Be sure to screen your tenants and make sure you have enough cash reserves to cover future vacancy and maintenance.

Generally though, I break it down into the "five pillars" of protecting your assets.The first pillar is avoiding unnecessary and risky activities (don't drink and drive, insurance generally won’t cover your poor decisions) and take good care of your investments(maintain your property, etc) - these simple steps will help you prevent lawsuits before they even occur.

And then... the webpage emails me a PDF of all this information, which I would send to NTNonline for screening. 

This includes tenant screening, writing leases if you don't hire a PM, managing rent payment systems, filing as needed with the county/city, maintenance and upkeep and how to out-source jobs that you don't want to do or can't do, scheduling, maintaining income and expense records, and the list goes on.

(Jeff White has his systems dialed in for screening rent by the room tenants) As your income increases with your new job and expenses decrease from your tenants paying your mortgage, you will be able to save up for that next SFH 12-24 months down the road.

If you want to get super detailed MIleIQ is great, but overall I found it to be an unnecessary amount of work for at best a negligible improvement in your mileage accuracy at the end of the year.

Hi All, I'm about to self-manage a property and I would like a straightforward online tenant screening software.

Wondering what you guys use or recommend for screening potential tenants?  

I think the bigger concern, especially with rising rental rates, is will the local/federal government continue to introduce further regulations like rent control and reduced tenant screening.

I plan for a minimum of $2k for code inspection work- sidewalks, window locks, trip hazards, maintenance issues (basement wall sealing, exterior brick work, painting exterior trim on windows, screens, and then all of the expected- plumbing, HVAC cert, chimney cert, electrical,  and on and on.)