Turn my Primary Residence into Investment Property?

[David Lemont]

Hello,

My wife and I are wanting to purchase a new primary residence here in Denver but instead of selling our house we’d like to turn our current primary residence into an investment property. We have a low interest rate and a relatively small balance on our home now and we’d hate to let go of that. 

Projected monthly cashflow for the investment property should be $1858 (we have a super low mortgage payment and rents have gone way up here).

Moving into a new primary residence is going to bring us a mortgage payment of about $1500 more than what we’re used to paying on our current home. The risk here is we are relying on rents to stay the same (at minimum) and for our tenants to pay on time each month or else we can’t afford to pay the mortgage on the new home. 

Is this too risky? Would it be better to just sell and move all the equity into a new purchase and not have to rely on cashflow from an investment property to make the payments on the new property? 

Any insight is appreciated! 

David