How much Debt on Rental Properties

[Tyler Demars]

Other than a response of knowing what your comfortable debt level is, how do you decide how much debt to put on a rental property, if any at all? Some people choose to purchase all rentals with cash and some choose to leverage as much as they can. Does anyone have any calculations that help them decide how much cash to put into a property factoring in opportunity costs for that cash?     

...I have a rental where I'm trying to decide to whether to pay it off (and put a HELOC on it for as needed cash) or save the cash for a down payment to buy more rentals. I've been struggling with this decision in general for my investment strategies moving forward. Thank you SOOO much in advance! I'm pretty conservative so I don't like being leveraged to the max.