Some verbiage may be confusing but with each one you will walk away with some seed that sticks with you.

While you work on those two things I encourage you to soak up as much information as you can here.  

He is going to come out and look at the place - judge how much he can soak you for and tell you to pay it or he leaves and the tenants can stay. 

You're never going to learn exactly what will be on the exam but as long as you're soaking in the information, you'll do fine!

So that leads me to the question: we live in Florida and we recently paid cash for two out of state properties and I would like to get my seed money back out of them so I can purchase more property.

That's exactly how I got started in REI and I look at it like I'm planting seeds right now and will start to see the great results of my efforts in 5 years or so.

I think there are two valid points here.If you want to grow the business and your wealth faster use leverage. it can add more risk but you will get a better return in the majority of places.If your goal is to retire with as little passivity as possible don't get all caught up in the hype of you need a good return that's important yes but it isn't your primary goal in that sense it is stable income for as little work as possible. high dollar hours vs smaller dollar hours.If you have 10 paid off duplexes that cashflow 16000 a month and net 8000 that is a hell of alot less work then 40 leveraged duplexes that provide the same income just better returns in potential appreciation and better equity pay down. in one case you make 6 figures with probably 10 hours of work a week most likely alot less if you are good at managing and selecting tenants and in the other case you would work 4 times as much for the same income soaking up all that valuable time you could spend with family or other activity your like(passion hobby ect.)

Definitely looking forward to soaking up as much knowledge as possible.

I’m still soaking in all of the information and knowledge I can.

There are 2 Golden rules to REI, and GR#1 is "Never, under any circumstances, for any reason, ever, spend you seed money (that's your cash).