However I am willing to make personal sacrifices to build a solid financial future and put "emotional buying" out of my head.

You end up putting large chunks of time into the "investment" managing property managers or dealing with tenants doing evictions and the emotional toil of the drama of low end tenants.

Most of the time folks in that situation don't want to have to deal with the emotional pain of going through and selling itemsIf you are going to wholesale, make sure you have a good understanding of the 65% ARV and 70% MOA formula to allow your profit and profit for your potential investorRemember, their motivation is probably not money at this point, but is having to deal with the loss of a loved one and they need someone to be empathetic to their situation and help them through it.  

Frustrated, I sold the property last year off emotion and I nearly burned thru all the capitol gains because I also quit my job.There had to be more in life.

I'll take a deeper look at your cost breakdown to get a feel for what's possible here in town.

All these years I have been grappling with the emotions of thinking back and the memories.

I can only assume by the way you wrote the post that you have exhausted this avenue and someone may be negotiating by emotion ;) $74k is an expensive emotion....

If I were to stress this one thing to a self-managing landlord, it is to keep your emotions out of it and follow the lease as it is written.

And that's what brings me here...She wants to buy a home and is very emotionally invested in that idea.

But yeah I recommend digging deeper with someone who knows more current tax laws regarding that.