BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 25: Raising a Family While Seeking Financial Freedom with Chris and Debbie Emick

Episode Date: June 18, 2018

Chris and Debbie Emick have two daughters—AND are well on their way to financial independence through a combination of local and long distance real estate investing coupled with frugality and conscious spending. Chris and Debbie are everyday Joes... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money Podcasts show number 25. Big thing I noticed as a mom, the shift is before we were just hurrying to get out the door. And then when we got home, we were hurrying to get ready to go to whatever sport or activity or meeting or whatever we had after work. And then we're hurrying to get all the homework done and get baths done and get in bed and all of that stuff. And that's just not our reality anymore. I mean, that was a priority too. We were tired of that hustle and bustle. and the word busy, we just decided we didn't want to use the word busy anymore.

And so this has really helped with that. The pace is as fast or as slow as we want it to be. And so that feels like freedom. 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. How's it going, everybody? I'm Scott Trench. I'm here with my co-host, Miss Mindy Jensen. How are you doing today, Mindy? Scott, I am doing really great today. I am having just a really awesome day. It's beautiful weather outside.

I really like it when it's nice and sunny. We've had some rain lately, so it's been nice to see the sun for a while. The temperature's heating up, so it's nice to be able to go to the pool with my girlies. How are you today? I am doing fantastic. I drove today, but I've been biking the rest of the week.

though, had a meeting across town. But other than that, things are going good. I'm so excited that we finally have what I think is one of the best examples of how to approach financial freedom from starting in a position where you already have a family and maybe a lifestyle locked in, and then make the shift to kind of aggressively pursuing financial independence. We found our today's guests, Chris and Debbie, through one of our old podcast. We sent on a call to you, the listeners, asking for folks that have a story about how they began a approaching financial independence with a family and began making the hard shift towards that. And Chris and Debbie kind of embody a lot of really good qualities and mindset shift.

And then, of course, the production of incredible results after that mindset shift. So I'm very excited to hear from them today. I think it's going to be one of the better shows that we've had. Yes, I am so happy they reached out to us back on show 17. We asked for people who had families to come on and tell their story. And it has been a bit of a struggle to find the right family to talk to. I found a couple of families we're going to have more of these interviews. So you can see that this is possible while having a family, already having a family,

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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. All right, Chris and Debbie, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. Thank you so much for coming on today. How's it going? Good. Thanks for having us. We're excited.

It's going great. Scott and Mindy, really excited to be here. We are really excited to have you. So Scott and I were recording a show a few weeks ago. And we asked for families to contact us that are pursuing financial independence. We heard a lot of people saying, hey, it's great that this single person or this couple was able to reach financial independence. But we'd like to hear from a family perspective. How did a family do it?

Or what are they doing on their path? You know, how are they cutting out this expense or that thing? So we would like to hear about your story. This is how we found you. You heard our call. You sent me a note. And I really, really like your story. So how did you get started on the.

personal finance journey, the financial independence trip that you're now on? Well, you know, we are a couple of people that came together and chances of two people coming together that have the exact same mindset and habits with money are pretty unlikely. And so we are that normal story. We were completely opposite. Chris has always been sort of natural saver and wanting to save money and keep as much as he can. and I grew up with a whole other experience with money, some financial insecurity that made me feel a little powerless with money. And so I always set the bar low with money. I didn't aim high or think I could make a lot of money.

I just thought I would get by. And so I graduated college with some student loan debt, about 24,000 in student loan debt, about 5,000 in credit card debt. I had a car, so I had a car payment. I was a single teacher. And so I was trying to pay rent and a car payment. and start paying my student loans back and pay credit card debt.

And it was really hard. And so that was maybe my first aha that it was like, yeah, I don't need to earn a lot of money, but I need to earn enough to pay the bills. And then Chris and I got married. And he was as far opposite of that as he could be, where it was like save every penny that you can save. And so that's how our marriage really began. And we've slowly worked closer towards each other to where we're now, you know,

at a good place where we've had lots of budget conversation. lots of talk about priorities and what we value as a couple and as a family and where we need to spend our money. And so anyway, to get a little farther ahead in the story, I had taught for a long time. And we were always the kind of couple that was like, you know, traditional. Let's work really hard. We'll save our money. We'll retire on these good pensions. And then we'll really live it up. We'll live our life. And so I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that caused some significant health problems. And so first, we weren't really going towards financial freedom, but we looked at our budget and we thought we could make it work, reprioritize and I can stay home

with the kids. And I don't need the added stress from my stressful job that was adding to the health problems. And from there, we just kept adding more and more freedom into our lives, which meant, you know, a lot of things like freedom with food. We were growing a garden and freedom with our kids' education. We started homeschooling, and eventually this topic of financial independence came up. So I don't know if you want to take over from there, Chris, or? Sure, yeah. And like Debbie was saying, you know, saving always came natural to me. I was very close with my grandmother growing up, and she was a child of the Great Depression. So she taught me that that kind of fear-based mindset of, look, you don't spend your money, you know, you keep it and you

keep it because there's always that day where something bad could happen. So, so that part of me just came, it came naturally to me. Like I can remember back to Halloween as a kid, me and my two brothers, you know, we'd go out trick or treating. They'd come home and they, you know, by two days later, all their candy would be gone. And I would still have candy like seven or eight months later. I always just thought, oh, I got to save for this rainy day, you know, never know when, when a candy crisis might, you know, crop up. And I'm going to need to have, have all this candy like that. So, never know.

