A buddy used a portion of his school loan to buy a duplex.

@Alex Applebee Maybe while you are evaluating options loan it out as a hard money lender, they make a huge portion of the profit in flips/wholesaling even if the investor lost money.

I'd like to 1031 exchange my portion into another property that I'd buy myself. 

Buy on the better streets, look for streets with a higher portion of owner occupied vs rentals.  

In order to improve your credit score, it's good to show a low credit utilization score - which you can do by having more credit available to you, and spending a small portion of it - and you can do this by opening a credit card.

So basically the insurance company came up with an amount that they would pay but the board wanted to give me some and keep a portion for themselves. 

My advice to any beginner is to allot a portion of time each day (like sleeping) to educate themselves ( BP forums, books, etc) as much as possible to have a better chance of staying in the game until things get great for them. 

And over the past 10 years my renters have paid off a huge portion of my loans.

The distressed portion of that market is also in the trillion dollar range.  

They may be ok with you borrowing a portion of it and you could avoid the rollover and potentially higher fees of a solo 401k!