The safe harbor applies to amounts paid during the tax year to acquire or produce what the regs call a “unit of property” (UOP), you must meet these requirements: (1) at the beginning of the tax year, the taxpayer has written accounting procedures treating as an expense for non-tax purposes amounts paid for property costing less than a specified dollar amount (which will be 2500 for you), or with an economic useful life of 12 months or less;.(2) the taxpayer treats the amount paid for the property as an expense on its books and records in accordance with its accounting procedures. ( do this on your bookkeeping software or whatever you utilize)(3) the amount paid for the UOP doesn't exceed $2,500. as substantiated by invoice.Note: The cost for the Unit of Property includes additional costs (for example, delivery fees, installation services, or similar costs) if these additional costs are included on the same invoice with the tangible property.Eg:A purchases 100 printers at $500 each for a total cost of $500,000 as indicated by the invoice.

I’ve looked into areas in Maine, Worcester MA, and Providence when multis are more affordable and cash flow well.

I can move that money to a taxable account with a 35/65 allocation and use those funds for the down paymentShould I not be contributing the max to my Roth IRA if my purpose is to use the funds to purchase an investment property?

The main resorts are already priced pretty high and can be tough to make numbers work if you're doing rentals during the winter. 

To be clear..operators CAN LEGALLY "wholesale" if that is their desire:1. own the property and resell (some call themselves "wholesalers" and others call themselves "flippers"2. be licensedThe main reason for this post was to make people aware that some teachers don't know the laws or don't care. $5400 is a lot of cash to pay for BAD information.

One near 39th and main.

I am mainly working in the afternoons until after the holidays, but the beginning of the year I will start working on the weekends. 

Jared Viernes my wife and I will actually be living here for the next 2.5 years or so and we had toyed with the idea of buying a new construction but the main reason we didn’t go with what you’re saying is that a lot of the inventory here is either relatively new or just nasty looking and/or in a flood zone.

Our goal to begin is to buy and hold the real estate for cash flow purposes.

My main concern was to get credit for paying property taxes.