Advice on the next move

[Dave Green]

I realize that I probably need to hire a financial expert to truly assist me with this question, but I’d like to ask the community how they’d look at this situation beforehand because my wife and I are relatively new at all of this. I’m looking for some genuine advice on the next investment move here. My wife and I own a condo as our primary residence, we owe 216k on it. We also have 2 investment properties within about a 15 min drive of where we live. Both are condos. One, we owe 130k on, valued around 215k currently, the other, we owe approx 38k on, valued at around 150k. We’re looking at some different options. Ideally, we’d like to sell both of the rentals, and use the cash to place a down payment on a larger multi family home investment property, maybe valued somewhere around 400-600k. We’re relatively new at this. I’m not sure how the financing would work for such a move, being that I have 50k in student loans and 216k owed on the primary residence and work as a traveling nurse on a modest income. I do know that we could come up with about 150k as a down payment. The other option that we considered is selling our rentals and paying off our primary residence mortgage. I can easily come up with the remainder needed to finish off the mortgage, however, that leaves me in a bit of an undesirable spot. Yes, we’d have no mortgage payment, which is huge, but the ultimate goal was to create passive income and scale upwards so that I could eventually retire and spend time with my family. I’d much rather create that reality than simply cutting down our costs and deleting all of our passive income. Of course, there’s the option of holding onto these rentals, as they both cash flow about $400 a month each, but we’ve got what feels like adequate equity to scale up at this time. If you were looking at this situation, what would be the move you’d ultimately decide on, and why? If you were going to hire a professional to speak with, how would you know where to find the right one? We aren’t looking to pay one of those “guru’s” that feed you a bunch of crap. We want real advice to make some real moves. Any info is appreciated, thank you.