Yeah. And then, you know, I go to college and I was on track to be computer scientist, software engineer. And the main spur to that was I enjoyed computers and I knew it was going to be a hot career and I could make a lot of money. And, you know, that's what I needed. Well, I graduated right around the time where the dot-com burst happened and it was real tough to get a job.

So then I was like, oh, then I kind of felt defeated by that. Like, oh, maybe I won't ever be able to get to a position where I can make the kind of money I had been promising myself and all that kind of stuff. And so then we moved to rural Colorado at that time. And we both had, you know, modest job in our early 20s making, you know, she made around 30,000. I made around 30,000, you know, nothing, nothing crazy. And at that time, we weren't really saving a lot. But we easily could pay our bills and we were chipping away at student loan debt and got into a house and we're always kind of used that extra money to pay down the mortgage. Because that was, again, one of those philosophies of like, you just debt was evil, you know, get rid of debt.

fast, fast, fast. And so we just got rid of all of our debt. And then we started to have the children. And I got into technology. And so then my career, you know, started picking up. You know, I wasn't, I didn't go from 30,000 to 100,000 overnight. But, you know, over 10, 12, 15 years, it started to get there. And when Debbie did get that autoimmune disease and we had our second child and she's like, Chris, I'd really love to stay home. And again, I just had that fear-based mindset of like, look, if you just work another 15 years, your pension will pay you this much money. And if I work another 20 years, my pension and my 401k will be worth all this. You know, so it's just that limiting belief that money is this finite resource and we have to hoard it and collect it.

And when we're 60 or 70, that's when we get to reap the rewards of that kind of thing. Well, in comes that decision that, okay, Debbie does need to stay home. How can we do this? You know, how can we budget? How can we understand how much we spend? And so that's what we did. We started using a program called Wynab. You need a budget to just start tracking our money. Because at that time, we were still saving, but it was like as long as we saved, we were good. What year was this when this happened? So we talked about a timeline. It sounds like 10 years or so between graduation of college, getting married, all that kind of stuff. And then this focal point of transitioning because of the diagnosis into an approach to fire. When was that?

It was about 2014. I think I got sick and I worked for several years after. And then it just makes it really real. It's a reality for everyone, you know, like I might not even be around to enjoy my retirement by the time I'm 60. So why wait till then? And so that reality, whether you have an autoimmune disease or not, it's like, why wait for life until someone tells you, yeah, now you can retire.

Now you can get all this money that you've been safe. all this time. So that was 2014 when I actually quit, you know, being a teacher, we had that conversation about a year beforehand because of contracts and all of that stuff. That's great. So as soon as you decided this, what was your position at that point and what did you change in order to make this work? What were the kind of lifestyle and adjustments you guys had to make in order to kind of realize your objectives here? Right. I think the first thing was we didn't really have any aspirations of let's find additional ways to make more money. It was more of let's find ways to cut so that we can take this much money that I earned from my W2 job and pay all the

necessary things. And still at this time, so we're pre real estate investing or pre, you know, anything other than funding 401ks and IRAs with that long term mindset. So the position we took then was, okay, let me whip out some spreadsheets. Let's try this Wynab thing and let's start tracking our spending to see what a normal month to month looks like. We were kind of used to the tracking concept because, again, with Deb's disease, we got real mindful about what we were putting in our bodies. So we started tracking better what we're eating. Like, are we eating out this much? Or are we, what kind of food are we eating and all that kind of stuff? So the budgeting part was just kind of similar to that. It was like, hey, just make tiny bits of time every day and let's keep track

of what it did. So we found out our number. Here's our number that we're spending now. You know, I kind of played with the numbers a little bit added here, took away here. And it was like, okay, yeah, this is actually doable, surprisingly enough. And lo and behold, we can still pay down our mortgage. We can still save for the IRA. We can still put in my 401K, you know, I helped the amount and all that kind of stuff. And so then it was just that, that, that aha moment of, whoa, you know, because 2014 might have been when Debbie stopped working, but in 2005 when our first daughter was born, she was like hinting like, hey, Chris, you know, it'd kind of be nice if I could stay home with our, you know, this new baby we just had for a couple of years. I was like, oh, yeah,

that's, that's sweet now. Could you please go back to work and let's, let's earn some more money, you know, so. Well, let me just say a couple things here because Chris really acts like that was when we started budgeting, but he is like a spreadsheet master and really budgeted, but it was more like him looking over. I mean, we, we use credit cards wisely. We always pay them off, but we use them for points. So he's always done that kind of thing. And so each month he would sit down and analyze the credit card bill and be like, what was this? Why did you spend money on this? What's this? Or look at the bank statement. And so that it really wasn't beyond the scope. We had, you know, budgeted before. It was just that this was the most we had ever

budgeted. Every penny out, every penny in. And over time, he kept getting raises and really in a teaching position, I never got raises. But we had really increased our income quite a bit. And when we increased our income, we would really never increase our spending. So we always lived off of what we made when we first got married for the most part. But right before I quit teaching, we kind of got relaxed. And that was, we were making quite a bit of money and we weren't paying so much attention to what we were spending. And so that's when we went with why now. But I remember early in our marriage, a conversation that Chris and I had where he was like, wouldn't it be fun this month to just like live off the pantry food and try to spend only $100 on groceries.

