What would you do?Purchasing power issues!

[Tarold Davis]

Greetings All

My wife and I are planning to sale our home in the next  6 months. Primarily to get our children in a better school district.  Our price range for the area we are anticipating moving to is between $200-$260K. You can get a pretty decent size home for that amount in our market and with 3 small children we need it! However, I'm starting to wonder if I should even tie that much money up in a home. It will drastically reduce my purchasing power. We want to start RE investing and we could easily qualify for $160K with our current mortgage. So there are a couple of options I'm thinking about and would like to get your feed back.  Here are the options:

1. Lease a property in the better school district and use all of my purchasing power to buy and flip properties. This would allow for me to invest $200-$260K. 

2. Reduce our price range to $150k-$175K for our new primary home in the better school district  . Thus allowing me to free up between $50K-$85K in purchasing power. 

3. Lease option our first home. Lease a property in the better school district and use all of our purchasing power to RE invest.

What would you do?