First potential opportunity, VA foreclosed SFH

[Justin NA]

I have a two part question about an opportunity my agent and I looked at yesterday. It is a vacant VA house.

Agent says comps are $400, listed currently at $299, initial rehab estimate is $20k.  Although I ran across a post that said on your first deals, give yourself a 1.5x multiplier on time and costs.  So with that, I bumped it up to $34k.  The biggest expense will be flooring throughout, which I gave initial figure at 12k.

Initial discussions with my agent leaned toward owner occupied as I guess the sell (VA I think) prefers owners over investors. So this is the thought process we are going with to buy and hold to rent. Rent estimate is 2300/mo.

I have plugged in the numbers on multiple spreadsheets/formulas, but the one I liked the best was the "SFH_Rental_Analysis" excel from BP here.  If I go with the 70% rule, max offer would be about 245.  However I played with numbers to see how it all fits together.

If I offered 275 + 34k improvements + 3k closing or other fees.  3.5% down (9,625) @ 4%.  Taxes 4400/yr.  Then calculating it as a rental 5% vacancy, 100/mo insurance,  200/mo repairs, no PM, utilities, etc.  My cash out of pocket is $12k, loan amount (including repairs) is $300k.

According to the spreadsheet it has a cash flow of about $100 a month with Cash roi @ 11%.  (I had roi at 7% so I must have tweaked something last night)

I have a question about cash flow.  I understand it's income minus expenses.  But what is left over (in this case $100/mo) is what you would spend on hookers and blow...or cross stitch...or whatever, i don't judge :)

If my intentions initially are to just put everything into a bank account and leave it alone, is cash flow less of a priority?

I'm sure I did something wrong or forgot something.  Or maybe I'll too all over the board and need to focus on one specific thing.  But this is all fine and a good exercise.  Am I on the right track with these numbers and how I am going about analyzing them?

I lied, the second part is about financing.  I'll go post it over there.