I enjoy the education aspect of all this but fear the analysis paralysis will get me if I ONLY analyze.

As long as landlords continue to operate out of fear we will never have answers.Document every thing, all conversations, and, as Greg suggests, be prepared for them to play the "emotion" card.

Your goal is minimizing your losses, not minimizing their losses.I wish you the best of luck, it's an unfortunate situation that every investor fears!

Wasn't a large part of that excitement caused by fear?

Exactly my fear, I do not want them to think I will not take care of the property. 

Predicting a market crash is all fear mongering in my opinion, if it does happen, it will be completely unpredictable and most people wouldn't have any knowledge about it.

It can be a heavy responsibility, and there's a horrible fear that you might squander it.

I am very eager to get started, but I must admit I have been frozen with fear on what I should do next I suppose.

I would fear that if performance hurdles aren’t hit in a big way, sponsors lose interest, and then they take their eye off the ball.

The Austin market is still going strong and we live in a very desirable area.We *could* roll up some debt and take our mortgage to 284k.This would increase our mortgage payment by 566/month, but by reducing the monthly minimum payments with the debt disappearing we would gain an additional 1000-1100/month (after the 566 is deducted).I'm also aware that mortgage interest is something we can deduct from our annual taxes vs. other debt which we can't...This is not our forever home, but we've had so much equity in our home for so long that I can tell I'm fearful to cut into our equity, but I don't want baseless emotion to make this decision and keep us tied to something that we're not looking to stay in forever.