What would you do in this situation? Sell, keep, something else?

[Michael Perry]

Hey everyone, 

My name is Michael, I am currently a new Real Estate Agent in Alpharetta, GA.  I became an agent with the eventual goal of buying rental properties and getting into flipping houses.  I've been listening/watching BiggerPockets podcasts for quite awhile now but this is my first post.  My wife and I are trying to come up with a plan and were hoping to get feedback from the community.  We want to get into rentals and potentially flipping as well as a way to replace my income but just aren't sure when the right time to pull the trigger is.  We have come up with a couple strategies for what we could try and do, but honestly we're unsure the best way to move forward.  Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

We live in Alpharetta, GA in a house we purchased for 267k in 2013 and have paid the loan down a bit and now owe 170k.  Our home is now worth conservatively 360k, maybe up to 385k based on comps, so we have a bit of equity available.  We also have 20k set aside as an emergency fund which we aren't too keen on touching.

So here are the options we were considering:

Option 1: Sell the house.  Cash out on the equity (~160k).  Find a smaller home and only put 20% down.  Use the remaining ~100k to either buy a first rental or start flipping houses.  I think this is the option we want to go with if we're sure we could either start the flipping business or at least buy a rental property outright.

Concerns with option 1:  
- Is 100k enough to really consider being able to flip a house?  I don't think it is likely we can get qualified for a 2nd loan to be able to purchase a house to flip? Is finding an investor partner who can afford the home outright our only way forward here, or do you have any financing suggestions?
- side question - Our current bank said they wouldn't give us a loan if they knew the property was for a flip, but they would give us a loan if it were for a rental.  If I'm buying the property with the intent of either renting OR flipping depending on the outcome of the project and what numbers make more sense... could I get myself into trouble here?  
- If we use the money to buy an investment property, what type of property would you be looking for?  We are very nervous to carry a 2nd mortgage (if we could even qualify for one), so we would want to purchase a rental property fully... what type of property do you think we could afford or should aim for here? 

Option 2: Refinance the house.  Refinancing the house would cut our mortgage down to 700/mo from 1300/mo.  We would then start saving the extra until we had enough to either flip or buy our first rental.

Concerns with option 2: Time.  With this strategy, its going to be awhile before we can really get started with either flipping or rentals. We'll pay more for the house in the long run by refinancing back out to 30 years, but with the lower monthly payments we'll be able to invest the difference in either a flipping business or rentals.  

Option 3: YOUR SUGGESTION! If you have an idea about a better strategy, or something you would personally do, please let me know!

What would you do? Do you think even if we sold, we would have enough capital to begin flipping?