BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 2: An All-Out Approach to Financial Independence at an Early Age with Scott Trench

Episode Date: January 8, 2018

Scott Trench wanted something more out of life, so he grabbed it by the horns and pointed it in the direction HE chose. By accumulating a large financial runway through a 50% savings rate on a median income, he gave himself the courage to take... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Kickstart your well-being journey with your first audiobook free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash BP money. Welcome to Bigger Pockets Money, show number two. It's time for a new American dream, one that doesn't involve working in a cubicle for 40 years, barely scraping by. Whether you're looking to get your financial house in order, invest the money you already have, or discover new paths for wealth creation, you're in the right place. This show is for anyone who has money or wants more. This is the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and I am hosting today's

show. We have something a little bit different today. Today's guest is usually on this side of the microphone with me, but today I'm putting him in the hot seat. I want you to get to know him, and there's no better way to get to know someone than to interrogate them. So I'm going to bring in Scott Trench, the director of operations at biggerpockets.com, and usually my co-host, but today he is my guest. Scott, welcome to the show. Awesome. Well, thanks, Mindy. And yeah, I'm excited to be here. You know, we're going to be posting the show for ever forever and so i thought it would be good you know i think we thought it would be good to have each of us you're going to be next week share just kind of our philosophy and our story and how we approach money so that you guys the listeners can understand where

we're coming from when we're talking about money and finances and all that kind of stuff yeah lend a little credibility to the show if you will so i'm just going to jump in with both feet and and start at the beginning tell me about your childhood i'm just kidding. How, well, you know what? Tell me about your childhood. I was born in a small town. So what kind of childhood did you have? Like a regular rough and tumbled childhood. You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. You had no money and you were homeless forever. What's your, what's your quick background? So I grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood and went to, you know, excellent school. I was in an excellent school district throughout my entire life growing up.

I had two wonderful parents. And if I were to kind of define my childhood, it would be defined by competitive sports. Because I was lucky enough to have parents that were able to provide for all these things. You know, it was basically, you know, I can't remember a time between the age of maybe five and 18 where I had more than two weeks off from playing various sports. I was always in a soccer league, a basketball league, lacrosse, rugby, you name it. I played sports my entire life. And that's really how I kind of define myself as a child.

I was an athlete and a competitor. So gosh, Scott, do you still play sports now? Yes, I still play sports. I played rugby in college and I still play rugby to this day, although I'm continuing to rack up some injuries from rugby. Yes, well, I'm laughing. People may not be aware of this. I'm laughing because Scott comes into the office frequently with a black eye

and just as frequently with stitches. So he's actually bruise free right now, well, his face anyway. Is bruise free right now? It's just funny to see somebody in a professional setting with this black eye. And he gets it from rugby, not fights. Or are you calling it rugby, but it's actually fight club? Who cares? Oh, rule number one.

Okay. So you had a happy childhood. It wasn't filled with a lot of strife. No, no. So, yeah, and I, again, I had a great, I had the great privilege of being able to really just kind of focus on my athletics, by academics, without too many, you know, things going on in my personal life to distract me from, you know, being successful in those things. And I'm very grateful to my parents for that. That's an advantage that a lot of people don't have. And, you know, I've tried to do the best I can, given that

advantage. I went to college at Vanderbilt University and then studied finance and economics and then got my first job in the finance world out of there graduating debt-free. I had that that nice head start into the world right there. That is a huge head start. Okay. I think how you grow up is really important. It doesn't define you. And we'll have a guest on in a few weeks who took a not so amazing childhood and really

turned it into something amazing. So I don't think it has to define you. But it's definitely interesting on how it affects the rest of your life. So fast forward, how did you discover this concept of early retirement or financial freedom? Because you went to school, you studied, presumably you went to college to get a four-year degree so that you could go out and, you know, be whatever for the rest of your life and work until you're 65. And, you know, then you said your very first job was not so fabulous. Well, to back, you know, in college, probably towards the end of my senior year, I became very interested in finance. And I began reading some things like rich dad, poor dad, and that kind of stuff.

So I understood the concept of building wealth. But I didn't really, it didn't really click. I think it has to, I think you have to kind of absorb this information or this perspective over the course of months or years before it becomes, oh, for some reason, this one is going to hit me at this time and things are going to become crystal clear. And financial freedom is going to become the obvious concept. So out of college, I actually went and spent all the money I'd been making at internships and whatnot for the summers on a trip to Europe with a couple buddies.

So I could start just to make sure that I could start by a career broke. And so I started out, you know, with, you know, with. two or three grand in my checking account and my first job here in Denver, Colorado. And within three months, I figured out, hey, life is just hit really hard. I am now on my own with, you know, a solid job. I was making 48K a year. But this is it. This is what I'm going to be doing with my day to day for the rest of my life. And did you enjoy that? I didn't. I didn't. And I don't think the reason I didn't enjoy it was because the work was bad or I was treated poorly. But, you know, If you go back to my childhood, you know, every single day, every single week for my entire life,

I've been competing. I've been practicing or straighting myself to the utmost with some sort of challenge that's going to something that's going to challenge me to the utmost mentally and physically. And my work was not doing that at the time. And so, but I'm not one to waste time. So I'm not going to sit there. And because I don't have any work, just allow myself to sit around and, and twiddle my thumbs. I spent as much time as I could reading and learning and figuring out how do I become a better and better.

and better and better at my job with every possible moment. And I soon found that there was very little marginal utility to that. The job is, make the spreadsheet, come up with the projections, here's how to do it, and then update that once a month and give us your feedback. I was a financial analyst. That would basically, how much do we think we're going to spend? How much do we spend? What do we mean to make any changes? What's the difference? And so there wasn't really that much to it. You can only get so good at that particular role over time. So once I figured that out, I just started learning more and more about finance in general. And that is when I came across the concept of financial freedom, is in studying to become better for my job.

Learning more about finance, I discovered the realm of personal finance and really dived in. And particularly, I remember that two of the key resources were the mad fientist podcast. I think it's called the Financial Independence Podcast. And his first ever guest was a guy named Mr. Money Mustache, who you might remember from last week. And once I discovered Mr. Money Mustache and began reading his blog, everything clicked. I just agreed with every single piece of information that I absorbed of Mr. Money Mustache. And from there, it was off to the races. And how old were you?

