Would this strategy work ?

[Ben Francis]

I'm fortunate enough to live in a paid for personal residence( appx 200k), my wife and I are fairly risk averse and love the idea of never being homeless or facing foreclosure.

Could we, take a HELOC for enough to buy, rehab and holding costs for a rental property ( appx 150k). Get it rehabbed, stabilized and rented. For our security of having a paid off house we would want to get into a house/neighborhood that we would be ok with living in if we had to.

Then do a cash out refi on the rental having forced in equity during the rehab to pay back original HELOC.

If this venture works out could we rinse and repeat in order to acquire approx 5-6 rental units ?

Once we get to 5-6 acquired start using the cash flow to do a Dave Ramsey style debt snowball until they are all paid off, at this point life would look pretty good. I'm not interested in obtaining private jet money. 

Is this feasible or am I missing something ?

We both have good credit, no debt and a healthy enough cash position that a 10k mistep wouldn't sink us.

Many thanks