I decided to learn as much as I can before jumping in, and one of the books I picked up was The Rental Guide To Investing - By Brandon Turner which introduced me to this site.My wife and I have 4 children and used a lot of our income to save and prepare for their college and our retirement.  

I think the benefit of the job is that you get to retire earlier than most, although the job does age you.

Remember, you won't retire tomorrow.

Pete is pretty stable being a beach town with a good mix of higher and lower end properties.

They had regional meet ups to share and market their properties and put these wonderfully complicated but fun daisy chains of exchanges.And of course there's a few companies out there that have a stable of properties (particularly the fractional DSTs etc) that have properties you can actually look at.But the current 1031 regs really make this unnecessary. 

Things have been a lot better since the heat treatment and things seem to finally getting back to normal or stable I should say..With all that said through this process I have learned a lot.

That means that if I'm burning up my limited time with an investor who wants to lowball offers that have a 1 in 500 chance of success, I've lost that time that I could have spent with clients who will actually buy or sell real estate.You might find a desperate rookie or semi-retired part-timer who will be happy for the "opportunity", but you're not going to get a good, professional Realtor.

You will be retiring from your current job in less than ten years, at that time you will be making 5 times your W2 income in cash flowing real estate investments!! 

don't forget loss of state Health insurance,and retirement  

My coworker already retired down there and the guy is basically just texting me the current temp, pictures of the beach or of him fishing...