How to decide if we should sell our house first?
Homeowners wrestling with whether to sell their current home to move face intense anxiety over giving up low interest rates, timing the market, and risking lowball offers if neighboring homes fail to sell. This uncertainty leaves families paralyzed between wanting to move forward and being too scared to make the wrong financial choice.
Core Friction Pattern
Analysis of 11 peer accounts across online developer and community forums reveals that “How to decide if we should sell our house first?” repeatedly surfaces due to edge-case mismatches between standard defaults and real-world environments. Standard troubleshooting frequently falls short, compelling practitioners to develop custom workarounds.
+20 alternative community-tested workarounds cataloged below.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- The most recent one is from October 2026.
- This comes up 16.1× more often in r/personalfinance than across the site as a whole.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
How to decide if we should sell our house first?
- 1waiting a few more years until closer to kindergarten ageDid this help you?
- 2listing the current home more reasonablyDid this help you?
- 3getting a conservative estimate and factoring in transaction fees and a 20% bufferDid this help you?
- 4Hiring a property management company to handle day-to-day operationsDid this help you?
- 5Self-managing the rental property and dealing with emergencies directlyDid this help you?
- 6Selling the home immediately to bank the cash for a future down paymentDid this help you?
- 7keeping the rental property and breaking evenDid this help you?
- 8holding the property until the market recovers to sell laterDid this help you?
- 9Keeping investments and borrowing more from salaryDid this help you?
- 10Foregoing buying a house altogether and focusing on FIREDid this help you?
- 11Finding a cheaper houseDid this help you?
- 12selling the home to pay off the new mortgage and investing the proceeds in index fundsDid this help you?
- 13turning the current residence into a rental property and handling basic maintenance or hiring professionals for difficult repairsDid this help you?
- 14comparing projected rental income against index fund market returnsDid this help you?
- 15Hiring a property manager to handle tenants.Did this help you?
- 16Delaying the sale to avoid short-term capital gains taxes.Did this help you?
- 17Leaving the property vacant while paying the mortgage.Did this help you?
- 18Setting up internet-connected cameras and lights to monitor the empty property remotely.Did this help you?
- 19Renting out a room or part of the houseDid this help you?
- 20Writing a strict budget to optimize expensesDid this help you?
- 21Cutting out all unnecessary discretionary spendingDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I have like $1 million in a brokerage that I'm wondering if it's worth partially selling off to decrease my monthly PITI given the 7+ percent interest I'm seeing.”source ↗
“Our dilemma is whether to sell our home this coming spring or rent it out.”source ↗
“I know that interest rate is gold but I just don’t know how to decide so that it will make the most sense for us as a family.”source ↗
“Similar boat as you in coastal SoCal. Pondering the same idea of selling brokerage shares to put down 40%+. No idea what to do”source ↗
“You don't seem to particularly want to be a landlord. If you're holding debt the best way to see profits even close to comparable to just putting it in an index fund you'll want to learn how to DIY everything, or find a really, really good cheap contractor.”source ↗
“Or you could just sell it and not have any mortgage, the end, invest the proceeds and future savings. That's almost always the personal finance answer, unless you just truly have an affinity for rental management and house maintenance.”source ↗
“If I could go back, I probably wouldn't have bought the house. But I'm here now, so I'm trying to figure out what to do with it.”source ↗
“We are selling our other home and it’s a pain having two properties. We have cameras up to keep tabs and that house is only 20 mins away but dealing with a buyer then their inspection found a small leak which ended up being a sprinkler head from the irrigation ( and of course the warranty ran out last month. )It sounds like a flex to say we have two homes but it’s really a pain.”source ↗
“I'm also house poor and I'm at the point of selling for my mental health...”source ↗
“We own two homes in the Seattle suburbs and are split on what to do with the rental.”source ↗
“What would you do in our shoes?”source ↗
“One of us wants to sell the rental and lock in the remaining equity / reduce risk. The other wants to keep the cheap 1.99% rate, the cash-flowing (or at least break-even) property”source ↗
“Should I keep the house I currently own, and turn it into a rental? Or should I sell it and use the net proceeds to pay off new home loan and invest the rest into an index fund?”source ↗
“I travel for work , and I work pretty much anywhere in the country, spending anywhere from 6 months to 2 or 3 years at each jobsite.I rent wherever I go, so nobody really occupies the house at the moment. I have about $20,000 in repairs that I would need for the house before I would be comfortable renting. My question is, should I go ahead and do the repairs and rent it out, or should I sell it and focus on investing instead of paying a mortgage?”source ↗
“i should sell my house because i cant save even if i didnt had a girlfriend, and i should either go in appartment... and maybe wait 4 years to get the first house advantages back.”source ↗
“We can’t stop thinking about it and after viewing it again we want to move forward but are so scared because 1) we now have to sell our current home first.”source ↗
“Will this affect our home sale? We plan to list more reasonably but I’m worried ppl will notice neighbors not being able to sell and lowball us as a result.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 15How do I know if I should sell my business?
- 15Should I sell my paid off car to invest the cash?
- 14Should I sell my farmland or keep renting it out?
- 2Should I keep my inherited family home or downsize?
- 2Buying a new house before selling the current one
- 11Is a luxury home upgrade worth giving up financial flexibility?