So I was 23 at the time when I first started doing this. Probably maybe just turned, was that 2013? Yes, I was 22, 23. Okay. So 23, you discover the concept of financial freedom and early retirement. What was your next step after you did? decided, okay, this is something I want to do. What did you do after you've decided, okay, I want to retire early? So once I decided that, I said, hey, you know, I need to just focus

on saving. And I realized that saving was not going to be a, you know, something I could just do immediately. I wasn't going to be able to suddenly start saving thousands of dollars a month. I actually had to change things step by step. Now, I had the good fortune of not making too many big mistakes prior to discovering financial freedom. You know, if I discovered it, a year or two later, I might have been locked into some choices that would be much harder to erase. But, you know, the big things that I did in those first few months before I got serious about financial freedom was I bought a car. I bought a brand new, at the time, 2014 Toyota Corolla and financed it. And that was probably my biggest financial mistake, which I'm lucky to say that's

my biggest financial mistake because it's a corolla. Yeah, it's a nice, it's a nice mistake to make. But what I should have done is I probably should have waited another couple of months and taking public transit and then bought in cash just a 2004 carola, a 10-year-old model, and I'd probably be doing a little better today. So that was one decision. And the second one that I'd made that really that really helped me move forward was I lived in an apartment with a roommate, actually my college roommate. And just continuing to live with a roommate in an apartment, you know, I was able to spend like $550 per month, maybe $600 per month with utilities to live. And so that, you know, by doing that, you know, by doing that,

having an economy car, the corolla, and, you know, beginning to make lunches, I was able to start saving initially. And then over time, I was able to make changes that even that accelerated my savings rate to about a 50% rate. So what kind of changes did you make in your life to be able to save 50%? That's a nice savings rate. Yeah. So it took me, it took me a year to get up to that rate. And what I did was I started off by learning how to cook. Sounds simple, but for a 22, 23 year old guy who's, you know, never really cooked before. That was a challenge. I had to buy pots and pans. I had to go, I'd use a website called ladies crockpot.com or something like that. And so, you know, I eat a lot of a rugby player, you know, so I'm a little larger and, you know, I like to consider myself an athlete.

So I would make meal, family meals and eat them all myself or maybe have a little bit for lunch the next day. And so that was the first thing I did. And by just by doing that, I think I saved a ton of money. Again, the fact that I had made decision out of out the gate to pay $5.50 a month for my housing enabled me to come up big there. So I think it was, I'll have to look back at the number specifically at some point. But I think it's called $600 a month for housing and utilities. Let's call it $350 to $400 for food. And then another $300 to $400 for car for the car payments and insurance and all that stuff. You know, I'm looking at $12 to $1,300 a month and expenses. And then I have $700 that I'm blowing on fun, you know, drinking, drinking beer, having friends over,

you know, going downtown, that kind of stuff. And that was plenty of money to do that. Maybe the occasional, the ski pass would come in there and you average that out over the winter months. But I didn't take very many trips. I avoided, you know, a bunch of my friends from college went on a trip to, I think it was Cancun or one of the Bahamas. And I remember being like, no, I'm serious about financial freedom. I'll spend $20 in a case of beer to go downtown with my friends, but I'm not going to spend $1,000 to go to an island resort. And just by kind of consciously making those decisions,

avoiding big expenses and still having fun with a few hundred bucks a month, I was definitely able to, I was bringing home around 3,500 to $4,000 in after-tax pay. And so that was how it did. So what did you do with your money that you were saving? So, you know, I basically after I had about $2 to $3,000 in my savings account, I put everything else in index funds. And so this is where a lot of people get a little antsy because they're like, oh, you're not supposed to put your reserves, the cash you're accumulating into investments.

Otherwise, you might lose them and they might go down. You should have done Bitcoin. That's a way better investment. I would be way rich. I would be way rich right here if I had done Bitcoin. That's for sure. I'm going to jump in right here and just say, we're currently recording this at the end of December and I think Bitcoin crashed today, went down 25% or something. And there's kind of a whole

big spiel about how, you're not a fan of Bitcoin, are you? I do not believe that, I believe Bitcoin is a currency. So if you want to call currency speculation investing, you can. I'm not here to discredit people who have made money from it. But I think I certainly, I'm not touching it myself. I don't, I don't believe that Bitcoin is an investment that can reliably be expected to appreciate in value or generate cash flows. And that's my criteria for investment. Okay, I concur and I don't want to make this a Bitcoin podcast, so we're going to skip over that. I just think that's funny. So people, I would not recommend putting your money into Bitcoin while you're waiting for your investment. Okay, so my question was, where did you put your money while you were waiting? Did you know you

wanted to buy real estate? Actually, actually, that's not true. Let me go back into this and really dissect what I did in that first year more carefully, because it's been a couple years since I thought about this. What I did actually is I stockpiled that money in cash at the very beginning because my employer offered an employee stock purchase plan. So I could buy the stock of the company at 15% off. This is what I did. So I put that money in my bank account and I was like, shoot, you know, next quarter, I'm going to take a zero paycheck. I literally had paychecks of less than $100 for that quarter because I put all of my money into the employee stock purchase plan. And the way it worked is I could, you know, the paycheck goes in there. And at the end of the

quarter, let's, you know, let's call it 14 days after the end of the quarter, they buy company's stock and then they sell it. And then you can, you can sell it once you, once you own it at that same day. So I was basically arbitraging a 15% discount. So I think I put in like $5,300 or something like that into the employee stock purchase plan. And then I immediately sold it for like a $6,000, like $6,000. 100, I forget exactly what the numbers were, but like something like that and made my 15% return. And I was like, that's a guaranteed 15% return. Okay. That was the first thing I did with my, with my savings was I put myself in position to do that. And then, you know, that quarter kind of sucked because I didn't have, you know, I was running low. I was like waiting for the, the ESPP to come

through. You know, it was still, I just bought the car. So I was still kind of low on cash at that point. But then I got that huge boost. I had six grand. I was like, oh, I could last for years now. Exactly. Yeah. That's small tweak. That was it. You're right. That small tweak, that little thing allowed me to make a lot of extra money.

