Fees Is there any advantage to crowd funding vs standard hard money deals?

Look at your current situation and use it to the best of your ability, take advantage of it.  

Probably some of the biggest ones was not being responsible with the money I was making and re-investing in more RE and taking on a partner that I trusted implicitly who took advantage of a young kid (he was much older than I was with lots more RE experience).

Michael,I think you certainly have an advantage as contractor to not only understand costs of rehab and managing properties, but also the ability to control them and keep them rather low.

I'm going to definitely take advantage of those when I'm on the move. 

Cash flow is most important to me at least, the beauty of real estate is the use of leverage to increase returns, take advantage, but don't go over your head and get 50 rentals with huge loans on them.

The big advantages are an income stream and deferring some taxes from capital gains. 

There is so much information to take advantage of here.

If the financing offered by the seller is more advantageous than the buyer's other options then it's a plus; if not then it's a non-issue, as the buyer will obtain better financing through other means.On the other hand, if you're saying that the property owner will only sell with those terms, then it could be a deal breaker if the buyer has better means of financing available.

And even if you just sell, then the fact that you deferred it for so long and get to pay the tax rate for long term capital gain instead of as regular income, its still such a huge tax advantage its silly.And if you want to set your properties (must be done at acquisition) to use accelerated depreciation, then you can negate even more income in the early years.