My PM's are worth their weight in gold and I would rather spend my time managing my property managers than managing my tenants.  

REI is not a printing press, it's a salt mine; where one can learn alchemy, to mine salt and turn it into gold.

If something inside the box creates liability, you can loose the whole box content, but nothing outside the box.If you are sued personnaly, you can loose all the asset that you own, but not what is in the box (if the State where you organized your LLC offer the charging order as only remedy).The gold standard in asset protection is to put each dangerous asset (ie the one that gives you liability; real estate being a good example of it) in its own box, while you can put all the non dangerous assets (bank and brokerage accounts) in another single box.In practice, you will have to decide what is the size of the box that you would accept to loose vs the price of establishing and maintening these box.

Our first house is a SFR that we still live in today, we are apparently sitting on a gold mine and I get several calls and texts a day asking me to sell which is annoying.

I have seen that one investor and another may see the same deal and its gold to one but nothing special to another.  

Some people do not understand the essence of REI and try to find cheap rentals out of states, while ignoring the gold mine right next to them.

It is EXACTLY the same as "yes little Timmy, you could become an astronaut" or "go for the gold little Suzzie, you could be President some day". 

I know of plenty of real estate investors that have taken lines on their assets (cars, gold, paintings, stocks, etc.) to buy more cash flowing assets.

You can go outside in shorts 350 days a year...ocean front property is like gold.

It's like the movie Glenngarry Glen Ross when Alec Baldwin says, "these are the new Glenngarry leads.." while they are in pink paper wrapped in a freaking gold bow.