As you get closer to crunch time for closing you’re not worrying about the appraisal being made, being out through processing or underwriting to spit out the actual amount of money you will be bringing to the table (your rates, money down, points, etc can change depending on the appraisal).

I was reading Brandon Turner's rental property book and I wanted some more information about paying for property inspectors.Let's say you find a property that fits your criteria, crunch the numbers and find out it's a good deal. 

I also have a decent idea of what I can start with, like finding potential investment properties, going to city hall to find the real owner of the property, seeing if they're willing to sell, open-minded and negotiable, crunching the numbers to see what would be a good deal, etc, etc.While I was networking with local REI groups, I was offered a marketing internship from a local, successful real-estate investing company, where they will show me how they do their bird-dogging, in exchange for finding leads for them. 

They have a steady paycheck, the get housing allowance etcI'm no where near in the area of expertise on whether you should or shouldnt... that def depends on the numbers you crunch/market.

But, they are much less likely to lose their property or find themselves in a liquidity crunch in downturns as well.

If you are not 1,000% positive keep your money in your pocket.Rule # 5 - Crunch the number for a deal 50+ times.

There are things that being debt free will do for you that are not math related or crunched with numbers.

Ask flippers if you can see their flips, Ask brokers for P&Ls on listings and practice crunching the numbers.

I've crunched numbers and I'd only use a Hard money guy as a last resort.

I work in data science at Freddie Mac where my team crunches a lot of mortgage data for machine learning, data mining, and data visualization.