BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 167: From Fired to FI Couple in 2 Years with Josh and Ali

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

Most people are told the same thing growing up, “go to college and take out a loan, get a car and take out a loan, live in a nice apartment even if it’s expensive”. This is exactly what Josh and Ali, AKA “The FI Couple”, did in their 20s. They racked up over $100,000 in student loans, had two car payments, and lived in an apartment outside of their means. Josh grew up without much money, causing him to not have much of a financial foundation when he reached adulthood. Ali grew up middle class, but didn’t have any financially savvy role models to look up to. As they started dating and later got married, they realized that they had to take care of debt soon, or they’d be swallowed whole by it. Josh stumbled upon a book that changed his financial view forever. A book one of our hosts is VERY familiar with. It was Set for Life, by our very own Scott Trench! After Josh read through it, he knew he had to share the information with Ali, but it took him time to find out her specific “financial language” and the best way for him to get her excited about financial independence. After they were both on board for FI, house hacking was their next stop. As you’ll hear in the interview, they acquired four units in a short amount of time, paid off a big chunk of their student loans, and now have passive income rolling in, every month. Talk about a rags to riches story! In This Episode We Cover How debt can anchor you to a life that you don’t want Why getting fired or losing a job opportunity could be a great catalyst for change The importance of keeping your expenses as low as possible Finding a house hack that works for you (and your partner) so you both love where you live Using FHA loans to secure house hack properties with a very minimal down payment Making debt a “common enemy” when you and your spouse are working to reach FI And SO Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group BiggerPockets Forums Finance Review Guest Onboarding BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast ChooseFI Podcast BiggerPockets Bookstore BiggerPockets Investments Calculator BiggerPockets Money Podcast 34 with Andy Hill BiggerPockets Money Podcast 157 with Scott & Mindy Mr. Money Mustache Mad Fientist Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/moneyshow167 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How'd everybody. We mentioned this last week, but we are going to have a Q&A, the first, a Q&A, maybe, maybe the first, maybe not the last, maybe we'll have them going on a go forward basis you never know. Live. But yes, a live Q&A with me and Mindy, and we're going to answer questions that you have as an audience. We just want to get to know you a little better and want to hear your questions directly from you and spend some time with you in our Facebook group. We already obviously interact with you guys on a regular basis in the Facebook group, but it's very fun. But this will be a chance to talk live, I think, and and get some good questions from you.

That live session is going to be on February 4th, which is a Thursday, at 5 p.m. Mountain Time. That's going to be 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific. So prime time, hopefully. We're going big. But anyways, we hope to see you there. I think it'll be a little fun little event. And obviously, it's just, you know, all you have to do is join the Facebook group if you'd

like to attend. The Facebook group is completely free to join. You can just find it at facebook.com slash groups slash BP Money. Hope to see you there. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast show number 167 where we interview the FI couple, Ali and Josh, and hear how they went from a net worth of negative $100,000 back to zero in just a few short years. Figuring out your why and it has to be a big why and you have to really care about it because whether you're paying off debt or you're investing or you're pursuing FI, it is not like a smooth sailing,

easy road. There are going to be challenges or there are going to be things that test you. And I think when that happens, remembering your why and remembering the big reason why you're pursuing this, because at the end of the day, that's what gets you through the hard time. So just figure that out and stick to it. Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen. And with me, as always, is my ideologically pure bi-portfolio investing co-hosts. Got Trench. It is a cult, but you know, yeah, you guys will figure that one out later in the show. Yeah, towards the end, that gets explained a little bit better. Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else,

to introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter where or when you're starting. That's right, whether you want to retire early and travel the world, going to make big-time investments in assets like real estate, start your own business, or dig your way out of $100,000 in student loan debt after getting fired. We'll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way so that you can launch yourself towards your dreams. You said after getting fired, after losing your job, because fired means something different in our vernacular here, Scott. Yeah, fair enough. Lade off, terminated, whatever.

Whatever floats your boat. I am really excited for today's episode. We are talking to Josh and Allie from the fight couple, and we get into several topics. including house hacking, student loan debt, and, as Scott just alluded to, sudden unemployment, just as they discovered financial independence. But their story really isn't that unusual. Student loan debt exists for a lot of people. And sudden unemployment does too, especially after 2020.

And while today's guest is very young, their underlying message of being conscious about your spending and investing aggressively, reducing unnecessary expenses, can be taken and applied to your financial situation regardless of your age. This was an awesome episode, one of my favorites. They're just so enthusiastic. The dynamic, I think, between them is hilarious and fun. And they just have made so much progress in such a short period of time, knocking out chunks of student loan debt, getting the house heck underway. The underlying money story, I think, is incredibly informative and relatable, I think, to a lot of folks.

I think everyone who listens to this is going to learn a lot. And I end up being really impressed with both Josh and Alley here. and it was just amazing. By the way, we found Josh and Allie through the Facebook group. They're really, they're like, some of our Josh in particular is one of our top contributors in our Facebook group.

And his name just keeps popping up over and over and over again. I started following on on Instagram. And yeah, we just got to know him there. So if you're interested in connecting, that's a great place to go. You can follow him or you can go and join our Bigger Pockets Money Facebook group. And Mindy,

I think we have a special incentive for folks if they do join the Facebook group this week. Would you like to listen to Scott and I talk live on Facebook? Would you like us to answer your questions live on Facebook? Scott and I are doing a Facebook live on February 4th. Do you know what time that is, Scott? It's going to be at 5 p.m. Denver time, which is 7 p.m. Eastern or 4 p.m. Pacific. I guess whatever, yeah, there's time zones. But yeah, we're just going to be doing a Q&A.

It'll be a good chance to hang out. We'll have a couple of questions that we'll be ready to talk about. And then we're hoping that you guys will chime in with some questions or thoughts. It can be about a recent episode, a money challenge, just general, hopefully not too personal questions. But, you know, we'll just hang out for a couple hours. I think it'll be really fun. Yep.

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30-day trial at audible.com slash BP Money. Ali and Josh from The Fye couple, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money Pied. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Thank you so much and thank you for having us here. We are super excited to be here today. Yeah, this is like a dream come true for us. So you're a couple. So I'm wondering where your journey with money begins.

Is there some like before we met backstory or does it start basically as you became together? Yeah. No, I think we came from kind of polarizing backgrounds in terms of like financial upbringing. I came from like a very, very low income background and really, really, really, poverty and hard circumstances and things of that nature. And that very much kind of shaped the decisions that I made kind of like in early adulthood in terms of like really poor financial spending. And I think for me, I came from a more middle class background and I didn't really, I had the privilege to not fully think about money growing up. I knew my parents fought about money sometimes

and that that was a point of contention. And then I remember being in high school and my dad lost his job and that was like, you know, a really big deal and it made it hard for my family. And my mom went back to school. She got her master. She got like a stable state job. And that was a point in my life where I remember having that thought, like, I need security. I need something that will provide me safety. I think that's a big reason why like I have a school job right now with my pension and all of this. And it kind of led me on that path. And I think your experiences led you on the financial path that you were on. But then we meet in college and we have these different backgrounds and we, you know, we're friends for a long time and started dating. And yeah, it definitely was interesting

to merge those two perspectives in one. What college business just out of curiosity? Yeah. So we went to the state university of New York. It's called SUNY and it's called Oneonta. So it's a small state school and kind of like the southern central part of upstate New York. And I graduated in 2012. Allie graduated in 2013. And unbeknownst to each other initially, we actually transferred into the same major at the same time. And conveniently, I was one of three guys in the entire major.

And most of the classes, the two other guys were like sleeping. So it helped me kind of stand out. So that's how I met Allie. That's awesome. So not to be confused with Sunny, I imagine at SUNY. What was your terrible joke? Let's move on.

So what's your position like upon graduation? What are you guys, you guys are dating at that time? Do you have student loan debt? What's kind of the situation at graduation there? So tons of student loan debt. Josh was in a special program called the EOP program for folks that came from disadvantaged backgrounds. So you graduated with about 30,000. I did the same.

My parents were willing to take. on half of my student loan debt. So we both had 30,000 each combined 60. But then I did go back for my master's, which was almost 40. So right out of college, we weren't dating. We were friends for a long time. But about a year after I graduated, we started dating. We moved in together. But even at that point, we weren't talking about money. We were making minimum payments on our loans. Money was not a big conversation in our home. Nope. And it wasn't until, so we got married in 2018. we'd started dating in 2014, and it really wasn't still until we started kind of merging our lives together, you know, moving in and having conversations of marriage that we, for the first time

ever really started talking about finances and specifically, frankly, like the debt that we had had. I kind of knew of debt, and there was some number attached to me, but I didn't really know what that number was. And when Allie went back for her master's, again, we knew it would be more debt, but we just assumed like, well, it'll all work out, not really knowing the true depth of the debt. So what triggered that like decision to begin thinking more about money? What was maybe that inflection point for you guys? Honestly, like, and we talk about this a lot, you know, the year of our wedding, the first

week of January, Josh had been with a long-term employer for seven years. He had poured his, you know, heart and soul into that company and was very unexpectedly laid off. So that was like, it was like, it was like, The first week of January 2018 for COVID. Yeah. So we got married in August. So then prior to that in January, he had gotten laid off. That was like really, really scary for us.

