Not really sure where to turn for advice, and would love to hear opinions on our situation. Financially my partner and I make 180k total before taxes but have received a lot of help from our family in order to make this work. My wife and I recently bought our first house, a small 2br 1 bath property in Berkeley for about 800k, with monthly mortgage payments of about 4k. We have roughly 250k to do repairs on the house that are needed. One of the things is a "rotating foundation" that a lot of architects and contractors have looked at but said they have seen worse, but we would like to protect our house as well as take advantage of the seismic retrofit refund (we also have a roof that hasn't been replaced in 20 years, and would love to do our kitchen but are willing to put that off for later). We have an unfinished dirt floor crawl space that's about 6 ft tall and we were thinking that while we were finishing the foundation we were thinking we could finish the basement and have another unit we could rent out to reduce our mortgage. Costs of finishing the basement would run roughly 250k-300k from estimates we've been getting from a lot of architect-build companies and contractors.
One of our family suggested we buy another property (requiring another mortgage or a possibly buying a condo outright) in Sacramento or someplace else where the rent would cover its own mortgage and end up with another property and not do any repairs to the house, just to get more "in the game". I'm hesitant to sign up for another mortgage, I know nothing about real estate in Sacramento (said family member has a few properties there and would be willing to help scout a property) and I'm worried that buying now (or even in the winter time) during a time where real estate prices are inflated would take even longer to build equity in the future. And if the prices of housing is overinflated, would it also be wiser to wait for the housing bubble to deflate a bit before building as well since contracting costs are crazy as well? I feel like we've stepped into a world where we know just enough to get ourselves into trouble, but are unprepared to deal with the ever changing market. What are things I should be looking at? What am I missing? Was it a terrible idea to have bought the house in the first place? Would love some clarity on this situation because we're spinning in circles without any direction, thanks in advance for any opinions.