It got me used to, you know, being very careful with the money in that first quarter. And then, of course, I applied it again the next quarter, but then I had a big chunk to invest. And so I had, I put some of that money into investments in stock market and then kept a reserve that I dwindled again the following quarter. And then, of course, and this is in 2014. So, of course, by the end of the second quarter, I was looking for another job and got one at bigger pockets. So, see, I had, and so by the time I got through one full year of employment in September of 2014, between the ESPP, some side gigs, my savings rate and all that, I had accumulated roughly about $24,000 in cash. While making at your salary $48,000.

Yes, but remember, I was able to increase that because I was doing the ESP and I did a couple of side gigs. And ESPP is employee stock purchase plan. Yes. Okay. I just want to clarify for everybody who might have skipped over that. I skipped over that the first time you said that. Okay. So you have some money in stocks and some money in company stocks and then no money in company stocks because you sold it all.

Did you know that you were going to invest in real estate or were you just saving at a high rate? You had mentioned rich dad, poor dad, which is the number one real estate inspiration book. That's everybody's favorite book on the Bigger Pockets podcast. Did you know that real estate was your goal? Yes. So, you know, I had told you that Mr. Money Mustache was my, was the big thing. And I really kind of got into him in December and January of December 2013, January 2014. But, you know, after reading that for a little bit, one of the things that Mr. Money Mustash and a lot of the guys in the personal finance space talk a lot about is index fund investing.

And I think index fund investing is great. I'm a big fan of it. I just told you, I invest in index fund. with a lot of my excess cash. However, what I, what I kind of, when I boil it down, I was like, what is really killing my ability to save money at a high rate? What is really the thing that is, that is holding me back right now? Well, it's this rent.

You know, no matter what I do, I, in $600 is not a lot of money for a place like Denver to rent a room. No, that's nothing. If you could find a $600 a month apartment now, get it. But it's by far the biggest part of my expense. It was by far, biggest part of my expenses. And I was like, I got to eliminate this if I wanted, if I want to do this. How do I do this? And that's where I kind of turn to real estate investing.

You know, I think I discovered an article by Brandon Turner that was how to hack your housing and get paid to live for free. I think he published that in 2013 or early 2014. And that was the moment. Yeah, that was the moment I knew that I was going to get into real estate. And real estate is a side effect. I invest in real estate because I looked at real estate as a, as a way to eliminate my housing expense. But I knew going into that first house hack that I didn't want to be in that duplex or in that part of town or in an area or an investment property that would be a good house hack permanently. I knew it was a stepping stone to something else. So by definition, if you're going to use a house hack to eliminate your expenses and then intend to keep it as an asset,

you're going to be a real estate investor. And real estate investing makes a lot of sense in a lot of other ways. So my goal was never to become a full-time real estate investor, and it still is not to become a full-time real estate investor. My goal was to eliminate my housing expense and acquire stable cash-flowing assets one at a time over the years in a way that would help me accelerate rapidly towards financial freedom. Oh, I didn't know that you didn't want to be a full-time real estate investor. No, I even say this sometimes. I don't even like real estate. I talk about real estate all the time and I love talking about it. I love doing that. But if you told me, hey, here's a better way to create equity, to build wealth and to generate cash flow with your

money, I'm out. I'll go, I'll go do that one. Okay. I don't want to talk to you anymore. I like the income that real estate produces and the equity it builds, not the physical structure itself. If I can make that much money without having to deal with tenants and repair toilets and all that, I'm all in. You tell me. Okay. Well, that's interesting. I did not know that about you. I've been working with for like two and a half years. I didn't know that. I thought you loved real estate. I love real estate. I love the structure. I love the concept. I love, you know, all of that. But that's interesting. And I was just thinking, it's kind of hard to interview somebody when you basically know the answers. So this is,

this is great. We can go on this tangent. So you discovered real estate. How did you discover bigger pockets? Well, bigger. I mean, bigger pockets was already at the time, you know, they'll go to resource for real estate investing online, it was impossible to avoid. And, you know, after, after you read, let's say, you read Mr. Money Mustache or you read any of these bloggers that are there and any of these guys who have their whole philosophy put on paper, put on, and I guess it's not paper, in the internet, you know, you read all these posts that the outline becomes pretty clear. You save your money, you invest in index funds, you try to find ways to make marginal differences each month, and you accelerate and accelerate and accelerate in perpetuity.

Real estate is a little different. Real estate is where you can really put in a serious amount of education and reap benefits from that education. You know, there's, it's not like, hey, I'm just going to, you know, here's the practical way to decrease my lifestyle expenses and then invested index funds, right? Real estate, you can learn every bit about how to analyze deals, which neighborhoods in your market are there, which people in your market are good. How much, you know, there's, there's, you could spend a lifetime learning how to DIY,

do DIY construction projects. You can spend a lifetime learning how to, you know, learning ins and outs of various tenant law in various parts of the country. You know, there's just so much to learn. And so putting in that excess education, I believe, gives you a shot at earning outsized returns in real estate in a way it might not in other asset classes. So I became obsessed with the Bigger Pockets podcast. I must have listened to all at the time 100 or so episodes that were out.

Now there's 250. But, you know, I listened to all of them and began to feel more. increasingly confident by the time the end of 2014 came around and I made my first investment. Okay, you just threw a lot of stuff at us again. Yeah. I like real estate for the same but different reasons. I like you had said that you can do research and get a competitive advantage. I like real estate because I'm in control.

I am not in control of Enron the company. So when they go and do whatever monkey business they did that caused the whole company to crash, I have no control over that. I can't tell them to stop. I can't, you know, do any of that. So my preferred method of investing is real estate. And I will talk next week about mine, but I love the control that it gives me. I'm kind of a control freak.

So you mentioned an article by Brandon Turner called House Hacking, How to Hack Your Life and what was it called? How to hack your housing. You get paid to live for free. Okay. So let's talk about house hacking for people who don't know what this means. Tell me what this means. So house hacking is, again, I stated my goal was to live for free.

The way that you can do that with house hacking is, and I'll explain the concept of house hacking with my first duplex. So if you're following this story so far, I had just quit my job at the Fortune 500 company and moved to a job at bigger pockets. My role was still technically finance, so I was able to use my base income to help me qualify for a mortgage. And so I bought my first duplex in November of 2014, shortly after I had. I joined bigger pockets.

And by the way, I did not really get any benefit of working at bigger pockets when I bought that duplex because I just, I met someone on bigger pockets before I even joined the company. I just as a regular user. And that person brought the deal to me and all that. So this is not like I had some super secret advantage here in buying my first property. It was this was all done external to bigger pockets. My latest deal, I did get some advantage, but I'll get into that later. So my big thing is what's realistically repeatable for people and what's not is what I want, always want to try to convey.

