Straight out of College

[Juan Carlos Castillo]

I made a lot of bad decisions in college,  I started partying, racking up loans (even though I had full scholarships) and somehow still managed to max out two credit cards. It's been a year since I graduated college, and I've now worked down $20k of debt (10k/30k in student loans and 10k/20k in car loan), and also got my credit score back up from 500 to 700 after missing three months of payments on two cards in college. What a mess right?

I'm trying to get my finances in order and have always been interested in real estate, I even went to school for civil engineering (my dream is to design, build and rent my own apartment building). I just applied for my first FHA loan which my realtor said should have been an easy approval, but got denied because of the missed credit card payments on my report 2 years ago. I'm just looking for some general advice on how I should set myself up. I want to jump in, possibly into a fix and flip, but i feel it would be even harder to get that approved through a bank than the FHA loan I just got denied for, would it be completely idiotic to try to get a private lender/hard money loan for a fix and flip?