Hello,
I am new to the journey to financial Independence and am hoping to get some good advice regarding selling my house. My wife and I bought a foreclosed house in a booming historic district at the bottom of the market about 6 years ago. We had very little money saved between us at the time and a small mountain of debts. We had only 5% to put down, but we loved the house and especially its prime location - walking distance to both of our jobs and schools for our kids, a large yard, and terrific neighbors. Since then, we have paid off all of our debts except the house. The interest rate on the mortgage is 3.75%. I'm 34, my wife is 32, and we have two kids, both younger than school age. I work a white collar job with a steady salary and my wife works from home part time while staying home with the kids.
Home prices in the area have doubled since we bought and we have had several unsolicited offers recently. We realized we could now sell this house and make enough profit to buy another with cash. Obviously such a house would not be in as prime a location and would lack the improvements we've made to ours, but the idea of not having a mortgage payment is very appealing. We would try to stay within biking distance of my office. We don't want to spend more on the new house than we'd make in profit on the sale of our home.
Again, I'm new to this and would greatly appreciate the community's input. My question is which strategy of these makes the most financial sense:
1. Continue to live in the nice big house and focus on paying the mortgage off as soon as possible (with frugality and some good luck, this will take us 5 to 6 more years).
a. Do this by paying as much extra principal each month as possible
b. Do this by investing as much money as possible in Betterment or Vanguard ETFs and cashing out when the payoff amount is reached in the ETF balance
2. Sell this house and move to a less advantageous location, be mortgage free right now, and focus on building our stash with ferocity since we're older than many who start down this path
3. Other (OP is insane, hasn’t considered X, Y, or Z, or hasn’t provided enough information)
Thank you for reading.