Hubby and I are considering purchasing a duplex, renting one half and living in the other, at least that's my idea. Hubby wants to buy one, keep our current house and rent both sides of the duplex. We still owe on the house ($116k) an will probably owe on it for the next 4 years (unless the duplex thing works out, then closer to 2 years) He has some student loans at lower interest rates than inflation so we're just going to make minimum payments on those until they're gone. That's the only debt that we currently have. We currently make 90k a year and have only recently worked out a budget where we only spend ~30k a year (including our mortgage) of our income and have committed to putting the rest toward paying off the house.
Most of the duplexes we're considering are 100k or less (80k after downpayment) and I don't know for certain but I imagine the rent around $600-700. Obviously we could cover it if we didn't have tenants but neither my husband nor myself are incredibly handy people (I want to learn) however - my FIL is a licensed contractor but lives 2 hours away and is generally pretty busy.
I think it's a better idea for us to move into one of the sides so we can kind of keep tabs on our tenant, and be there to keep the place up. I'm also afraid that if we don't move in, that we could be stretching ourselves too thin, increasing our debt, our risk and our length of time to FI.
If we move in, we increase our security in that in case anything (IDK what though) ever happens, the other tenant would basically be covering our mortgage, and our extra money would just be going to pay down a lesser mortgage than we currently owe, leading to FI sooner.
We would also need to sell our house to have enough for the down payment. We just had an appraisal done on the place and it was valued at 145k.
Hubby wants to keep our current living situation because the number 145k is bigger than 100k and therefore increases our value. I think that it's worthless unless we sell the house and can actually spend the equity we have in the house.
What say you?