Financial Freedom in 2 Years by Scaling Rental Portfolio FAST

Tony:
Hey, Rookies, while we’re still off enjoying the holiday season, we have a special episode to share with you from the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. Now, just two years after discovering Fire, today’s guest achieved it and they did it without millions of dollars in the bank. Their secret, a strategic real estate portfolio, slashing expenses, and a laser focused approach to financial independence. Now, how did they scale their real estate portfolio while keeping costs low? Well, Emily and James are breaking it all down. In today’s episode,

Mindy:
James and Emily were able to retire less than two years after they started saving for early retirement at the ages of 27 and 28. Now, they travel the world, and if any of this sounds amazing to you, keep listening to hear how they did it. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my amazing co-host, Scott Trench.

Scott:
Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here with you. You’re my super duper trooper co-host. Today here on BiggerPockets Money, BiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting, or maybe it’s attainable for you even before you hit millionaire status. Listen on to find out how

Mindy:
Today we are going to discuss how to get your partner on board for financial independence. And I’m going to suggest maybe you spend a little bit more than the 30 seconds that James did. We’re also going to talk about how you can cut down your expenses to help you reach financial independence and what your fine numbers should be when investing in real estate. This segment is sponsored by BAM Capital, your path to generational wealth with premier real estate opportunities. See why over 1000 investors have invested with BAM capital at biggerpockets.com/bam. That’s biggerpockets.com/b. Without further ado, James and Emily, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

James:
Thanks. We’re excited to be here.

Mindy:
We

Emily:
Are. Thank you

Mindy:
James. And Emily, we want to get a bit of a financial snapshot before we jump into your story. So can you give us a bit of information, what life was like growing up, financially speaking, and I’m going to go with James first.

James:
So yeah, financially speaking, it was, I would say difficult growing up. So I am a coda. That means I’m a child of deaf adults and my parents divorced when I was young and my dad passed away when I was 12. And so my mom worked third shift at Walmart to raise me and my two sisters. And so it was not, I don’t want to say it was common, but it wasn’t uncommon for our cars to be repossessed. We had our utilities cut off multiple times. And so it’s funny, looking back on it, as an adult, I can see that this wasn’t normal, but at the time, you don’t know that that’s not normal. People don’t typically set up camp in their living room, and so we would get out the tent and get candles and stuff together, but in retrospect, it’s because we didn’t have utilities on.
And so there was actually a couple of years where we had a leak under the slab of our house, and we didn’t have the money to have it fixed. So anybody in the family that needed to use water for whatever reason, would have to walk out to the street where the utility cut on was and would have to cut the water on if we needed to shower, brush our teeth, wash dishes, use the toilet, anything. But we always had to remember to cut it off because if we didn’t, we didn’t have enough money for the bill. And so that was a few years of existence in the Lowry household.

Scott:
So how did that translate to your money story in high school and college years? Can you give us just a little snapshot about how that parlayed into kind of adulthood?

James:
Sure. I mean, it definitely created a chip on my shoulder. The problem was I actually probably aired the other way. I overspent money because I thought that I’m going to show that I have money and I didn’t have any money to be clear. And so every dollar that was coming in would be spent on a phone or a car or whatever going out on these lavish dates. And then I would be at home not eating anything for days because I had spent all my money. And so because of that, I think that living frugally came naturally to me because of growing up so poor. And then it just becomes as opposed to, we live this way because we don’t have any money, it turns into we live this way so that we can have money. And that was a really important mindset shift that I had towards, I guess our financial independence journey.

Mindy:
When did your mindset shift? You are in high school and you’re spending every dime that comes in on lavish high school dates. At what point did you change the spendy ways?

James:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So it was a lot after high school, actually. Emily and I were already married and we were pretty much living hand to mouth. And I mean, it wasn’t as dire as it was when I was growing up, but we definitely didn’t have any finances to speak of. And so I actually found out about Mr. Money mustache and just this concept of I can choose to live in this manner and it’s against the de grain, it’s against the norm, and that really resonates with me. So because of that, that’s kind of what put us on the financial independence path. So I went from zero to a hundred. I did not air into it at all. There was no dipping my toe in. And so I went from really poor habits to really good habits, I think.

