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Updated over 3 years ago,
To sell or not to sell
My husband and I own a fourplex that cash flows extremely well. We both work full time for a property management company, and always wanted to own real estate of our own for the purpose of building wealth, having financial freedom, etc. It took us 5 years to finally get our our first property, and now we've owned it for two years. Over the two years, we remodeled the common areas and all four apartment units and built a ton of equity.
We find ourselves with a tough decision now. We have a TON of personal debt. An embarrassing amount. Some of it is from the remodeling work that we did, some is student loans, some is for a vehicle we had to purchase on short notice, and we also had a baby last November so that didn't help. Without telling the amount of debt (because really...it's embarrassing) I will say that it's enough that if we sold our fourplex we could likely pay off most of our debt and still have a small amount left we would have to pay.
The decision we are trying to make is...should we sell our fourplex and pay off our debts. We have been in overwhelming debt for 6+ years, and the purpose of purchasing real estate was to allow us to become more financially stable, but our long term goal is to invest in as many units as possible. Selling would allow us to become more financially stable in our personal finances now, and allow us to start fresh, but our fear is that it would be that much harder to get back in the investment game if we sell our property. We always planned on rolling into a larger property, or keeping this fourplex for several years because it cash flows so well. But the idea of being debt free is really tempting, and we can't really make any other moves right now to buy more real estate because of the debt.
I know it's tough to give advice/feedback without having all of the information, but I would appreciate any recommendations or guidance!