It's quite a few words and search phrases that has a lot of competition, such as insurance, loans, etc. But how difficult is it to rank on such words, if they start on a new website today? In order to share among top-10 on Google. What does it require to be able to rank for words such as "equity loans"?
The current #1 ranking in Google has (according to yahoo) 38,212 in-bound links. The site itself has 673,000 pages indexed in Google. You'll need to do better. Sounds like quite a challenge to me.
Depends, nothing is impossible.. depending on your knowledge and your effort it could take 6 months to 6 years.
the problem in the beginning is to go out of the sandbox, as it is probable that one site about this subject will go to the sandbox imediately.