And I was like, no, that doesn't even sound fun at all. You know, so he's always been, he's always been pretty good with that. It was just that we started budgeting every single cent and finding, oh, it actually would work just fine. We wouldn't have to do that much to make sure I could stay home. I'm married to Chris too. Every single thing you're telling me. I'm like, yep, that's my husband, that's my husband, that's my husband.

and that's my husband. I think that sounds like great fun. Yeah. You didn't tell about the time when I went to the electric box and turned off all the breakers too. And it's like, let's see what a day without electricity is like. Oh, no. Don't you work with computers? Lots of candles and board games.

Yeah, don't you work with computers? How do you do computers with no electricity? It was on a weekend. Oh, okay. Yeah, my husband would never turn off all the electricity because then he couldn't get to his stuff. So in that aspect, you're different. But, okay, so one thing different than my husband. There we go. So you hit on a bunch of points, but some of these that I really, really like is why wait for life? And then Chris said, we tracked our spending and figured out that this really is possible.

And that's something that I don't think people who are not in this mindset really even understand that this is possible. It's not that hard. I mean, yes, if you're making $10,000 a year, it's going to be a little bit harder than if you're making $100,000 a year. But this is absolutely possible. And why wait for life? Why wait until you're 60 to enjoy your retirement when you can do it by making these small tweaks into your lifestyle and into your spending right now? Have a let's shop out of the pantry month. See how many things you can eat out of the pantry.

I have way too much food. I'm a bit of a hoarder and I'm trying to get over my stuff. but I hoard food. And I've never been food insecure, so I don't even know why I do it. I need help. So I'm trying to get rid of everything in my pantry. And that's like in the next couple of months. That's all we're doing is going to the pantry and eating everything in the pantry.

I completely agree. I think if anyone proves it, it's your Bigger Pockets Money Show, because I was doing my homework to be on the show. And we've always listened to Bigger Pockets, like getting into real estate and everything. And now your show coming along. Like, your show proves that you can do it on $20,000 a year. Those people become financially independent in just a matter of a few years. So to me, it's a feeling of powerlessness or not with money, where it's like, yeah, if you want

to do it, I haven't ever heard of anyone yet on your show that made $10,000 a year and became financially independent. But I did hear, you know, a guy that made $20,000 a year and kept working towards financial independent. Yeah, you can do it. I'm sorry, Scott, go ahead. Well, I was going to ask is, what was your spending prior to you leaving teaching and what that's changed to after you kind of implemented these things and began tracking every penny? Yeah, so it really was, I would say for me, it was a lot of eating out, but not like, you know, I'm not going to a $50 or $100 dinners. It was just, I'm going to grab a subway sandwich, you know, on the way

into work in the morning. I'm going to grab a salad for lunch, then maybe twice. three times a week we'd do that. I think that was really the only thing that I felt like, hmm, we're giving up on that. And then consequently, Debbie's just an amazing cook now. So it's like, it's awesome for me because every morning, you know, we have breakfast as a family and every night we have dinner as a family. And I usually take lift of us to work or whatever. So it's like, that's really the only sacrifice that I feel like was made. And did that change your life to stop going to subway in the morning and to stop grabbing a salad for lunch? Like, do you feel deprived? No. Yeah, I feel. It's so much better. Yeah. That was a conscious choice and a conscious effort on our part because of health, because we started sort of taking control of food and trying to grow as much of our own food as we can, which is another step toward freedom in our mind. And eating out just wasn't healthy, but because we both worked, there was just only a certain amount that we could do. And now that I was able to stay home, yeah, we could really focus on that. But we didn't feel deprived.

or like we had to sacrifice at all. Because it's not that hard. You've said conscious several times. This was a conscious decision. We consciously looked at our spending. We consciously made a budget. This whole journey is a conscious decision, but it's not like this overwhelming,

like, all I can think about is money and, oh, I can't spend that penny. And, you know, I think that's really important for people to understand is, you know, I say this all the time. Personal finance is personal. And what means a lot to you? You said in your email,

to us that you really like to go skiing. Awesome. I do too. Let's go. And Scott, Scott, you can come with us. Yeah. Let's do it. I do love skiing. That's an expensive sport. You're not eating out. You're not doing all these other things. You're choosing to spend money on skiing that other people may not do. So you choose what you want to spend money on.