We didn't know how we were going to afford our wedding, pay our bills, all of this. And through that crisis, it kind of led us down the path of we need to figure out our financial situation and we need to do it quickly. Yeah. And just to kind of backtrack a little bit. So I had been working full time while Ali was working. working on our master's. And in 2017, actually, I discovered like Dave Ramsey and the total money makeover. And I was kind of like, well, once you graduate, Ali, and I'm working and you're working,

we're going to take the world by storm. We are going to get rid of this debt because now we're starting to be more aware of it. We had two car loans at the time, too. And we are going to change our lives and live like nobody else. And so Ali graduated college. He got her first job, first career. We were both working full-time for about three months, and then we were going into 2018. And back in 2017, I had also found Set for Life by Scott. And we were feeling a little burnt out on the Dave Ramsey method and feeling like there had to be a better way to achieve our goals. And so that's actually when we discovered Set for Life. We discovered bigger pockets in general and started listening to the podcast, reading the books, and everything like that. And

And that's when financial independence actually became like part of a vocabulary. 2018 was going to be the year that we really made a huge dent. And then I got fired. So wait, going back for a second, a big fan of that book, too, of course. But going back, you discover this concept. You start reading Dave Ramsey and some other, you know, guru around finance. And you get this picture together. But it sounds like you have $100,000 in student loan debt and you've got two car loans.

Like, what's the picture that you paint? What's your net worth statement look like when you're making this transition heading into 2018? Do you have that? No, I mean, I can tell you, assets-wise, I had a 401k. That was about it. And then any money that we had in savings, that was from an assets perspective, that was all we had. But we had, I think, just under $20,000 in car notes. Then we had about $102,000 in student loans.

I'm not really sure if we had credit card debt, or what that number was, but I'm sure we probably did. So all the bad things, I guess, relatively speaking, that you could be doing financially, we managed to get ourselves into that. Well, congratulations.

Yeah. Well, what is, well, this is why it's going to be such a good story, right? I don't think that we're in the same position today with that stuff. I hope not. That would be a terrible show. What's your income at this point combined? Do you know, do you can get a ballpark there?

Well, Josh's income was zero. Yeah. Before the firing, though, getting laid off. Correct. So I think Allie was working part-time during her master's program, but it was just kind of like side job and stuff like that. I was just under $60,000 a year in my full-time career, working got a ton of hours.

And, you know, that was another really big conversation for us the year before our marriage was I was working probably 70, 80 hours a week. and we were both saying like, well, when we get married, like, we want to spend time together. And if we don't make a change, nothing will change. And so that's really when the conversation started to shift in terms of me maybe making a career change, which originally I was planning to make a career change and then it was made for me. And he was making like $60,000, right, but he was making it at a not-for-profit where there was very little room for growth or advancement or control over your own salary.

So that company where he poured so much time and energy, and yeah, he was doing valuable work. But it felt kind of like tough because you don't have so much control over your financial state. It's dictated by someone else, you know. It was a small startup. Yeah. And what were you kind of, what was your plan going into 2018? What were you, you were planning both to work, I imagine? And what would you projected your income to be that year before being laid off in January?

So 2018, you were probably pretty close to 60. and I had started my school job in a small rural school district making about 45. So just over 100,000. And we could not be more excited because, again, like you talk about synergies, we didn't feel like we had a blueprint. Then we get set for life. And set for life came into our life right around like April or May. Allie was getting ready to graduate from her master's around April or May.

And I'm like, oh, my God, like we have it. We will have the income. we will have the blueprint. This is going to be everything is going to work out, and this is the process by which we're going to do that. And so she graduated. She starts working in September. And wouldn't you know it?

We're making this money. We are implementing strategies in terms of like saving money, cutting out costs, so on and so forth. And we had like a glimpse of proof of concept of this can work as long as we do these simple steps. And so 2018 was going to be like that just on steroids. And we were going to completely change our life and, you know, march down the path towards early financial independence. So what happens after January? How does that, how do things change from there?

Yeah. So unexpectedly laid off. And everything shifted very quickly because we went back to a single income household. And so what's nice, though, is because we knew what we wanted to do and we had had a lot of conversations about figuring out kind of like what our why was, like what are our values. It wasn't a question of if we would still do that. It would just be a matter of maybe like a different timeline. And so like I said, I had started kind of some entrepreneurial endeavors prior to getting fired. And so all me getting fired was was just kind of a kick in the pants to really do that. And so I started pushing more so into doing that full time while Allie was still working. But also, Josh had gotten fired and it was such a shock. He went immediately out into the

workforce and he secured a job making half his salary. He went from making close to 60 to like 30, 35. And he's like, I need a job. I need money. You know, that automatic fear response. Of course, we need to pay our bills. But then a few months later, it was like, wait, I'm actually going to take a risk and go out on my own and be an entrepreneur and develop my own business because we can't forward not to because if I'm making this salary compared to what we were, we have all of this debt, I need to take that risk to achieve our goals. And it was around that same time that we also were considering house hacking and we started looking at real estate so that we could radically reduce our cost of living as well. So it kind of was a nice, a nice synergy there with some of the

changes we made. You know, and one thing I'll say too is I went from 65, 70 hours week to 30 to 35. So all of a sudden, I had a lot more time on my hands. And so instead of, while I wasn't making as this much as much money, I got the Uber, you know, side hustle. So if I wasn't working in that job, I was driving for Uber. And if I wasn't traveling with people in the car, and even sometimes when I was traveling with people on the car, I literally had like Bigger Pockets podcast going.

I had like Tuesday FI podcast going. And I was listening and I was studying and I was studying because I was like, this time capsule I'm in right now will not last. I don't want to get to the end of it and not be equipped with the knowledge and know-how to execute the plan that we had started in 2017. So I was like, I can't control necessarily my income fully right now, but I can control my knowledge. And so that was the lever that I tried to pull us. So I just poured into all things bigger pockets, Facebook, the website, podcast, books, you name it. I just went all in because I knew.

How much are we paying you for this episode against you? Oh, my God. No. I literally, I mean, I joke with people. Like, I went to like bigger pockets university in my spare time, you know, like I had like professors like Jensen and Trench and Dorkin and Turner and all the adjunct professors like Chad Carson and J.L. Collins, Paul, Pant, Andy Hill, you name it. Like I was just completely, completely obsessed. No, it was actually though, like kind of a problem. Like it would get to the point where like I would be like, how many podcasts did you listen today and he's like seven because he drove a lot for his talk and i'd be like that's too much you like because then he's like i'm listening to all these podcasts and all these people making

these incredible moves and we haven't bought our first deal and his level is like up to here you know like through the roof i'm like you need a chill maybe we limit it to like three a day let's cut back um but that's like real conversations we had to have like let's have some boundaries to this it felt like it was like the one thing that i could control you know And again, like, there was so much in my real life that I felt like I wasn't really happy with. I can't control. I was surrounding myself, like, in my head with all the people that were telling me, like, this can't happen.

And when everything happened in January of 2018, it kind of dampened our dreams a little bit. But like bigger pockets definitely like breathe, like light into that. And I was like, no, like, we can do this. And this is, and these people are telling us we can. This is how we're going to do it. And now we're here. Love it. Okay.

So looking back to pre-January 2018, did you have any indication that this was coming? Like if you look back now, could you see, you know, oh, there were some indicators that the company wasn't doing very well or that they didn't like what I was doing or that they were going in a completely different direction. Or were you completely blindsided? Because I've been fired one time and looking back, I'm like, why didn't they fire me sooner? I was a terrible employee. So full disclosure, I am Mindy Jensen in that regard. I would have fired me a lot longer, or sooner or whatever, before that, because so I'm starting to... You're listening to podcasts at work.

Yeah, no, well, no. Yes, actually. But I'm listening to podcasts of like very successful entrepreneurs and business owners. I'm hearing what they're saying. And then in my own respective career, I'm saying like, my gosh, why are we running the organization we're running this way and I became very vocal. And I probably pushed the envelope a little bit. But also, like, full disclosure, the Christmas party two or three weeks prior to me getting fired, I mean, they were announcing that I was probably up for a big promotion, that I was doing wonderful things. And so I could not, in some respects, I could not have been more blindsided, but in hindsight now two or so years removed, yeah, I would have canned me a lot sooner because I was

very noisy. That's weird, though, that they would announce a big promotion for you in Christmas, and then, oh, by the way, you're gone. Yeah. But there were definitely some weird dynamics. And I think, too, you know, Josh is a really big out-of-the-box thinker. And something that I love about Josh is that he has really big, crazy wild dreams and goals. And we are now creating those together.

But when you're working at a tiny little non-for-profit that's Medicaid funded and you have to live in a little red box because that's what the state tells you to do. Big wild, crazy dreams are not really what you can do, and that's not a reality. So I think it probably just wasn't a good fit, but something that I always like to say, like especially this year, we have a lot of friends that have lost their jobs this year. And I tell them, like, Josh, getting laid off was single-handedly one of the best things that ever happened to us in our lives because it offered perspective. It offered an opportunity to build a life that we want.

live more aligned to our values and our dreams. So it's definitely worked out. Well, let me ask you this about that situation as well. And then we'll move on if you're listening, I promise, and get to the fun start fair. But you had said you were executing your plan prior to getting fired. If you hadn't been executing your plan, what would have been different about that situation? Was your spending, for example, lower than it would have been without having put a plan in place? Yeah. I don't know. From a a financial perspective. I don't know if it necessarily, I think the biggest thing, truth be told, Scott, that like from like an implementation of plan was acquiring and equipping myself with knowledge

and know-how. Because so I got, you know, when I got, after I got laid off, yes, I went and got another job because ultimately in nine months or eight months, we were getting married. And I was like, we have a wedding to pay for. But a day or two after that, I also launched my own consulting business. And so I was already kind of laying the foundation for eventually working for myself. And again, in terms of like blessings and disguise, me getting fired was the kind of the kick in the pants that kind of kicked me from the nest. And it was kind of like a sink or swim kind of scenario. And that's now, in retrospect, kind of worked out really nicely.

