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