My husband and I anticipate a need for travel a few times a year, and so we're thinking the Alaska Airline VISA Signature card might be helpful, since it would accumulate some miles and also has the annual companion ticket. 

My long term goal would be to accumulate 3-5 rental properties in the DMV area and possibly one long distance property that would be used as a vacation rental.

Hey @Charles Goetz I appreciate the advice Sir, and the house doesn't have any gutters around it so when it rains it starts to accumulate under the property and Im in the Longview tx area , I will look more into how to prevent this for next time and try and get quotes on the floor repair separately , Thank you

Older property we bought which has two low spots where water accumulates.  

I think they're going to increase in popularity because many professionals accumulate money, don't necessarily have the time to do their own deal or manage them themselves, but don't know how to invest directly into real estate (so that means not REITS).These websites are advertising to people like that and what they provide is the ability for these people to have multiple deals sent to their inbox every day/week/month and have a certain level of trust that the deal has passed the websites own due diligence on top of any they might do.However, every syndicator has their own style/set of fees and any of these websites are going to have their own fees/costs on top of that, which is going to decrease the return you would make.

(Stands by expecting a bolt of lightning)  Since it now takes very little skill or effort to sell these days that's the path of least resistance so it's going to accumulate more lemmings. 

Unfortunately, you can't hit homeruns this way.You need to use all of it on one property, then flip it with profit, and repeat using those same funds (now with added accumulating profits) to expand the number of cash entries you can have...each flipped cash entry generates profits, that when added with the other profits (on a repeated, continuing basis) allows you to buy with all cash a continuous string of Rentals...with no debt on them.Then, you can refi these rentals as you see fit.

Your retirement income may well rely on the "slow dimes" you choose to ACCUMULATE.

You want to be accumulating properties, not selling them. 

Contributions and accumulated earnings in traditional IRAs may lead to taxable income during conversion.