I was thinking about post cards, door hangers or flyers.

Baking bread, processing it, transporting it, selling it to the public is entirely different than walking into a store and buying at a good price. 

Call landlords that have vacancies and ask if they will sell.Get some nice business cards together and give them to people.

forget having home depot install. call up a local (independent) carpet installer and i guarantee it will be cheaper. let the guy know that you have rentals and may be looking to use him for future gigs. i was quoted $250 for HD to install my last carpet job. i went into a local carpet warehouse and got the card of a guy they contract out to and he did an install and even hauled away the old stuff for $80.

Our renter has expensive medical bills, no car to get to work, no public transportation near our property.Pets nor any animal has to take car of them selves, humans do that for them plus, plan for the future.  

As we spoke, my real estate investing came up and I asked for a business card from the contractor stating the need for construction services at some point. 

I second Chris Mason 's response there in terms of you being able to qualify as long as nothing went south.It could very well be that the underwriter didn't know how to apply the fannie mae rules for calculating DTI with an investment property OR maybe their bank had an overlay.But basically, your DTI should not take a hit when adding that property.Here is how they're supposed to calculate DTI with an investment property.1) Figure your personal debt and income side.So lets say your monthly debt payments (i.e. car payment, credit cards, PITI on your primary residence, etc) are 2k/mo.

My question is:Is it advisable to use my credit card to pay for closing costs?

Open a separate checking account, get a debit card for it, put a chunk of money in for reserves and do all transactions from there.

So I increased the limits on my credit cards.