There is a light weight interior door being used as an exterior door.

@Jesse HowellFor fix and flips, your experience will likely carry more weight on the terms than your FICO.Lenders are still doing up to 100% financing on purchase and rehab if you've got the right experience.If not, 95LTC is ok, but 9-11% interest only payments for 12 months is pretty typical...Cheers!

IRS Publications are full of errors and do not carry any legal weight.

We closed up shop with the service business for good this past summer after gradually cutting down on hours put into it and I've been a full time Realtor for about 6 months now. 

If you do let them tie up the property you should have a gradual pain point.For example 90 days and 50,000 earnest money of which thereafter 20,000 becomes non-refundable.

Since you asked for a metric - the metric that LPs do not put enough weight on is DSCR.

Weight the pros and cons, know the market and comparable. 

But at the same time you will not accept someone only being needed to finance only a portion of the deal which decreases the expenses of financing because they could have made more by using that money to their advantage.Is there a better way to accomplish Mike's objective factoring in the cost of money, opportunity cost, and some kind of weighted (il)liquidity factor?

Once I have established some funds, I can then gradually start looking into investments that offer the benefits of cash flow.

Originally posted by @Paul Tibok:Thank you everyone for your feedback, very helpful it took a big weight off my shoulders.