Is it plausible in your market to find an investment or primary home were grants, FHA loans, can be leveraged to make the $5,000 stretch out, I do not have that answer, but some research surely can answer it for you Myself being new on the adventure of real estate, my advocacy is learning the market I want to continue to invest in, analyzing deals, and becoming an expert.

And in the vast majority of cases, yes those board positions on the HOA are UN-paid positions, the people do it because it's where they live, because they care about it.

Also, all the deals I analyze with the rental calculator don't seem like good deals.  

@Patrick Cianchetta hard to analyze with minimal information.

Airdna is one of the best tools for analyzing markets available for STRs. 

Hello,I was wondering - when you are a new investor and learning do you call places like the utility company on every property you analyze?

I'm pretty sure I filled this out correctly. I included points and private money fees, then for refinance I estimated my closing costs based on the loan amount. View report
*This link comes directly from our calculat...

I want to get great at the math part because that is how I will be able to analyze and know what I am doing!

@Ben Nelson mentioned the sage wisdom of correctly setting team members, that is a whole lot harder today because things are at such a level with so many factors at play and fact is the vast majority simply do not have the resource pool to have a truly well equipped internal team or knowledge base, it is a very small number of us who do. 

The reason CAP rates are popular is because it removes the financing variable and allows investors to analyze deals on an equal playing field.