Managing Debt While Getting Started

[Brendan Harrison]

Hi! My fiancee and I are both recent college grads and we are wanting to get our start in real estate, but we have a considerable amount of student loan debt and some credit card debt as well. She is currently working full-time and I was in my first semester of medical school when I made the decision that I wanted to begin pursuing real estate full-time, so I'm currently searching but have several interviews lined up. With her income and our savings we are doing fine financially and will definitely have some excess once I get a job. With that being said we aren't really sure whether our excess should be put towards our debt or if we should use that to try to find our first property.

Personally, I would love to put it towards our first property because this is something that we've been talking about for 3 years now and I'm at a point that I'm tired of talking about it and ready to make it happen (hence me dropping out of med school haha) but I'm not sure if that's that best decision and I am just seeking some guidance on managing debt while still getting started (and it hopefully not taking us another 1-2 years to finally buy our first property).

One thing that we've discussed is house hacking while using an FHA loan. But finding a duplex where the numbers make sense (at least in our market) right now seems almost impossible. We're also unsure whether we'd even be able to get a loan due to our debts and that's something that we weren't sure whether we needed to just go talk to banks about and tell them what we were wanting to do to feel out the situation or if there was some way to tell whether we could qualify or not.

Any advice/guidance is greatly appreciated and thanks in advance!

(I know there have been several posts on this but they seem to be 6+ years old and the market has changed quite a bit since then so I was hoping for fresh advice)