You see I'm worried about accepting tenants with income that you can't garnish (Social Security Disability, Child Support or veteran's benefits) which makes it risky for a landlord to recuperate losses if the tenant doesn't pay.

He was planning on putting in new store fronts, residing the building before renting it out, but it took a while since he's recuperating, so the place look vacant of over a year.

Now that the investor purchased the mortgage note from the bank HE then becomes the "BANK" and is allowed to try recuperate the 100k owed from the borrower.

You can recuperate it hopefully down the line when you have it as a rental property.   

You've done the right math - figure out how long it would take you to recuperate the points after monthly savings.

So if in this deal you leave 5% that takes you 7 years to recuperate but investing in a 7% deal you are making an extra 2% year over year for the next 7 years.   

A couple weeks later our Oregon property closed we headed south for an adventure and recuperation from 4 years of non-stop remodeling on fix and flips.

I need my husband to come home, recuperate from unrewarding employment, we need to be able to support our kids and ourselves and my dad (somewhat, he's got some pension), and we need to be smart and prepared.My sense tells me that my area is not necessarily a great place to start, so I'm looking at markets outside CA, but I'm going to use my town as a case study so I can become familiar with all the macro/micro analyses and learn how to communicate with the professionals in this area. 

The Refinance step where you can recuperate the dollars you spent purchasing the property!

I always tell my clients there is no one size fits all with mortgage, and it's very true. one person i explain points and rate-buy-down to, they say "you'd have to be nuts to do that" and another client would say "buy it down as far as i can go, don't care how much it costs". what i recommend is doing the math on the recuperation period. so in your example, if the cost is $6500 to save $400 per month, how long would it take you to recuperate the $6500 in added cost?