You spend money on things that are important so you can save money on things that don't matter. That's really like that's what helped with kind of breaking it out other than just before when we, before Deb left her job, we just, just saved off the top and then spent the rest. And we weren't very intentional about that. And then all of a sudden when we decided, okay, hey, how much do we want to put in category A, B, and C and all that kind of stuff? That's when that intentionality started to come in.

And we're like, hey, we don't want to skimp on ski. Like there is a line item in our budget that's just for skiing stuff. There's a line item in our budget for travel. There's a line in our budget for investing, you know, now at that time it was savings. But now it's for saving. And it's like we just prioritize those buckets get filled every month. first and when there's left over there, that's when we kind of start saying like, oh, okay, maybe I want to get this neat thing off of Amazon or whatever, you know, and if there's not money extra left over

and there, then that's easy to skip. It's a prioritizing. So there is not a big line item in our budget for clothes. It's very small. We don't buy a lot of clothes. So that's a small priority. But there is a big item in our budget for travel. So we save for that and that is a priority.

And that's kind of how our budget works. you know, like talk about what's important, figure it out, and then we budget towards it. Awesome. So when you were doing this, you decreased your spending primarily. It just sounds like by tracking it and not allowing anything to leak out. And then also with this primary change of how you eat is the major lifestyle change that you noticed as an outcome of this. Is that a good summary of that change? Yeah. What happened to what I find as interesting is that when people begin doing this and years go by, career growth seems to follow in a weird way. Do you find that that happened as well for you in terms of opportunity in your career? Yeah, I did. It was,

it was kind of weird. Like, I mean, before, when it was Debbie and I both working, like, I was very obsessed about, you know, how much money I was making. And I always kind of felt like, okay, what's that next thing that I can do to increase my value at my job and how can I make more money and all that? And so I just really focused on it and it just felt like it was always consuming me and I never felt like I was, you know, getting paid enough or whatever. And then just starting to come to that realization. And so maybe, maybe. this is what you're asking, maybe it's not, but coming to that realization of like, look, this is decent enough. Like I'm happy with this. It can pay for all the things I want. And then all

sudden, it's like, whoa, here comes this extra money. Now that I stopped focusing on it as far as like it was eating away at me, you know, all the time. And I was just like come home and complain to dad, like, I can't believe I'm not making da-da-da-da. Then it started just to come in. And then it was it was like we didn't even spend it though. It's not like we upgraded our life. All we did was, okay, that top line item for saving, investing just got bigger every raise I got. Everything else pretty much stayed the same, you know, and everything. And that's how it's been for for several, several years now. But, you know, our ideas about earning money changed a lot too because we started realizing that all this money we had been piling away in the bank was making zero. You know,

it was just sitting there. And so we had worked so hard to save all of this money. And it was there. But we could only live off that money for so long. And so we started looking for ways that that money could earn us money. The more we started investing and the more, well, actually Chris is the spreadsheet master. So we sat down with a spreadsheet and looked at what we could really do with that money with real estate. And it was like, oh my, you know, I earned probably take home, you know, less than $30,000 a year as a teacher. And I worked and worked really hard for that money every year. And with really, you know, I earned, estate, we were able to, you know, make that double that money in about two years that we'll make for the rest of our lives and we can pass that money on to our girls. And we made that money

ourselves from our own money. And we don't need a W-2 for it. We don't need a boss for it. So you stockpiled this money that be through your frugal habits and through your savings here. How much money are we talking about? And can you walk us through step by step, how you began making the decision to invest it and then where you invested it and what those first, maybe those first few steps look like. So how much is you, how much were you are you talking about here? 10,000 or 100,000 or a million or I think we were right around 60,000 when so it's like we had 60,000. Well, that's not, I'm sorry, but I'm going to interrupt you now that you go for it. We had saved 90,000 dollars, but when we decided to invest, we took 30 right off the top and said, we're going to keep this

in savings. And we could live off of this for a very long time if we needed to. if Chris lost his job too because I was without a job at the time. So we left 30 of it as our safety net. And then we took 60 and that's what we felt comfortable with, with our risk tolerance at the time. And we felt comfortable investing that much. Okay. And where did you put that 60,000?

I really wanted to put it into self-storage sheds, you know, because I was like, I heard all these horror stories of like, oh, if you get into real estate, you're going to be fixing toilets at two in the morning. You're going to do it all this. And it's like, oh, I don't want to deal with tenants, you know, in that regard. I just want, I want to buy a lot of storage sheds. And that seems like a good thing. Well, I couldn't find any storage sheds.

