All Forum Posts by: Rich Chen

@Stone Jin Appreciate your advice!  So it's a rent vs. buy decision?  $5k rental sounds unreal. With your analogy, don't we throw $2000 out of the window every month? Am I thinking too small? 

We have never been serious investors beside the condo rental property. So what you are saying we can make it up using the equity of the condo for investment?

We are in the mid-40, so if buy, we likely to live in it for another at least 10 ~ 20 years. Thanks again.

We are renting a condo, a tad small. If we rent a house which would cost more. The condo we are renting cost around $3k. For a house would be looking at $4~6K rental payment. Does it any sense to continue to rent? 

First post. We need some advice!

My wife and I have a condo in LA that has been paid off and used as rental property. We are renting in a nearby city with much better schools where our kids go to. The income from the rental offsets our rental.

Our property is worth about $600,000.

We want to move to a house with backyard and more space since our kids are much older and just started in middle school. The house in the area averages $1.2 million. Despite we are pre-approved for $700,000, we don’t have enough money for the down payment.

We do not want to sell our condo since it provides a good source of income. However, we don’t know how we would come up with the down-pay without selling it. We can probably take out some home equity but that would also reduce our loan amount. Can’t win.

On top of that, the current market situation is crazy! Low inventory, historically low interest rates, and Covid19, the house value went up over like 10%. Just perfect storm! It’s a great time to sell, but probably not a good to time to buy. But my wife and I didn’t want to wait for too long. The kids are growing bigger by the day.

What would you suggest in our situation? Should we sell or continue to rent or renting a bigger place instead? Any other options that we should look into?

Would really appreciate getting some advice about our situation!