A quick bio about me: I’m 40, work in waste water, want to leave the rat race, and I will achieve my goal.

I'm also new to REI and trying to learn as much as possible - this book breaks everything down with actionable steps to help achieve everything else I'm reading/listening to!

I, along with my team, help these people achieve desired returns through our real estate investing decisions. 

It's going to be tough to achieve significantly positive cashflow in the short term in the LA market without putting a lot down.

With this structure we have not been turned away from lender because we are Canadian, but have found an increased difficulty with refinancing our rentals with ARV of $60,000.We have a couple more lenders we are talking with, and have determined that by packaging our two SF rentals together to create a combined value higher than $100,000, we have achieve refinancing. 

One might choose to undercut their competition slightly, but only enough to lure enough renters to 100% occupancy, even a 5% undercut would likely achieve that.In other words, you should have good reasons not to buy, reasons that outweigh the fact that if you rent you're not really saving much money and you're buying the property for someone else.

They will be able to give you advice on specifics on how you can achieve your goals!

The highest salary I achieved was $55K/year. 

Another option (which from your posts, doesn't sound like one you would like to entertain) is speak to a lender that offers a portfolio product where you can pool properties valued at $72k - $99k together to achieve a total minimum loan amount of $300k ($50k per property). 

Trying to achieve two goals first is get my family into a more comfortable house and once the dust settles, I will be looking to buy a property out of state and start doing brrrr for the long term.