After hearing him deliver a presentation about negotiation skills I asked him to recommend someone who would help me improve my own skills (and unlearn some self-defeating mental habits that made negotiating difficult for me)--and to my surprise he said he would consider working with me himself.

At this point, I just felt defeated and that this bad deal was going to put me in the hole so far that it would kill my real estate career before it even got started. 

You could do the reverse and put chunks of your emergency money into your mortgage and use your HELOC as backup, but that defeats the purpose in my opinion.

In the end it is in a sad way amusing how the US psyche (me included) are looking to a life where Covid continues to be part of our daily life when countries much smaller than ours have defeated Covid through the right measures, of course with the cooperation of their population.

Defeats the point of a contract.I do not believe you can walk into court and tell the court that you did not read a contract, and that deems it unfair because a paragraph you did eventually read looks a bit ambiguous.

Also you will be making two payments on the property, mortgage and a HELOC payment which could end up in a zero or negative cashflow situation, which defeats the purpose.So I would look at the 401k.

Also keep in mind that an extra month of vacancy defeats the gain so get in renovate and re-rent as soon as possible. 

The core part of the legislation was that a landlord would have to accept section 8 vouchers. the legislation was defeated by a vote of 6-1.We will see more of this social engineering legislation in the future I am sure.

I hear that San Francisco has successfully defeated the looming regulations. 

You need to be comfortable with the answers or you’ll end up feeling the need to manage your manager, which defeats the purpose of hiring them in the first place.