But as far as the financial decisions that we were making, again, like, you know, if there's like, you know, 70% of your income is housing, food, transportation at that time we had known of set for life but we couldn't or at least we didn't feel like we could really make a big change in the 70 percent so we were really just focused on the 20 percent so that which was helping but it wasn't making big leaps or bounds got it well let's get into the the fun part here what happens in the rest of 2018 how does the how do things evolve from there yeah so um august 2018 we get married we go on a three-day mini moon and then we got back and we scraped together every literal dollar that we had to buy our first duplex. And we had started

looking for properties prior to our wedding, like in the spring and the summer. And we were putting in offers left and right. They kept getting rejected. We used a 5% conventional loan on our first property in my name alone. And we were competing against buyers out of state that had way more money than us. cash offers $50,000 over asking Josh and Allie were just not competitive buyers. So very luckily, and maybe not luck, but just kind of persistence, our realtor had happened upon a couple that was owner occupying a duplex. And they were looking to sell their property. They were going to be having their second baby. They didn't want to be landlords anymore. So we were able to get this duplex off market, which is honestly a huge, huge reason why we were able to secure it.

it. Another thing regarding that story is that, you know, they weren't able to do a traditional closing where it's like, you know, maybe a 45-day closing window. They needed a bit more time so that they could find their own home. So we were willing to like find a solution for that. We're like, oh, you need extra time. We'll wait as long as you want as long as you agree to sell this house to us. So finding a creative way to make a compromise. Were you guys both on the same page about the house hacking? No. No, no. And I'll tell you what. I'm so glad you asked that question. So you want to talk about like a trial by fire or like leading up to our marriage. I got fired in no way, shape or form did that deter like, Allie, we are house hacking this year. Things look a lot different and I get that. But the kicker is if we house hack, it'll actually make all of this that much more manageable. And so our initial conversations were a lot different because I was so heavily

focused on the numbers of the deal. I was, again, I was like, well, you know, Brandon Turner says, like, no and low money doubt. And David Green says, if we just burr the deal, then, like, we will get all of our money back out. So I was taking Allie to the absolute worst possible places because I was like, the Excelcy says the cash flow. And the Baker Pockets Money Calculator says the cash flow is going to be massive. So this is what we have to do. And, Allie, what are you hearing when he's saying this? Like, why am I getting married to this person? I'm joking.

I'm joking. I love Josh. But the reality was that we were going to properties that were in super rough areas. I was like, I'm not going to feel safe here. Am I actually going to ruin my life right now? I've never imagined being a landlord or owning real estate. I've been in my safe little secure box and I don't know if I'm ready to deviate from it. And it just felt like this wild crazy thing because I wasn't consuming eight hours of

podcast a day. So it hadn't been normalized for me yet. And we actually, and we haven't shared this on a podcast, but it's a funny story. We were under contract for a house prior to our wedding. We did actually get one under contract. And it was definitely out of our budget. We had no business looking at it. So like this is the home that we were considering. And very quickly, it was like, you know what, this might not be a good fit. The numbers ended up not working out and we got out of it. But like that was what we were looking at. So in my brain, I'm like, I am sacrificing my quality of life by house hacking. Like, there's no way about it. Like, my quality of life is going to go down the hill, which is funny because the house hack that we ended up getting was so lovely. Yeah. And I have to say, too,

like, so again, like, bigger pockets podcast kind of became like my full-time job. And I was saying things to Allie, but I wasn't getting the response that I was really hoping for. So I was like, okay, I need to change my message somehow so I get the results, like the results that I want. And I remember, you guys actually, you guys had Andy Hill. And Andy Hill one time was sharing the same story of how he proposed financial independence with wife Nicole. And she didn't want anything to do with it because he wasn't speaking her language. And I found that once I learned not to be so driven by like the Excel sheet and the numbers and the calculators and, you know, podcasts. And it was, I was able to show Allie that the things that she really, really loved

the most and wanted to do more of, but that we frankly couldn't because of our circumstances, by doing this thing called house hacking and pursuing these things, this thing called financial freedom, it would allow us to have a much better chance of doing more of that. And once I changed my message and I was more reflective or respective of Allie's values in terms of like where she would feel comfortable living if we were going to pull it off. After that, everything changed. Okay, I think Mindy has a number of comments. I have a lot of comments. First of all, I want to address the most recent thing that you said, which was the speaker language. I believe that Scott and I, way back on episode 157, were talking about having a money date with your,

partner who is maybe not on the same financial plane that you are. And absolutely, that's the top tip, is to speak their language. Because you can't convince somebody to do something they don't want to do when they super don't want to do it. And it's like living with somebody else or, you know, doing this, living in a very rough neighborhood. When I first met Scott, he was living in a neighborhood that I was fine to visit during the day, but would not have, would not have visited him at night unless he would walk me to my car. Scott's a big dude. I didn't have a spouse to convince at the time. He's a big dude. He can walk around that neighborhood. And now the neighborhood has changed a lot. And it's no longer as rough and frightening as it was when he lived there originally. But that's

a tradeoff. Scott didn't feel unsafe there. But again, Scott's slightly larger than I am. And he's been playing rugby forever. He's like, if you get a fight with Scott, you're not going to win. This is like compliment Scott Day. All right. It's not even your birthday. And then back to the very beginning where you said that you had to work with them on their closing timeline because they had a slightly different timeline than a normal timeline.

I'm a real estate agent and I have been finding deals for people that are different than what everybody else is finding. If it's a lazy agent who decided that they're not going to make it easy to schedule a showing, there's a lot of other agents who are like, I don't have time for this. I'm going to go schedule all the showings that are easy to schedule. I will call you up and keep calling because those agents that make it tough to schedule never seem to answer their phone either.

I'll keep calling because I want to get my people into your house and buy it. Being persistent, being creative. So what if you have to go rent an apartment for an extra month or, you know, live in a hotel for another weekend? That's okay if you can get a deal, especially in this market where there are no deals to be had. Yeah, I was for the time in there on the artificial timeline. Like, so many people are buying their house because like, oh, my lease is expiring and I need to buy a house right now.

I mean, it's like, no, you're going to rush your three or four or $500,000 decision in order to avoid your artificial deadline of your lease. Just pay an extra $100 a month or $200 a month to go month with your landlord. Like any landlord is going to take that and postpone that turnover in a general sense, especially for an incremental fee. of course. But don't, you know, that's 400 bucks and you have that much better odds at making the $400,000 decision that much better. That might be, that might be a 10 or 20 or $50,000 difference to your wealth, you know, even though it's a time decay. I'm getting going on this, but I support Mindy's points. Honestly, though, I love what you guys are saying because something that has been really big for us, like kind of like a mantra is like, we have to get creative here and we have to find

innovative ways to reach our goals because when we looked at our picture in the beginning, it's like we're $100,000 in the hole. We have two car loans. We have credit card debt. We have all of these perceived obstacles. And we were like, we don't have any breaks. Like I wish we had someone that would swoop in and pay our debt or someone that would help it. Like, it's us and we have to change our position. So we felt like we were in a position where we had to get very, very creative to find ways to change our circumstance. And if the sellers needed more time, if whatever the situation was, like we were willing to do it because we knew how badly we needed this. So let me ask you this as well. You're $100,000 in a loan debt. Why are you choosing to house hack rather

than pay that off? Yeah. I'm supportive, by the way. I just want to hear from you guys. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I, by probably like middle to end of 2018, kind of leading up to the wedding, my income was pretty stable overall. So we were able to pay bills and everything like that. But still, like, we were living in a one-bedged, one-bath luxury apartment with a pool and everything like that. And when we started understanding how to budget and actually looking down, looking at the numbers, which, again, like, we really hadn't done for most of our relationship until leading up to our marriage, $1,200 a month in rent was hands-down our biggest line item. I was, like, trying to pull together some type of entrepreneurial endeavor. and Allie being in the schools, I mean, you know, we anticipated the year after our wedding maybe she'd get a pay bump of, you know, maybe two or three percent. But we knew that our incomes

probably wouldn't dramatically change in the next, you know, six to 12, maybe 18 months. So instead of focusing heavily on the income front, we said, well, if we can lop off, you know, our largest expense, namely housing. And we had every intention once we understood the cost, the true cost of car ownership, you knew we were getting rid of a car too. That's why we decided to go into House Act because it was a way for us to put more money after tax back in our pockets more than we probably ever could have done just by working more. But honestly, too, like our income was just covering our expenses. So in terms of like, why don't you just pay off your loans, we didn't have a lot of capital

to just pay off our loans. Our margins were very skinny every month. We weren't saving very well. So it would have been a struggle in order to do it. that. So that's why through house hacking, our finances, our margins were a little wider. So we were able to make better changes. Well, how'd you get the cash to pay the, to buy the house hack in the first place? Like very, very modest saving. And every single dollar that we got for our wedding as a gift, we like lumped in and used it for the down payment. So literally, thank you everyone that attended our

wedding because you helped us buy our first house hack. Okay. I have a question. And this is for both Josh and Allie and Scott because I know there's people who are listening who are in the same position where their housing is their big expense, they don't have a lot of money to buy a house, they know that it's a better option, but they also have this debt

and I need to pay off my debt first. So what's a good way to look at this? Like Craig Curlop on episode 35 talked about how he had $80,000 in student loan debt and he chose to pay the bare minimums and bought a house house house house. and then bought another house hack and then bought another house hack. And then he's like, here's a bunch of cash.

