This will give you guidance on whether or not the return on any property is sufficient (moving you toward your goal & compensating you for the risk involved).  

I would say the vast majority of investors buy properties needing work.

Would not need to make vast improvements. 

If you don’t want to pull out all 22-26, you could even find deals where 10-15k is a sufficient down payment for a property that cash flows.Max

I have sufficient cash reserves to handle the inevitable repairs/replacements that WILL come up.

We handle ours a bit differently we dont create a savings account for it but we do think about it regularly and monitor our balances to make sure that our company accounts are growing sufficiently to ensure that these bills are manageable. 

This is the power of trusts and why trust are so strong and vastly used.

You simply calculate all expenses, establish a rental rate that will meet your cash flow requirements and move forward assuming that market rents are sufficient to meet those requirements.

In the vast majority of markets in Southern California, your rental income on a 580K house is not going to be sufficient to cover your mortgage and your expenses, so you're likely to either be in negative cash flow territory or get such a low rate of return that your ROI is terrible.

Not just because the vast amount of knowledge between the people here, but because there are good people like yourself that can help motivate someone after their first “loss”I’m excited to grow with this business and appreciate all the criticism and motivation from others because it will just bring me that much closer to achieving my goals.