New from San Francisco/Los Angeles, CA!

[Charmian Wong]

Hello BiggerPockets Community! I'm Charmian, and I'm currently a graduate student in the health sciences in Southern California. I've lived most of my life in San Francisco, so I suppose I'm looking into both SF Bay Area and greater LA markets. I'm looking into single/multi-family units, although I'm also open to other areas of real estate.

So how on earth did this graduate student become interested in real estate? Well, a recruiter tried to [unsuccessfully] introduce me to multi-level marketing and had me read "The Business of the 21st Century" by Robert Kiyosaki. The author wrote that one of the avenues for generating wealth is real estate investing. Rather than get sucked into selling products for an MLM company, I decided to go straight for real estate investing instead, and researched affordable ways to get into real estate investing. A Google search led me to BiggerPockets, and I started listening to podcasts on my long driving commutes to clinical rotation sites.

One thing that the podcasts haven't mentioned much is investing while having student debt. My first two questions to the BP Community are, did you pay off all of your student debt first before going into real estate investing, and why/why not? I understand that every person's situation is different from mine, but I asked in the hopes of gathering multiple perspectives and strategies on this topic so that I can better formulate my plan. (If anybody is curious, I have calculated that I will be in $130,000 debt by the time I finish my two-year master's program. Interest rates on the loans are 5.84% and 6.84%. My starting salary whether I'm in SF or LA should be around $100k/year.)

I'm looking forward to furthering my real estate education through the BP podcasts, blogs, and forums, and I look forward to being involved with you all!