College graduate with student debt looking to buy a property

[Henry Bojanowski]

Hello! I am graduating in ~5 months (May 2021) with an Electrical Engineering degree. Unfortunately I have no job lined up after graduation (seems to be happening to a lot of students now). I will have 69k in student debt upon graduation. I have enough cash on hand for a down payment on a rental property ($20k) but I see that it will be hard for me to get a loan since my DTI ratio is rather high. I've seen in previous posts a mortgage broker may be a good way to go. Any other ideas? Do you recommend paying off the debt prior to getting a conventional/FHA/USDA loan?