Mindy:
How about you, Emily? What did your upbringing with money look like?

Emily:
So grew up as my dad was the sole provider and tried to, my parents tried to instill good budgeting habits. They followed Dave Ramsey, and we always had our little banks that we tithed and that we saved and all that kind of stuff. They always wanted me to have at least a hundred dollars in my savings account or my checking account, which sounds wild, but that was just the threshold. They were like, if you ever dip back into it, make sure that you refill it up. And then in college, I went off the deep end and then just started spending and spending and spending, even though I knew that I had to pay for school, I dunno, I just feel like once I got my degree and got a big girl job, I guess I would have the money to just get everything that I wanted basically. And that kind of led to whenever we got married, not saving anything and going shopping and just spending money frivolously.

Mindy:
What was your inflection point? Did you come to find Mr. Money mustache together? Did one of you find it and tell the other, did you have an agreement to stop spending and start saving or was it more of a difficult conversation?

James:
It was a little more difficult than that. So I found Mr. Money mustache, and I did it as poorly as one could pose this to their spouse.

Emily:
And you also tried to send me articles.

James:
Yeah, yeah,

Emily:
Yeah,

James:
Exactly.

Emily:
And just

James:
His writing doesn’t resonate with everybody, and that’s okay. But yeah, so I found Mr. Money mustache.

Scott:
The face punch was not a very good cajoling way.

James:
Who would’ve thought that that doesn’t work for everybody? So yeah, I found out about Mr. Money mustache at work that day. I went home and I lowered our air conditioning. It was in the middle of summer so that we weren’t using as much air conditioning. I changed the hot water heater. I was doing the smallest thing to move the needle. And she came home and I’ve already done half of these things and I’m like, Hey, I found out about this website. We can quit our jobs if you listen to me. And it wasn’t quite as chauvinistic as that, but it was like, Hey, there’s this information here if this works, if you hop on board, then we can do this pretty quickly.

Scott:
So what was the temperature of the room and the temperature of Emily’s response to this conversation?

James:
The room was pretty warm. The response was pretty cold. I’ll tell you.

Mindy:
Wow, what a surprise. I can’t believe that approach didn’t work, James.

James:
I don’t know why I had planned it out, mapped it out for about 30 seconds in my head, and it did not work out the way I hoped. So it turns out that that’s not the way to do it.

Mindy:
Emily, what was it that he said or did or showed you that started to change your mind

Emily:
For whenever a new idea is presented to me, I feel like I need to hear different sides to it. And so when James told me that I didn’t have to obviously work forever, which I mean that was what he had said to begin with, in five years, you can quit your job. I hated my job. And then it was also him doing actions. He was showing me that he was changing based on his actions. So he was riding his bike to work, even though it was kind of sketchy, going down main roads and packing his lunch. Just little things that showed me that he was making an effort and I don’t know, just actions speak louder than

Mindy:
Words. We are speaking to James and Emily about their money story, but it’s time for a quick ad break. When we’re back, James and Emily will tell us how they cut their expenses in half to hit financial independence. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast.

Scott:
Let’s hear about some financial details. How much were you making when you started this journey? How much were you spending? How did that change over time, especially on the spending front? How much were you able to lower it down to?

James:
So combined, we were making just under a hundred thousand dollars when we first got married, and we had essentially a 0% savings rate. We have texts back and forth to each other saying, Hey, the mortgage is coming out in a few days and we don’t have enough money in that account. We need to move some money around. And then it was the same text the next month. And so it was pretty, we’re not making any contributions to 4 0 1 Ks or anything like that at the time. So we genuinely had a 0% savings rate. The good news is we weren’t actually actively in debt and consumer debt. At least we did not have student loans, and we did not have any debt other than our condo that we lived in at the time.

