What to do with $10k

[Mark French]

Hello everyone, good day,

This post is for some advice and feedback into how best to invest $10k in real estate and to share some ideas for critique.

We have been building our investing cash pot for a while and we are at $10k, we have one house currently which is our homestead with approx. $100k in equity, great mortgage rate at 3.7 and if rented would yield approx. $200 dollars on top of what our mortgage payment is. We were initially thinking of renting our house and buying another that we would move into. My wife is a realtor so thinking we would drop the 3% commission from closing as a way of negotiating down the buy price since we need our mortgage payment on the new home to remain very close to what we are currently paying today (so that our life living costs remain within my salary/income so not depending on my Wife’s non W2 income Realtor income). However!! We have just learned that we are having another baby, baby number 3, a "oupsie" baby, "not part of the plan" baby, an "oh f***" baby. We are past all that now and are excited/delighted about our #3 addition to the family however it has put a pause on all the above since we feel we should hold onto the cash for security and any unexpected stuff that may come up. Another thought is to sell our house, 10.31 exchange the equity into a new house (aim to keep new mortgage close to what we are currently owing) and the $10k cash goes towards house preparations to sell our home and then moving costs etc. This hurts since we’re trying to get a head and it's taken grit to build the pot up to where it is. We are now leaning towards more staying in our home for another year and keeping things as is. My wife has a good 6 months of Real Estate prime time left before she will need to slow down and so we focus on stacking more cash and ultimately sticking to the plan of buying the 2nd property and renting our current place out, just later.

Any feedback appreciated, thanks all