A conventional rate term refinance can go up to 95% of your current homes value so even if you value did not go up at all you may already be at 95% of your market value just purely from amortization/pay down.If you're lucky values may have gone up a bit and your at 95% LTV or lower (your loan divided by current appraisal value).This will free up your full VA entitlement so you dont have to deal with a partial entitlement problem.If you do not refinance and leave your current VA loan in place it will be much more difficult to refinance it later on.

  $750 is insurance greed pure and simple.  

I have a propensity to take the risk if there is a greater reward and I am looking to generate returns for a longer-term time frame of 5 - 7 years.How would I go about making my investment decision to deploy this 30k purely as an investor?

The purpose of my trip is actually two-fold - I will be spending 2 days purely for leisure doing some sightseeing and I will have 3 days with property visits and meetings.

For the rest of your life, every time you try to uphold his memory, there's a small sarcastic voice in the back of your head that reminds you that he knew less than nothing about money.By pure dumb luck & juvenile arrogance, I made sure that would never happen, by encouraging my Dad to buy a couple of short sale properties during the crash 8 years ago. 

I say it with pure humor and respect for math way over my head.

So technically one day out of three was pure lunch+ breaks.

This is all purely opinion at this point, and you know what opinions are like....

The plan is to live there for at least a year and then move out to make it a pure rental.

The scenario is purely fictional, there's some holes in the story but bear with it.