First SFH Rental Property Financing Question

[David New]

Hello all,

I have a question regarding my first potential rental property and it cash flowing properly. 

I don't have any hard numbers on a property yet to analyze as we are just now getting to that phase of our research. I'm still educating myself at this point. I would love to hear what others would do if they have bought a property in the past that did not cash flow to what their expectations were.

1. My wife wants to put as little down as possible and then if for some reason the property is not cash flowing positive, then she thinks it's best that we have our extra cash to the side and we can just make up the difference this way. However, everything I have read says this is the quickest way to lose everything by having properties that don't cash flow positive.

2. My view point is to go ahead and put a little extra down since we have the money laying around to make absolutely sure that it does cash flow positive. 

Lets say that we go my wife's route and put down the minimum of what we will be required from the bank. If it is NOT cash flowing positive, does it make more sense to refinance and put more equity into the deal to make it cash flow positive or just leave it like it is and make up the difference from our cash reserves that we didn't put down on the house initially?

I'm sure this is a very dumb question to a lot of people here, but I haven't found answers to this in the podcast and books I have researched. Of course, I plan on taking my time to make sure I analyze the properties throughly, but I'm also being realistic and understand that people do make mistakes their first time or two in doing things and I want to be prepared for every type of scenario. I would love to hear everyones input.