Always felt the "nomad" method/live-in to rental was better for starting off and scaling. 

@Sai Krishna Byra , you dont want to complicate your first step with non-grantor trust.

So my question is..what is the next step before we ACTUALLY put our business plan and paper, and begin pitching to banks/investors?

However, your payday sounds substantial and if you step out, you loose the upside if buyer defaults and just have to step back in and fix it.

I didn't expect anyone to really read it.lol.Anyway, hopefully our talking can further narrow my focus and lead to more actionable steps. 

@Jacob FergusonI saw first step is to go to the bank and see the total dollar amount you can get with your VA loan and look for a property to househack.

If you want to learn some more about the Joint Venture method I mentioned above, my recent Bigger Pockets article on protecting yourself in a joint venture could be useful for your research.

Sounds like you've been doing a lot of research and are looking for how to take the next step.

You also may want to look into the HELOC method in hacking your mortgage down in a quick ammount of time.  

If you have positive cash flow, the money is coming from the tenant, so this method of analysis, or most other typical methods of financial analysis, isn't valid here.