Scott:
Okay. So you’re not in a high tax bracket at that point. So you’re essentially spending 80 K, it sounds like on your life more or less at that point in time. What were you able to drive it to over the next little bit? And was it a process or did it happen overnight? Was it an event or was it a process where it happened gradually after a couple of big breakthroughs or big moves that you made?

James:
I would say that it was gradual, for sure, for sure. And so some of it was you make a couple of choices and then that makes the next choices easier. And so we looked at our spending and once I got Emily on board living by example and doing things, and she actually probably out frugal me. And so it became, okay, let’s sit down and look at what we’re spending our money on and how can we game this? How can we lower this in any way, shape or form from our cell phone bill to our cable that we were paying for to the internet that we had on our phones in the house, everything. And then it turned into, okay, can we get cheaper cars? And if we’re doing all these things, why don’t we move from the condo that we’re in into a much cheaper condo that has essentially the same footprint, but we get to save so much more money. So we jumped from I, at our lowest, we were at 0% savings rate, and at our highest, we were at an 85% savings rate.

Scott:
That’s awesome. So how long did it take you to get to the condo decision, the housing decision, and what was the impact of that one decision in helping you move from 80 to 35,000 in expenses? I

Emily:
Felt like the decision took a couple of months because I think,

James:
Which is still quick. That’s really quick. She’s, it took a couple of months, I think we moved from one home to another,

Emily:
The condo that we had bought, so the condo that we were in was like 150,000. And then the other condo that we bought was, I think we bought it for 43,000. $43,000.

James:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. In what year? Yeah, this is in 20 16, 20 15, 20 16. And so the $160,000 condo sounds cheap now, but at the time we could have bought a three bed, two bath house in a decent neighborhood for that. And so we were like, oh, let’s live the downtown life live above some bars and restaurants and stuff like that. And then when we jumped, we jumped from a one bed, one bath condo to a one bed, one bath condo for a third of the price. And the HOA was a fraction of the price as well.

Scott:
And you guys are based in Huntsville, Alabama, right?

James:
That’s correct, yeah.

Scott:
And this is one of the markets that has, the whole country has transformed, but this is probably one of the more explosively transforming markets in the United States in the last 10 years, the last eight years in particular around that. What would a condo go for nowadays in Huntsville of both of those ilks that we just discussed?

James:
So the $43,000 condo, you could probably get for 125 to 150, I would say, and the more expensive condo in the nicer area. I think they’re going for two 60, so almost a hundred thousand dollars jump.

Scott:
Okay, awesome. So this is a low cost of living area, no bones about it even today with the changes that have happened around it. But even inside of that, you were able to find huge potential for this. And so what was the difference in your monthly payment, or how did that translate in terms of your annual spending getting you from 75 to 35?

James:
So yeah, our condo that we had, the initial one, our fancy condo, the HOA and the mortgage combined were $1,500 a month. And when we transitioned to the much cheaper condo, our mortgage was $323. And our HOA was not even a hundred dollars, I think at the time. So we went from $1,500 to under five. So our living expenses just right there and one third of what they were before.

Scott:
And I bet you could set the thermostat to fairly cool and still come out ahead in terms of your HVAC costs, right?

James:
Exactly. Yeah. But being in an HOA, being in a condo, you’re actually insulated very well on all sides. So still no air conditioning there.

Scott:
Okay, so we’ve got that. What were the other biggest chunks here? Was it transportation? When I think about average American spending, it’s housing, transportation, and food. Was it those three for you guys or was there another major category that really got us another big chunk of that $40,000 drop off in expenses?

Emily:
There was food.

James:
Yeah, there was definitely food.

Emily:
Yeah, I felt like we cut that at least in half,

James:
If

Emily:
Not more, based on grocery shopping and stuff like that.

