Newbie Investor - Sell or Rent (HELOC)

[Jam Jackson]

Hello!

I'm hoping to gain insight and opinions from more seasoned investors. I'm a newbie investor literally at the start of my REI journey - right now I'm soaking up as much knowledge as I can, goal setting, and researching target markets. Currently, I'm living abroad and will be here for another couple of months. But I own a personal residence in the States that a family member is currently renting. I owe about $81000k on the house and comps in the area are selling at $120,000-$129,000. I'll be coming back to the states with some savings (less than 20k). However, I'll need to use part of that to repay a personal loan and do some improvements on my current house (so will prob have less than 10k left).

I'm trying to decide whether I should sell OR retain my house, rent it, take out a HELOC and use it as DP on a rental prop in one of my target areas. If I sell it, I'd use those proceeds as a DP on my first rental prop. I'm looking to purchase rental properties for at/around $50,000.

I took a stab at running some numbers on estimated rent for my house. I used the worksheet provided by the authors of HOLD (buy and hold book by Gary Keller et al). See below:

My fear is that if I retain, rent and HELOC, the net cash flow would not be enough to cover what the minimum payment on the HELOC will probably be (used a payment calculator that said $13,500 at 7% would be about $70). In my mind, this means I would need to rely on the cash flow which will hopefully be streaming from the 2nd rental property I purchase. Is that actually a cause for concern? Am I looking at this correctly? Can anyone (hopefully several) people give their opinion on whether to sell or rent (HELOC)?

Thanks so much for reading!