I was hoping I'd find support for whether or not it would be a good idea to get hard money for a 25% down payment, traditional financing for the remaining 75%, with all profits (rent less both loan payments-HML and traditional financing, prop tax, insurance, and 10% maintenance fund) going to the hard money lender under the loan is paid off. 

My idea of getting into real estate investing was coming up with 20% of your own money (that's 60k where I live for a low end property), traditional residential mortgage, net maybe $200 a month if I was lucky and repeat the process when I came up with another 20% until I had maybe 40 properties.

And @John Kent had a good idea, too, to try to conserve  as much cash as possible so you can use that as a down payment on a straight rental property.

Does anyone have ideas on how to find properties that are not on the MLS yet besides Craigslist that are reliable?

I can't answer your question about the land bank, but getting a license is probably not a bad idea.  

Any idea where to look?

Feel free to reach out about any questions or to bounce ideas off of each other. 

However the property taxes are expensive and eat into a lot of the cash Flow, any other investors who deal with this have ideas?

Looking for any ideas on tax strategy here.

Would be nice to meet your girlfriend as well, Im sure we would have a lot in common and could share some design ideas!