DC market I have been looking at for over a year, I have a feeling if the stock market crashes which I know it may end of the year or early next year it will effect the housing market in the DC area, specially the developers that have been building..

There is so much bad advice out there and on this site; it is hard to pick just a few...You need an entity before you start buying real estate.Entities protect you from personal liability.You don't need a lawyer (or CPA), you can use off the shelf forms from Staples or such and such guru for that.Stay out of the stock market.Stay out of real estate.Stay out of lending.Stay out of angel investing and venture capital.Quit your day job and focus on making your investing your job.Keep your day job and forget about that investing nonsense.Follow Kiyosaki's investing and financial model.

Some investors are late as usual.One year, two years or three years ago, many stock investors were buying real estate.

In the late nineties 'everyone knew' that dot com stocks always went up.

If you got them from stocks and if you still have stocks, you may borrow against your stocks in a margin account.

I'd say REIT investing is as much stock investing as real estate.

Much of that will depend heavily on the lifting of restrictions for the "real" crowd, aka the 115 million US households of non accredited investors, which should take effect in Q3/2014.I also compare it to mutual funds and discount brokerage for stocks, which became open to a wider array of investors, allowing all that capital to flow into the markets.

Fair enough.Playing devil's advocate I'd just like to suggest that Murphy will make sure when you need the liquidity of that emergency fund the financial assets (think stocks) will be down 50% ;)I keep my emergency fund in cash.I am also leery about putting my money in government programs like 401(k)/IRA. $5 trillion in savings for a government $17 trillion in debt may just be too tempting for them not to confiscate via mandatory US Treasury debt conversions at some point in the future if we see the sovereign debt crisis come to our shores.

You could sell and take that $50,000 and invest in anything you want to - stocks, cds, bonds, another/different rental, or whatever.

I've basically taken my money out of the stock market and looking to invest in real estate.