@John Hickey is right, the 50% rule doesn't apply to NYC and besides, any simplistic rule of thumb will only get you so far.

While I will concede that this ‘back-of-the-envelope’ analysis is a tad simplistic, I think a trend established using thirty years of data is compelling.

My simplistic observations for the Houston market, and specifically the West Houston / Katy / Cypress area (since that's where I live), are that one of the Paths of Progress is pushing West out in Katy and beyond.  

In a simplistic example a 400K property broken down into 4 equal units would yield a basis for each one of $100K.  

I'm still a novice myself, but are RE contracts really that simplistic?

@Bryan Otteson: The 401K plan itself can have options and one of the options is Safe Harbor option, but all employees must get a contribution from the employer (generally 3% of their gross income -- yes again I am being very simplistic here).

Now, I've broken down what it takes to do Virtual Wholesaling into three overly simplistic general outline: 1.

Also, the Nolo article is extremely simplistic and not worth much.  

I'll give a simplistic example using smaller scale numbers/properties-Assume  5 properties  with $100,000 net income form these properties. 

If the answer to the second question is more than $10K above the answer to the first question, it's probably a good investment.That's a very simplistic way to look at it, though...In real life, unfortunately, you can't just look at each component of the rehab in a vacuum like that.