I couldn’t imagine telling my attorney that my property manager doesn’t feel comfortable sharing notices and material communication to me.

If you are comfortable with the neighborhood, it comes down to the price and required renovations.

I'm the founder of Comfortly (https://comfort.ly).We are new, but we run our properties on them and as a remote self-manager I love it.

Pick the policy type based on your comfort level with dividends vs variable interest crediting, policy flexibility, and loan options. 

Not sure how long the commute would be exactly but sometimes you have to sacrifice some comforts for long term goals.

How comfortable are you with that risk and are the odds in your favor or against you. 

I felt very comfortable with them.

My question is I have about $30,000 in cash that I am comfortable using, but would like to keep that and see if I can get a home equity loan (since it is paid off and I could get at least $200,000) and use that to purchase my first rental property.

When we had more properties we would increase it, but it was not linear, but for me comfortable would be $20k for the first property and $5k increase for each additional door on top of that. 

.- Current Rent is 150$- $200 behind market avg.I am very comfortable in single family homes in this town (own 18 SFH rented and performing well).