Basement apartment opinions

[Chad Lundquist]

Hey BP family, I have a question. My wife and I were going to sell our property since property values are so high right now, but we'd have to move into an apartment (most likely) which would cost us $1,500 - 1,800 / month for a 2 bedroom in our area, not including a few hundred dollars per month in storage fees. Our son is going to be a senior next year so there's that as well - I don't really want him to have to spend his senior year in an apartment.

The idea that I had was to add an apartment in our basement. We have a fairly large home 3,600 square feet and before we remodeled our main kitchen we added a kitchen in our basement so we already have a kitchen (minus a stove & DW), a full bathroom and a large finished space that could be a nice sized living / dining room. We'd have to finish part of the unfinished area for a bedroom and WIC, but there is already egress for that room and the basement is a walk-out so plenty of egress for the remainder of the "apartment". We have a 3rd garage bay that I could add a wall to close it off from the 2 car garage so the tenant would have a garage as well. I've estimated that it would cost approximately $14,000 - 16,000 to complete this and have been told that I could get at least $1,200 / month in rent (I've included a photo of the plan for the basement apartment below for reference). With that in mind it would only take us a little over 13 months to pay this back and we could stay in our house and have about 55% of our entire house payment (PITI) paid for. It seems like a no-brainer to me, but I wanted to see if anyone else has opinions or has done this themselves.

I look forward to any and all responses and thank you in advance.