Although I have sustained my lifestyle and family with this career, I have never been fulfilled completely by it.

By acquiring distressed business and property, leasing to ourselves, implementing improvements, and strategically refinancing, we are poised for sustained success.

From my end, we wanted volume with flips and we both know the long term goal was to take the cash and put into buy & hold assets to build a sustainable model of passive income.

>Cash out of pocket - 15kI am unconvinced (meaning I think it is unlikely) that these units will meet the sustainability rules of FHA.  

Maybe that's odd math/words to explain my thoughts, though.If many houses in your area have solar panels, especially with trends towards sustainability, then it's certainly something you should consider.

I find it very easy to talk myself out of a property and get scared or nervous but one thing that resonated with me is everyone said you need to just JUMP IN and own your first property.

With a petroleum based agricultural system, man made water shortages, no next great Agricultural yield technology, won’t be sustainable.  

I’m just trying to get a sustainable investment going now so in 5 years when I have more time and some equity built up I can start to make the moves to scale up more. 

However, I can't sustain this pace caged within the security of my W2.

For example, to my knowledge going into 2008/2009 if you had at least 15% equity in your deal, you were able to sustain and make it through the worst of that market cycle.And, I'm sure you know all this.