You have used home equity lines of credit to purchase investment rentals and want to know the best way to pay down the HELOCs.Between the two properties you bought, after expenses, you have $250 a month positive cashflow to use.What I like to do is pay down some principal every month with my positive cashflow.I use my extra active income from real estate commissions helping other investors to pay down the principal even more which just frees up that credit for me to use again.I know I can refinance the HELOC debt before it changes to principal and interest as it is just interest only payments as yours are.One difference is the cashflow, I have greater positive cashflow and could make the principal and interest payment in the future with the extra cashflow I already enjoy.I always get HELOCs on my income properties as well after purchasing them to pull out as much of my downpayment as possible.

You can claim to be the best guy in the world at finding and analyzing deals, but when the market turns against you, and you just went all-in, even on the best relative opportunities that market had available at the time, there is nothing you can do to prevent losses, especially if your debt has a maturity date that will force your hand.Timing the market is an interesting concept. 

@Alec Barnes we use Debt-To-Income Ratio (DTI) instead of income = 3x rent.Reason?

My goal for 2025 is to complete 50+ transactions and collaborate with even more people in this community.If you’re a private money lender, investor, or fellow enthusiast feel free to reach out.

We are only selling completed homes with our own in house financing currently at 3.75%, a huge discount from most bank rates.We are a long time property provider for some of the bigger podcasters: Real Estate Guys Radio, Marco Santorelli (Norada), Kathy Fetke (RWN) Jason Hartman ( Empowerd Investor) GRE (Keith Weinhold), Whitecoat Investor Group and more We also work with American Homes for Rent, Invitation Homes, Crescent, Haven Realty (JP Morgan) to name a few on the institutional side We are partially owned as of 2022 by Sumitomom Forestry, which means we have no bank debt and self fund all our building projects.

Also do you have any debt?  

Refinance into a debt service loan.

Just a follow up question, were you utilizing debt to invest, I have always been taught since a young age to try and not utilize debt (I come from a family of stock market investors, traditional business owners) where debt is not utilized as frequently which I obviously understand debt can be a very powerful tool and utilized in a great way its just something I want to avoid with my investments to an extent any suggestions for investing without debt or as little as possible. 

If it is indeed I/O, I would just make sure you have enough NOI to cover the refi with some conservative debt sizing assumptions.

Let’s break this down because there’s a lot to unpack here.The real question is, how well is that debt working for you?