I’ve bought low and held and sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit, reinvested, have many properties now, continue to buy more, have a solid cash flow from real estate, keep a fairly stress-free W-2 job to increase my income and my ability to obtain financing and keep up my standard of living.

This is a LESS stressful and cost efficient way to get your first rental and take advantage of the loan programs that are afforded to home owners.Otherwise continue to read, listen to podcasts, study reports and numbers, but if it makes sense and all your ducks are in a row, take the plunge!

One thing I will stress upon though, you need to get educated, but if you join a guru class or workshop, DO NOT buy from them as it is a complete conflict of interest. 

Thank you guys for responding, just reading your responses relieved a lot of stress and simplified things in my head a bit.

A metric we must never forget is RoS: Return on Stress.

Make sure you underwrite deals extremely conservatively & stress your assumptions to the extreme to see how far the economic outlook can deteriorate before your deal goes bad.Can the deal survive rents being flat even after completing your value-add biz plan?

That seems like a reasonably obvious answer that my stress induced thinking completely ignored.Now, if he does resolve the lien himself or we purchase anyways and get it taken care of, moving forward it shouldn't matter that he had purchased QC and ran into all these issues, right?

I've been reading about the "investment 1031" and it sounds expensive and stressful with the 180 time frame. :-) Plus we like to do the work ourselves because A. we like it and B. we know the quality of the work.

It was just too hard and stressful to deal with problems, maintenance, and complaints from afar, while still working on my other full time job.

You are talking about $172 man..... come on....Dealing with this kind of BS isn't worth $172 to me......not worth my time or headache......Two options.....Say "ok take me to court".... which she probably won't.... if you get served, pay her the $172 and settle.... is the "what if scenario" worth the stress for $172?