Next Move After First Property

[Thomas Glenn]

I am looking for some advice/possible ideas I did not think of for my current situation.  I found the Biggerpockets website earlier this year, and since then have completed my first deal (aside from the purchase of our primary residence).  For some background on that deal my wife and I are new to real estate investing, and we were working to find a way to make it so that she could continue to stay home with our new baby which is why I turned to real estate.  While we were both working we had saved up a good amount of money for which I knew I needed to find a way for that money to make more for us while she was home.  I will also point out this was not an easy route for me due to it being a huge purchase for our family, and my personality usually not comfortable with the risk (I was a prime candidate for the analysis paralysis label).

We currently live in suburbs outside of Austin, TX, and we ended up buying a quadplex in the Killeen area outside of FT. Hood that has been good to us so far (its calculated to return approximately 15-17% COC with a cash flow of approximately 700 per month after expenses). The issue I have now is where to go from here. We still have some money in the bank which I have kept as a cushion due to our single income, but saving has obviously slowed down a bunch. One of the things we do have going is that we purchased our house 3 years ago in this area, and as everyone knows the Austin real estate market has been climbing tremendously allowing us to have somewhere around 80k equity in our primary residence.

One of the ideas we have been throwing around is possibly finding a duplex in the area, and house hacking while our primary residence turns into a rental property.  There is also the option of pulling money out of our primary residence, but is not my first choice due to wanting to keep the mortgage on the property at its low level (I think a lot of it has to do with being uncomfortable with the inexperience of the finance side of this option).  I think one of my most comfortable options would be to use some of our money we still have saved, but it is getting harder to do so with how expensive properties have become in such a short amount of time in this area.  I have been playing with the idea of turning to a turn key provider in the Dallas/San Antonio area due to places appearing to be more affordable.  

Basically I need some outside ideas to throw at my dart board while I decide what I want to do from here.  As you can see I am somewhat all over the place so I apologize for some of the random information.  Any help is greatly appreciated.