Paying off consumer debt while owning a rental
A young couple with high consumer debt and low cash savings struggles to balance keeping a cash-flowing rental property against selling it to wipe out their debt before having children.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1applying for second jobs to add more income
- 2trying to be frugal and slowly pay everything off
- 3Throwing money into the stock market instead
- 4Focusing on aggressively paying down credit card debt and building an emergency fund
- 5Using medium-term rentals like Furnished Finder to reduce short-term turnover work
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Our household income is around $106k gross from my two jobs, plus my wife brings in some additional income from her business. We currently have about $36k between two car loans and around $9k in credit card debt.”source ↗
“What makes me nervous is that we’d be putting our primary residence further on the line to buy an investment property.”source ↗
“Dude you can't even pay off your credit cards.”source ↗
“You have credit card debt and are already over leveraged”source ↗
“You don’t have any cash to invest and you are already carrying $9k in credit card debt.”source ↗
“Currently, we have about $70K of consumer debt.”source ↗
“I’d hate to let go of it, but I know if I sold it now, we could eliminate our debt.”source ↗
“We are 24 and 25 and want to try to have kids soon, but we realize right now financially we need to do better. With our debt, we have very little left over every month and it’s a lil scary.”source ↗
“I am currently applying for 2nd jobs and hopeful that adding more income can help us get through this and then we can slowly pay everything off.”source ↗
“We do not have a retirement savings, or a good cushion of savings in general to fall back on. At max we have about $2K cash for emergencies.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 5How to pay off multiple small short-term debts and loans efficiently
- 7Tax and financial implications of paying off a parent's debt
- 6Should I use my savings to pay off my partner's student loans?
- 3Will it be too late to start investing once I’m debt-free?
- 4How to make extra money as a teacher without leaving your dogs
- 9Should I use my savings to pay off student loans?