What's the plan on where to live? Because you have to live somewhere. There are pros and cons to owning a house, and pros and cons to specific, individual houses, and depending what they are, selling out may not be worth it.

 

If I were carrying the debt ok and making some progress on paying it, I probably wouldn't consider it. But if the debt were a serious issue, and your equity after sales fees would cover your debts, I'd do a cost analysis of both sell or not to sell. Look at the monthly cost of rent then look at your debt interest, mortgage interest, and tax and insurance costs. Also consider quality of life, if the place you have to rent makes you unsafe or miserable that is a big factor to me, while renting in the past I've lived in cramped apartments, places with stuff falling apart where the landlord didn't fix things, a place with mold, places with druggies and paroled people screaming at each other outside late at night, it doesn't make me look positively on renting.

 

We just had this conversation yesterday...watching for responses.

 

We were planning on making this decision, and we decided we were going to sell our house and use the proceeds to pay down debt. Mostly we made this decision because we wanted to move to a one income family so that I could stay home, but with car payments and our combined student loans (which is essentially a mortgage payment in and of itself) we just couldn't make it happen. We've earned enough equity in our house to be able pay off the remainder of both vehicles (we've been working on paying those down ahead of schedule) as well as most of DHs student loans. That combined with no longer having to pay for daycare, which is pretty expensive where we live, and we will actually have just about the same amount of money leftover after all expenses each month to direct towards the remaining student debt. With the additional cash flow we will be able to access by paying down more debt in the next couple of years, and with the expected promotions and bonuses DH will get during the same time, we will be perfectly positioned to buy exactly what we want in a couple of years, instead of making concessions and trying to buy something else now. After making the decision to sell, it turned out we are going to move to be closer to family anyway, so that makes the decision even easier. Now instead of renting here, we'll just rent somewhere else.