James:
Pretty much if Aldi didn’t carry it, we couldn’t afford it. That was the idea. So we only shopped exclusively at Aldi, essentially for everything. And that definitely lowered our expenses a lot. We ate out so much less because we were at one point living in the condo above restaurants, we would just pop down and go eat every weekend with friends every weekend night. It would be a Friday night, Saturday night brunch on Sundays, and that stuff adds up. So on top of that, we now, even now, but especially then, we wouldn’t eat out if it wasn’t just the two of us. The two of us, we would just eat at home and we would go out for birthdays or events and stuff like that. But it just became, if the only thing that you have in common with your friends is going and spending money in the same place, then you actually don’t have that much in common. So that helped.

Mindy:
That’s a great quote. I think a lot of people can take that to heart.

Scott:
And what do you think that was the impact of the change there in your approach to how you eat and hang out?

James:
That’s a great question. I think that we probably were spending a couple grand a month on food, and some of that was just food waste. Some of that was going out to eat. A lot of times we would buy things and then not eat it. And so we essentially eliminated food waste. We would take everything to go if we needed to. I was just having a smorgasbord of meals for lunch at work. And so I think that we probably got it to under, I mean, we were definitely under $500. I think that we were in the 300 range for a month,

Scott:
So this was even bigger than the housing decision between these two things. We’re getting 80% of this drop off and 40 K in spending. If it was thousands a month and even 2000 and you’re dropping to 500 a month, I mean, that’s the next 1520 k of this. So what did you do with all of this money that you started saving?

James:
So we decided to focus almost exclusively on real estate. I don’t want to say exclusively because we were still maxing out Emily’s 401k at her job. She got a better match than I did. Mine was a discretionary match, which I didn’t really trust too much. And we were maxing out both of our IRAs. And then any dollar after that, any dollar after that went into real estate.

Mindy:
What kind of real estate, and were you staying in this $43,000 condo market? A little jealous.

James:
We were, yeah, so we bought anything that we could afford at the time. And so part of that was we were just starting out, we’re scraping by. And at the time too, we didn’t understand creative financing or anything that, so we were just going down to the bank, putting down 20% or 25% on multifamily homes and just groveling at the bank like everybody else. And so the harder part was finding mortgage companies that would give you a mortgage for a property under $50,000. We’ve bought that condo. We bought a duplex for 50, another duplex for 50, and then another duplex for 47. So it was a very cheap market at the time.

Mindy:
And what are these properties renting out for

James:
Now or then? I mean, then they were still hitting the 1% rule and then some, they were 2% rule, essentially. So a $50,000 duplex, you could rent one side for $500 essentially.

Mindy:
Wow, okay. And what year was this?

James:
This was in, that was 2018.

Mindy:
Yeah,

James:
Yeah.

Mindy:
Wasn’t the market supposed to crash in 2018, Scott?

Scott:
I think it did. Oh, wait.

Mindy:
Oh wait. No, it didn’t.

Scott:
You accumulated how many, okay, so we’re getting a pretty clear picture of this. You’re accumulating 40 K ish a year from your income, and does your income change dramatically over this period of time, or does it remain relatively steady around that kind of 90, 90 ish grand mark?

James:
A little bit. We both kind of jumped around.

Emily:
Yeah, I maybe got a six grand raise in that time period. And then the most that I made was 72. And so it wasn’t that much of a jump.

James:
Right. So I think all in, by the time I got a promotion, she got a raise and stuff like that. We were making around 120 grand a year by the time we quit our jobs.

Scott:
And how did the portfolio, so it was just straight up 25% down accumulation on rental properties in Huntsville, Alabama. That cash flowed and slowly snowballed over What time period are we talking about? Is this a couple years?

James:
Yeah, we bought our first rental in December of 20, well, I guess, no, sorry.

Emily:
The first rental. Yeah,

James:
True

Emily:
Rental property like mid

James:
2017. And we quit our jobs in 2019, September, 2019. So two years,

Mindy:
Scott, or 25% down on a $50,000 condo is still only 12,500, or I’m sorry, a $50,000 duplex. So 12,500 and they’re renting it for a thousand dollars in one year. You’ve got your whole down payment back, I’m sorry, one year in one half of one month, you’ve got your whole down payment back to do it again.