So then I start Googling and bigger pockets just came up over and over. And I start hearing these success stories of people in a similar situation. And they're able to do it. And I'm like, whoa, you know, that just really opened my mind. Like, you know, I don't have to be fixing toilets at two in the morning. I don't have to be, you know, doing. that all the time. You know, we can build a team around us and everything. So that's where it started going. I honestly didn't know the real estate market around me. We bought our house 12 or 13 years ago,

and I haven't paid attention. So I had no clue that investing locally was even possible. So we started looking into Turnkey in Memphis. And I was like, it just seemed to come up over and over and over again. I was like, oh, that's the perfect thing. I don't have to look for the property. I don't have to get a tenant. You know, that's all taken care of it for me. So we were going down that road. And then Just through happenstance, we started talking to folks around us, and they're like, oh, so-and-so does real estate around here. So we started talking to some landlords around here. I was like, wow, you can do really good, you know, here in little rural southeast Colorado. So we're at 16 properties now in about two and a half years. And that's a mixture of five out in Memphis that are turnkey and then

the rest, you know, here in small little rural Colorado. Can you walk us through your very first purchase? So, I mean, that's the scary one, right? That's the scary one, right? That's one that really is the big hump for people to get over is you have the 60K, you don't want to lose it, right? This is something that you've worked probably for for years. How do you go about actually the process of buying that very first property? And what did that look like? We did a lot of background work. So Chris is not traditionally a risk taker. That's why we had saved so much money. That was not risky. And so we just like consumed Bigger Pockets podcast. We read book after book after book. And we felt like, yeah, we're as prepared as we can be.

And then a realtor just helped us stumble upon this property that was actually two separate single family homes, but in one purchase because they were on the same deed. And so we ran the numbers on it. It was good. I think we got it for $37,000 for both homes, right? We put about $15,000 rehab into them total. And we were able to rent them both together for about $1,000. $1,050 a month. That wasn't cash flow. We decided to leverage. So after all of our research,

we didn't pay cash for the property we leveraged. And so our cash flow on that property isn't over $1,000 a month. But it was a $30,000 investment for $1,0,000 in rent. I don't know if I missed something there, Chris. No, that's how in a very small town in southeastern Colorado. Oh, so this is in Colorado. This one isn't in Memphis. It is. No, no,

$37,000 house in Memphis isn't unusual. Correct. Right. So, so $37,000 for the two houses and $15,000 in rehab. So, does somebody do math quickly?

$52,000, thank you. All ready to go. And that's like the 2% rule. The 1% rule is you rent out the property for 1% of the purchase price. And this is, 2% almost. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, we we hit anywhere from one and three quarter to two on our first three or four deals around here. And so this is about 2016 or so. We can't get that now. We can

still beat the 1% rule fairly easy. It's almost like, you know, when I look at a 1% deal, I'm like, no, no thanks. You know, I'm going to go find something that'll get me a little bit better than that. But yeah, so there's good deals. But the problem down here is, you know, there's not a huge network. Like we do manage those properties ourselves and all that kind of stuff. So it's a little bit extra work, you know, but that's what we found is we enjoy it and we're learning all the time. You know, Brandon Turner's book, How to Manage Real Estate, how to, yeah, manage your real estate property has been a huge, huge help in getting us some of that confidence and dealing with, you know, the tenant issues. But overall, what we found is like, and I found this in business and in life and

other places. It's like if you treat people with that respect and that and you just have that mindset of like, hey, they're not out here to screw me over and I'm here to provide you a service. You're here to pay, you know, rent and we have this mutual exchange. So far so good. You know, we've had a pretty good run of it with not perfect tenants, but everything's been pretty good. So how much, how much cash did you put into the deal? I know it was $52,000 was the total amount of the purchase price plus rehab. How much cash went in? And then what did you do with the rest of your remaining cash? So the home. we get locally, we get through a small bank, local like hometown bank, and those are commercial loans. And we put 20 to 25 percent down on those loans. And then all the rehab costs are in

cash. So usually when we close on a local property, the closing costs are a lot cheaper and everything. And so, yeah, I think that one was about 7,500 by the time we closed on those homes. Do you remember, Chris? You're saying like down payment and the bank costs. Yeah, what we owe the bank. And then all the rehab we used our cash for. Yeah, we took that from about $60,000 down to, and I think we spent about $20 out of pocket for that one. So we still had 40 left when we were done with that first deal.

Once we started cash flowing, we never lived off. We have never lived off of any of the cash flow. We take all the cash flow plus what we're saving from Chris's salary every month. And we just put that right back into real estate. So we used that then we still had some cash left and we were just actively looking for homes here. And we were investing in Memphis homes at the same time. And so each time we've started to get cash flow from a property, we've just increased the amount we can save to put right back into real estate. So I don't think I fully answered your question.

No. So I think I very much understand the concept. What I would love to hear is maybe like what was the second purchase? So you had $40,000. I assume that this is continuing to go up a little bit because you're cash flowing for the property and continuing to save from your job. What was maybe the second purchase there? Okay. And then, yeah, it sounds like you went off to the races after that, just kind of consistently operating this very simple yet foolproof system that's allowed you to scale to where you are today.

Right. So our second property was, I mean, like if we could have won a lottery ticket, I think that's as close to a lottery ticket as we've ever got. It was, again, less than $40,000. I think we paid $36 for that one. I mean, again, we live in a small town. Rentals here, they don't have dishwashers or air conditioners. Those aren't typical things that are provided. So it's a small, humble home, but it was in great shape.

