Now, we live in southern oregon, with a small-ish town (200k people i believe), and we were hit super hard by the boom-bust. houses that were selling for 1.5million+ are now selling for somewhere around 300k.

If you can tell me the numbers you are trying to hit I can suggest different avenues of real estate where it might be possible to achieve it.

The stricter guidelines includes requiring the home to be considered habitable which means the home must have a working furnace, good electric, good roof and a few other requirements.

A week and a hald into the tenancy, no electricity so garage door wont open, fridge is leaking puddles.

I was the person doing tile work laying carpets and install plumbing and doing some electrical work.

If you get the right person (fairly hit or miss) they are knowledgeable, the issue is you won't know if you have the right answer when you speak to them.Another approach would be to contract in one name and assign the contract to the ETC name.

Chris- I currently pay heat and hot water but not electricity.

This also opens up the old question of whether it is worth pulling $$ out of a 401k and taking the penalty hit, or letting it sit there.

I'm 18, currently in my 2nd semester of college studying Electrical Engineering.

Although I accumulated most of my wealth in a different way in real estate than Nickerson suggests, I still believe that it lays out as clearly as I have ever seen how one can accumulate wealth in real estate investing without doing anything extraordinary - just hitting lots of singles over time.