First time with potentially investing and in need of advice with my situation

[Chris Otto]

Hello everyone,

Hopefully this post isn't in the wrong forum. If it is let me know and ill repost correctly. Ill try to keep this concise as there are some questions I would like to have answered and some guidance. I'm 53, married with 2 kids less than 17 years old with debt only from purchases on credit cards and my home. I have a small landscape business (less than 7 workers) of over 30 years and have run my business out of my home for the past 25 of those years. I do well, at least enough to go on vacations as a family, put money into high yield savings accounts, max out the ROTHs and add to investments when I can with money saved in savings and checking accounts. I'm looking to lessen the load of work and concentrate on my exit strategy sometime within the next 10 years if not sooner. That may be aggressive. Worst case scenario, if that doesn't work, I can simply do fertilizer applications and landscape lighting as they don't require much labor. Im also interested in starting to invest in housing whether that be flipping, BRRR, etc

My wife, 54, is newly positioned social worker and climbing to what she feels is her max with clients. Shes carrying 60k in debt from student loans as well as cc bills, but she makes payments on time. She does wedding officiating as well which she has done over the last 6 years. She loves it.

Our situation is this, we have had our home that I purchased right before 9/11 for $110k that sits on an acre property. It's been my primary with the business run out of the 3-car garage I built soon after getting the property. We had our wedding in the back yd, grew the family and added onto the house making it roughly 1600 sf 3 bed 2 bath. As of today, we owe a little over $149k at 3.375% with payments of $1642/month so there's equity to pull from. We have been looking to move for the past year now due to past incidents with the neighbors that left us feeling that we don't need this frustration. Neighbors dog at one point jumped the fence and bit our little girl riding her bike in our driveway, neighbors constantly argue in their front yd cursing, loud music until 11pm at times during summer months just to give you an idea. It's a blue-collar area and was decent until we got the "book end" neighbors. We just choose not to socialize with either.

Logistically, Philly is about 20 min drive, closest shore point is about an 1 hr 30 min away, DE is about 30-45 min and NY is less than 2 hrs. As I mentioned we have looked but with house prices rising constantly with outbidding making it worse we have had to table the idea until now. Why now? Well, we were just notified through a neighboring towns police dept that there is now a sex offender within range of us, less than 1000ft roughly. Our lot is fenced in and we cannot see where he lives but close enough to be of concern, but we want to stay in the same town until the kids are finished school.

So, my question is this, would it make sense to rent our home (roughly $2300-2500/mo. as per real-estate agent claims), with the stipulation that the garage is used for my business AND buy a home nearby? I'm hoping to add this as a start to my portfolio, rent and eventually sell once the wife, and I are closer to retirement age. I know our numbers need to be reviewed but I was hoping to get more guidance on what others have done (or would do) in situations like this, minus the sex offender and neighbors of course. Is it smart to just sell, pull equity to put towards the new house or use the potential rent to put towards the new home payments once the rental overhead is taken care of? I recently heard on BP YouTube clip that we could use equity as a HELOC? Again, this avenue is new to me so I'm just learning the tricks of what can be pulled and used elsewhere. Thanks for reading this far and all advice is much appreciated.