The only caveat is that if you don't have two years of tax returns for a property, they only count 75% of your rental income as actual income.  

In each situation, we calculate how much it would cost to hire out versus do it ourselves (counting any cost of  extra time it might take for us to do it- usually not much, we are pretty fast).

As far as the impending crash that may or may not be true but I have been commuting to the west side( Westfield century city mall renovation project)  daily and pass by downtown Los Angeles on the 10 interchange I can tell you their is a ton of work happening there and on the west side right now with all the cranes up I counted 9....

I know the experience will vary widely from case to case, but I would like to know how long it took each of you to feel you could count on your RE investments to support you and your family.

The closest I've come is a Jeep Cherokee and a Subaru Forester, the wife's Lexus RX doesn't count as a material hauler.Being organized by type of work to do is good, another way is to organize by SEVERITY of work.

The market is definitely stronger now (in part due to out-of-state investors) but Round Rock can be tricky.I'm originally from the Chicago area where you can count on 6% appreciation per year like clockwork since WWII but I'm finding Texas is a whole different animal with negative appreciation mixed in with weak and strong years depending on the most recent oil bust or dot.com bust.The last few years have seen a lot of zero down entry level homes being sold with ARMs that are about to unlock after the inital 3-5 year period.

Looks like your having fun though, and getting stuff done, thats all that counts.

And the 401k loan payment will not count against you in underwriting.

I would not count on him being in business to long!

We learned the hard way not to listen when, for example, your loan officer says it's best to run your credit again after 90 days to keep your pre-approval active when we didn't find what we were looking for in the first 90-day window, that it counts as separate inquiries, even though we hadn't purchased anything and it technically was for the same purchase goal.