So anyways, I get this duplex and it's a $240,000 duplex. And it's a foreclosure. So it's been, it's owned by Fannie Mae and being sold through a bank. Okay. Were there anybody, was anybody living in it at the time? No, it was completely vacant. So this is an ideal first property for me for a number of reasons. One, it was in an area of town that I had been networking with investors throughout town.

for months previously trying to get a feel. And I joined a mastermind group with these kind of other real estate entrepreneurs. Some of them who had, were just getting started like me and some of them had pretty reasonable businesses going, even big businesses. And they had told me this is a good area of town. So I knew going in, I knew what numbers kind of made sense for various properties and what part of town I wanted to be in. And when this property hit the market, I knew it was, I knew it was something I should go look at, or at least when it came to me from this agent, I knew it was something I should go look at. So I go and take a tour and I'm not sure whether I want to buy it at. I'm kind of having that analysis paralysis. I'm kind of, you know, scared. And so, but the, but the reason I was able to get it is

because for 30 days, it was only available to owner occupant, you know, only owner occupants were allowed to put bids on the property. I have that house too. Was it a, did you say Fannie Mae home path? Yep. So exactly, yeah. So this was great. I've definitely, if there are foreclosures, which there haven't in Denver for some time, you know, at least not very many, the Fannie Mae Home Path program can be a pretty good place to look if you're a house hacker because this was a duplex. So most owner occupants, you know, house hacking wasn't a thing. It's been around forever, but it wasn't like something that was very popular. So I was the only person in the city that offered on this property, even though it was a pretty good deal. And a lot of the investors I talked to said, yes, if that market property

comes in the market, I'm going to offer at that price. And so I had it all to myself for that first offer. Nobody else was able, no investor was able to offer on it and all the homeowners were interested in single families. So that's how I was able to kind of have that a couple of days to really get my offer through without having to face a lot of competition. So great opportunity for me to get into that first property. I think it's important to note that Fannie Mae is a government program that wants to put owner occupants in the homes. They don't, they will sell to investors, but they don't want to. they want to put regular people in homes. So for the first 30 days, they have this window where only owner occupants can bid on it. And then after 30 days, it's opened up to everybody if it hasn't

gone under contract yet. And then I believe there's an investor premium of $10,000 or something like that, where if you buy it as you have to state that you're going to live in it or not live in it. And if you're not going to live in it, you have to pay an extra $10,000, I guess for the privilege of buying it. I did not, I did not know that last part, but I think, that first part was exactly right. And so a part of the deal was, hey, you know, you're buying this property. You have to live in it for a year. You have to live in it for a year. And this is something that comes up on the bigger pockets forms frequently. It is mortgage fraud, which is a felony to say you're going to live in the property and then not actually live in the property. You have to claim this as your

primary residence. You have to live there. And people will ask, oh, well, what are they going to do? Are they going to drive by? Yeah, they might. Is it worth five years in jail to, get a property, no, it's not worth five years ago. This is a cheat code to life. It's a, it's a way to vastly expedite your financial position. You put down five percent on a Fannie Mae loan as an owner occupant. And I got a good deal on the property. You know, three and a half percent you can put down even less. And you get to have this enormous loan and ability to wipe out your housing expense, you know, with, with a principal, you know, a mortgage interest premium. But that advantage is pretty great. and the only trade-off is one year of living in the property.

That's a trade-off I'm willing to accept. That's like signing a lease. And the other thing is, while you're right, it's mortgage fraud. You know, this is not like you're condemning yourself to be in there for the whole year and you have no flexibility whatsoever. You know, if your mom gets sick or you get a new job or you got or something else comes up that's a legitimate emergency, you can move away. Yeah, they have reasons.

They have a couple of exceptions to their rule. But yeah, you do need. It's to keep people from jumping in during the owner occupancy or owner occupant period. If your intention is to defraud the system, you know, you're not doing it right. No, and I hope you get caught because you should just be honest in the way you deal with your life. So, okay, so quick, in case somebody's listening, it doesn't know what a duplex is. What is a duplex? Oh, it's just a two unit building.

So it's a house with living space. It's like a town home. Like two completely different spaces, but just stuck together. Yeah, with the same, usually with a shared wall. So this property was a side-by-side duplex. So instead of, as opposed to an up-down duplex, a lot of duplexes are converted homes that have a basement living area and an upstairs living area. This was a side-by-side.

Each side was about 700 square feet. It needed some work, but not work that a first-time guy getting into this couldn't handle. It was like painting, drywall, installing a vanity, caulking, you know, staining cabinets, that kind of stuff. And so I bought the place for $240,000. I brought $12,000 in cash, and I probably put another $8,000 into it over the course of a few months. And then after that, I was able to install a set of tenants in there that were paying $1,50 a month.

And my roommate paid me $5.50 a month. So if you're following the numbers, that's $1,700 per month in gross rent. And the mortgage was about $15.50. Now, there's expenses that come up and maintenance, but I'm basically eking out a free existence at that point. And that's great. That's a huge, you know, I was paying $600 a month before. That's, you know, that's, what, $7,200 per year. That's almost like a 55 or 60% return in just rent savings alone on my down payment. You know, if you call it, it's a, it's a, it's a, what, 35% return on that,

on a $20,000 in total of cash that I put in. So it was a great, great return. And that's just on the rent reduction. That's not even including the appreciation. And you're learning how to be a landlord without having like a 500 unit building. Yep. That's why house hacking, which I think is a cheat code that many people should consider if they're trying to achieve financial freedom, just logically kind of moves you into that space of where real estate investing is not very scary and can be approached with a lot more comfort.