And I shampooed carpets, and then I rented it to someone right away. So I paid $36,000. There were no real rehab costs for that one. And we found a tenant for it and moved them in right away. And that was our second. So I think we got a little lucky with that one and that felt really good, you know, and we just kept moving from there. Awesome. How much does that one rent for?

That one rents for $5.85. Yeah. That's great. Wow. I'm so jealous. So you said you can't find these deals like this anymore. Are you continuing to look in Memphis or are you continuing to look locally? And where are you finding these deals?

Is it an agent? Are they on the MLS? Are they off market? Yeah. Everything actually has been on the market. We've gone through a couple different agents here locally, but we have one now. He's not like, you know, calling us every week saying like, hey, here's the next deal. You know, it meets these criteria or whatever.

But at the same time, he does bring us some that before they hit the market. Like I think this would be a good one. Debbie actually, our third home. It was on the market. We, it was one of those where I definitely, you know, we were getting 2% deals, but we still felt like, oh, we still got a low ball this offer. You know, 2%'s not good enough. Let's lowball a little bit more.

Let's see how good of a deal we can get. So the third one we actually missed out on, but they were unable to close. And so he gave us a call right away since we were kind of second in line. He's like, is your offer still good? And we got that one. And I think that was a three-bed house in the 30s again. And it rents for like seven or something like that. So anyways, each time we've like upped our skills a little bit,

we've put a little more rehab into each one, made them a little bit nicer just as we've honed our skills. But there's a push that we're filling from your area up in Denver and Colorado Springs of people trying to also find freedom. So they're coming away from those places where real estate is really climbing. And they're finding their way down here. And there are other real estate investors down here too. And all of that has meant that the supply of housing is a little bit lower than it was when we first started. And so we just have to hunt for those deals. I think they're still out there and I think a lot of people still shy away from the sweat equity that you put into a house.

And so as long as we don't scare easily away from those things, I think we can still find the deals and go. I mean, the last deal we got was at the end of last year, we haven't got another one since then. Well, we got two Memphis's in between. So that's why we haven't got a local one. But we got one locally at the end of last year. And it was a great deal. It was like four properties in one. So they're still out there.

I mean, I kind of live by this mantra that you find what you're looking for. So if we want to find a good agent that's up to us, we can look for the right kind of person. And we're happy with him. And he's a good, you know, honest guy that helps us find what we're looking for too. I like that quote a lot. You find what you're looking for. Nobody's going to call you up and say, hey, are you looking for a real estate agent? Because I am a real estate agent.

I'm super awesome. If they're super awesome, they've got all the business, they don't need to go out and look for more. They'll take more, but they don't need to go out and look for more. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, you're the one who wants to make money with real estate. So go find the deals. Go find the real estate agent, you know, learn your market and you have to do the work because

it's like finding a job. Nobody is going to call you up. Companies. Bigger Pockets is currently hiring. Go to biggerpockets.com slash jobs to see the jobs that we're hiring for. We're not calling anybody up on the phone randomly. Hey, are you looking for a job? Do you do this?

So that's awesome. You find what you're looking for. I'm writing that down. And what I think is great about the story is, I mean, you just walked us through your first three deals. And it's not hard to, I guess, let me know if there's anything that we or the listeners should know about the rest of the journey. But it's not hard to imagine that you just kind of operated the system and scaled up in your town and then bought a few that were kind of similar in Memphis to get to where you are today, which I think is 16 properties. Is that right? Yeah.

And how much cash are you producing from this portfolio? So after all, you know, taking out for vacancy and maintenance and all that kind of stuff, we're right around 35, 3,600. So they only average about 200 to 250 per property of cash flow. And some of those early ones actually are quite a bit more than that. But some of the later ones, mortgage rates, you know, climbing up just a little bit here and the prices of housing getting a little bit higher and all that kind of stuff. So that margin is shrinking a little bit.

He's being a little modest because he runs those big years every week, I think. And just last week he brought me a graph that was showing exactly how it was climbing and where we would be next year. So he probably knows to the scent how much. No, that's incredible. So you took, what I was summarizing here from the story is, you know, went along, you behaved reasonably for your finances, and then a trigger happened, a trigger event happened with your diagnosis. And that's when you decided, hey, we're going to get really aggressive

about this. It makes some changes. Save up $90,000. Set aside 30 as a safety fund, which is really smart. I think it really gives you a cushion and allows you to be, you know, very comfortable with the risk that you're taking on in this brand new career of real estate that you're kind of doing on the side here. And then you turn $60,000 in two years into three to half thousand dollars per month with a family. And I mean, wow. That's awesome. I think we're just as surprised. We, I mean, we set goals in the beginning. We made projections. We were hoping, you know, that we could make even loftier goals. But yeah, we've been, we've been really pleased with how it's turned out. So, Why can't other people do this?