Scott:
That kind of market situation is pretty incredible here for it. Do you think it’s still, do you think if you’re starting today, you would still be able to do that? Would you have done something fairly similar to get there if you were starting over here in 2024?

James:
Absolutely. So part of it was we bought the cheapest property we could find, and then we renovated it ourselves to make it look nicer on the inside. It was a condo, but we painted cabinets, we pulled down wallpaper, stuff like that. So those, some sweat equity involved. And then it turned into, okay, well, we had this clear goal of let’s buy 10 properties in five years. So two properties a year. Well, when you have a clear goal set, you have to look at every property that comes on the market essentially, and especially at the prices that they were coming on at. So we had a house with a mother-in-law apartment under contract for 83,000, I think 86,000. And we were planning on renting out both of those and staying in the condo that we were in at the time. And in the process of us closing, we found the two other duplexes for 50,000, but we didn’t have enough money like cash on hand. We didn’t have the 12,500 that you’ve told us about Mindy there times two. So 25 grand essentially, we didn’t have that in cash on hand to buy all of these properties with 20% down or 25 for the multifamilies. So we ended up doing a house hack. We lived in the mother of law apartment and lowered our down payment on that one to 5% so that we had enough cash to buy the other two properties. And so we went from having one condo that we lived in to having seven doors in a month.

Emily:
Well, on top of the duplex.

James:
Oh, we did have a duplex. I’m sorry. So we did have a duplex, so we had three doors. So we went from three doors to 10

Emily:
Doors. Yes.

Scott:
And you’re levered at two to one from your income to mortgage ratio in the process here. So not even counting the rental income from these properties. So I mean, what a responsible, relatively speaking play that you’re making here as well in the context of that. It’s not even really high leverage, but anyone’s reckoning on that. So that’s incredible. Just like a new question here, because I have not bought a $50,000 property, is it difficult to get a loan, especially a low down payment loan for one of these properties? How did you facilitate that?

James:
It is, yes. So we had to shop around quite a bit to find a mortgage broker that could find someone that would work with us, because there are a lot of fixed costs on mortgages, and at a $50,000 property purchase price, they’re not going to make their money back on some of these costs. And so ironically, capital One at one point offered mortgages, and I think they went as low as 40 because we got a $43,000 mortgage on that. And that was actually not counting our down payment. So it was probably like $35,000. And then once we found a company that would do it, we just went back to them over and over again for these cheaper properties.

Scott:
Are these 30 year fixed rate Fannie Mae insured mortgages, like normal stuff? Are they particularly expensive to take out? Do you have a lot of points on ’em?

James:
No, but at that point we already had a higher interest rate. That was before the historic lows that we had. But in talking in today’s terms, it’s still a good rate. I think we were paying between five to five and a half percent on most of those.

Mindy:
Who cares? It’s $43,000.

James:
Exactly, exactly.

Mindy:
Your mortgage payment’s like a dollar 50 and you’re renting it out for a thousand.

Scott:
I guess this problem I’m asking about doesn’t really apply here in 2024.

Mindy:
Stay with us. We’re taking a real quick break when we’re back. We’re going to find out what life is like after financial independence for James and Emily. Thanks for sticking with us. Let’s jump back into the show. Okay.

Scott:
So what did your cash flow and net worth situation look like when you chose to retire two years later in 2019? And what does your portfolio look like today here?

James:
Okay, that’s a great question. So you can tell what our numbers were in life.

Emily:
So when we left our jobs in 2019, we had nine long-term rentals and one short-term, and our cashflow was just over 31,000.

James:
Awesome. I will say we did have a healthy, I would say healthy cash savings so that we could dip into that if we needed to because this was all a trial run. We’re going to quit our jobs and live off of real estate. We don’t know if it’s going to work or not. So we had right at, I think a little over a hundred grand saved up to give us a runway, and that to us was like three or four years of living expenses.

