My understanding is that whatever "net income" I have from my rental is taxed at whatever income tax bracket my wife and I are in.My wife and I file jointly and our taxable income puts us in the 25% bracket, so my understanding is that if we make say $4000 net income from our duplex then we pay $1000 in fed taxes on that.Are you saying that is incorrect?

FED cannot avoid cutting rates they dropped in December and January and a CPI index report crushed everything that was really all hedged data.  

The grass isn't always greener on the other side.  

So what you are paying for is the time-savings of having it spoon fed to you versus hunting it down across BP, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

If they need to approve the grass (or have a list of approved grasses), that should be outlined in the HOA documents. 

I have been cutting the grass and taking care of small outside items to keep it looking nice and keep the pests down.How can I go about trying to buy this home as an investment property.  

Then the key is that :1) you do active participation and not passive investment (eg: flip, rehab to rent and so on)2) leverage, but here is the key to do able to leverage there's time constrain, that time constrain is spread between notes/Fed Rate with cap rate ; that "window" create sizeable future appreciation of property.3) buy in good location, for example, buy only in DOM market where DOM is less than 5.by doing these three combined then we can always beat the stock market index.This is why if we're using statistical average as passive investment,stock market would better perform than real estate.But when we're the developer or active owners, then we could beat the stock market index. ...Also what's funny about stock market index is that the index is being helped by the top 4% that produces return (in today's example is the magnificent 7), as the number of top 4% keeps changing every decade or so, it creates a phenomenon as well that the best passive investment is always stock market index.

I do bookkeeping specifically for real estate investors and almost all of my new clients come to me with books done by an overseas bookkeeper that they got fed up with spending so much time answering the same questions over and over.

I actually never believed the rates would come back down and assumed the Fed was feeding us a bunch of ******** to keep the real estate market active for a while longer. 

@Jimmy HumphreyThe 10 mortgage rule is a FNMA rule, thank the Feds in DC for that one.