I'm just going to pay off my loans now. And it was a great story. But I can hear a lot of people saying, well, you can't invest until you pay down your debt. Yeah. No, that's a great question. And I'll be honest with you. Like my first couple of mentors were like Scott and Craig. So I had like two young single guys.

And so how I, because I've kind of been the driver to some extent, and then now we're kind of both working at twofold was like, well, Scott did this, okay, and Craig did that. And so as far as the balancing act between like paying off debt versus investing for us, we were super jazzed about the idea of becoming debt free. And that kind of was stemmed back when, you know, we started like the Dave Ramsey School of thought. But then the more that we thought about it, we were like, well, we also have a really aggressive timeline. Like we have every ambition of being financially free within our early to mid-30s. And, you know, we wanted across that debt-free finish line with some assets in our back pockets.

So that way we had some net worth liquidity and cash flow versus like I've also spoken with a ton of people who are older and more experienced. And they just were so focused on paying off that debt. And when I asked them and they say, you know, I probably could have took a little bit more time to pay that off, especially during like bowl markets. I could have bought more real estate. I could have bought more index funds. I'm glad I'm debt-free, but I wish I had taken more of a balanced approach.

No, I think that's great. And I think that, you know, one of the things about house hacking is you put down a low-down payment. What did you put down in your house hack? 5% down. What is that, like 10, $10,000? So like all in, I think with closing costs included, we were around that $16,000 mark.

Okay, great. So you're putting, let's say it's a $15,000. down payment. And that, you know, that's 5%. So you're looking at a $300,000 property in that case. You know, if that property appreciates by 3%, that's, it's going from 300,000 to $300,000 to $9,000. That's 9,000 divided by $15,000, right? That's a 60% ROI on your money, right? Because you're using extreme leverage. That's what house hacking is or why house hacking is attractive because it would have taken you, God knows how long, to save up $60,000 in cash to put down 20%. So the house hack, by definition, for most people, is going to be an extraordinarily highly leveraged investment.

And with that, if you can get average appreciation or loan pay down, you're going to get a ridiculous ROI. Now, that can work on the downside, too. But every homeowner who's buying a home with a low down payment loan is taking that same risk. And I'd argue a much bigger risk because they don't have any tenants to help offset the rent. So for me, the ROI of a house hack is 60% if you get a 3% appreciation, plus the loan amortization that you're getting, plus whatever the difference in cash outlay that you're getting from what you were paying in rent to what you're now paying net on your mortgage utilities and all that kind of stuff after rent. And so the ROI can easily be to 100, 150, 200, 250% in the first year or two. And so that is just a gigantic, a gigantic

return, and there's no way your interest rate like your student loan debt is coming close to that. Now, obviously, that's discounting the fact that you can to have a down year. But on average, the average year at 3% appreciation, you know, which is lower than the average, you're going to see that absurdity of a return only accessible in that first time to the house hacker. And by the way, you can't just repeat that, you can repeat this a few times, but once you get past $500,000, I'm getting going on this, $600,000, $600,000 in net worth, okay, getting a 200% return on 10 grand is not that interesting anymore. It's extremely interesting on your first 10 grand and a huge catalyst to wealth. So anyways, my rant's over. But that's why I think the math and the

qualitative and quantitative evidence to me indicates that it's a really good move for someone in that because otherwise you're spending the next six years paying off your debt and then another year or two coming up with a down payment on a property. I think it's a risk, but I think that the odds are going to favor that risk 14 years out of 15, maybe 29 years out of 30. I don't know. Well, let's look at the numbers on this house hack. So you were paying $1,200 a month in rent, which I don't know what that's like in your neck of the woods, but that's like inexpensive, I'll say, in my neck of the woods. So $1,200 was, I think it was expensive for what we were getting, but it honestly was.

was pretty average for like a one-bedroom, one-bath, like luxury situation apartment. So we were paying about $1,200 with our first house hack moving in, it had a long-term tenant. The rent was undermarket, and we were paying about $600 a month. So right there, moving in, we cut our cost of living in half, which was huge. Can you walk us through the numbers? Like you said you put down $16,000, what was the purchase price? Yeah. Yeah. So it was $158,000. and we got a $3,000 seller. Yeah, people... I was off by a back down.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, and that's the thing, too, right? It's just on like a sidebar. A lot of times I think where people get in trouble is they do the math and they say, okay, well, if the property costs X and I put a 5% down, then my out of pocket is 5% times, you know, the purchase price. They don't understand just how many, how much goes into closing costs.

and all in all, I mean, probably almost half of our total, you know, down payment was closing cost. Yeah, I think our actual down payment was closer to like seven or eight thousand and the remainder was closing costs. Correct. So Ben, I should let you guys go before I went on my rent. Sorry about that. So it's all right. No, it's a, so 158,000, five percent down. We got a $3,000 seller concession and to help with actually help with some of the closing costs. And so the total PITI and up being $1,384 a month. Awesome. And then what were you getting for rent? It was 725, which again, we knew that it was under market, but at the same time as first-time

landlords, A, like, we were just super excited, obviously, because what started off as like a crazy idea, probably like 18 months prior, it now became real. And all of a sudden, I was like, I know this is going to change our life. I don't know exactly how and the numbers and so on and so forth. and never could have predicted like where we are today. But I was like, this is what changes our life because this is what bigger pockets that changes your life. But then like a year after we moved in,

our tenant ended up moving. He got married. He wanted to move in with his wife. And we fixed up the apartment a little bit. And we raised rent to 925. 925. So now our cost of living from 1,200, 600. Now we're kind of in like that 400 range.

So again, that was big for us. you know and something i would point out too right to kind of go back to what you're saying is like so allie and i are both working our jobs doing our best to kind of maximize income where we could but between you know going from like 1200 a month just drawing down to uh we were paying a little over 650 a month right so that was six six six six five hundred dollars a year in after tax income back in our pockets and to me like that was a no-brainer And I was like, and I knew we had in the back pocket, like, we could probably get another $175 a month upstairs, you know, eventually when the person moved out and we updated the unit. But just that amount of after-tax savings was a huge, you know, pay bump for us, especially as someone who was just trying to start their business. So we got the spreadsheet from Josh. Allie, what was your take on the situation from moving in with the house hack? Was it better or worse about what you expected? So initially definitely expected that my quality of life was just going to go down the drain at this point. I had very low expectations, but was very pleasantly surprised. And I think this was the point, especially when we first saw the property, that's when like he started to get the buy-in from me. And I was more on board like, wow, this is really cool. This is powerful. I mean, this property was lovely. Three bedrooms, one bathroom. We had a big fenced-in backyard in a garage and a driveway. And it was way nicer.

than our luxury apartment. We were paying $1,200 for. So that was the cool thing. And often, I think there's a misnomer. Like when we tell people that we're landlords and we house hack, I think there's an automatic thought of like, well, you must not be living in a nice situation. So I feel like it's important to like kind of dispel that myth

because that does not have to be your reality at all. And you could still save a lot of money. And something for us too, like we're always trying to like find the happy medium. So we got the duplex and I was super excited to have a duplex. But instantly I said, well, we're going to move into the smaller unit, not the bigger unit. And we're going to get a roommate because we're as newlyweds because like, I mean, if Craig is living behind a curtain, Scott's got a roommate. Your expression is just amazing. Literally, like literally this is what we have to do.

Why? Because we have to live for free or it's a failure, right? Because you have to live for free from house hacking. And once I kind of step back from that a little bit. And I step back, he means his wife was like, no, that's not happening. And I realized that it's okay, especially on your first deal. And you guys talk about this all the time. Like your first deal doesn't make you rich.

And your first deal is really about just getting in the game. And once I kind of made peace of that and then it kind of settled into it. I was like, you know what? Like it's nice having this extra space. We're still saving a ton of money. My wife is super happy. And, like, we're in. Like, we're doing it.

And so, like, I didn't live behind the curtain. We didn't get the crazy extra roommate, although I proposed it a bunch of times. We didn't rent out the garage. We didn't do necessarily anything, like, super exotic. That's a little dig at Craig Curlop, huh? With the behind the curtain. And you? I guess, no, you didn't ask your wife to have a roommate.

Yeah. Never mind. But at the time we were buying, Scott wasn't married. And he had a roommate. Right? So like, Scott lived for free. We have to live for free. But anyways, once I kind of got over that and realized, like, we are still winning, things really started to evolve from there. So what did winning look like? What happens to your financial position as we move out from this house hack and closer to today? Don't answer his question because I got one that's more relevant. And then you can answer his question. First of all, Scott was living for free because he was living for free in a neighborhood that your wife would not have felt safe in. And you would not have lived. in this neighborhood.

No. Number two, happy wife, happy life. Yeah. Write that, etch that in a rock. And Scott, do you ask your wife if she wants to have a roommate now? I have not asked her that question. Why don't you go home and ask her tonight and see what she says? Yeah.

You know, I'll try that, but, you know, after, you know, we'll make sure that she's in really good mood before we have that conversation. And then I want to point out that you said. that if you didn't live for free, you were a failure. And you are 100% wrong in your thinking. And everybody listening, I want you to know that Josh is 100% wrong in that thought. Because you reduced your expenses. You cut your living expenses in half.

That's a win. If you cut your living expenses by a third, that's a win. Cutting your living expenses and then doing something productive with that money is a win. But cutting your... Let me just say, they might be living for first. after it's all said and done, after we factor in the appreciation impact and the loan amortization impact and those types of things. Yes, but you can't pay your mortgage payment with appreciation and loan and amortization. Your cash outlays for living weren't zero, yeah. Yes. So, but you cut it back.

