Let's say you were strapped for cash when you got started as a real estate investor.

In order to get the cash for your down payments or your repairs,

you borrowed money from credit cards or maybe borrowed money from a personal loan or a home equity line of credit,

but the point is now you have a mountain of debt and you want to figure out how do I get out from

under it. That's the question I'm going to tackle in this edition of Ask Coach and we're getting started right now. Welcome to the Ask Coach edition of the podcast.

I'm your host, Chad Carson. You can also call me Coach and my mission here is to help you get out of the financial grind so you can do more of what matters. And the format of the Ask Coach podcast is where I do my best to answer your burning questions about real estate investing and personal finance. Today's question comes from Al and San Antonio. And let me read the email he sent to us with his question. I have seven single family homes in rural North Carolina where I'm originally from. However, I'm a retired Air Force veteran living in San Antonio, Texas, and I wanted to ask Coach the following. What is the best way to get out from under mountains of credit card debt as a result of using them to get started in real estate? Thanks in advance. I wasn't sure if your questions were covered in the earlier podcast.

So I asked the follow-up question. I actually emailed Al and just wanted some more clarification

on how I used the debt and what his background was. And this was a reply to that. I used credit cards

for repairs and paying some labor costs. And I have a farm in North Carolina that I also borrowed

against to buy some rural houses. So I'm assuming like a home equity line of credit or something on there.

And those properties fell to me due to the families passing away.

All in all, I still owe about 45,000 from farm equity and down to 32,000 in credit card debt.

So now I'm sitting at seven houses and a 65 acre farm.

And I think I should hold there until I can get the debt under

control. Your thoughts. First of all, Al, thank you for your question and for sharing the details

of your situation so we can answer it here on the podcast. I'm going to give you both a short

answer and a long answer. The short answer is, my hunch is you should be attacking the debt

and trying to pay it off. I want to unpack that a little bit and explain both why I think in your situation, just reading between the lines, it's probably a good idea, but also want to explain why it's a good idea in general. I'm just a believer in paying off your personal debts especially. Of course, there's some exceptions or some things I'll talk about here, but I also want to talk about how you can do that because that was part of your question. Once we go over the why, I want to get into the how. And so just reading between the lines of your situation, Al, you know, you said you're a veteran from the Air Force, which thank you for your service there. And I'm assuming you're getting some kind of pension. Some of you have some income coming in there. I don't know if you have any other jobs or other things going on there, but you're kind of in this retirement mode or semi-retirement mode and you have these long-distance properties. So assuming you've got some good properties there and you have a farm, you know, getting those paid off will be a good stable foundation upon which you can build. You can basically build your own pension

with these rental properties. And the other reason, and this is a general principle for me,

that not all debt is equally good or bad, right? So having a mortgage on a property and you

buy an investment property and you have a 4% mortgage and that property produces positive cash flow

and it's a long-term 30-year mortgage.

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