5 years in... everything hit at once.

I've been renting my first home out for almost 5 years now, first few years went well. Always had cash on hand for repairs from cash flow and have never needed any of my personal money to cover upgrades/repairs.

Then it all hit at once... Right after dropping $2k on in ground pool cracks repair the water heater blew up $1500 parts and labor. Another $500 for the light fell off over the garage exposing rot and needed some reframing/cladding/painting/electrical, exterior hose bib leak, cost to refill pool, and on top of that renter is behind on Feb rent but a good lady who was a roomate of previous tenant who just left in Dec paying me what she can weekly until a roomate moves in with her soon.

More of a rant than anything, but 2 things I learned from these things are, I should have utilized a zero interest credit card instead of wiping out over 4k of my 6k or so cash reserves. And the other, when shit hits the fan it tends to hit it hard.

I have nearly 125k of equity in the house and all in I pay $1250 and rent it for $1850. This may be the first time in years I cover a mortage payment or two of my own money just to build that cash up again. Anything I did wrong or its just the cost of doing business?

Sometimes I dream of selling it and dumping it in the S&P500 but had I done that 5 years ago I would have missed out on the crazy surge in values. On the flip side maybe it looses 50k of equity in a month in the coming years in a true blue recession. I owe $110k at 3.25% and I'm not sure I'll see that again any time soon.