Renting vs Selling w/ small rental margins

[David Beatty]

Hi all. First post after listening with a question.

Wife and I are planning to rent a 2 bedroom as we now have 2 kids. We are living in a one bedroom condo w/ a mortgage on it. Obviously because I'm on these forums I want to keep it and rent it :) but wanted to run the numbers by you all and see what you thought.

Including HOA we currently pay $1530 mortgage - in about 6 months $30 of that will drop off because we won't be paying PMI anymore. We could probably rent for about $1600. My concern is that this only leaves us profit of $70 and I worry about big repairs/other issues that come up from being a landlord.

On the flip side I don't really want to sell yet because we haven't occupied for 2 yrs, so we'd be hit w/ the capital gains. Thoughts?