Hi Leah, Why not just work with your current lender to cut the points?

I work a W-2 day job and have my own electrical business.

The bank and mortgage company we are using is giving us a hard time about us co-signing due to my separation and new job due to only having been separated a couple weeks now.

Just personally, I would never do an absentee landlord kinda thing....Too many moving parts, too much to go wrong and cuts into your profit big-time....Sentimental value is one thing, but not if you end up hating the house down the road.....Stay local, plenty of opportunities in good ole AZ.....

I file a KS return anyway for my W2 job.

My question is how can someone be so far off on value and continue to keep their job? 

Quote from @Michael Klick: Quote from @Jonathan Greene: HELOCs are fine, but keep in mind that you really only want to use 50 percent of less (each) of your available equity just so you aren't creating a problem that you can't solve later if the value of your personal residences fluctuates.If you both have W2 jobs though, have you looked into getting qualified together and just getting a loan, 10 percent down each?

There is always SOME manual work, but you can cut out a lot of the back and forth-- definitley.

I would first look at a place where you can transfer job wise that makes the most sense.

Purchase price: $150,000 Cash invested: $90,000 Bought as a forclosure gut job.