I hear NJ has some bad squatter laws.

@Steven J Mooney I'm personally okay with buying a property that is a "bad" deal when I close as long as I am confident that I can turn it into a good or great one.

It's sometimes hard for an agent to find what you want if you just give them the general criteria of "between $50k-$100k in a C or B neighborhood"Look at Crime data on Trulia to see where the good and bad neighborhoods are.

For example, we can be especially bad with buying cheap books and leaving them everywhere...so we try to use resources like the library more often or we'll donate our excess.

Or, I look at the overall robust economy, the relatively strong housing market, and wonder if I'm entering at a bad time - but then realize that when/if things crash, that'll be another round of changes that provides for opportunity.Opportunity is born from change, and at 42, I'm old enough to know that the secret to doing something is to just get started, and to keep chipping away at it.Anyway, my short term goal, once I have finished doing enough research and working on getting the overall engine in place, is to get a couple deals under my belt, and get an idea of what pieces of my process needs refinement in order to scale up a bit.

I want to start off on the right foot and not waste time or money in a bad fit. 

Apparently Wendy does not want to keep working low paying jobs and is trying to make a living off wholesaling which I don’t think is a bad idea.

Since people pay a fair amount of taxes (similar to NY and CA) the least they expect is free of charge public services Here in LA people have to suffer a burdensome and highly dysfunctional planning administration asking ridiculous amounts of useless studies and documentation, charging insane fees for very bad services.Architects and owners have to deal with up to 10 different agencies with their own requirements, timeline, fees and applications, resulting in massive delays and costs over the roof.

I'm in the middle of doing those now, the fees aren't bad, the interest rate is 5.49%   30 year fixed. 

The zip code 38111 has some good and bad areas so it depends on where the house is, size, year etc.