It's like training wheels for real estate investing. So you said your mortgage payment was $1,500? $1,50, about, yeah. Okay. So that's principal interest, taxes, insurance, and the mortgage insurance. premium. Okay. So you could afford that comfortably on your salary if neither side was rented out and you were just the only person living in this whole building. Oh, yeah. So I, you know, this is, this is just fundamental to my philosophy and life and investing is, you know, my investments should always, always be something that can

help me, you know, increase my, you know, that will help me accelerate and improve my financial position. But they're never something that I should depend on solely. I should never depend solely on a single investment to determine my financial future. It's always going to be incrementally additive. So yes, I was not dependent on this investment working out in order to sustain my lifestyle and make that mortgage payment. Okay. And I think that's really important. It's not a good idea, in my opinion, to buy a house that you can't really afford, even when the lender says, oh, you can afford $5,000 a month in your payment. You're like, well, I'm really more comfortable with $1,500. Don't buy the house it's $5,000 because you're, you know, if you're planning on renting portions out and then for some

reason you can't, your bank still wants that mortgage payment every month on the first. So I think that's really important that you could afford this on your own and then you didn't have to. So now you're saving $600 a month in rent. You're just going out and partying every night. What are you doing with that money? I'm continuing to live my life in exactly the same manner as I had lived before, going out in the weekends, going skiing, having all the same stuff.

In fact, I probably relaxed my spending just a little bit, you know, just maybe had a little bit more fun. Although I did, I did remember, you know, I got really serious. I was like, I'm going to live this perfect life. I'm going to bike. I'm going to have the, I didn't have a dryer. So I just had a washer. I hug and dry my clothes outside, that kind of stuff. But I really just had fun on the weekends, went to the mountains to ski, played rugby, did exactly what I wanted to do that whole time.

I just happened to no longer be paying rent. And that was the big thing. I will point out that this house hack also, the reason I chose this area was because I thought it would appreciate, but also because it was within an easy bike ride of work, which is another thing that allowed me to save a lot of money. Oh, like Pete talked about last week with living closer to work so you don't have to have a car and insurance and gas and yada, yada, yada. And there's two ways to be able to bike, right?

You can move your home closer to work or you can move your work closer to home. And I did both. So part of the reason, really, part of the reason why I chose to work at bigger pockets, besides from the fact that I was a fan and loved it and thought it was a good opportunity, was because it was within biking distance of my first apartment. And part of the reason I chose this house hack was because it was within biking distance of my due job at bigger pockets. And that was definitely all intentional. So with my day-to-day life, my commute and my living, I'm not spending, I'm spending hardly anything.

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So what were you doing with your money after you've got the duplex and now you're living for free? You are saving money on your rent. What are you doing with that money? Sure. So the duplex purchase took pretty much the majority of my cash over this first few months. Because remember, I put in 20 grand into 12 down, probably another eight into it. And I'm paying the mortgage without much rent help. So I'm pretty low on cash, maybe like down to like five or 10 grand at the point where I get my first set of tenants.

So that first year, what's called 2015, was really spent, I just allowed my rent to stockpile in a reserve account. And I built that out to about 20 grand before I started taking, you know, I just built up that reserve with my savings over that before I started really thinking about investing elsewhere. I don't think that reserve was as necessary for my personal life. But once you have an investment property, you're now running a business. And a business needs capital and cash and cash in it to make sure that it. survives any problems. Right. What if you get this like Murphy's Law kind of perfect storm thing going on and you

have problems with your water heater and problems with your plumbing and problems with your electrical and problems with your furnace and problems with your roof? And you can't afford all that if you have no money. Yep. So my goal in life that year was basically how do I, I'm going to work hard at my job, keep my expenses low, still have fun, but I'm going to build that up to that 20 grand in my emergency reserve. And then I had some a little bit of extra cash. After after I got back up there, I began putting my money back into my Scott trade account and investing in index funds. So I think I had three. Yeah, of course. I'm Scott. So I had like three to five in personal cash, 20 for my business. And then I began building up my next reserve there. Okay. So I know that

you have more than one property. When did you start looking for your next property? How long did it take you to find and when did you move out? You did fulfill that one year of owner occupancy requirement, correct? Yeah. So the next property was purchased in March or April of 2016, so almost 15 months later. Okay. And if I closed on the property in November 2014. And so that one was an up-down duplex. Probably wasn't the best deal. I got on the MLS, but it's a nice place to live. It's an up-down duplex. I live in the basement. It's got a, it's in a really good spot that is pretty speculative. And so that place overlooks a light rail station that goes to downtown. It's also got a bike trail, which I often use to get to work.

And it's got a nice garage for a man cave. I can throw events there with my rugby buddies and all that kind of stuff. We play ping pong in the garage and all that kind of stuff. So it's just a great kind of lifestyle investment. And the upstairs pays, I think, 1575 on a $2,000 mortgage. So doing pretty good there. But it's not the cash. It's not quite as good as it.

investment as that first property was. So I think that it'll probably when I move out rent for like $1,200 in the basement, $1,500 upstairs, and the mortgage is about $2,000. So not quite, you know, I'll probably break even on a cash flow basis on this property after all the expenses are accounted for, as opposed to my other property, which now produces about $2,600 a month in rents on a $1,400 mortgage. So that's, so that's the difference there. And in the last, the most recent, property was actually a fourplex. Me and a partner each bought about 50K, 45K to, for the down payment. We put down to 90K and bought this $355,000 quadplex. The quadplex rents for about $3,200 a month or did at the time we purchased it. And the mortgage was about $1,700 per month. So I can go to the

rest of the numbers there. But yeah, we got a good deal there. We did as though, is we bought a property that had some problems. So there's a tenant being evicted at the time. There's a guy living in the crawl space. There was a murder on the property a few months before we bought it. This guy was selling because he had problems with his tenants. And we have a problem tenant. I do not believe anybody's gang related that's currently living in the property. Like I believe the murder was gang related and those tenants are out. Okay. You know, we are having some issues and that is part of the process of getting a good deal. Now I think I'm a real estate investor or at least a fledgling real estate investor as opposed to a house hacker who's kind of cheating to acquire properties.

You know, now I'm buying deals that have value add that I need and I need to come into the table, solve problems. And I will solve these problems and make sure that property is stable and not taken up any of my time. And over the course of the next year as we as leases renew and all that kind of stuff comes up. Okay. First of all, it's not cheating to house hack.

Don't say that. I love, I love calling it cheating. It's a cheat code. You're cheating expenses, but you're not cheating as a real estate investor. I mean, like let's suppose. you make 50K a year, right? You know, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you're able to wipe out your living expense, even at my level, six thousand, six hundred dollars a month, that's seventy two hundred dollars and

saved rent per year, right? That's probably eight, what about 20%? Maybe 10, 15 to 20% of percent of your aftertax take home pay, right? You're going to get a 30% raise in order. In order, that's that's that's unrealistic for your, you know, and then, And then you're adding in a, if you're working on the property and improving it, you can increase your equity. You're paying down the mortgage, which is another couple grand. You know, this, it's a cheat code. There's, there's no other way to describe it.

