Thanks for the tips, guys.
My dad offered up the idea of doing another 1031 exchange on the current place we're at, and finding a bigger house where we might pay the difference. E.g. say our place is valued at $500k and we have this $200k saved up - we could rollover the $500k value to another place that's worth $700k and fork over the $200k we have to make up for it.
But is that really the best use of our money? Living in Southern California is pretty expensive, and thinking ahead in terms of expanding our family, etc., I've been invaded with thoughts of getting a bigger place and doing it sooner than later. So many "what ifs" - we're still not sure about time frame. I think the desire is there to get a house but we are also OK where we're at currently (it's a 1300-1400sq ft 2bed/2bath condo, well, technically 3bed since the 3rd room is a den/office area that I've been in since 2007). It would probably be okay with 1 or even 2 kids but probably would start getting really cramped with more than that. Funny that I'm talking about all this though since we don't even have a kid or are expecting yet haha.
In the meantime, it sounds like generating some interest on the money at hand is still something I need to do. Just not sure the best way to go about it... When you say invest all of it in the S&P, I'm assuming you mean diversified too right? So some stocks, some mutual funds, some bonds? If I have a Roth 401k through work, I can't back/post-contribute to that can I? We were recently given the Roth 401k option so I'm splitting my contribution amount by contributing 6% to the Roth 401k and 6% to the regular 401k... I think I even upped the contribution amount recently to 15-16%. We each have our normal Roth IRAs as well, which we make sure to max out every year. It's harder thinking about maxing out the 401ks through work though since the amount taken from each paycheck would be way more significant. Anyway, with the additional amount we've saved up to generate this $200~ I'm still not exactly certain how or where to invest - I'm also concerned about having the least impact on taxes (say if I do invest all or most of the money and start generating interest).