What are the costs of management of this portfolio, real expenses, time, effort required, CDs are pretty much hands off, playing options takes more effort and real estate can be intensive at time to manage.9.

You already have a lot of experience and with additional effort, will quickly climb the REI ladder to its pinnacle.

The benefit of bird dogging is that you don't have to invest a bunch of money for marketing and you are just using your free time to find deals and taking some cash for your effort. 

Moving the asset from your husband to you in an effort to hide his liability in it and not disclosing it would be considered mortgage fraud. 

Like others have already mentioned, make an effort to meet other local investors by going to local investing meet ups.

I appreciate your bringing it to our attention @Doug M. and I'm not discounting you or your efforts doing so.:)  Good to be aware of!

@Bobby Holley here in Oregon its very tough for deals @Michael Moikeha as Michael alludes to its not Georgia were I could fly into town and snag 3 nice deals in a weekend LOL  ( cash in pocket of course)First off NO hard money lender is going to go into second position on your proposed deal so forget about that.. not sure why no one has mentioned that yet.And if you don't give a capital partner enough juice its hardly worth the effort I would never do this deal on a % basis for only 3 months.. make a whopping 1,500 bucks or so who cares about the APR your a one and done investor  not worth the thinking about it and the due diligence. .. given the risk that you may not really know what your doing and I could get wiped out completely since I am in a junior position...

I have started using this technique and it has helped my direct mail gain recognition and also i have found motivated sellers through my skip tracing and cold calling efforts.

This is a tax professional question...but with the disclaimer that I am not one, I would say it depends on how you are going to compensate your efforts for the rehab work. 

Ex: in a foreclosure the bank Atty has to serve the owner of the property, the service processor has to do the skip trace in order to serve them and you can piggyback off their efforts by just looking where they served them.Also, Google their name and you can find additional info on them.