Scott:
Awesome. Not many people are comfortable leaving work on a $31,000 a year in cashflow from the rental property portfolio. The a hundred K in cash helps. But did you also have stocks or something maybe like a Coast Fi concept in the 4 0 1? You mentioned that you had contributed to 4 0 1 Ks and those types of things.

James:
Yeah, we did. So there was enough in the 401k that we were essentially coast fi. And so if we quit contributing by the time we reach a certain age, but that doesn’t help us if we have to go back to work in a year or two. But part of it was we dipped our toe in the water, so we both took leave of absences from work. And so that gave us also a little runway outside of our cash to say, okay, if this to the bed in a year, then we can go back. And my leave of absence was only a month, so if we didn’t make it a month, there was a huge miscalculation.

Scott:
Alright, so we’ve got 31,000 a year. What did you retire to and how did that number fund it?

Emily:
I think that we retired to travel and that was a big, so we moved abroad and so it was about eight months I guess that we were abroad. And so that life, that money funded us to travel and go experience things that we wouldn’t have been able to had we been at our nine to five jobs.

James:
There is a caveat to this. There is a caveat there is. So we traveled abroad, we moved to Cyprus, which is where Emily’s parents or dad is from, and her grandparents still live there. And so we actually moved into a mother-in-law apartment that they had and we were renovating it while we were living there. So that was our rent payment essentially to them was us fixing up this apartment. And so we were living rent-free then, and then we did house sitting and stuff like that to travel around Europe continuing to live for free in other locations.

Mindy:
That’s a valid way to do it. You didn’t just happen upon this. I mean, that would’ve had to take some planning to do, but that is something that allows you to travel and still live at 31,000. I don’t really see that much different than the person who has saved up a ton of credit card points and are using those credit card points at hotels and airlines and things like that. So

James:
Part of that was Covid happened, and that’s why she said eight months we were in Europe and Emily has her cprt citizenship, but I don’t. So it turned into, okay, how long can we stay here before he gets kicked out? So we actually had a repatriation flight back to the us. This is when all the airlines were closed, all the airports were closed. We were, I think one of two flights into London, Heathrow that day, and people were walking around in hazmat suits. It was really weird. And so all of a sudden being the nomadic travelers wasn’t quite as trendy as it can be on Instagram. And so that was our catalyst to come back to the states, and I think you might’ve asked this 10 minutes ago, but you were asking about our portfolio now and how that looks. And so on our return back to the states, we decided to focus a little bit more on short-term rentals. And so we’ve converted a few and bought a few. And so now we have more short-term rentals, so we also have more cash flow. So we got to loosen the purse strings on that 30 grand budget a little bit.

Emily:
So before we quit too, we had converted one of our long-term rentals to a short-term rental with the idea that whenever we come back home, we could stay there and stay with all of our things for free basically. And when we moved back after, whenever Covid happened, we kind of used that as there was a long-term tenant that was moving out, and so we moved into there and decided to convert that to a short-term rental.

Scott:
Right. Awesome. One of you guys is an engineer because this is a very clear engineering plan of how to as rapidly as possible, attain financial. Which one is it?

Emily:
So I’m the engineer, but she’s

Scott:
The engineer.

Emily:
The brains behind all of the that’s, well, I feel like the brain behind it. It’s a team. It is a team effort.

James:
It’s a team

Scott:
Effort. Awesome. So I mean, this is a very cool way to approach fi, right? I mean, 31 KA year. I don’t think most people would be that comfortable with. It sounds like you weren’t that comfortable with it, that’s why you had a hundred K in cash, stockpiled around it and ran a test before moving forward with the rest of it. But you clearly said, I’m, we’re going to go after phi, we’re not going to go deep into these careers here. We’re going to play and we’re going to figure out how to do that in stages and whatever with this. And it seems to have worked out really well. It seems like you were able to do this test, come back, build short-term rentals and continue to pile on and build your net worth even as you have not had a traditional career played as I called it the last couple of years. Is that generally right?

