Would you accept this tenant?

[Elizabeth Winter]

Hi everyone. This is probably a really dumb question, but I figured I'd ask a forum full of intelligent and experienced landlords rather than fly blind.

We've just started to advertise our first rental property and we've received a lot of interest and applicants. Unfortunately, the area of this rental property isn't exactly stunning, so only a few applicants are passing our basic screening (600 credit score, 3x rent income, and so on).

We've had an interesting applicant today. He was a really nice guy and things look good on paper...at first...but I'm not sure.

His credit score is 760. He's never had a late payment. His credit card line limit is 20,000 but he has a balance on it of 10,000. His other debt is 80,000 in student loans, which he hasn't even started paying---he has no payments on them because they are deferred or otherwise delayed somehow until the winter of this year. I'm not really sure how student loans work (I didn't need one) so I have no idea what this means, but using a basic student loan calculator online it looks like he could have a payment of 800-ish/month or so when he finally starts paying the loans. But again, I have no idea how this works.

Right now his income is 3,300 a month. Our rental is 1,000 a month.

I'm just a little concerned because he's carrying what seems to me, at least, to be a lot of credit card debt (it was 10k out of 20k). But he has always made his payments on time. It just seems weird to have that much credit card debt, but maybe that's normal for the average person? I've always treated my own credit cards like cash and paid them off in full each month, so I really have trouble understanding why/how someone could have such a big balance and just keep paying the minimum payment for years on end.

And I'm also concerned about his 80k student loans and what it means when he starts paying them late this year. If we sign him onto a lease now, sure, he could pay everything fine I suppose, but what happens later in the year?

Everything else checked out about this applicant, but I can't shake the worries I have...maybe it's just normal to be worried when choosing a tenant for the first time. I just don't want to make a dumb mistake by ignoring something that could be a problem.

What do you guys think?