It's, you know, you have to start a business that would produce $10,000 or more per year. In your free time, it's even come close to the benefits of house hacking. It's, you know, it's, it, there's, there's really no way to make up for the advantage without some sort of herculean effort on the income front. that is a really good way to look at it. And I want to say, I want to point out that you had said that now you own a business, now that you're a landlord, you own a business. And you really do have to treat this like a business.

But think about starting your own business. What do you need to do? You need to come up with like a billion things. You need to have a product or a service. You need to, you know, starting a business is really, really hard. So or you could just- Generating revenue is really hard. Okay.

Well, yeah. You can just say, oh, I've got a business now. And then, yeah. I started a lot of businesses that have generated no revenue. Okay. They didn't go bankrupt. They just did nothing because there was no revenue and no expense. Okay, let's not delve too far into economic terms.

So you have eight units, seven of which you're renting out. What is your biggest hurdle with all of this? You mentioned that you had a murder in one of your units. Somebody was living in the crawl space. Is that not a legal unit? That's just somebody living in some little like someone, yeah, broke into the crawl space and was apparently living there for a couple months before I own the property, not while I owned it.

So I just put a lock on that. But you say the biggest hurdle, you know, my biggest hurdle is I have a set of inherited tenants that are a little bit of a pain right now. And it's not that big of a hurdle. It's like maybe I get a phone call once every couple months about some sort of misbehavior from them. They parked the car on the front lawn, which drives me nuts. There's like so many parking spots in front of the house. It's like perfectly legal street parking. It's completely empty. And there's their car not only parked on the front lawn, but parked in front of another tenant's

door. It's like there's also in addition to the fact that there's just there's perfectly legal street parking right in front of like six feet away from where they parked their car with nobody in it. There's also reserved parking in a little section with concrete that they could park on and they don't park there. So I'm just like, I'm just like, what is it going on? They had a bond there's just a bunch of little things that drive me nuts. But that's my biggest hurdle. It's not really a big hurdle. No, that's not. That's pretty easy. And the reason for that is because I come into this with a strong financial position. I self-educated a lot. So I've learned from other investors' mistakes, which I think have allowed me to avoid making some mistakes of my own.

And then I'd like to think of myself as a pretty reasonable guy. You know, if someone's a problem or something like that, I'm going to try to work out a solution for them rather than, you know, strictly enforced my lease on certain terms. You know, like, hey, like, for example, I have a problem with the trash at the property. And one of the tenants was having a little trouble paying the rent. He's never been late, but he's like, hey, what can I do to get a break? I was like, well, hey, if you can get rid of all the trash for me at the property, well, in the time, in between now and when I get the garbage beans from the city, I'll pay you, I think it was like 25 bucks a week. And he was like,

Great, yes, I'll do that. And I don't have to go there and pick up trash for my property now, which doesn't sound very appealing to me on a Tuesday afternoon. And he gets a little break on rent, like about $100. And it's helping me solve a temporary property. It's like that kind of stuff. If I can just be reasonable with certain things and work with people, I'm able to avoid problems. My real estate business should provide me with passive income so I can put my best energies into my job here at Bigger Pockets and producing content on financial freedom. So what is next for you? Are you looking for more? real estate, are you looking to branch out in your real estate investing? You mentioned passive

multiple times. I have become, since I can't find any deals, I have become a private lender. And I am the money side. I'm the bank for other investors. Do you have any interest in something like that or do you have any other ideas? Well, well, before I do want to talk about that, but before I get to that, I would like to point out something that has been underlying all of this that hasn't been brought up yet, which is my income, my earned income. Oh, okay. So I'm going to say right here, I actually work with you and you're not supposed to talk with your with your coworkers about income. So I didn't want to talk about that. Well, I won't talk specifically about it, but I'll talk generally about it because I've said this before publicly, you know, on this kind of stuff. I, when I started, I was making 48K a year.

And I lost some of the income potential I could have had with an impending promotion at my first job to join bigger pockets, which at the time was a startup. right because I had saved up all this money I just come off my second ESP and had had been lumping up some extra cash you know I coming into this new job with about 18 15 to 18 grand which is enough for me to feel very confident about going into a job that was less certain it was instead of a fortune 500 company going to a two person startup is a big difference I perceived opportunity at Baker Pockets and I loved the prospect of working here right And that decision did not pay off at first, but it paid off big time over the course of the, you know, the first three months, it paid off immediately because I enjoyed my work and loved my life and was proud of what I was doing. But financially speaking, it didn't pay off for the first six months or so. And then after that, it really began to because I was, I was in charge of sales for advertising. And because I was in charge of sales for advertising, I was able to earn commissions and grow the advertising sales of the company. and I was able to do that. I'll briefly outline how I do that in three quick steps.

So first, we increased our audience. More audience means you can sell more advertising, right? Second, I was able to teach advertisers how to put together more effective ads. So at first, they were not really good at advertising, but I learned my audience and I studied what was happening. I was able to get them really effective ads. So when you read the newsletter or listen to the podcast, you know, these are ads that we've designed that are useful to the audience and designed to help produce a good return. for our advertisers and hopefully hook up the users and listeners with good products. And then the other thing I was able to do is increase the amount of inventory that we had so that bigger pockets was able to sell more advertising.

And so because of those things, I was able to increase my income. And that is what has helped me accelerate towards owning these current real estate investments and having a lot of liquidity to make future investments at the present time. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense. Were you asked to do this or did you ask to do this? Well, that's the beauty of joining a small company and startup is more risk, more opportunity, right? And so that was that was something that I weighed and I was able to take advantage of that. And that's may not. And hey, you know, when you start out saving money, it's a guarantee. You don't spend $10 at a beer at the ballpark. You guarantee yourself to be $10 richer. When it comes to earning more income, it's hard work. You're going to have to work harder and longer and smarter than you're used to. But you have the potential for to earn more. more. And a cost of that is going to be the stability of a high base pay at a, at a,

well, you know, a very stable company. I think it's important to point out that you were, what, 23, 24 when you started with bigger pockets. So, and you're not married. You don't have any children. So you've got nothing holding you back. You're not, nobody's dependent on you. It's, it's, it's, you don't have this huge mortgage payment because you're currently renting. That's the time to take the risk. Yes. Yes. It's a lot, it's a lot easier. You could have worked at McDonald's and paid all your bills while you were looking for another analyst job when Bigger Pockets didn't work out. Absolutely. And that's exactly right.