You consciously made a decision that bettered your financial situation and that is a win. So stop with the whole, I'm a failure. You're not a failure. And for us, it was really finding that balance, but like we're still making smart financial choices, but we're not super sacrificing our quality of life. I think if we were in a different phase of life, maybe we would have been more willing to sacrifice our quality of life. If Josh wasn't married to me, he would have been way more willing to sacrifice this quality of life. But we, yeah, for sure. But we, you know, we were where we were. And then fast forward, because of that situation and house hacking, it made us way more in tune with our finances, way more motivated to make that progress.

So in that span from 2018 to present, we've paid off more than $50,000 in student loans. We used to, yeah, which was, that's amazing. We still have 50,000 more to go. Let me, let me ask you something about that because in my experience, my journey was not just house hacking. House hacking is one component of the financial journey and other things are happening too. Incomes are going up. other expenses might be getting paid off. Can you give us the other parts of the financial picture? Because there's no way your $6,000 from the house hack paid off.

It helped you get to $50.000. There's other things at play here. Absolutely. Yeah, great question. And something you said earlier that I really liked was like there's like that there's the quantitative or then there's the qualitative truth. So again, so in 2018, so I got laid off. I took a job, but within a matter of weeks, I was like,

this isn't going to last. And then once I got my first and my personal business, once I got my first client, that was my first taste of making money truly for myself on my own terms. And it's kind of like getting that first rent payment. And I was hooked. So I was like, okay, I have proof of concept. Now I just need to do this more. So I spent most of 2018. And there's a lot of cool synergies. Like we're ramping up closer to the marriage. My business is really starting to pick up steam. we're learning real estate. I'm still listening to a ton of, ton of podcast. And then it all kind of culminates a little bit in terms of we get that house hack. My business is now at a point where I'm making a comparable income to what I was making in my previous full-time career.

What time period are we at here? You're feeling you're making the same amount annualized as you were in your career. When specifically was that? Yeah. So we're in like January of 2019. Yeah. So by the end of 2018, January 2019. So I'm now, I'm back. I'm kind of, my income is kind of whole, if you will. Our cost of living has gone down quite a bit. We got rid of the car debt. We got rid of, or my income is back up.

Our housing is down a lot lower. I think you had started, she had taken a higher paying job. I applied for a different school job where I, you know, got like a $6,000 pay raise. So that was awesome too. And so by doing all of this, our confidence to start taking. bolder chances on a higher income because at that point, again, we had just been focused on how can we cut our cost of living? And by doing so, especially as a full-time entrepreneur, it gave me so much more confidence to grow my business organically versus just taking

every opportunity that came at me. So I think like both of our salaries went up, our cost of living went down and getting rid of the two car payments. Like that was big too. And that was really by chance. We joke that we crash hacked our way out of car debt, which is like, disclaimer, don't do this. And I swear we're not bad drivers. Sounds like Craig again. I know that's what I was thinking. We had, I had gotten re-erended on my, well, no. So Josh gets fired in 2018. A week later, he got in a car accident and totaled his car. So what did we do? We went out and got another car loan for $14,000, which was like a splurge for us.

And then that same car, I got rear-ended on my way to work. And it was that pivotal moment. We're in our house hack at this point. We have... This is early 2019 when this... This is early 2019, right? So, like, we're in our house hack.

We're making financial decisions. I'm like, well, I'm going to go back out and get that nice Volkswagen facade, right? Josh, because I love that car. And he's like, wrong. We're going to get a huge... I used Toyota Corolla and pay for it in cash. And I think I cried my way home from the car dealership that day.

It was like missing a chunk off the bumper. And it had like a cigarette burn in the seat. But you know what? It was $7,000 and it had like 70,000 miles. And it was a solid car. And Josh was like, Allie, millionaires drive this car. This is the car we need.

And it wasn't a year or it wasn't a new Toyota Corolla. Scott Trent. There you go. And so I literally, I felt so excited. We were, it was polarizing in the car ride home because I was like, we have a Toyota Corolla and we have a house act. We are literally so, we're set for life. Like, we're doing it.

I know. Like, we are literally checking the boxes. I swear to God, she was crying. But I was literally just replaying all the podcasts in my head. I was like, this is what they do. do, we are doing it, we are going to, we're going to do it all, Al. And I mean, she was not feeling excited about it. But now I can laugh about it. And I'm very grateful for my reliable, safe vehicle. And at the end of the day, it's a car and it gets me from point A to point B. And it's, like,

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the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk. Business. So I want to focus on Allie for a minute because I know there are people who are listening right now, who are in this position, they identify with Josh, oh, I want to do this, but my wife says no. What was it that he said that got you to think, okay, maybe I could do this? Was it, did you actually have to see the duplex

and know that it wasn't like a super dump? No, they were under contract on the horrible one that she would have hated. The drug house. So there was something else going on here, right? Yeah, I think it's a great question, Mindy. I think that it is thinking about your why in the bigger picture. And we talk about this a lot because for me, like, did I want to drive a beat-up Toyota Corolla or move into a yucky duplex? I didn't want to do either. But what kept driving me was, if I don't do this, what is my life going to look like? It's not a life I want. So it was like, I know I have to make hard decisions because I want more time with the people that I love. I don't necessarily want to work. my nine to five for the next 30 years. And it was like, these are the breaks and I have to make them

for myself. So like the reality of our situation was my driving force. And sometimes it was easy to blame it on Josh. Like, Josh, you're ruining my life. You're forcing me to make these choices. Yeah, like I definitely said that. I'm not going to lie to you. But like the reality is and he would always say this. He's like, Ali, it's not me. It's our debt. It's our financial situation. That's what's doing it. So we kind of created like a common enemy and cause of our debt and our financial position and we worked together as a team. And once we had that perspective, you know, we, we accelerated our path to our goals. Yeah, it isn't Ellie against Josh. It's Ellie and Josh against the world. Yes. Yeah. So, okay. So when what's different? Like you, oh, this is going to be horrible.

This is going to be terrible. I don't want to drive this ugly car. How has your life? Let's see. How do I want to phrase this question? I've got the Carolla and the house hack. I felt like a millionaire at that point. I couldn't have been happier. We're posted that on Instagram. And I think too, like something to think about, and this is important when we think about consumer purchases, like my time versus my money.

And it is nice to have nice things. but we have to think about how much of our time we spend to pay off those things. So he's like, yeah, you can get that nice $20,000 car and you're going to like driving it for the first three months. And that's great. But you're also going to be paying it off for the next six years. And that's money we could have, you know, spent to buy our freedom. You know, and a book that I think was really transformative. So like, again, every time I would come to Allie with a new concept and I didn't get a response, I'd say like back to the drawing board, Josh. So I would go back to the drawing board and I would read, I would listen. And Vicki Robbins,

your money or your life really was transformative for me because, I mean, Ali, I vividly remember we were sitting in the parking lot in our car and the heated seats at the time. And we both sat there and we said, okay, what are the things that we value the most? What makes us happy? What's the perfect day? What do we love? And we literally, line by line, started writing those things. And then it was, how much time do we have right now based on our lifestyle, based on our circumstances, to do those things. And it was pretty minuscule. And honestly, for us, both, the biggest one was time with family, whether it be with our parents, aging grandparents, and time together. And so for me, where my approach really shifted was, okay, here's the things that Ali values the most,

loves the most. This is how house hacking, driving the coroner, 50% savings rate index funds, all like the nitty gritty stuff of like five. These are bridges that will get us to where we really want to be. But I was at the time, I was just focused on building bridges. Love it. Well, I want to get back to the how and the nuts and bolts here. So you guys are sitting here in early 2019. You've crash hacked your way into your new Carolla, your house hacking.

and what's going on with the savings and why do you choose now to begin applying the savings towards debt as opposed to making the next investment? What's your logic there? Yeah. So our goal going into it was we want to be debt free. And the reason that we prioritized house hacking in the beginning was we felt like that would be the best, the best lever that we could pull, right? So like earn more, spend less and best the difference is our income we couldn't really, you know, elevate that much. So by house hacking, that lowered our expenses. And that we felt like would accelerate our ability to pay off debt. And so we closed on the duplex December of 2018 and then January 1, 2019. One, we got that first rent check. We had never

gotten a rent check before. And that was life-changing money right there too. But really, we were like, we're just going to buckle down for 2019. And we had, because our housing was so, cheap and we had no car payments. We were saving now probably in that like 53 to 54% in terms of savings rate. So all of that extra income that we that had now between our income and expenses, we just started making big lumps on payments on our student loans. Awesome. So what's your position at closing 2019? So we had paid off well, yeah, so we paid off just over $50,000 in student loans. I paid off my student loans. Allie was a little bit higher because she still had it. She'd taken on a master's degree. So we were just about $51,000 going into 2020. The property had actually

appreciated quite a bit because like so many housing markets, you know, our housing market is no different. So there was a lot of appreciation going on there. The rental income had gone up because we got a new tenant. I was still jamming out to podcast every single day. So I was really understanding real estate and finance better. Was your income going up with the, you got a $6,000 raise, Allie, but was your income going up from your entrepreneurial activities? It was. And then, you know, it's the sequence of returns risk. So my income, or not sequence of return risk, the law of diminishing returns. So my income started going up, but very quickly, I started finding myself getting back into 2017, Josh mode of, I'm just going to work all the time. My

income was going up, but my quality of life was going down. And I created this business not as a means of just making money, but I wanted it to make a comfortable living, but really I wanted more time with Ali, especially 2019 was our first year as newlyweds. I wanted to be enjoyable. So I actually made a real abrupt pivot in my business. And again, this is where like the confidence of having such a high savings rate because of low cost of living gave me is my income was going up, but really my focus became, instead of just trying to amplify my income, how can I make a comparable income by working half the time? Love it.

