Unfortunately , lots of newbies get stuck at the startup/education phase and never progress beyond listening to podcasts and reading  a few forum posts ... break that trend and take action consistently... 

The podcasts are excellent and its great you are educating yourself.

If you park your $30k into a vehicle that pumps out money every month, and if that money can yield 15-20% or better (leveraged, with a mortgage) or even 10% without one, you've made a sound investment.

The HELOC is a great way to leverage your equity so paying cash cant hurt.

It helps you narrow down the massive amount of information on the site.Don't get sucked into paying for education until you have done a good bit of self education.

what will these properties do to my mortgage quote2. is there anything I can do to leverage the inherited properties that can help with my future residence?

They can leverage your Canadian credit history to provide financing in the US. 

As far as end game goes, I would like to scale my assets to pull in more passive income by leveraging what I have into more and higher cash flow properties.

Leverage is the main reason real estate works!

I hate that I haven't yet been actively investing but I'm also extremely proud of myself for clearing the debt and being able to move forward and be in a financial situation to leverage my money wisely in real estate before I begin.So all in all within 4 years of graduating college I will be house hacking with no personal student loan debt.There are a lot of smarter people than I on this site who have much more experience who may give different advice, but this was the plan that I really latched onto when I was reaching out about my first property 2 years ago.