Sit tight and let the levers of house hacking + real estate investing work for you.To optimize your house-hack experience to better achieve your goals, I'd recommend pretending like you have a standard mortgage payment for your area and stuffing the savings your realizing every month into your investing account, sock drawer, or other preferred method of stashing cash. 

You will achieve much greater cash on cash returns using leverage...just make sure you don't 'over-leverage' and you should be fine.  

One of my first recommendations would be to surround yourself with those already doing what you wish to achieve.

The other piece to that problem is that the vendors down below are severely underperforming due to COVID which has made any sort of financing hard to achieve. 

Essentially if the only metric that is important to you is your bottom line return and you do not mind spending the extra time in order to achieve that one goal these rentals make sense.

In every neighborhood there is someone who dreams with a contemporary cool home, and it can be achieved with any budget.The house was abandoned for a couple of years, it had a fenced front yard, and a very compartmentalized layout; we opened it, added bathrooms, a suite bedroom, finished attic and basement, we painted dark and picked finishes and amenities not expected for the neighborhood.

Despite not full achieving my initial goal to cash-out refinance and eliminate PMI, I consider this deal a great success and will diligently save and re-invest the significant cash flow from the property until my equity position increases to the point where a cash-out refinance will work.

I was not bale to achieve my desired valuation, as the surrounding market just does not support it here in Joliet.

I still live there and rent out the other side, but I got hooked on RE and the income I could achieve. 

But you will get solid guidance on what is a realistic cap rate based on comparables, and what are really achievable market rents.