Now, if you hire a contractor who will be responsible for the work, licensed trades to sign off then we have some assurance as to the condition of our collateral.

Is having them in an LLC right now worth the trade-off in terms of not having the stability of plain old boring 30 year fixed mortgages on them?

Run away from this.What I would do is try to get a job either in the trades or a real estate office and just soak in everything you can.Starting this early in life with REI is a great thing.

My market here in Cleveland tends to lag behind the rest of the country and the swings are not as volatile so prices are still 40-60% below the highs of 2007.As a buy and hold investor looking 30 years into the future - does it make sense to keep these assets until I retire our should I sell them if the market here goes back up in 5-10 years.Example - the house I picked up in a Cleveland suburb for 50K sold for 120K in 2006 - if the market reaches this level should you always sell if you are looking long term.

This is a good place to "paper trade" and start learning.

It can either be schedule C (Form 1040) as income from a trade or business or Line 21 (Form 1040) as other income.

The end result may be effectively the same, but if there are any issues it's much cleaner to be dealing with the individual transaction that was a problem than the trading between multiple transactions.

Really, it's running on WordPress and for $5 per month you can get a host that will host WordPress and it is pretty easy to set up and configure yourself and there is a lot of free information online about that.I'm a developer by trade myself, and am currently offering small projects for free and larger ones pretty cheap in order to rebuild my portfolio and get back into freelancing.

We joke about tenants and trade ideas.I think there is a lot of money to be made in buying and selling homes and it is a very emotional decision for most.

q=NYSE:TWTRMarket cap of $25B, trading at $46/share.For reference, Facebook has a market cap of $118B, Google has $339B, and Tesla has $17B.Revenues are $316M in 2012, and growing fast.Still running a loss of over $100M a year.