Balancing these factors is crucial in making your decision.

Let's team up and achieve success together!

The idea behind what I trying to coin 'Total Return Investing" is that how you balance the different forms of returns is up to you! 

I have very little equity in it and my loan balance is around $400k. 

With this setup, the buyer would still make the same monthly payments, but instead of stretching those payments over 30 years, they would need to pay off the remaining balance at the end of 5 years.

@Matt W.I have a 1031 vs no 1031 calculator model that I built that shows me the IRR breakeven to help determine the difference in risk to achieve the same quantifiable return.

How do I navigate the processes and find the right approach to adopt for achieving my goal of generating an income and preserving wealth in the long term.

TLDR: If you're in year 4 of 10 and pay the mortgage off, your payoff balance will be adjusted to reflect the cost of buying a gov't bond that will produce the equivalent amount of dividend payments for the remaining 6 years (in other words, one way or another, the lender is absolutely going to get their 10 years of payments).

Counsel with the seller after you obtain all the information about his situation (balance, how far in arrears, why he got into this situation, and all financial information).

It's typically not a good thing for a lender to have a loan that is only getting a 6-8% return, sitting on their balance sheet.