And so, okay, so this is a great mentality. What happens in 2020? So, nothing, Scott. It was a plain old regular year. We're feeling on top of the world. We're real estate investors. We've paid off 50 grand in student loans. 2020 is our year.

And as I'm saying this out loud, I'm sensitive. a trend because every time we say, like, it's our year. Like what, Josh gets laid off, our world crumbles, and now 2020 is our year, and there's a global pandemic. So, you know, all intentions to continue to pay down that debt, you know, to get another property. But we kind of hunkered down for the first chunk of 2020 because Josh's income was pretty greatly impacted by COVID. Yeah. So my income in probably like March or April when everything really shut down, really was cut in half. But prior to that, January and February, again, like all systems go. We paid off almost $11,000 between January and February. We figured, you know what we're going to do? We are going to spend the first half of the

year, this is before everything happened. We're going to spend the first half of the year crushing student loan debt. And then around June, we're going to start slowing down a little bit and we're going to start raising cash so that maybe in the second half of 2020, we'll try to buy a duplex and get our second house hack and then basically rinse and repeat in 2021. And then everything's going to go perfectly. And by the end of 2021, we will be debt-free and two house hacks have four units and almost financially free. So what was your cash position heading into this? So you're paying off debt. How do you kind of think about how much cash to have on hand in your emergency reserve and those types of things while you're aggressively prepaying

debt? Yeah, great question. So we typically hover, and I know this is a little bit skinny, but we stay pretty close to like that three months cash reserve. Some people are a little bit more ambitious and they're like the six, the nine, the 12 months for us, because we felt confident in our earning potential, especially my business, I was able to pivot to like virtual, which was prior, it had just been like a cool little idea, but now a lot of it's virtual. Our savings rate also felt, I mean, so we were now starting to ramp up closer to that like 65, 70% savings rate. That felt like a really nice buffer in terms of like almost like an emergency fund that and of itself. So instead of having a lot of cash, we were going to shift to probably six to nine

months closer to the end of the year. But in the beginning of the year, we had a high savings rate. We wanted three months of cash in case anything happened, which things happened. I just want to point out that you make a great point here, if you're listening and you missed it. The less you spend, or the bigger the gap between your income and your expenses, the less emergency fund do you need, paradoxically. And the easier it is to accumulate that emergency fund. If you spend a lot or close to your income, that's when it becomes even more important to have the emergency fund. And it's harder to accumulate and takes longer. So anyway, I just want to point that out.

And I'm interested to see how that dynamic and your mentality in there helped you, probably didn't hurt you as the pandemic begins. Yeah. No, honestly, I mean, it helped a ton. You know, hindsight was a little 2020 in March and April because we were probably like, man, it would have a nice to get it 2020. Nice job. Oh, did I make it an inadvertent pun?

Well, you'll hear it when you listen to that. You know, so when everything shut down, I think we were kind of like, man, it would be nice if we held on to that cash a little bit. But at the time, we were like, we were also really happy to have paid off the student loans. And I got to tell you, like, that time from, say, like, March to like May or June, in a weird way, it kind of gave us like a dry run of five, if that makes sense. Like, we were together pretty much all the time. Life got really slow and quiet for a while. And it gave us, because 2019, I'm, we're going gang busters. We're working a lot. We're paying off debt, so on and so forth. And that gave us a time to almost

hit pause and kind of reflect on, okay, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? And is it working? Are we happy? Are we still working towards that? Why? And it was actually kind of a really interesting time in our marriage. So when you bought this house, what condition was it in? It was turned to. The first house or the second house? The first house. We haven't gotten to the second house yet. Yeah. No, honestly, like, you could not have cherry picked a better first house hack. Okay. Yeah, it was the couple, again, the couple we bought it from,

started house hacking like seven or eight years prior to us buying it. They were a young couple, taken the world by storm. They had a child, and they're like, okay, like, we can still house hack more with one child. They had a second child, and they're like, no, okay, like house hacking, we're good on that. But because they had put so much time and money into it, they really didn't want to just have it go to the highest invest. They specifically wanted to sell the people who they could relate to. And so there was some cool intervention there. When our agent introduced us to them, we were like, man, you guys are us in like seven or eight years. Like it's so cool. But yeah, it was in great shape.

Okay. And the reason that I asked that is because I don't want you to have three months of expenses or three month emergency fund and you bought a dump that needs a lot of work. And then there's a pandemic. So I just wanted to point that out that was in good shape. I'm glad. Sorry, Scott, go ahead. I bet they would have increased their emergency fund, though, if that was the case and the condition of their house warranted that. Yes, they would have. But maybe somebody listening was like, oh, Josh and Allie only had three months. So therefore, you need to have three months. And not if you're buying a dump. You need a lot, a lot of extra money. Okay. So you guys are having a sit back and reassess period and you're experiencing a taste of of fire, what you guys have to be like, what happens next? We're in the summer it

sounds like of 2020. Yep. Yeah. So summer 2020, Josh is like, Allie, I think we should buy our second job sack. And what I'm about to say, I think in relationships, it's really important to have balance. So Josh is like the go, go, go person in our. relationship. Like he's always thinking of the next plan. And I would describe myself as like the whoa, whoa, whoa, person. So like Josh is like, let's go get that house hack and like, hold on. I really like where we are. I'm comfortable. We're in a good situation. So again, it's finding that that compromise. But we ended up, you know, looking at some properties and getting our feet wet with it. And then it's like, okay, I think we can do this again. We should do this again. So at that point, too,

So I network a ton, right? And I'm always trying to learn more and provide value any way that I can. And so 2019 also gave me a really, really good chance to start attending like Facebook group meetups, real estate meetups, get coffee with other investors and learn a ton. And so I started parlaying a lot more of those skills into 2020. And so again, like so many housing markets, our area was crazy competitive. There was a lot of out-of-town buyers, things were selling for less than 20, you know, or in cash less than 24 hours. So we decided that if we were going to stand a chance to buy a property, we were really going to have to find something off market. And so we had met another real estate investor in our area, probably sometime in 2019. And he was actually in the

same neighborhood as our first house hack. We told him, you know, we admire your property. You know, this is who we are, this is what we do. If you ever thinking about selling. And he was pretty adamant, like, nope, love the property, never going to sell. Great. Okay, well, if anything changes, we live up five houses up the street. And then actually in May of 2020, we were renovating our upstairs unit to have a new tenant move in.

Ali was out there. She was painting and stuff. And the investor kind of walked up and kind of admired like the work that we were doing. And so I saw him through the window. And I was like, oh, shoot, that guy. So I came out and, you know, put on my sales cap. And I said, hey, you know, oh, yeah, we're renovating. Man, we really love this neighborhood.

You still got that property? And he's like, yeah, probably still not going to sell. So we're like, okay. And then in July of 2020, we went on Facebook and a neighborhood Facebook group. And I knew he was a part of it. So I said, you know, I'll take one last chance. And I posted in that Facebook group, hey, everybody. You know, this is who we are.

This is what we're doing. If anybody in the neighborhood might be interested in selling, let us know. And he shot us a message shortly thereafter. His situation had changed and he wanted to talk about selling. And it's funny sometimes, yeah, I've noticed this in my life and I've read this across a couple of other things, but it seems like sometimes when you have your eye on that one property, you know, it just ends up in your possession one day somehow if that's like, if you're thinking about it.

Not always, but you know, not whatever. But it's interesting how that kind of works. So it's fascinating that you're just like, oh, yeah, I've got that that one in mind. And I'm just going to keep playing my little game until that comes under there. So walk us to the numbers on this property. Yeah. Yeah. So, and this was our first duplex is off market, but we did have the benefit of a realtor.

And that realtor was a very good realtor with the heart of an educator. And he walked us through step by step. This is, these are the forms. This is why there's these forms. so on and so forth. For this particular property, it was a for sale by owner. The owner had no interest in involving realtors. He just wanted our attorneys. And so this was a really steep learning curve for us in terms of actually handling the transaction almost entirely. So we were getting the forms from our attorney. We were walking down to their house. We were filling out the forms

together. We were figuring out how to negotiate a price and so on and so forth. And so we ended up purchasing the property for $152,000. And I say that because there was a $2,000 seller concession in there, again, to help offset some of the closing costs. We felt very confident the property would appraised more for that, but the seller was really adamant. That was his price, and we were trying to be as accommodating. Our big thing right now is we want to solve other investors' challenges because we can't compete with like cash offers and stuff. And so it was 152,000. We used an FHA on this property, so three and a half percent down between the down payment, closing costs, and any other fees, all in it was $13,200. And then we were pleasantly surprised when

the appraisal actually came in just a little bit south of 169. So right there, you know, we're getting a house for 150 and it appraised for 169. So that was pretty cool too. And the property, the condition of this property was a lot different than our first property. And I don't, if this was our first duplex, the one we're in right now, it would probably would have harder to sell to Allie. I'm actually really glad that our first duplex up the street was a lot nicer because it was kind of like dipping her toes in the water of real estate. The one we're in right now is kind of like more of like a burr hack, if you will. Like we're renovating like Mindy, I know you do like live in flips. And this is like a very mini live-in flip.