I mean, it was one of those where it's crazy. So like, you know, I was the saver and everything, but I don't know if I would have been able to get over my risk aversion, you know, without some push. And Debbie's illness was that push. You know, it got me to at least start opening books and reading blogs and all that kind of stuff. So I think if they're listening to this podcast right now, you know, that's, and you're hearing this story and other stories, you know, that might be that that push that they need. But yeah, it's absolutely possible. And it's just, I'm very thankful for for folks like you and, you know, the other great blogs that are out there that just take this crazy idea, you know, of like, whoa, you can, you can find other ways, you know, whether it's through investing in mutual funds or investing in real estate or starting your own business and all that kind of stuff. You can find those other ways to pay the bills, you know, and allow you that freedom in life to do the things that are important to you. I think the real message, though, is they can do it.

They just have to sort of wrap their minds around it and prioritize what really is important in their life. So, I mean, would they rather have a fancy car that they make a monthly payment on or would they rather work towards this? And so if we can do it, they can do it too. It's just a matter of taking a look at priorities and deciding what they want to do. So tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks, it can be a little eye-opening. That's why I like Monarch. It helps you see exactly where your money is going and more importantly, where your tax refund can make the biggest impact. Because the goal

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See golden nugget casino.com for details. Please play responsibly. Okay, so Chris said that he has to get over his risk aversion. What's the worst thing that can happen? You buy a $30,000 property. The worst thing that can happen is that it gets wiped away and you don't have insurance or whatever. Like, it's not worth, it goes from $30,000 to $0 in value.

So you lost $30,000. That's literally the worst thing that can happen when you're buying a $30,000 house. It's not going to come shoot you. It's not going to, you know, take away your home and your, you know, so buy it intelligently. But when you're trying to get over your risk aversion, think about what is the worst thing that can happen. Yeah. Joel from F-I-180, who I've brought. believe was on episode, I don't know what episode he was. I'll put it in the show notes.

The show notes for this show is biggerpockets.com slash money show 25. That's Money Show 25. And he said, well, I don't really have enough money to retire, but what's the worst that can happen? I'll just go get a job. My worst case scenario is everybody else's everyday life. Exactly. Yeah. Right. I quote that all the time. That is so powerful. People get this like, oh, what if, what if? What if? Yeah. What if? Yeah, it's so important to actually go there because even if I go farther down the road and I think like, what if we just start over. I mean, that really is the worst what if. We both have very marketable skills. We can both get a job whenever we want to get a job and we just start over and now we know how to do it again. And so once you realize like the

worst that can happen, really it's no big deal. So now it's all just a game. Yeah, it's not that bad. But, Scott, you ask, why doesn't everybody else do this well? Because you can't invest in rural areas. There's no deals on the marketplace. You can't find a good contractor. Let's see, what else? What else? You only can find.

Yeah, there's no time. There's no money. Especially with kids. Yeah. You can't do it with kids. I mean, I think they're just lying. Everything in this story is just a big fat lie. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Well, they just made it all up. Yeah. You know, we've never shied away from hard work. So we've always believed, we value hard work. And so that's something that we've done. But I don't think there's any special magic or anything like that here at all. Yeah. You find what you look for. If you're looking for the TV listings or you're looking for the game, that's what you're going to find.

When you're complaining a lot, you find other complainers. So that's what you find. So if you're saying there's no contractors, there's no good deals, then what you're going to find. Then what you're going to find is more people complaining about the same thing. Yeah, it's all really, I think it's so important in life, but really in real estate, mindset is the thing that, I mean, it could drive you nuts and you could get out of it right away or you can work on your mindset and keep reminding yourself of the reasons you're there and what your goals are. And yeah, it can be, you know, a blessing for your lifetime. So, let me ask a question here. So you've done all this. You've had a lot of progress.

since you've left your job, are you noticing a household improvement in quality of life? Has this financial result you've achieved resulted in a better lifestyle and family and family dynamic? Yes, absolutely. So one thing that I read not too long ago that was pretty startling was, so taking just an average snapshot of an average family, by the time your child leaves the house at 18, as a parent, you will have spent 93% of all the time you will ever spend with them at that point. So it's like, whoa, between 18 and till I die, there's only 7% left. So that's, I mean, that was kind of that spur that really started getting me thinking like, hey, Deb, is there a homeschool? Could we do that? You know, what's that look like? That'll buy us more

freedom and more abilities to say like, oh, everybody else is in school. Let's go take our family vacation right now. Let's take school with us. Let's go on a week long ski trip. Let's go to Ecuador for three weeks and all that kind of stuff. So absolutely, Deb being home and me having a decent amount of vacation time has allowed us to really improve our life in that regard. Like I feel there's definitely times. You know, when I'm working from home, Debbie's teaching our two daughters and all that kind of stuff. There can be times where it's like, okay, let's spread apart from each other for a little

bit here. But overall, though, it's just so nice having that freedom to be able to spend that quality time. And as I mentioned before, the food part is amazing. Like Deb's an amazing cook now. So I just, I feel like I'm eating at nice restaurants almost every night. So it's awesome. He's exaggerating. But the big thing I noticed as a mom, the shift is before we were just hurrying to get out the door. And then when we got home, we were hurrying to get ready to go to whatever sport or activity or meeting or whatever we had after work. And then we're hurrying to get all the homework done and get baths done and get in bed and all of that stuff. And that's just not our reality anymore. I mean, that was a priority too. We were tired of that hustle and bustle. And the word busy, we just decided we didn't want to use the word busy anymore.

