfortunately he suffered a stroke and has never been the same, that being said his family told me they wish they could have gone on more trips and done more things together  instead of pinching every dime . 

*Confetti trickles across the blissful New Years’ sky, backlit by *sparkling fireworks* *A passionate kiss* at the stroke of midnight, etc, etc..

Long term even index funds have performed better than RE (drawing broad strokes here, RE investing is local and market dependent).

That's not going to be helpful when your tenant is dying of heat stroke. 

But, again, you should be careful with generalizations and broad strokes...