Plans.. are always changing!

Hi there! Plans a changing! Started listening to Set for Life by Scott Trench.. you guessed it. Planning to save $ first now and possibly "house hack." Fortunately for my wife and I we are pretty much debt free of all "bad debt" as he puts it. Except a mortgage. We were blessed enough to be able to work through or have college paid for once we completed.

So here's the conundrum...

My family wants to move to a location that is closer to our work. Right now I have about an hour commute in the morning and sometimes more in the PM. My wife has about a 30 minutes commute to and from work.

We are looking at locations that gets my wife about a 10 minute commute and mine about a 20 minute.

Now the big question!

Do we house hack and sell our current single family home OR rent it out and move into another single family home. I know we could rent it out and house hack at the same time, but I am a noob to real estate investing and would like to go slow... not 2 real estate investments at once...

• Option 1: Selling current single family home + house hacking:
  • If I go this route I will need to sell the single family home we are in now. We will make about $15,000 from it and that would help with the down payment for a Duplex closer to our work. We would live in half the duplex and rent out the other half. This would also give me experience in the REI game
• Option 2: Renting our current single family home + moving to another single family home:
  • This option would allow me to get experience with renting Single Family homes. The home that would be rented however, based on the BiggerPockets calculator, has a -$111 cash flow and -15.87% cash on cash ROI. With that said, my family members are saying it's still worth renting it out because of the tax benefits + equity growth.

What would you do?

I'm not really sure yet. My wife and I will be trying to view some of these multi-family homes and see if its the right thing for us. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Either way, we are looking to save up a year worth of $ first, reduce our debts, and then make some kind of REI move within the next year or year and a half!

Hope that was helpful for someone! See y'all next time!