I know because I did both for almost a decade and was able to save money at a very good clip while I figured out where I wanted to deploy that money which ended up being in real estate.

I am really surprised by the amount of people who are just shrugging and saying "of course it will come back" It was a struggle to turn the corner in the 1990's, with decades of ground work, and as I said before- the city cannot deploy those resources again.We have a grand old shell of a city here in NJ.

Your question deserves an in depth answer because it's one of the better ones.The first thing you need to is compartmentalize what you can do, meaning what are your resources and how can they be best deployed. 

They are measuring their IRR and EM goals and deploying capital to operators where they can achieve true risk adjusted returns without being hands on and spending their time elsewhere to make money. 

It's meant to inspire hope though they often fail to inspire the creativity and social skill building it will take to bring it all together.Self-direction of retirement accounts, soliciting other sources of investment in your deals, ... that's all part of it.While you may not need your own resources, you will need to know or be able to learn how to find them, gather them and deploy them to the benefit of everyone involved.That's where most of it falls short. 

The search continues, so you are not alone in finding the perfect lender, if they exist.I try to put myself in the lenders shoes, and there ultimate goal is to maximize the rate of return on deployed capital. 

I spent most of my adult life deployed, living out of a bag in third world sh@tholes.

It's part of entering the game here.The second question is "can I make more money deploying my funds elsewhere, if I conserve cash using an FHA loan?"

Sometimes I have been more lenient in the lending terms just because the amount of money that the person wanted to borrow for a particular deal was a good fit for a chunk of money I wanted to fully deploy.

@Annu Zer I guess that depends on the deal and what strategy you're looking to deploy.