After that's under control, focus on increasing income through additional work at your current job, taking on a side hustle, or finding ways to increase income on your existing rental.At the same time, educate yourself.

Plus new folks do a very poor job of screening the buyer for Ability To Repay (ATR) which involves pulling full doc and calculating the borrowers DTI, honest income, honest debt payments, prior debt payment histor (FICO) etc etc.Plus shockingly (or shocking to sellers) if you bought this investment house, fixed it, then are selling with financing you are selling "inventory" and y9ou owe taxes on the gain in the year of sale, you are NOT able to use installment sale to spread out paying taxes. 

🔥🔧And you know how we're always chatting about the importance of understanding market drivers like rents, population growth, and job growth?

Electric: is the easiest to split, but may require holes cut in walls to separate the units.Gas: gas lines aren't as flexible as wires, but it can usually be done affordably.Water: most cities will NOT install additional water meters on a property.

I make about 70k a year from my salaried job and my friend makes double that.

You can list all the reasons why you charge $250 for a one-time shoveling, but nobody will care when there are other vendors doing the exact same job for $100 or less.I'm in a city of 10,000.

Some of them have converted to flips, but I do not do flips because it is a job (stop flipping, stop earning).  

First person I hired, I also had them write their own job procedures and so on.

I only have a single rental (at the moment) and a simple W2 job.

Columbus is the only Ohio market that has seen rapid growth in jobs and population.