Stressing over what to do next

[Quan Pham]

Hi all,

I'm in quite (to me) a difficult situation and looking for some insights.

I'm buying a new house $1.2m @7.2% interest, and my current house is worth ~$780k @3% interest. I've managed to secure the loan for the new house without having to sell the old house first. Now I can't decide what to do next.

1. I could sell the house and pocket ~$360k (after the tremendous agent commissions T_T ). I can then put that back into the stock investments that I sold to make down payment for the new house with some left over. The left over would cover the difference in monthly payment for about 2 years. Then my passive income would solely come from stock investment.

2. I could keep the house and try to rent it out. Rent analysis is around $3400-3500/m which will net me $1200-1300 cash flow if self-managed. I picked up the book " The Book on Managing Rental Properties" and it both clarifies and scares me. I'm the single breadwinner for my family (2 kids) so I don't know if I'd have the time and energy to both run this rental and manage my work so I can reach the income level to handle the bigger mortgage comfortably.

I feel like this chance for us to have a rental property with positive cash flow won't come often so I really want to explore it. Is it a viable option and what could I do to increase my success rate when taking this opportunity?

Thanks.