For once in my life, I'm going to take things slow and build out my portfolio over the next 10 years so hopefully I can retire early with a nice nest-egg.

Sadly, yeah, we're dumping more in than is going to principal, so it may be time to walk and eat it.

I generally max out my IRA in stock market every year just for diversification and nest egg...Anyhooo... 

The 6% to the realtor upon sale will eat up pretty much your whole profit after those other expenses, even in the best case $450k sale on $400k purchase.3) If you can buy that $450k house for $400k today, that means the seller couldn't sell it for $450k, so you probably won't be able to sell it for $450k in 90 days, either.

I have found that to work extremely well after the dog starts eating it's own poop.

Eat dinner and check all messages before you go to sleep.

But its good to not put all your eggs in one basket especially once you've accumulated the assets.  

If you have a nest egg of $25K to start and it takes 2-3 trips to find a suitable property at $2K a trip (not that hard to do) you could end up spending 20% of your investment budget just on looking for a property.  

So you're going to have to eat the fines, get proper permits and build within those restraints.

I've used UFCU in Asheville lately with great results, but they have switched to only doing 15 year terms for investors which would eat up my remaining DTI too quickly.