Should We Keep Our House Or Sell It?

Over the past few weeks, we have been going back and forth about what we want to do with the home we currently own in Missouri.

I realize I say this all the time about everything in my life, but I am an extremely indecisive person.

This decision has been a difficult one so far, and we are still leaning either way depending on the day.

There are many reasons for why we are undecided about what to do next as well. So, what should I do? Should I rent or sell my house?

Below are some of the reasons for why we keep going back and forth about whether we should rent or sell our house:

We love our house again.

We’ve been fixing it up and have been slowly falling back in love with it. I know, this isn’t a good enough of a reason to keep a house and it seems like we are just coming up with excuses to keep it.

Some of the things we’ve done in the past few weeks include:

• The whole upstairs and downstairs have been completely professionally painted. Trim, walls, doors, etc. and it all looks so much better now.
• We’ve replaced a light fixture with something much nicer.
• We fixed all of the curtain rod placements to make the windows look bigger.
• We’ve bought new curtains.
• We’ve deep cleaned the whole house.
• We replaced the broken garage door with a nice carriage door.
• We replaced our back door with something nicer as the last one had a cracked door frame after someone got locked out of our home.

All of these improvements have made us wonder a little more about what we should do with our home. We know we should probably just get rid of it and sell it, but the fact that it looks so much better than before definitely hurts a little!

I realize this is normal though when someone goes through preparing a house to be put on the market.

Our neighborhood’s value has tanked.

I’m not sure what has happened, but our neighborhood’s value has tanked significantly over the past year.

Our realtor already told us that we most likely either breakeven or we will owe a little money after selling our home because of realtor fees and the lower value of our house, so this is playing a big factor into whether or not we want to put our house on the market at the moment.

There is risk with this though. Our home value could continue to plummet. I doubt that would happen as it seems like the plummeting has stopped, but you just never know.

We could turn our home into a rental.

One factor that’s throwing me in a loop about whether I should I rent or sell my house is that we could potentially rent it out for the time being.

We are debating renting out our home, either on a long-term or on a short-term basis. Renting would be great because we could see if our house increases in value over time, while hopefully earning enough money to still pay off our mortgage each month. Another positive of this is that we would have a home to return to if we decided down the line that the move was not right for us.

A long-term rental would be nice because we would earn enough to cover our rent with hopefully minimal work involved.

One the other hand, we could also do more research into renting out our home on a short-term basis on a website such as Airbnb, VRBO or Homeaway. This would also allow us to have a place to come back to since we know that we already have to be back in the St. Louis area at least four more times this year.

Having a rental would require work.

In the end, we will probably just sell our home. However, if it sits on the market for a long time then renting it out will probably become more appealing.

Keeping our home on the side most likely wouldn’t be worth it. We would mainly be keeping it for all of the wrong reasons, mainly just that we are attached to the first home we bought.

What would you do in our situation? Should I rent or sell my house?