At the end of the convo, give them the official 30 day notice, and explicitly state that you have to give them that because of silly Illinois laws and that it is just memorializing your conversation...doing so helps keep the conversation more casual vs adversarial.To note: If you get a door slammed in your face, the tenant calls the police on you (happened to me twice now), or any other sort of aggressive response from the tenant, the approach will be completely different from that point onward.

Armed with that information, you will certainly be able to narrow down your scope. 

The best I am doing is no seasoning on cash-out with 5.25% 5/1 ARM no doc 75% LTV 

Make sure that you explicitly state that the deposits turn over to you at closing.

i am closing my first investment property next month and searching for various options for downpayment. i am considering 3 options and need suggestions on which option would be better1) sell some stocks (50% of amount) and borrow remaining 50% from 401k or2) sell stocks for 100% amount or3) HLOC 50% and 401k 50%4) use all 3 of themAlso, would it be good to go with 30 years fixed vs ARM.

Good service does not have to cost an arm and a leg.

Conventional lenders don't tend to lend on arm's length transactions (people selling to themselves, relatives, etc).

a 3/1 ARM at 4.75% or a 5/1 ARM at 5.0% with a 20 year amortization.

I contemplated the idea of just changing the design concept to have it be attached to the main home, but even in that scenario, the explicit CCR's against even renting one room seemed too controlling to be sane, considering that if this worked as we wanted, there were like 200 other nearly identical situations with lots with homes in that neighborhood that we would have just wanted to rinse and repeat that strategy.

What is different is the processing model and the capacity of the IRA custodian to document off-exchange transactions that are more one-off in nature.As this is still a tax-sheltered IRA, there are rules you will want to educate yourself about with respect to keeping things at arm's length and exclusively for the benefit of the IRA.