My wife and I purchased a primary residence in May 2022 in Ottawa for $510K. Our mortgage was $2K a month when we first purchased but now it’s about 3.1K due to the aggressive rate hikes and being on a the variable rate mortgage (hindsights 20/20 and of course we should have locked in at a lower fixed rate). We were not educated enough, we didn't have an investing mindset and we weren't thinking long term, which was our mistake.

Since we have become extremely interested in real estate investing, we want to house hack our next house purchase but we don’t know what to do with our current property. We can probably rent it for about $2.2 /2.3K but the delta between the mortgage and the rent would be still be around $900/1K+. We will would be cash flowing negative right out of the gate and that doesn't include other expenses.

My question now is, do we wait on the side lines for the next 6-12 months to see what happens with the rates before taking any action or do we continue to purchase a second property as a house hack and if the numbers work, we would eat up the negative cashflow on property #1 and pay our portion of the mortgage for property #2 for the house hack. We can see if a short term rental would work in our area to improve cashflow for property #1. Selling would not be an option as we only purchased the property last year. For arguments sake, lets just say we would be comfortable in covering the remainder of the mortgage for property #1 and we’d be comfortable in paying our portion for property #2.

I should mention that we are pretty risk averse in general. We obviously don't want to take on more risk and leverage but we also don't want to have to wait on the side lines for too long. We are both 30 years old so we have a little bit of a run way. We want to buy and hold properties for the long term and we don't plan on quitting our jobs anytime soon.

I'm constantly thinking about ways to figure this out but I would love to hear peoples thoughts / feedback.

Thanks in advance.

Ottawa, Ontario

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