James:
Yeah, that’s pretty accurate. So yeah, we would spend a couple of months working on a short-term rental and then we would travel the rest of the year, whether that’s in Mexico or back to Europe, we snowbird in Florida. And so yeah, that’s essentially what we do now.

Scott:
Why do you think this is so hard? Why do you think it was so easy for you guys? But most people find the concept of fi so hard. What is it about the approach that you’ve taken or the way that you think about this that makes it so easy?

James:
I think there are multiple facets to it, I think. But one of those would be we didn’t care about judgment. We didn’t care about what people thought. We went from living in a fancy condo to living in a really crappy condo and then not crappy. It was fine, but not as nice as the first one. And then we downgraded our cars and people in our families thought that we were struggling financially, and ironically, we were doing the best we had ever done in our lives. But from the outside looking in, they thought they are struggling. And I don’t know what they thought. If I had a gambling problem, I have no clue the drug problem. I don’t know what they thought, where they thought the money was going. So I think that ignoring what you think other people think about you because you’re not all important. And so I think that doing that helps a lot.

Mindy:
That is a huge superpower. If you can just get over what everybody else, what you think everybody else thinks of you, you can do all of these things. What does Dave Ramsey say? Live like no one else now. So you can live like no one else later. You move from the nice condo to the nuts, a nice condo, and then now you own, how many rental units do you own now?

James:
So we have 17 doors now.

Mindy:
17 doors allows you to not have to work every single day and you can go travel and snowbird in Florida, which is I think is funny because doesn’t Alabama touch Florida?

James:
Yeah, it does. Yeah. Yeah. But we’re in north Alabama. It snows there a couple times a year.

Mindy:
Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

James:
Yeah.

Scott:
The other thing that I think is really awesome about the way you approach phi, which I think I would have a hard time wrapping my head around, especially with a family and those types of things, a little one here is I think there’s a mentality of just in time for both of you guys, which is like we have a just enough for what we need to do next. We’re going to enjoy ourselves and it’ll work out in the next layer for all of this, which I think is the right way to mathematically go about life, to maximize for happiness. If you’re to engineer it, that’s the right way to do it, right, is to, Hey, why would you stockpile wealth for another eight years if you knew you could make these things work? But most people, I think, would struggle to take that test year because of the disruption that it put into their career and those other types of things. Again, am I hitting something on the head there around this just in time concept? Do you have a way that you describe it?

James:
I think that we haven’t really described it that way, but I mean that’s pretty accurate to say that for us it was let’s quit now and if we have to go back and get jobs, we have to go back and get jobs. You know what I mean? So I mean, I know that everybody says that our worst case scenario is everybody else’s everyday life. But for us, I mean it really kind of was that let’s test it out, see if it works and if it doesn’t, we can go back. And it wasn’t like she loved her job. It wasn’t like, I mean, I didn’t dislike my job. I enjoyed it, but at the same time that it didn’t bring me fulfillment or anything like that.

Mindy:
So you’ve said that you could always go back to jobs if you needed to. Do you consider yourself to be fully retired?

James:
I would say it depends on when you ask. So had you asked me that this time last year, I would’ve said a hundred percent. We are fully retired and I work an hour, maybe two hours a week on real estate managing it. But if I wanted to, I could offload that into a property manager as well. Now, I wouldn’t say that because we just bought a six unit apartment and have converted that and it’s going to be essentially a boutique hotel. And so I’m renovating it all myself essentially, and Emily’s helping with all the furnishings and the concept of what’s going on in the apartments themselves. So the past few months have not felt retired, but at the same time, I get to not go and work on that and I get to go to Kilimanjaro and then we’re going to Europe right after that.

Mindy:
So I’m going to say that you are retired, even though you have a current project, you’re not a sit still kind of guy. You’re not a, let me just read for nine hours a day for a month. You are an active person, I would say you’ve got ants in the pants. Emily, would you say that that is a correct characteristic of James?

