Hellobee Boards

We have 3 bedrooms with our second kiddo on the way as well. For now, our plan is to have the two kids share a room for awhile. The room they'll share is a pretty good size, but they are mix gender, so I know it's not a permanent solution. I'm hoping it'll work for a few years at least.
We do have some extra space in our basement, so eventually well have to move the guest bed down there. It won't be nearly as nice of a place to stay, but will work out for an option for our guests. Both my parents and my father in law stay with us on a semi regular basis.

We'll be moving in the next year or 2, most likely summer of 2023. We briefly talked about moving this summer but decided to hold off for now because of some other personal reasons. The market here is crazy too! I'm not sure if it will be calmer or not by next summer, but we hope so!

We currently live in a smaller house in a big city. We're looking to move further out to gain more space. Now that we're both working permanently from home, the house feels a lot more cramped. My mother-in-law is also aging, is a widow who lives alone, and may eventually need space to stay with us more often. And we've run out of space here. We've had 3 kids, 2 adults, and 2 home offices in 1600 sf. It's doable, but space would be nice. We could basically trade our house for a much bigger house further from the city for about the same sales price.

We talked to our good friend who's a real estate agent when we were debating moving this summer. We have a lot of equity built up in our house, but we'd have to sell it to tap into it. And houses where we want to move are going so quick - multiple offers, over asking price, no contingencies. What he recommended is to go ahead and get pre-approved for financing and see if we could qualify without selling our current house first, using what liquid cash we have to put down. Or if not, get a home equity line of credit to put down, then pay it off once this house sells. We have well over 20% to put down if we use the equity in this house. But in liquid cash, we could do about 5%. We've decided to wait until next year, so we haven't contacted a lender yet. In the meantime, we're trying to save extra so we could get to 8% or more in liquid cash in case the market is still crazy next year.

We moved in July and it was crazy. We lost out on two homes due to multiple offers. We ended up including an escalation clause and had to raise our offer amount to match a competitive offer. I did not want to pay above the appraised value so we were strategic in the amount we were willing to pay above asking and thankfully it fell within the appraisal value.

@krispi: We were in a similar place with the equity in our previous home. We put 5% down on our new home and paid 1 month of PMI, our old house sold quickly and we were able to put a lump sum (more than 20%) towards our new mortgage and recast the loan to reduce the monthly payment. We sold for more than 2x what we paid originally.

We're also waiting and sending up a prayer, lol. I'm keeping an eye on what's for sale around us, getting really well versed in different neighborhoods, etc. Just biding our time until we are ready to take the plunge, and hoping the market cools off at some point in the next few years.