Thinking of selling a rental

[Christy Brey]

Hello.  My husband and I have one duplex and one house that we rent.  Both are competitive with low to zero vacancies.  Right now, we make just over $1000 after we pay our mortgages on both properties.  We have owned the duplex for 13 years and love the location and size.  It's a great little place and we manage it ourselves.  Our house, however, is a 30 minute commute and more importantly it's a larger project when repairs are needed. We have equity locked into the house (over $100K).  We have rented it out for over 3 years and we realize we would be taxed greatly by selling.  We are open to keeping it if that's the smartest move but we are considering/researching all the options and then decide.  If we were to sell, we could roll that $ into our duplex loan and pay it off.  However, I believe that when we do, we would be paying more to Uncle Sam b/c our write offs are not as high.  We lose the write off of the house rental deprecation and the write off for the interest paid out.  Plus, if we pay off the duplex with the sale of the house, we would also lose the tax write off for the interest paid for that as well. The way someone once told me is we will be making more $ every month but we won't be keeping more at the end of the year when taxes are due... The maintenance isn't a lot for us to do-our family is just busy with small children of our own and both my hubby and I working-it's more of a pain when we do have to change tenants and do repair work.  Thoughts? TIA!