Use our current home as our first rental property?

[Elizabeth N Trahan]

Hi Ya'll! I am brand new to the BP forums and their website. I will try to keep this short but we live in our current home now in SC. My fiancee bought the home in 2010 and there is good equity in the home now. He/we owes about 160-170k on the home loan currently and based on Realtor.com it is worth at 260k. Here is the link: https://www.realtor.com/reales...

He refinanced his mortgage earlier this year and now has a 2.75% interest rate on a 30 year loan. We did not do a cash out refinance as we want to keep the payment low. The mortgage payment is now $800/month and the average rent in our neighborhood is $1,600 minimum but I believe we could ask for more and get it because our neighborhood is a hot spot! My question is, what BP calculator should I use? I was in the process of using the rental income calculator but that is based off of buying the property, closing costs, and what not but we already own the home so I am wondering do I need to use one of the calculators to run my numbers? Or is this something I need to do on paper and pen type of thing? The cash flow is definitely there just because of the wide margin gap between the rent charge and the low mortgage but I want to have accurate numbers. Any tips and advice is greatly appreciated!!! I believe that we can make this work for our 1st rental property but I would like some guidance/help just to be 100% sure that the numbers will work. Has anyone else done this before? THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!! 

**side note: we are planning on putting in a new a/c unit this year or at least before we decide to rent it out. The home is older (2010) but we had the roof looked at by a roofing company and he said it is in good shape and should go another 5 years or longer, etc. depending on the weather. And we are slowing updating certain aspects of the house too.