The “mansplaining” was the cherry on top.I am my sole support, and wanted to build the second home on my property to make my retirement more comfortable.

Retirement and Tourism, basically.

My wife and I went into our mid west investments 4 years ago with the goal of building a nice portfolio of paid for rentals before we retire from our W2 jobs.

A pie chart of retirement investment diversification changes over time from young investor to old investor - but the change is typically shown as a shift from aggressive mutual funds to more bonds or less aggressive.  

Hi Derek,Cashflow positive real estate will help your ability to qualify for a primary residence mortgage, not hinder, assuming an REI-friendly lender, and that you maintain adequate PITI reserves (if you have healthy retirement accounts, that'll typically do it). 

I want to leverage as much of the funds in these 2 retirement accounts as possible. 

If that's where you want to live, stay, retire and the ROI metrics are anywhere close to what you want: buy there.  

Usually the more doors per apartment building and/or the more money you put down, the more cash flow per door.You could also look into buying businesses (owning them, not running them), good old fashioned stock market investing (not retirement accounts, im talking brokerage accounts so you can actually use the moeny before retirement age) , cryptocurrency investing, or a mixture of all of them. 

My goal is to be able to live a comfortable life style and retirement plans for our future together is there anything I can do to make her better understand my vision for us.

I live 1000 miles away and my agent that I bought several properties from has retired so I knew no one.Only one agent even answered the email, one.Find an agent with experience that owns the type of property you want knows you can do this and will work for you.Telling them if you find me something good I will keep using you is a worthless statement to the agent because they well know who ever brings you a good deal you will use.