Buying first home and rental property at the same time - Help!

[Meghan Helbick]

My husband and I are current renters and never owned a home. We are both just under 30 years old, I have a steady, decent paying job, excellent credit, but his career is uncertain and we both have a good amount of student loans. We want to buy our first home and a rental at the same time. We have looked at Duplexes, but most are outside our price point. We are in the Orlando area, looking to buy each place around $50,000 or less. Most of these are condos, which do have higher HOA and condo fees. We want to buy under our means since his income is uncertain for now, and he wants to keep debt as low as possible. We have talked with a few banks, who don't like that we are buying 2 properties at once, but if the numbers work, I don't see why not.

We are new to this, and unsure the best way to get started.  Our ultimate goal is to acquire buy and hold properties slowly, paying off as much debt as we can, which is another reason for the low price point.  We could put 20-30K down depending on the amount of work the places need.  So the combined loans would be about 70-80k. Our initial plan was to take the cash flow from the rental and put it to paying off the mortgage, and make our own monthly contributions of $1000 a month, even if it's above our mortgage, again to pay it down faster.

I realize paying off the loans gives us less leverage and would take a lot longer to buy more properties, but my husband can't stand even "good debt" so we'd rather pay that off first.

I would appreciate any words of wisdom/advice.  I've listened to 88 podcasts so far, which are awesome, but so many strategies makes my head spin!