@Peter Hanna I think the lender would be Ocwen which has a terrible history of fraud and deception with borrowers.

Perhaps, there are others out there with terrible situations that still made that jump and became successful.

tenants are  like toddlers in their terrible 2's starting out, they'll push every button and test everything they can in the first few months-- your best option is to be very firm and direct.    

Is financing with the equity of my current home a terrible idea?

Would that be a terrible idea to waste all of tha money.

My personal opinion would be to lean towards paying down the loan debt more aggressively - I'm not terribly risk-averse myself, but if your first deal goes sideways, you'll be dealing with both a student loan issue and a real estate issue, so I'd personally look to stabilize my student loan situation before taking on additional risk.

Those are some terrible odds.Dump it and move your money to a more affordable, Landlord friendly state that is on an upswing.

Like others have said, this assumes that the interest rate is low on the remaining debt.But you can't go too terribly wrong the other way.

@Chad Deberry seems like you have the bases covered here. one thing I would advise is that when your buying at the auction it is very risky because your often buying with a lot of unknowns. the pros take this route knowing that 2/10 deals will lose money but the other 8 will far exceed those loses. it would be terrible being so new to investing to get hit with 1 or 2 of those auction property loses with your first ones so be extremely conservative with your numbers in the beginning and never go over what you planned to pay! 

Most will never even get a property under contract, but will definitely be kind enough to forward you the daisy chained terrible deals that go around every day.