Is having in between 6 and 8 thousand saved along with a certain percentage saved from rent each month a sufficient to be safe from unexpected expenditures?

If you are using hard money you need to budget for the points and fees as well as traditional third party closing fees.Repairs: The money it is going to take you to rehab the property plus an extra 10% of estimated repair costs to account for unexpected repairs.Holdings Costs: Here is where a lot of investors get tripped up.

The bottom 10 were a bit unexpected but why would I know any of those?  

Not a ton of money to fix, and took me less than a day, but a "nothing" turned into a bit of unexpected work.

However, regarding getting a nice FHA deal - what I did by accident you can do on purpose.

This alleviates a lot of my risk, and helps me sleep at night.Having cash reserves saved away really takes the worry out of unexpected repairs.

What I did not account for was the management expense of my time to handle these units (as they were not hands off since I was self-managing), vacancies, damage to units and other unexpected capex costs (like a new AC for one unit) that almost took me under financially.  

It's pretty easy to project your expenses ahead of time and if your builder is good you should rarely run into any unexpected problems.

Looking at regulatory links will be much like looking at actuarial tables of an insurance company in an attempt to predict when you're going to have a car accident. 

We have our encountered first absolutely unexpected cost - YAY!