No you don't have to have a college education or be good at math to go into real estate investing, but you do need to have some sort of income to buy a property and if you aren't good at math, hire a good property manager who is.A good place to start is buying a duplex where you live in one half and you rent the other half. 

Should I deduct half of the mortgage interest (interest of $200k) to A and half to B?

Pro's   check is good every monthOn time for one year or moreTenant gets kicked off if they mess upState will take care of unit if tenant doesn'tCon'sWill get taxed on every rent  1099.tenants are not the easiest to work with,It may offend you how easy the tenants life is becauseof all the assistance they get.

I had no idea at the time how I was possibly going to buy and sell real estate in Ohio from half way across the world.

She was pretty confident that most appraisers will only use flood plain comps--that is, factor the flood plain at all--if half the town, and most available comps, are also flood plain (makes no-duh sense w comp-method of appraisal, now that I think of it).

One of the easiest ways to do this is to borrow as much as you can and invest in Real assests. 

Most OOS investors fail to realize that Detroit was geographically built for 2 million people, but currently has less than half that population.Some areas of the city, maybe 1/3, are coming back strong, another 1/3 is so-so and the last 1/3 is no mans land.How long you have sit on a piece of land before you can profit on it, depends on where you buy.

@Daniel RosaIf this is up down, easiest by far is elec baseboard down and hvac for up.

My contractor is conveniently doing the siding as well so we're modifying the window size by half inch to get some big box store windows in, now we're just waiting on the siding!

The easiest way is do it find an investor friendly real estate agent.