The spouse does not have to be involved with the business (mine isn't) but must be ok with the general idea- if you want to have a healthy marriage.

"Giving credit to Carlton Sheets for getting you into real estate is like giving credit to a snake oil salesman for getting you into being healthy."

The trees are healthy, but I understand his nervousness.

From there, dig into things like Unemployment Rate and Population Growth; those are both good indicators of a healthy market. 

@George CoxThe Yellow Letters get opened and get a healthy call response.

Although I am a successful business woman and have had a healthy retail store for the past 25 years, being a member of BP, reading sugessted books, and enrolling in an amazing inexpensive REI course , has given me yet another perspective of how to increase wealth. 

once your send it out, there goes your money and you're now stuck to chance, "odds", and the best you could do in trend research on a list provider, etc...BUUUT, if I had a decent size budget, I'd spread it out between a healthy balance of PPC and tossing up my own website and throwing proper seo campaigns at it to rank for the necessary "motivated seller" terms that have decent search traffic...this way I have control over my budget and can see the short term (PPC) benefits along with the long term (SEO) benefits.the only caveat to this approach is you WILL NEED to really know your stuff for PPC and SEO...but if you obviously have a marketing budget you'll probably want to carve out some room to consult or hire someone who knows what to do and how to do so that you're not throwing money at the wind bc if you try to do it on your own, you might as well just send mailers lolsorry so long, but the cool thing about real estate is that there's always an alternative path to a solution...its just a matter of finding it and where there's a multitude of counsel, there's bound to be gem of an answer somewhere!

My husband and I purchased 30-year term life insurance policies (inexpensive for healthy 20-year somethings) just in case.

For example, I will lose 10 lbs by the end of March 30, 2012 by eating healthy salad, and exercising 1 hour a day.

I think a healthy mix along with a healthy mix of other assets is good for one's portfolio.