Cases where a land lord comes close to losing it all?

[Alex Silang]

I'm in the classic situation of deciding whether to pay down mortgages vs refinancing and buying more. A recent BP podcast featured a guest talking about just that, how he wanted to be on the safe side versus getting massive and having a 30% chance of collapsing.

In my case, on one property I had 4 evictions in 4 years on one property (ugh...2 of those tenants were inherited). Went back to school and unemployed for 6+ months. Some "life" stuff came up and added more debt. 

I was able to rack up the necessary cc debt to cover everything, including rehabbing the bad property and selling it into a strong market. Could have been bad though. I made 2x my money on the bad property and it makes me think what would have happened if my timing was off...

I'm just worried when a recession comes around what can happen. I mean, if you have enough DSCR, reserve (say 1 year PITI) and the right team in place you should be okay?

What do you think?