I've got a couple that I usually refer to my clients.

You want to be able to buy a couple rentals at a time or very quickly, it’ll minimize your risk and help you when things get tough.

A couple small pieces of advice when selecting contractors I would offer which is used in the commercial world is to always make sure you have (3) bids per job and level their scopes of work to make sure they are ‘apples to apples’.

The numbers-1300sq ft bought 13 years ago for 127k , house hacked the first 5 years with buddies so technically didn't pay a note till married 7 years ago. 

Just a married couple.

I have already started looking for deals and have found a couple that I think could be a great start. 

I've been listening to the bigger pockets podcast for a couple weeks now and am looking to make the first steps in investing.

You have a couple chinks in your armor. 1) she put you on notice that the tree had issues (legally you are responsible for a tree of it's obvious that it's compromised in some way.

We are looking for local GC's and plan to have a short list in the next couple of weeks.

If I was a couple hours East, I'd take you up on your offer.