And the reason for that is I had accumulated a lot of cash and felt like I could last a very long time, even if things didn't work out. And of course, I got to Bigger Pockets and I quickly learned that we were in great financial shape and the business is booming. And we ended up hiring a lot more people and going off to the races, which certainly was a big boost to my career. But the point is that is something that people ignore because it's really difficult for a median income earn significantly more money within just a few years unless they change and go into a job that is less certain. And the way you can kind of get yourself convinced to do that is if you have this stockpile of cash relative to your expenses.

So for example, if you're married with kids and you spend 60K a year, you know, unlike me with 18 to 20K, you'd probably need $60,000 or $70,000 to feel comfortable. comfortable with a similar decision. Right, right. That's a good point. So with great risk comes great reward. But I just want to throw that in there because that is what I'm really working on with my best efforts throughout this entire time period where I go from accumulated my first house hack

to my third one. Is there really going to how do I produce great results that are scalable for my company that I work for and love and for myself? So what are you doing now? What's next on the horizon for you investment-wise? So investment wise, I plan to continue to create and buy assets. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to continue to save aggressively. I still spend very little. I'm a little bit more willing to go out for wings and stuff on Friday night now. But I'm going to continue to save pretty much exactly what I've always say, you know, spend exactly what I've always spent and, you know, earn a good income. And then plow that money into one real estate investment every 12 to 18 months here in Denver. do that a little sooner. I'm thinking about buying a triplexer quad in a nice neighborhood. That's a little closer to work and more convenient in the next six to eight months here. So that may happen. And then if I

have excess cash after that, I'll continue to hope to buy one property every 12 to 18 months in Denver, but I may also buy properties out of market. You know, if I can, if I continue to, if I'm able to execute my Denver plan, kind of dollar cost averaging here in Denver, then I might try my hand some alternative investments elsewhere or like lending private money or whatever is opportunistically a good a good bet for me at that time okay when you say out of market do you mean out of the Denver market or off market not found on the MLS yes I mean this this gets into the my real estate investing philosophy but what I say out of market I mean somewhere that's not Denver okay my core principle my core philosophy what I've started with what I'm trying to sustain

is regular periodic investments in a Denver market in state and properties that I can stabilize and manage myself because I believe long term in this market. But I also don't want to overextend in this market. So if I have extra cash beyond what I was expecting, I'm going to put that somewhere else and begin to diversify. Okay. Ooh, diversify. That's a really good word. A couple of seconds ago, you said dollar cost averaging. What does that mean for people who aren't familiar with that term? Sure. So dollar cost averaging, most people when they go to invest are not like, oh, I have 100 grand sitting around to the bank and I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm going to dump it into the stock market.

Instead, what most people do is they're like, oh, I'm saving $500 to $1,000 a month. I'm going to put that into the stock market and invest it. So if you're doing that, that's called, you know, you're really a dollar cost averaging. You're buying a bit of stock, small amounts consistently over a period of time. And what that does for you is it ensures that you're more likely to get the average return of whatever you're investing in, right? So you're not going to invest all your money at the top. You're not going to invest all your money at the bottom. You're going to invest some when the price is high, some when the price is low, and you're going to get close to the growth rate of whatever you're

investing is in overtime. Sure. Sure. That makes sense. And so I'm trying to just repeat that formula with real estate investing. And what's kind of great about it, especially if you're a house hacker, is you can kind of leapfrog. So like, you know, I've been house hacking for a while, which allowed to be put down very little amounts of money for my down payments and stockpile a lot of cash. I was able to put down a lot of cash on this last property. But in my next property, I can house hack again and put down a very small amount of cash so that next year I'll have even more to put down for a bigger property. That is not a house hack. Does that make sense? So it's kind of. Yeah. So what size property are you looking at? You bought a duplex, a duplex, a

fourplex. Are you going bigger? So I think it's probably still going to be a residential, which would be a three to four, you know, in my case, a triplex or quadplex. But I'm going to buy in a nicer area. in a place that generates more cash flow. When I say size, I'm referring to the amount of income I can generate relative to my investment or the quality of the property I can get relative to my investment. So, you know, it's the difference between a $300,000 or $400,000 quadplex and an $800,000 quadplex

may not be very significant. Like the structure may be the same, but the location and the income they generate as a result may be very different. So I'm looking probably in that four to six or $700,000 range for my next investment that I'm going to house hack, so a bigger house hack. And then I'll, you know, I'll probably look for a similar sized investment to try to put down 25% maybe on my own, maybe with a partner in two years.

Nice. So. Okay. Well, this has been very informative, Scott. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day. This is your job. Yes. I'm very lucky to get to do this for a living.

Yes. Okay, it is time for the new famous four. Are you ready, Scott? I'm ready. What is your favorite finance book? My favorite finance book. Hmm. My favorite finance book is the millionaire next door.

Oh, such a good book. One of the things, you know, that was really disappointing because I believe the author died. I think he was killed by a drunk driver just a couple of years ago. And I was like, I always really wanted to meet him because what he did is he did the data behind all of this. You know, he went and interviewed millionaires, dozens of them, maybe hundreds of them. He conducted studies. He has, this is, he gives you the data behind exactly what America's millionaires have did back in, what is that? I think it was written in like 70s or 80s, in the 90s.

But he went and found out what they did, who they were, how they lived, and what we kind of understand today, but he was the pioneer in that field. And it's just really fascinating. look at what what these folks do. You know, two-thirds of them are our business owners, right? They are self-employed, right? They are in high incomes. They live in expensive houses, but they don't live expensive lifestyles. They live in nice neighborhoods, but not in new houses, right? You know, you talk about how they pass wealth onto the next generation and what their outlook is, what the effects of all that stuff is. It's just a fascinating, data-driven book into who the millionaires are. And the sequel, The Millionaire Mind is also a pretty good one.

Yeah. I have not read Millionaire Mind, but The Millionaire Next Door is a must. If you don't have a book to read right now, pick up a copy of the millionaire next door. Do you remember what the number one car is for millionaires? The number one vehicle that millionaires drive? A Ford F-150. Really?

