I give the book"Richest Man in Babylon" by George Classon some credit to this mindset of mine.

I expect to buy and read a few books including a couple that have been written by mods on this site.

They can be useful in buying rentals from landlords wanting to get out of the business, provides a steady income at a lesser amount without the headaches.There should be a really good book written about CFDs, but there isn't!

Young people who live with their parents and go to in state universities have no excuse to owe 50-80K for a degree, especially when you can complete the first two years at a community college for less than 5K including books.

We have a pretty large Board of Realtors here and they have an extensive library of books.

Is there a how-to book that explains this?

This is a pretty fair trade for their time.keep after it, read books, read BP, get to your local investor meetings.

Is there a particular source - book, blog, set of posts here on BP, or mentor that I should look into so I can see the panorama of options and how they each function?

The first piece of advice I'd offer is reading a few books on the topic and visiting this area of the site and reading EVERYTHING you can: http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/12-starting-outHopefully a more experience investor will come along and answer the things I've miss.

My approach has been and will continue to be a buy and hold strategy spanning core and value added investment approaches.I found BP through Brandon's website Real Estate In Your Twenties (great site Brandon), which I visited while searching for REI book reviews.I'm looking forward to contributing to the community and tapping the wealth of knowledge offered up on the site.Paul