Over the course of a year my wife and I fixed it up, rented to friends, ate peanut butter and jelly, did everything we could.

You only make $500 per month, so you just ate up 14.6 months of profit with this one tenant.

We never intended to include lawn care but as it was our mistake, we ate the cost for the past year.In March we gave him 60 days notice (per GA state law) that we would be raising rent to $685 to cover cost of lawn maintenance.

Dan Ariely has a TED talk titled "Are we in control of our own decisions on presenting "dominated" options ", and their effect on influencing decisions (applicable part starts at 11:05 min). 

You ate right.

How does an investor protect themselves and their properties from being ate up in a divorce?

If  you want to be a cop don't get a criminal justice degree because being a police officer requires 4 year degree in any major (in my area ate last).  

I'm setting up my first tenant on SparkRent very soon.Someone on here mentioned that tenants may have the "I couldn't get the website to work" or "the computer ate my payment" or whatever excuse for late rent.

Instead of going back and trying to collect $25 from the tenant, I ate the loss as a reminder to not make stupid mistakes like that.

For two solid weeks I ate, slept and thought about how I was going to get there.