New Young Interested Investor - Christian Tallet

[Christian Tallet]

Hello everyone, my name's Christian and I'm from Dayton, Ohio. I'm 20 years old and I currently hold a full time job a software support specialist. I'm also in school full time to finish up my associate's degree in software development. 

I want to get into buy and hold rental properties to be able to enjoy financial freedom in the long term. I'm not necessarily interested in quitting my job because I currently enjoy my job and still want to delve deep into software development. My current plan is to save up money for a down payment on a multi-family property where I will live in one of the units so I can hopefully live for free and maybe still get some cash flow. This will luckily allow me to have a smaller down payment since it wouldn't qualify as an investment property. I live with my parents still and so the only expenses I have are my car payment, food, going out, gas, and phone/insurance so I'm thankful that I'm fairly well off to be able to save money. The down side is I have about 15k in student loans yet to pay off and I've been putting as much as I can on them at the moment. My question to all you savvy investors out there, if you'd care to give me some input, is whether I should solely focus on my student loans then save an amount for a down payment, I should focus solely on the down payment to start my journey in building some wealth, or if I should do a little of both. I currently don't have to pay anything on my loans because I am still in school.

I'm sure I left plenty of things out about me and my plan, but I hope to hangout here on the forums and meet as many friendly investors as possible and hopefully a few locals.  I look forward to talking to everyone. Have a great day :D

[Steve Stackman]

Christian,

Welcme to BiggerPockets it sounds like you have been reading a lot of the forums and listening to the podcasts already. Be sure to continue to do so. 

Everyone has a different tolerance for risk, only you know where yours is, but if I were in your situation I would start saving for a down payment on a multifamily property. I would then be able to use some of the cash flow to pay off the student loans when they are in repayment. 

There is no right or wrong way to do this, it's really up to what makes you comfortable. 

If you have any questions, there are a lot of investors all around the Miami Valley that will be happy to try to guide you along the way.