He had insurance on the S-Corp for one million and none for himself.

The bottom line is this: Concealment is not asset protection, proper (time consuming and expensive, I know) management, and good, prudent, practices (ditto), WHICH ARE ADHERED TO, and insurance (expensive), are needed for asset protection.

Assuming property taxes + insurance added don't go above $1,100 total, you could maybe make this work. 

It can be done ethically, but you need safeguards to confirm mortgage & possibly property tax payments made on-time, as well as insurance with you protected.- Also, you need a legal way to take back the deed if buyer defaults!

Quote from @Cody Caswell: Quote from @Jay Hurst: Quote from @Cody Caswell: Is it true you can use taxes, depreciation, insurance, and mortgage interest for qualifying income when applying for an FHA loan on a primary residence? 

The moral of this story is to have good home owners insurance!

That's easy compared to trying to fight and erroneous $13k water bill (a real issue we had) or an insurance policy tripling (that too).

the way to go about it is turn it over to your insurance and get the police report.. sometimes insurance will then subjugate the claim and go after the tenant criminally I had that happen on one of my rentals where the tenant did 40k in malicious damage on a new construction home I purchased in MS. 

To be honest, I´m in the Maintenance & Construction for corporate businesses for some US companies in Mexico and we do some Real Estate down here also, but it´s way much different than the US, so I have much to learn from a lot of people around here and as @Julio Gonzalez, I think this is pretty much the right pad and place to start and to break my fears to start all over again from scratchAlso, I´ld like to hear more from @Justin Brickman why he voted for his city, pros and cons, it will help to read from a local...As I said before, thank you all guys for taking the time to write in this post and share some experienceDo you plan to owner occupy. $40k will not get you a non owner occupied San Diego property unless you find some unlikely alternate financing.

There are opportunities out there but some strategies are risky. 1 - Airbnb (STR) comes to mind - very competitive, very saturated and becoming highly regulated.2 - Most STRs are transitioning to MTR so that market will be saturated soon if it isn't already.3 - Insurance crisis in florida is getting bad so those costs will eat up cashflow and short term appreciation.