I would also comment to consider Darien, Westmont and that area, though I'm not confident on the school situation.House hacking is working for me with effectively the same strategy.

The drop comes even though there were some positive indicators about the state of the economy, including the rise in pending home sales and consumer confidence.

We are thinking about doing a cash out Refi on our 2nd to keep our money working ... we currently have a 3.625% and not sure if we can get any lower, but we did a fairly large remodel when we purchased it and confident in the value.

You need some confidence boosters at the beginning.

They both work closely with this municipality and are confident it won't be an issue. 

This has created more investor confidence in investing in the area and house prices have gone up.

So I don't bother with recording time any longer since I'm quite confident I meet that standard, no safe harbor is therefore needed.If you have multiple properties as I do you might be better served by simply working up a list upfront of all factors tending to establish the trade or business nature of your activities instead of tying yourself to unwieldy contemporaneous logs that must be kept ever year indefinitely.My list has about 30 factors that tend to establish trade or business status, very likely far more than I would ever need to prevail if challenged.  

And have lots of confident cause there’s so much different ways to start off honestly

Once I learned that I did belong, and built my confidence, nothing could stop me!

However, I do know a couple things that make me fairly confident of my answer.Aside from something like a small annual fee (which you’ve already said is $100/year), one of the main benefits of HELOCs is that if you don’t use them you don’t have to pay.