This tip will save you from financial alot of stress in which I endured and cut my teeth on.

.)* Reserves - savings from each rent payment for future expensesIf you wanted to use more like a PM, you could set up an online form for tenants to input requests and include attachments and track maintenance through it.Hope that helps.PS - I still use Excel for projections/modeling

A lot of that occurred after the recession or in very rough markets, or extremely rural markets.Now if you are talking a normal market, and an investor who is not already independently wealthy from some other business and has a ton of cash to spend, I imagine the podcast episode would sound like this:Host - Tell me how you got started.Guest - I saved up cash until I had enough for my first investment.

We were able to save about $44k because we negotiated the price down.

So, hopefully it almost never exceeds that and saves you the hassle of dealing with collecting a separate payment for the electric bill.

Read read read save save save it'll build confidence to.. have some money put aside and then pull the trigger...

Do I use a home  equity line of credit that I have on another rental at 6%  or do I use my  saving earning 1.75%?

Ideally, I am trying to transition out of the 8-4 work lifestyle for many reasons: I don't like feeling rushed in the morning and that's waking up at 4 AND preparing beforehand; My take home pay is not very much at all, making it a little more difficult to save/invest; I want to give more time to others and this goes back to my first point, but practicing gratitude more as well. 

Or will I just have to save for a 10-20% down payment for my next investment?

You could save labor costs and time working on site.