To sell or not to sell: Personal residence

[Brent Perkins]

I have been browsing the forums for a bit now after discovering the Bigger Pockets Podcast a while back. What a great resource! I am hoping you all could chime in on this one:

My personal residence (and our first home) was purchase a few years ago at a great price and now has $100k in equity and total value of $240k. We would like to move into something with more land and I cant decide if we should keep our first house which I could sell with no capital gains, or keep and have about $500 in cash flow as a rental. The thought of loosing out on the primary residence tax exemption makes me cringe. 

Is there some simple math that would make our decision easier? Thank you for your guidance!

[Ed Emmons]

100k divided by $500 a month is almost 17 yrs. Do you need the money now or do you want to spread it out? Is this going to be your only rental and if so is it going to be worth the hassle?