If you are trying to further decrease your initial cash outlay, you might try to pursue a closing cost credit from the seller as part of your offer where you ask the seller to kick in a certain amount of money at closing to reduce your closing costs and thus some of your initial out of pocket cash spend.

Gives you a good entry into being a landlord and also reduces your living expenses.

If she chooses to retire at 65 and stop being productive, then she should reduce her living expenses accordingly instead of expecting the government or her Landlord to make things easy on her.My mom is 76.

So, 60 payments with an added $43/payment < $2500...which is all the roof would reduce your cumulative CF...not $6500 out of pocket. 

Your chances of landing a job where you will use your degree will be greatly reduced the longer you stay out of the field.

I like using leverage to acquire, but seek to reduce the principle in the shortest time period possible.  

If the improvement allows you to rent faster then your competition and reduces your DOM then it might make sense.

It's nice to have some confidence that we could do that when partnering on deals.However, the biggest reason by far that I'm personally interested in pursuing the partnership is to reduce my risk.

Example: an mls listed under contract sale, below market value that is "a deal," and you have knowledge that it is going to fall out of escrow and the Seller needs to get back under contract immediately and is highly motivated. orOne of your contacts, maybe a fellow Brokerage mate, has a listing coming up, that is still a pocket listing, but you find out the Seller would love to just get it sold and not deal with putting it out on the open market. ...etcBut, if you tell me about a property that happens to be listed on the mls and "it seems interesting," and all you did was search the mls for potential deals, then your "value" as an investor agent gets drastically reduced.

However, the more a property deviates from ARV because of deferred maintenance, the less reliable the result is on two fronts: you would expect more expenses and your reduced property value would predict less expenses.