So I strongly recommend that your rental have its own bank account.As for worries about the mortgage bouncing - the only way to prevent that is to fund the rental property's account up-front with some reserve capital.

It seems these tenants may be incapable of supervising or training their dogs in the fenced backyard to prevent this from happening.

Surely a card system would prevent drilling the locks and stealing the coins?

It will save you a lot of stress/prevent issues from spiraling. 

However, the parents and/or Realtor should be close enough to prevent things from getting out of hand. 

@Benjamin Aaker is on the money.Your income probably prevents you from using RE to offset your W2 income but you can still use deductions and depreciation to offset rental income.If you are looking to REI to reduce your taxable income on your W2 earnings REI won’t help much at all.One needs to be precise when discussing tax law.

I'm nervous because I've never had a business before and I still have a full-time job as a cloud solutions architect, which I'm really passionate about - so hopefully it won't be my golden handcuffs that may prevent me to thrive as an investor and  I'm excited because of all the benefits and freedoms being a business owner offers, one of which is to connect and collaborate with forums like this and people like all of you, where I can both learn from and hopefully share later as I develop more experience. :-)

I know there are many variables that might prevent a true constructive feedback but I was hoping to get some insights and guidance from this platform. 

Please refrain from screwing into the window sash, as this can cause damage for which you will be held responsible.Weather Stripping: To prevent water or critters from entering your unit, it is necessary to install weather stripping around the edges of the air conditioning unit.Tipping of Unit: The unit must be tilted slightly towards the outside to prevent water condensation from dripping back into the room, thus avoiding damage to floors.

If the tenant closes their accounts to prevent Obligo from collecting (this rarely happens and has never happened to me), Obligo still pays the Landlord and goes after the tenant.