To be fair, it’s not because I’ve had several horror stories, in fact I have zero.

There are several issues here.

Everyone we have networked with says we must have skin in the game to do any kind of joint ventures/learn from them or even join a team, which we would love to do, however we basically gave our life savings to a family member to deal with a health battle.

I was speaking with a multi-billion $ institutional investor's COO several weeks ago and they said when they went to Wall Street to raise money, every banker wanted to know how much of their portfolio was based in Atlanta...meaning, Wall Street knows that Atlanta is a very stable and quality location to own in and while return may be lower than other higher risk areas, it is a quality area and top of the bell curve in most return and risk respects. 

It asks to enter my email and that it would take several minutes to receive and to try again after 30mins if I haven't gotten it.

One popped up in my neighborhood and several people in the neighborhood informed code enforcement and they shut them down.If you and your wife are good with living in a smaller place to pay down your mortgage faster than that seems like a great idea to me.At some point in the future you could always move back into the main house and rent the smaller unit if you ever wanted to.

I've read several books and am getting conflicting info.

There are very few rentals in this area... they have been at 100% occupancy for the last several years. 

Being an investor in several different states, I prefer a national lender so I can always go to one lender to fund all of my deals, no matter where it is. 

The first property you get will have closing costs and need probably several thousand dollars in a "general fund" to fund your advertising, maintenance, unexpected CAPEX, initial vacancy, etc.