What would you do with $30k?

[Ryan Jones]

After a brief hiatus while my wife and I had our son, we are getting back on track for our investing goals. I have been listening to all of the podcasts I can and reading more books (I promise I'm not in education paralysis) and think we came up with a couple of good options for our situation.

At first, my thought was, "how do I start when we have no money, two car payments and student debt? OPM of course!" And while yes, it is doable, we felt we needed to get some of our financial stuff together first. So, we paid off both cars and refinanced my student debt to save half of the monthly payment. Now we are looking at three options around July-September timeline.

Option 1: We sell our primary residence in the HOPE of finding something to move to in our extremely hot market. Take our $30k profit and invest that out of state in a rental. (Moving our primary residence out of state is not an option at this point)

Option 2: We hold on to our primary residence due to the inability to find another one and by then have $20-30k saved up and find a rental property out of state to buy.

Option 3: Go with either of those options but with the addition of finding a partner to buy a bigger (maybe quad?) property with.

Bottom line, for those experienced small MF investors: What would you do with $20-30k cash and just starting out?

Any and all advice is greatly appreciated!