$6,000 and no interest in a second job. Income, or hobby?

The gap in the math is that a wholesaler's cost is per conversation, not per month. $600 of outreach buys a fixed number of contacts, and the deal comes out the far end of a funnel with follow-up attached. Most people who report their own numbers describe several months of nothing followed by clustered closings, because the leads they touched in month one convert in month four. A six-month runway is close to the length of the lag, which means you would be deciding whether to quit at the exact point the pipeline should be producing.

On the fee: the roughly $10,000 typical assignment fee you have read is widely cited but comes from commercial and recruiting sources rather than government data. The same sources put average wholesaler pay near $55,700 a year as of late 2026. Read both as indicative. Your realized fee also arrives net of whatever you pay a local person to walk the property and whatever your attorney charges.

The other cost your plan doesn't include is legal setup in each state you touch. Wholesaling rules vary by state, and several now impose written seller disclosures or restrict how someone holding only a contract can advertise a property, which can also raise licensing questions. An attorney licensed in that state has to answer that before you market anything, and that is a real line item, not a formality.

What your choice actually turns on is whether you can add income during the dry months without cutting calling hours. If you can, runway length matters much less than you think.

I'm halfway through licensing coursework and the thing that surprised me is how many of these state rule changes are aimed exactly at unlicensed people marketing property they don't own. Not saying you need a license, plenty of people operate without one, but if you're picking a state anyway you may as well pick one where you've read the current rules first rather than after you've spent $3,000.