I think I need to object to the idea on philosophical grounds.When you extract a late fee it's because the tenant has caused you legal injury because if their failure to pay on time.

If there's a mortgage, the holder will usually file for a Protective Order(PO), basically extracting the property from the BK. 

And most of the good cashflowing ones I found were in derelict housing, which I didn't want to take on.Back when I was looking, I spent like a solid year reading every single article on BP, searching the market, and creating a somewhat sophisticated Excel analysis spreadsheet (I got it to the point where all you had to do was enter in the MLS number and it would extract all the data, analyze it, and spit out all the details.It's analyzing everything from appreciation rates, cumulative appreciation gain, IRR, NPV, etc.Here's a screenshot from the summary numbers of some of the properties I was looking at over a year ago.

Should I sell or refinance and extract cash?

It's in their blood to try and extract as much money out of you as possible.

I may be able to extract value out of the reno home but with a old home I would expect some issues during the renovations.I am very curious to hear everyone's thoughts as this would be my first investment property.Thank you,  

I'll be honest, I've only started looking into real estate investing in the last month, and most of my early strategies in terms of city selection etc have been extracted directly from books.

I would have the two properties and sit on that for a while until I saved more money to acquire more or accumulated more equity to extract from the investment property? 

With equity I've extracted from the first house I am looking at a 2-bed town house which has the following numbers:Monthly Income: $1095Monthly Cash Flow (income minus expenses): $-310.25Monthly Expenses...Cash on Cash Return...Principal & Interest$800.00Down payment$51,125.00Tax$80.00Closing costs$3,000.00Insurance$56.00Washer dryer$560.00HOA$205.00Paint$1,000.00Utilities$0.00Vacancy$54.75Repairs$50.00Capital Expenditures$50.00Total investment$55,685.00Prop Mgmt$109.50Annual cash flow-$3,723.00Total Expenses$1,405.25% ROI-6.69%However if I factor in the equity that will be built because the mortgage is slowly being paid off then the ROI becomes positive.

The theory behind the 10/1 ARM is that for as long as I've owned homes, I've never gone more than 10 years between refinancing (owning now for over 25 years).So we extracted the cash and were in no rush to invest instantly to offset the amount we'd owe with our mortgage AND the HELOC.If you have a mortgage, a HELOC and a mortgage on a rental property and you don't have the property occupied, then you're in really bad shape (IMHO).So what's why we refinanced over the HELOC.