All Forum Posts by: Oscar Toledo

Hi everyone, first post here. Just wanted to get some opinions on where to go...

My wife and I bought a house in Austin, tx, where we live, in dec 2011 for 375k. It has 2 houses on one lot, both huge in size, 2200 and 3500 sf, on a 50000 sq ft lot. These houses required major renos and we are about 90% done with our house, 100% done with the reno on the 2nd house, now rented for 2000/mo. The rent on the second house covers most of our mortgage so I pay less than 1k per month to live in our huge, remodeled house in perhaps the best public schools in the state. Our kids are just starting school so this is key for us. 

My question is this.... I'm told that I can get 900k+ for our house, which seems to fall in line with some the the recent comps in the area. I'd love to flip the house and cash it all in for a huge bump in our retirement/real estate investment fund, but we like the house and the neighborhood. Not our first choice in neighborhoods, but the schools are top notch and it's a very safe and comfortable place to live. We never planned on flipping, but it's difficult to ignore the opportunity, especially since it would be just about all tax free cash.

Anyway, the other option is a equity loan to buy some investment property, which I may try, but we are purchasing some commercial property for our business and I think this large comm property loan will drastically affect our debt/income ratio and our ability to take an equity loan on our house. Difficult to explain why, but the comm property loan must be in our names, not our company's.

What would you do?