And that business can certainly be RE -- whether development, rentals, notes, etc, if you have a trusted management team running the business, there are generally ways you can completely extract yourself from the business.Sure, the business could fail, the stock could tank, and you could be left without financial independence, but again, that can happen with govenrment-backed interest-bearing securities as well.

The best advice that I can give is: Don't borrow money that isn't going to make you money or enable you to live cheaper until you can comfortably do so.  

Through solid cash-flow, it has enabled our children to start their careers with NO education debt. 

Thus don't make an offer, instead present solutions that enable the seller to be able to justify and present to you an offer you're willing to accept.

I'm planning on going to the courthouse to extract some probate leads myself.

As with all licensing laws, it is a tool for the government to extract fees.

"BiggerPockets LLC".That doesn't mean you have to use the "LLC" part of the name all the time because you can also file a Doing Business As (DBA) for "BiggerPockets" which enables you to market under the new name which does not have the LLC addition.

If you have access to a public website and need to ‘capture’ the data from it to create your database or spreadsheet for your leads (assuming your county doesn’t already offer the information in a spreadsheet format), the keywords you need to learn are “data mining,” “screen scraping”, and “data extraction” (I had never heard of either term to describe capturing info from a website until I went to craigslist and found someone under the ‘services’ section who offered IT services….and explained what I needed.

So when you are out and see a place you can instantly extract the sale info on the property run the numbers for you instead of going and using your own your spreadsheets etc.

I'm using the MLS to extract the data.