Like we're renovating the unit that we occupy pretty much inside and out. And so while living here, so the total mortgage on this is $1,280 a month. The upstairs is rented for $9.75. And then the unit that we were living in prior, we actually rented out for $1,350. So how long did you live in this house? The first property, we moved in in December of 20,000. 2018 and we moved. I'm sorry, you were, you rented out the part, the first property. They're still in this house, the second house. You're in this like, okay, okay, I'm sorry. I misunderstood it. I was like, wait,

you just bought that. You have to live there for a year. So a lot of things that you have said that I think other people may not be super familiar with. You used an FHA loan, which is a federal program that allows you to put only 3.5% down, but it has to be a residence. You can't do that on a, an investment. investment property. And because you're living in there, and you have to live there for a year, because you're living there for a year, you get the benefit of the 3.5. I do want to point out because this is a point of confusion for some people. If you were to move out after living there for a year, you don't have to refinance. You can still have only a 3.5% down and keep that mortgage and then go find something else. I don't know if you can have two FHA. You can't have two FHA loans

at the same time in the same area. If you got transferred more than 50 or 100 miles, away, then you could get another FHA loan. So just FYI for that. But there's, there's a lot of benefits to this house hacking in that you can have a really low down payment. And go right through the numbers one more time. The pity is what and the rent is what on the second one? 1280 all in and 975 upstairs. That's great. So, so what's the situation at present right now? You've got the, you've got the almost, you're living for even cheaper now. Yeah. You've got rent from the first place. And so how much debt are we paying off in the second half of 2020? And what's the, what's the current situation? So we finally hit our live for free goal with this house hack. So after,

like, you back out reserves and whatnot for that property in terms of operational costs and savings, we are living for free with this unit. So that is really cool. Like Josh said, this property is not in the same condition that our prior property was in. So we had a lot of capital improvements on this property. We just ripped out the entire kitchen in our unit. We got some new appliances. We did new cabinets. Can you say we're doing it? Are you guys doing it? No. We're doing some work, but we've hired out for a bit. So we hired a company to do the kitchen. We replaced some of the flooring. And this was a nice surprise. We knew that some of the windows needed to be replaced, but all of like pretty much all of the windows needed to be replaced.

Windows are more expensive than we thought they were. So that was a really, really good learning opportunity. I'm not going to call it a mistake because I think that we've learned a lot. And every other property that we buy in the future, I am going to meticulously inspect the windows. So in the next few weeks, that's going to happen. So really we have kind of hit a pause on debt paydown because we have been using our extra money to stabilize,

this house and get it in a position where it needs to be. But I should say, though, that in 2021, we have now resumed paying student loans. So, yeah, so we were heavily focused on in beginning. This is your year. Yeah, right. Don't say that. Don't say it. This is our year.

Well, in full honesty, I mean, if we're able to execute some of the plans that we have, you know, this very well could be the year that we become debt-free. which would be really cool. Originally, we had shot for like four years to pay off $102,000. This would be like year three. But we also are mindful of there's a lot of stuff going on right now. So we're also like we're carrying a little bit more cash. We're still in that three to four month range.

But we now know what happened in like February, March of last year. So we're kind of kind of going to wait to see. But yeah. So and what's cool is because we bought the property with so much equity and there is that value add component. I think the seasoning period on this is like six or seven months. And so depending on where the market is, at that point, we may look to refi out of this FHA,

put it into a conventional loan product, which then gives us access to another FHA. And then we would be looking potentially for a third house act. So you guys are rocking and rolling here. And you're going to, I think it sounds like there's always things that can happen. and probably more things will happen. But in a couple of years, you're going to be sitting pretty with a small rental portfolio here, debt-free,

and a significant ability to generate cash with what seems like a sustainable work balance between the two of you. Is that kind of a nice? And then I think it will be this boring several years slog to FI after that, but that's a pretty good situation to be in. So how do you feel about all this now, having made this journey and being in your present state?

You know, it's funny. I think like when you're in the thick of it, like the mundane Wednesdays, sometimes I feel incredibly unimpressive and just like it is what it is. We have to do these windows. We have to do that. But we try to push that perspective away and just focus on like where we were when we started this. We did not have the financial knowledge that we have now. Our goals and dreams were so different. And I look at us. And honestly, I just feel so much pride for all that we've accomplished. I feel proud of us. and like the sacrifices that we've made and the hard decisions we've made and the, are you sure you guys really want to do this?

That sounds kind of crazy and like pushing through all of that. And I think that that's huge. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't be more excited. Yeah. To be honest with you. You know, it's one of those things where- Carolla and the house house house acts though.

Yeah, literally two house acts though. It's kind of like, Scott, you were saying something earlier about like when you visualize something. And I played sports all of my life. And so I was always about like visualizing the thing long in advance before the match or the game or the competition. And then when you when you compete and you achieve it, it's like it's a natural byproduct because you put so much time and energy into preparation. And so like I'm feeling really, really excited because I have spent more time than I'm proud to admit between forums and podcasts and books. And I'm excited to see where we are.

But in a way, I also feel like, well, like, if you follow a roadmap, it says, if you follow these steps, it'll get you to here. I have listened to so many smarter and more successful people share their stories and doing, if you follow this process, you will get to where we are. So in a way, I feel really excited, but I'm also like, this makes sense because all these really smart people said this is what would happen. Now, do you have any peers that were in a similar situation to you around when you got married that you're generally aware of? And are you seeing a difference there? Or, you know, is there anything? Because you made a radically different set of choices, I'm sure, than many of your friends and family. But do you have any, like, do you have any thoughts on that, whether there's a different outcome or thoughts around how not making those choices might have impacted you or where folks are there?

Yeah. I think that when we first started this, journey. The only friends that we had doing this were friends on bigger pockets forums and podcasts and people that we heard about. We were definitely the weird friends that were making this really radical choice. And I think that's how it was perceived by many. And I think that now that we are sharing more of our journey online through the five couple and we're having more open conversations with people around us, people are seeing the progress that we're making and the success. So we're a little less weird now. And I think over the past few years, we've really built our community of people locally and across the country that are on this journey too. So that is cool to connect with people as well.

And I think it's one of those things like it's as oldest time. Like at first when you're doing something different, people are going to say you're crazy. And then eventually when you're doing it and then you start maybe having some success, people are going to say, well, how did you do that? And, you know, we're still very much like on the path to five and we still have another $50,000 student loans pay off. And, you know, like we have a lot of work to do. But just in the, you know, a little over two years of this path, I mean, we have completely transformed our lives. And there are now people who are starting to kind of come to us, both people who we know and then people from, you know, reaches of the country we've never even visited. And they're starting

to ask questions. And it's really, really fun because, again, like, I've always been someone who's been too happy to give answers in other areas. And it's exciting to have people now coming to us, and I get to answer questions. And one more thing, and I know it's hard when you have two people talking, because there's a lot of dialogue. And it's super cheesy. But I have to say, like, when you are in the thralls of not making huge salaries and being entrenched by debt, it can be really demoralizing. And it's hard to think of the big picture and to dream because you're in the day-to-day trying to make it work. And I think that's something that so many Americans are struggling with and working through and that's reality. And I have to say that like my biggest takeaway with like real estate

investing, house hacking, the pursuit of five, I feel like for the first time in my adult life, I am actually dreaming like big dreams, big scary, exciting dreams. And I think like somewhere along the line like people forget to dream. And I think maybe it's like beaten out of us a little bit or life hardens us in some way. But I feel like we are like dreaming. and we're dreaming big, and that has been, like, huge for us. It's weird. You're like, oh, I want to get out of debt and just kind of build a little bit of private wealth and all that kind of stuff.

And then you're like, if I keep doing this, I could live there one day, and I could not do anything, or I could do this particular business venture, or I could, like, literally, the world is big, and I can go out there, and I can, I could do this from Maui, like Brandon. I could do this from Thailand. I could do it from New Zealand. I could do it from whatever. And so like that's, that picture is not available

in the $100,000 hole when $100,000 is an unimaginable amount of liquidity that you have. That's just like, that's a completely, but there's ridiculous statement. But then the itch begins to begin and around this time and the journey, I think, when you're like,

you know what? The rate of wealth accumulation could be 50 to 100. thousand dollars a year in a realistic sense. If we have a good year, if you have a bad year, it won't be. But if we have a good year, it could be there. And then what is that? What are the implications of that if I sustain that for a couple of years? I think it's awesome. So it's super exciting. This has been phenomenal. I had a blast. We went way over, which is great. Too bad if you're listening. This was fun. We had a great time. It's awesome. Their story was worth it. Mindy, should we do the financial scan, though. Yes, we should. Although I think our financial

scan this time is going to be a little bit shorter because we've kind of already talked about. it. But hey, Ali and Josh, where are you putting your money to grow for your future besides real estate? Because you already have real estate. But what percentage of your total financial picture is in real estate? And then what percentage is in anything else? Yeah. So right now, we are very heavy. Real estate, we're about 90% of our total assets are in real estate. And a lot of that is just because the other, the available cash flow that we would be putting into index funds. Right now we're just putting into student loans. So about 90% real estate, we do, we do have a brokerage account with just, you know, VO and some other, you know, boring

index funds. That's about 7% of our total portfolio right now. The rest is cash, so probably about 3%. You know, and really our goal, maybe we're pretty happy right now in terms of where our real estate portfolio is. We have no real ambition of having like, you know, hundreds of units or anything like that. Once our debt's really paid off, we're going to be looking to make sure that portfolio is a little bit more balanced and really kind of going more in the, you know, the index funds. Yeah. And I just want to come to chime in here and say like, that's not diversified. And that's intentional, I bet. Oh, yeah. It's not an accident. You don't dig yourself out of a $100,000 whole by guaranteeing

yourself the diversified 7% return. Right. And so like, sorry. you're a risky position, but you have to be, I think, in order to have a shot at a crack at those goals. That could go south. But I admire that and I think like, hey, you're going to make it work and figure it out if you can't, if you run out of cash, for example, or have something, you're going to figure it out. And you have to do that at some point before you can build this like ideologically pure buy portfolio. Yeah. So I just want to chime in there. And I think this is great. Yeah. Thank you. biologically pure five portfolio. There's the worst phrase you've ever called on this. It's a cult, Nandi. Everyone's got the index funds, the whatever. Yeah. So I love it.

