Your question is should you pay cash or get a mortgage.The investment calculators will say you will have a higher return on investment using as little of your own money as possible.Depending on your goals, like if you want to buy more rentals, this may be a wise strategy to put as little down as possible.However, if you are strictly looking to maximize your cashflow, having a paid off house is great.Honestly, I have a bit of both but like having the house paid off.

You are WAY better off saving up and using cash for the rehab than trying to pay down your princlple and using a HELOC.

Have you thought about using a DSCR loan?

I think using a value outside of that is going to be tough to defend if you are doing a cost seg, which already attracts quite a few audits.  

We run, at the very minimum, prelim title work and avoided anything that even remotely looked like it could be too large of a roadblock.We lost money once, very very early on by trying to scale by using a component servicer (we had a legal servicer, but this was a workout specialist) who was NOT functioning in our best interest at all.

If you choose to reinvestment those funds into another investment property, you may be able to defer the gain using a sec. 1033 election. 

Thats with my cheap subs and me paying them cash using a GC this would be a $70k rehab and negative equity. 

Hi Elizabeth,Using a  self-directed IRA to invest in real estate can indeed be a viable option, but there are several important considerations to keep in mind. 

Although I would argue that using a duplex valuation is inaccurate due to market forces.

Using a lower-cost skip tracing service and then a call/mail/sms campaign service separately may reduce your costs.