Quote from @Theresa Harris: For late payments, how late are they? 

Digitize physical receipts for easy storage and use a consistent naming convention for easy sorting - 2024.03.25 Home Depot.- Maintain proper records, such as contracts, settlement statements, and promissory notes.

The longer term loans would have lowered your monthly payments and decreased the costs.As for rent, each year you need to look at rents in the area to decide how much you will be increasing the rent by. 

Preforeclosure owner finance wrap, paid off the default payments and taxes with cash and assumed the owners loan.

Preforeclosure owner finance wrap, paid off the default payments and taxes with cash and assumed the owners loan.

Since they are considering renting their properties out, sell them on the concept of getting consistent cashflow from you - without the hassles of being a landlord.You will then need to make sure you can make those monthly payments EVERY month in addition to do remodels.

Plus, I'd prefer to take baby steps before investing out of state where I could better afford a 25% down-payment.

You can take out home equity loan and use that as a down payment on an investment property, but I'm pretty sure your return will be very poor.

If not, you may have to qualify with the full mortgage payment against your debt to income ratio, including the new home that you are looking to purchase.From a tax standpoint, you may want to speak with @Natalie Kolodij. 

I've never heard of a lender that wouldn't count Section 8 payments as income.