Yeah. I'm going to get you a T-shirt that says ideologically pure five portfolio. Ask me about my ideologically pure five portfolio. I have the cash position of X and yeah. That's in bigger pocket swag you can sell right there. Just coin that phrase and put it on there. Now it's time for the famous four. Allie, what is your favorite finance book? I wasn't paid to say this, but I would argue that my and our favorite finance book is Sefer Life. By Scott Trench. You may have heard of him.

No, I haven't heard of him. And just to be like fair and balance, like if it wasn't that, honestly, J.O. Collins' Simple Path to Wells, you know, I mean, that's really our thing, right, is we are not looking to be all indexed. funds are all real estate. We want to try to find that fair and balanced approach to it. And yeah, set for life and simple paths, we, you know, keep it simple. Two wise authors there. What was your biggest money mistake? Honestly, how much more time do you have on this podcast, first of all? But no, I'm joking. Honestly, our 20s. If I could like sum up our 20s, I think we went through a lot of those years really unaware and we weren't having smart money conversations and we weren't making good choices and we look back and we're like we see people starting out at 21, 22, you know,

making these choices on this path. And I'm like, wow, like we're 30. Like that would be really cool if we started this not in our late 20s, but our early 20s. So not a specific moment, but I think wishing that we started it sooner, but just to put a positive twist on it, we are where we are, we're making progress where we are and it's all going to work out. So, you know, despite that, we're going to hit our goals. Awesome. You guys are not behind. You're doing awesome. Yeah, I like that answer. It's so hard because, like, in the general population, like, we're doing very well.

And it can be tempting sometimes. Like, you get caught in, like, this very specific niche of the population of, like, super five people and stuff where 30 somehow becomes really old. And we always have to remind ourselves of that. Like, it's okay that we're, you know, where we are right now and we're still doing. really well. Absolutely. You guys are doing really well. And if you're starting out and you're listening and you're in a position of where Josh and Ali were when they started this journey and you know, you're 33, 35, 40, 45, you're not too late. You can make these changes and build wealth. And I'm telling you, you started this journey two years ago. You are not going to see a linear progression of your wealth, most likely. You're going to see once you get back to zero, the benefits of exponential gains and the compounding that those investments can pay off.

And I think you're going to see some of the benefits of that unimaginable number of hours you spent consuming content around this. I think that's going to affect your portfolio returns downstream and continue to contribute to that when you actually can do that on things that can generate that return. You're guaranteeing yourself a level of debt on the interest and you've got to do it. But once you're past that, I think you're not going to see this. It's not going to be like this. It's going to be a high metric curve.

Okay. Mindy. What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out? And you can each have your own advice. You don't have to agree on one. So for me, I would say figuring out your why. And it has to be a big why. And you have to really care about it.

Because whether you're paying off debt or you're investing or you're pursuing five, it is not like a smooth sailing, easy road. are going to be challenges or there are going to be things that test you. And I think when that happens, remembering your why and remembering the big reason why you're pursuing this, because at the end of the day, that's what gets you through the hard time. So just figure that out and stick to it. Yeah. And I mean, I would absolutely second that. And I would also say like the knowledge and know how to achieve whatever goals, it's all out there and it's free. And, you know, so whatever it is a person wants to do, like we, no one in our life, like growing up, no one taught this kind of stuff to us and no one talked to us about this kind of stuff.

But instead of saying, like, what was me? No one taught me this kind of stuff. We said, well, let's find out because other people are doing it. So I would just say, like, if there's something that you want to learn more about, just go on like, you know, like Google that thing and just like ask whatever question you want to know. and then just start equipping yourself with knowledge. And then from there, start connecting with people on Facebook and forums and stuff like that. And ask a lot of questions, get a lot of answers and then eventually start answering them yourselves. And to me, like, that's been like the best resource. Awesome. What is your favorite joke to tell at parties? All right.

I am super excited. So full disclosure. We are not like joke telling people. we just try to have conversations and if something funny happens, it does. But all right. So I'm going to ask it and I'm curious to see what you guys think.

Why can't you hear a teradactyl go to the bathroom? My husband is obsessed with dinosaurs so I know the answer to this one. All right. As long as I thump Scott, I'm happy as heck. Something with fossilized. I don't know. I can't hear a terror.

or Dacko go to the bathroom because the pee is silent. That is not where I thought you were going with that. All right. Amazing. Where can people find out more about you guys? You can find out about us on Instagram. We have an Instagram account called The FiCouple. We have a website, TheFiCouple.com.

We have a Twitter, too, the handle TheFi Couple. Nice. And they're all over the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, Facebook group as well, which you can find at Facebook.com slash groups slash BP money. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Allie, are you in there?

Yeah. I think I'm in there. She might be. I'm not as active as Josh, but like he sets the bar so high. I was going to say nobody's his activist, Josh. Nobody's his activist, Josh. Maybe me. I live in those forums.

And I will say, I love your Instagram. content and all that kind of stuff. And we actually just did a Facebook Live recently on there. That was really fun. So thank you for inviting me over there. And Instagram Live. That's right. You said Facebook Live. Instagram Live. Whatever. The kids are on these days. All right. So, guys, this was an amazing show. Thank you so much. Thanks for bearing with us as we went way long. But I think it was worth every minute. Phenomenal story. So wonderful.

to hear your successes so far. I'm really excited to watch your journey over the next couple of years. And hopefully we'll be able to have you back on the show. Maybe once or twice over the next couple of years to hear about the next movements in your journey. Thank you so much. I mean, like I said, this is a dream come true. And I mean, you guys help millions and millions of people every single day. And we are proof of that. I mean, bigger pockets in general changed our lives completely. It's pretty like full circle because like a few years ago when we first started our journey, we were listening to Bigger Pockets. And I'm like, what?

I'm like on a Bigger Pockets podcast. Like, I'm doing something right because I feel really cool right now. So. Sorry, this is all it is. This is all it is. So, yeah, thanks again. You guys are awesome. Keep it up.

Thank you guys. Well, thank you. As much as I would love to hear, you continue to tell us how great we are. We will have to say goodbye. But you can call me all the time and tell me how great I am. Scott's phone number is... We had somebody give their phone number out on the podcast once, not on our show on the real estate show. Oh, okay.

He was an attorney. He's like, call me anytime. And I'm like, did you just give out your actual phone number? You are going to be slammed with calls. But hey, works out for him. Yeah, so Josh and Allie, thank you for joining us today. This was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed your story.

And I think that, you know, anybody who's listening, you're 50. years old, you can still listen to this episode and say, wow, it didn't take that long to get out of dead. They were conscious about it. They did it. They pushed through. They moved on. And there's a lot of lessons to be learned at any age that you're listening to this. So I hope that people are able to get as much out of it as I did. I had a great time. Thank you guys so much. This is a huge honor. Thank you. And we'll talk to you guys soon. Okay, that was Josh and Allie from the Fye couple. Scott, what did you think of the show? I know what you thought of the show. You loved it. You thought it was the best. It was the best. It was so much fun.

Okay. Thank you. We don't need for my, you know, for me to talk. I don't need you for this conversation. I can have it all by myself. No, look, I love it. It's it, it's the dynamic of the, he's obsessed. I can completely relate. You go through this journey when you're going, when you're, when you're thinking about this and you're just surrounded by the voices in your head, which is kind of weird because maybe I'm one for Josh, you know, now. And that was my dynamic going through that and listening to Brandon and Josh Dorkin and, uh, you know, reading Mr. Money Mustache, listening to the mad scientists and all those things on my journey, that obscene obsession was there. And like, I can only imagine if I had a wife at the time how annoying I would have been to my wife. And it was just great. It was like, it was like, I just loved seeing that dynamic at play. And I think that, wow, look at them go. Look, they're doing it. They're, they've got the corolla and the house hack. And life is good.

good. They've made it. And I think that they're going to be so successful over the next couple of years. They're going to dig themselves out of that debt, I bet, and then they're going to be off to the races financially. I'll be shocked if that doesn't happen the way that they're approaching their finances. Yeah, they're just making really smart decisions. And I love the way that they tell their story. They fully embrace the fact that there were mistakes they made in the past and going forward, they're going to be better. And they're taking steps and learning from their mistakes. Josh was trying to force Allie into it. And I think it's really impressive that at his young age, he was able to say,

whoa, I'm not approaching this right. And it's hard when you're so excited about something to be like, no, no, just listen. Just listen. I'm right. Just listen to me. And he's like, ooh, I have to speak her language. And I think that was kind of a brilliant. We kind of glossed over that.

But that's a brilliant take on that. Absolutely. I think that's going to be a challenge for a lot of folks. because most, I would imagine that it's the rare couple that is equally obsessed with FI, right? There's always going to be one that is a little bit more intense about it. And I think that that's a huge lesson and a huge reality that if you want to achieve this and get the most out of life and build your financial position, you've got to be on the same page. And, you know, your complete gung-ho moving into the dumpy basement duplex and the up-and-coming neighborhood

may not be the right approach for your family and those types of things if you're looking about it. And so I think that they've got that how they worked it out, I think was just so wonderful. And I just, I'm excited to see where they go. I'm really excited for them too. I think there's big things in their future. Okay, Scott, should we get out of here?

Let's do it. From episode 167 of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, he is Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen. Girl Scout cookie season is coming up. I'm the cookie mom for our Girl Scout troops, So I will end today's episode with peace out, Girl Scout.