Selling Our Only Home for $170k Net... What Now?

[Jesse Kailahi]

Hi! I'm 30 years old, married with no kids, and live in Sacramento California. I have a stable 9-5 and she is a new nurse. We gross about 100-110k/yr and we have roughly 40-60k in retirement accounts and other assets. We do not have debt outside our mortgage. Our goal is to build wealth through real estate buy and hold (rental properties), and maybe handle a couple flips each year so that I can have the choice to quit my day job (I actually like my job), so that we can travel the world, and so we can also be better prepared to have a baby and spend as much time with the kid as we like. We have no REI experience, but we're handy and have brains, so...

My wife and I bought our home as first-timers in 2013 and are listing next week for a couple reasons: a) we originally bought for 131k and are selling for around 310-320k and we feel it's the right time 

b) we would like to live closer to my work, which is about 45 minutes to 1.5 hours away currently, depending on traffic and time of day

c) we want to sell our home high (we've done some remodels) and start over with another fixer-type property and just get into real estate investing with more cash to begin with in the coffers 

We are projected to net $170,000 from the sale.  Here are median home prices in Sacramento (and actually we would be looking at moving north into the Roseville area so I'm closer to work). The market seems to be pretty hot with few multi-family staying on market for very long (like maybe a week or less until a listing goes to pending). There still seem to be some fixer SFH opportunities at lower prices in rougher areas though. I have yet to analyze a property.

We will no longer own property after this, so my question to you is... what would you do with the money? We need to live somewhere (renting is fine for us if we must for a little) and we want to start investing in real estate.

Thanks for your input!