Nice. Oh, maybe it's a Ford F-250. No, probably not a new one. Eight years old, I think, was the average. Oh, wow. Yeah. Speaking of cars, what was your biggest money mistake? Yeah.

So, yeah, that was probably, well, so I have two money mistakes that I want to talk about. One is I get a little tunnel vision sometimes, and I dismiss the idea of travel hacking and credit card hacking and all that kind of stuff. And so I just recently dived into this world. It's like while you're spending your normal amount of dollars, if you're just type of person like me who's going to spend money on a credit card and then pay off the balance in full every month and be very responsible and track your finances, you can sign up for these credit cards and you get to the $2,000 or $3,000 spending limit in the first couple of months. You do it when you have an expense come up, like your car insurance or whatever.

And you hit the spending limit. You get like 50,000 miles or points that you can use for travel miles. And so I just did this for my first ever credit card. I got the 50,000 miles. And it's like, why was I do this before? It's like $600 in free travel. I got friends all over the country that are getting married over the next year. I need the travel points.

I'm going to continue doing this in the future. So I don't know why I dismissed that. I just thought, oh, I'm going to use one credit card and do that. But that was a mistake. And then the other one was the car. I should have probably, you know, Mr. Money Mustache has a great article on cars where he talks about cars in terms of inventory. And it's like, you know, bigger pockets is a business. We have books that we sell.

We would not go out and print off 20 years of books. No. That would be a bad idea. That would be a ridiculous investment. It would have way too much inventory. You buy as much inventory as you need to sustain your operating needs for a reasonable number of amount of time ago from there. Well, my Toyota Corolla is a really good, a good, stable, long-lasting car. It's going to last probably 20 years.

So I just bought 20 years of car inventory with my corolla. And again, this article, I forget which one it is, but it's by Mr. My Mustache. So crediting him with this concept, you know, if you buy an older car, 10, 15 years old, you're still going to have five to 10 years of inventory. in that car, which is plenty. So don't buy as much inventory as I did in your vehicle. Buy something that meets your needs more realistically and is better, you know, allow you to deploy that cash that you had invested in that in something that can produce more investments.

I could have invested the difference between the $17,000 I paid for my car and the $6,000 I might have paid for a 10-year-older model. So I want to illustrate this in a slightly different way. I totally agree with that. The two cars that I have, well, I have three cars right now, Two of them I bought brand new, and they're the only two cars they've ever purchased brand new. And this was before I had discovered this whole financial independence thing. But we had a friend who had a 1991 Accura Integra, just like a plain old seats for people,

hatchback, whatever car. And he was getting rid of it because he wanted to buy a new car. We said, well, how much do you want for it? He said, $2,500. Great. Sold. I know this guy. I know he takes meticulous care of his car.

People are always complaining, oh, I don't want to buy somebody else's problems. I'm never going to get a used car. You're not necessarily buying somebody else's problems. If you know the person or if you can have it checked out by somebody, you can get a good quality vehicle for a whole lot less money. $2,500. I drove it for $100,000 miles and then sold it for $1,500 when I was done. Yeah.

And I think it comes out of self-education there. You did your homework. You do the guy. You do the car, right? Yeah. And it was a great little car. I mean, it had some problems. But Accura makes a good.

car. Okay, sorry. Yeah, but if you're willing to self-educate, you know, you can, you can go through these things with much less risk. You know, if you don't know anything about cars and you're just going to buy something off Craigslist without ever meeting a guy, you know, you put yourself at risk unnecessarily. Yes. If you're able to do your homework and inspect it and have this insight, you can do really well. And that's the way that I would go in the future. In 20 years when I buy my next car, I'm going to do exactly what you do. In 20 years, all the cars will drive themselves. Yeah, that's probably true also. Okay. What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out?

Get to a 50% savings rate. Whatever you got to do, spend a year to however long you need to to get to a 50% savings rate. If you get to a 50% savings rate, everything starts to fall into place really quickly. You're going to accumulate by definition and 50% of your after tax take home pay. So if you can achieve that, you're going to start to see, again, advantage is piling up. your credit score is going to improve or you're paying any attention at all to your debts. You're going to have the flexibility to leave your job for a year or more. You're going to have to start a business, to travel the world, to do whatever you want. Just the ties that are holding you in place in life will begin to melt away.

That's good advice. What is your favorite joke to tell at parties? All right. I can't, I can't remember. This is your question. This is your question. I've tried to come up with one that I haven't told already. So here, I'm wearing one right.

Oh, this isn't really a joke. The microphone's in the way. So my shirt says, my shirt has a picture of a rock saying to a ruler, You rule. And the ruler saying to the rock, you rock. So I like that one. I like pretty t-shirts. Now what happened when the blue ship collided with the red ship?

I don't know. Both of the crews were marooned. Oh. Okay. So we sat around talking about when Scott and I were. getting the concept for this podcast and we wanted to do the famous for this is the new famous for and this was scott's joke what is your favorite joke to or this is scott's question what is your favorite joke to tell a parties scott is the king of bad dad jokes i think that's a what's the

opposite of oxymoron double statement yep that's a double i'm the king of good dad jokes no you're there's no such thing as a good dad joke you're the king of bad dad jokes a pirate walks into a bar Oh, God. And he's got a roll of paper towels in his head. And he says to the bartender, you're, I've got a bounty on me head. Oh, I quit you. I'm going to turn this off. Okay, Scott, where can people find more out about you?

I'm on bigger pockets. Slick me up on bigger pockets. I'm pretty responsive if you message me or PM me there. So I like to talk to people. If you're in Denver, I'll probably ask you to meet me for coffee one morning before work because I like to meet as many people as possible. And just make sure I'm absorbing perspectives so that I can be helpful to as many people as possible and adjust my approach accordingly when I get new information and perspectives.

Awesome. Well, Scott, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day. You don't do anything, right? To talk to us and share with us your views on life and finances. Okay, Scott, I'm going to get out of here. Thank you very much. And I will talk to you soon. Awesome.

Sounds good. Thanks for having me on. It's your guest. So, huge thanks to our guest, Scott, Trend. the director of operations and author of Set for Life, dominate life, money, and the American Dream, available at biggerpockets.com and wherever good, books are sold.

For the Bigger Pockets Money Show, episode two, this is Mindy Jensen, over and out.