Welcome @Daniel GreenOne of the marvelous things about BiggerPockets community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals.

Hardly a "tax shelter" or something a sane individual would purposely try to do.

Make sure the individual in the lien is a titled owner.

If you're invested in real estate with cash flow.... the flow keeps coming in regardless of the stock market or any individual companies.Maybe consider a mix of the two???

Newbie military investors (which I still consider myself to be one) really need to understand what may go wrong in real estate because they are in the military such as PCSing (especially shortly after arriving to a new area) and having strategies to deal with it, deployment/surge deployments (also something that us Navy folk call an Individual augmentee or IA), landlording at a distance or landlording in general, and overseeing rehabbing without being able to visit the job site on a regular basis. 

I always strife to be a better individual and being successful to be able to take care of my mother and little brother who i have never seen before, both residing in Ghana.

Just call the taxing authority.

I wanted to ask if anybody knows of a hard money lender that will lend to individuals for 2 rehab projects in the western part of Virginia.

I'm new to the bigger pockets community after only having read one of their books however Im excited to be a part of such a great group of individuals who share my passion for real estate investing.

Serve with an open heart so people really know you care about them individually as a person and a client.