Here is my situation.I am currently a fourth year medical student with ~$150,000 debt, some of which is at 6.8% deferred, some subsidized/deferred.

If he had debt on this property, he would barely break even.

Eventually I want to use debt to leverage and I was wondering if I should seek financing now, and not burn a lot of cash since I heard cash of refi's are extremely hard to do right now.

I'm making all my payments on time, but maybe I need to pay down some more of that debt to higher my score?

Basically at 1k rent, you are looking at $500 NOI to cover both debt service and any profit.

I have negative net worth so nothing real valuable to protect in a lawsuit at the moment :) At some point I will get more serious with that as my financials should finally start swinging up as I go through my 30s here (college debt can be brutal!)

At that time, we'd have enough rental income (and almost no debt) that I could make the move into full-time real estate and investing, starting with getting my realtor's license.

You also need to take into account if your competition is waving the security deposit for qualified applicants,charging a pet fee or not,paying for any water,sewer,trash for the tenant included in the rent,including appliances,or giving a rent credit on move in, and many other factors.Rent rates can look good until you see how many landlords you are competing with,quality of the product,and incentives given driving down the net rent before debt service and depreciation.

Bill too many factors would weigh into this.You are looking at hard money with very high carrying costs at 60% occupancy as a regular lender won't touch it.Too easy to go from 60% to 40% or lower and the new lender has a fresh foreclosure on their hands.Unless you pay cash you will need a HML or private money and will have to pay low to get it to cash flow until you can refi into a lower debt service once stabilized.Is this a local,regional,or national bank??

My deals are essentially like hybrid debt/equity placements.