The rental was our former primary residence. We bought the new house back when we had the savings to fix up the old one to become a rental, with a few thousand for a rental emergency fund.
We are holding onto a lot of debt. It was being paid down, but with court costs, attorney fees etc, it cleared out our savings and added some new debt. This month everything will be back on track with our new budget, and July should see some breathing room begin to form. The overtime I was enjoying back then has dried up, and while I'm hoping for it to come back, I'm also not planning for it. I just have a rule that any OT money goes straight to paying off our higher interest rate debt.
I don't know about a HELOC, I've been looking at a refi or other options, but I don't know up from down when it comes to mortgage financials. I've been working on learning, but also looking for suggestions.
Going bare-bones on the budget would net a few hundred a month, but the gain from that would still be less than the loss on the property from paying the mortgage every month. With that said, I'm still currently working on doing that... everything will normalize about midway through this month and then I can actually plan it all out in my spreadsheet.
I'm working on some side hustles, nothing has panned out to much atm, also more than open to suggestions here... I'm good at manual labor and fixing submarines, lol.
ETA: Court stuff is nothing bad... we won the case and have custody, just no savings.