Emily:
I think so, because there are times that he’s like, oh, let’s get this project and do this. Or there’s something that he has seen in the past and he’s like, oh, it’s for sale now. Let’s do this and make it this whole thing. And I have to kind of bring him down sometimes.

Mindy:
So looking at where you are and where you’ve been, would you say you chose the right time to retire?

James:
I think so, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Had we quit earlier, we wouldn’t have had the security that we have of the rentals that we had had we quit later, again, I don’t think that we would’ve quit because of Covid.

Mindy:
Emily as the one who sort of had to be convinced as opposed to the one who discovered it. Do you miss your job? Not at all.

Emily:
Now, I do miss some of the people that I used to work with, but the people are completely different from the work. I can see them outside of work, and I still have some friends from work and we hardly ever talk about work.

Mindy:
Okay, that’s really interesting. You miss the people. How many people are, oh, I would really, my whole life is wrapped up into my job. You can still go have lunch with your friends at your old job while being retired. That’s your reason for not pursuing financial independence is that you like your job because you like all the people that you’re working with. And I mean, that’s fine. I’m being super, super judgy there. But also look at the life that they get to do. You could do whatever you want. You chose to buy this little boutique hotel, but you didn’t have to chose to. I mean, you’re going to go choose to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. You’ve got all these options now, including the option to continue working if you love your job. So that’s what I’m doing right now. My husband and I are financially independent, but I continue to work. This is my job. How hard is this? Right?

James:
The other idea of it is that work is more fun when you don’t have to do it right. I am sure you enjoy your job a lot more. The stress rolls off your shoulders because you don’t have to sit there and take it. If you wanted to quit, you could. And that in and of itself is powerful. You never have to quit, but you can quit. And so that helps you deal with the day-to-day stuff a little easier.

Mindy:
That is such a good point. I love it. Alright, Emily, where can people find you online?

Emily:
We are on Instagram at Rethink the Route Race and we have a website and it’s rethink the route race.com.

Mindy:
Awesome. James and Emily, thank you so much for your time today. I think that this is an excellent example of how you can find financial freedom with a little bit of stock and a whole lot of real estate. And that’s kind of what we do [email protected]. To my listeners, we have a website. Every once in a while I will have somebody come up to me and be like, I didn’t know you had a website. There’s a website, it’s biggerpockets.com, and we share all sorts of ways that you can get started investing in real estate. We have a forum where you can ask just about any question you can think of. We have a blog, we have multiple podcasts, and we are here to help you repeat James and Emily’s story. So James and Emily, thank you so much for sharing with my listeners today and I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you

James:
For having us

Mindy:
And enjoy Kilimanjaro.

James:
Yeah,

Mindy:
Thanks. That was James and Emily and I absolutely love their story. I want to highlight a couple of things. First, James discovered financial independence and then pitched it to Emily in the worst way possible. But after his initial terrible pitch, he started to lead by example. So if your spouse is not on board right now, look at how you’re presenting this idea. They went from a savings rate of 0% to 80%. That’s fantastic. That’s not how you have to do it. Going from zero to one is better than zero to zero or negative. And I really liked that they were on board when they were together, when they were at that 80% savings rate. James said something very interesting near the beginning of the show. I’m not sure if you caught this. If the only thing you have in common with your friends is going out and spending money, you really don’t have that much in common.
That kind of hit me hard. I can remember some friends in my past life where that was kind of the only thing we had in common and that doesn’t align with my values. So really look at your friendships and see what you really have in common. Another thing that Emily said was, I trust James. I love that trust is so important in your PHI journey, and that is something I cannot underline enough. And finally, James wraps it up with work is more fun when you don’t have to do it. I’m going to leave you right there. I can’t say anything better than that. Alright, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I am Mindy Jensen and before he left, he was the Scott Trench, but sometimes CEO duty calls. So we are saying, I am saying on behalf of Scott, see you later. Alligator.