more. And so this has really helped with that. The pace is as fast or as slow as we want it to be. And so that feels like freedom. Nice. I love it. This is so fantastic. Just what you've created here, how you've done it. And it's so good that you're reaping some of the rewards of that right now. Yeah. So what's the next step? What are you going to do? What is your kind of goal for the next few years? What's the end point, I guess, for you? Yeah. So I'm, it's one of those. And I think this is part of the reason too why I never was really ready to get over that risk aversion hurdle and make a jump into something. I actually really enjoy my job. I'm in a leadership position and I love the people that I can mentor and help and coach and everything. And so it's great for me, but at the same time, I just want to

keep lots of opportunities open. So I feel a calling in several areas. I don't have a real specific, like by this time I'm going to do this for sure thing. But I'm really looking forward to, you know, starting something either on my own or partnering up with someone and doing some kind of other entrepreneurial type thing. As Debbie mentioned, I'm really into gardening. So I'm like, oh, maybe I could build some greenhouses and we'll sell produce. We'll be a little, you know, many farmers, you know, and that won't be enough to pay for all the other stuff, but that's what the real estate's for. So we're close. We're really close to just being able to live off of our cash flow now. And we could actually probably do it right now. But we're working on sort of wrapping our head around

the whole healthcare side of things. And I think Chris has this sort of two-year plan to maybe wind things up with his leadership role and look towards the future and be able to, I mean, none of us, neither of us say like, we'd never want to work again, but we want freedom to work at what we want to work at. And so this, I think we could actually live, I know we could live off the cash flow now, but it would be a question of prioritizing and figuring out that the health care side of things, which can be expensive. And so that's kind of where we're at. Debbie, early in the show you mentioned, and you made a nice motion here for a graph going up to the right. Chris, do you know what kind of your target is over the next two years for a cash flow

projection if you continue on your, you know, plan trajectory? Yeah. So I've actually got like several little targets. So it's like here's, here's target one. And this means, you know, we're, we can pay the bills and we're not driving around. We're not doing all this kind of stuff. then target two. Yeah, so anyways, I do have all of those targets. And we've hit like the first two, three and four mean, targets three and four mean in those two years, we will hit those numbers to where we can both still keep investing a decent amount every month. And whether that's in Deb, starting a new business, me starting a new business, some other kind of whatever. And I still actually find a lot of enjoyment out of real estate. So that's a potential too. So yeah, and in about two years,

we'll have not only enough to pay the bills, but still keep investing at the same similar clip that we're doing today, as well as having a healthy travel bullet budget to allow us to go see more of the world that we'd like to see. So do you have a goal for how many more units you want to acquire? Yeah, that number kind of changes. At first, I knew exactly what that number was as far as the units. And then I did a recalculation. It was like, oh, these are actually producing, you know, 30, 40% more cash flow than I thought. So actually, we need less units. Well, now that the market's kind of back up. It's like, okay, now we need to get back to that original number. So I think another five to 10 units will get us somewhere right in those, in between those three and four marks of where

we're still able to invest in either ourselves or other businesses or whatever. I'm still trying to, you know, that's one thing that I guess I did want to talk about is just our, what we do differently than I feel like a lot of folks is just the money conversations that we have with our children. And so we expose them to a lot of the business. You know, we explain like, my daughter, my 12-year-old daughter could come in here and she can tell you what equity is and she can tell you how a mortgage works and she can tell you how cash flow works and all that kind of stuff. And they get to help it like she just learned today. I came home from work and Debbie's working with her on some bookkeeping stuff for the business and everything. So so that way it's kind of a nice, healthy way to one,

pay her some money so that she can earn a decent little chunk of money and she can use that money to learn money mistakes at the age of 12 and the age of 13. And it's awesome. I mean, the benefit there is, you know, I think this was in cash flow quadrant where it kind of teaches you, you know, where, how it goes when it's pre-tax money. So it's like, okay, she needs to spend $200 to be on the swim club this summer. So she earns $200 through our real estate business. We never pay tax on that. She now takes that money. She's not paying tax on it because she's, you know, only 12 where she has to pay income tax and now she just paid a $200 swim club team fee and nobody ever paid tax on that. Whereas if if that money comes to Chris in his W-2 and then Chris pays that, well, to pay $200,

you know, I'm going to have to earn $240, $250 or whatever. And so it's just taking those little examples here and there and trying to teach the girls along the way what money is. It's nothing to be scared of. Like I grew up with that big fear mentality of like hoard it, hoard it, hoard it, because you never know when it's going to go away type of thing. So it's kind of like I think Deb and I both draw. analogy. It's like a breath. You know, it's like you take a breath in, you take a breath out. That's how

money flows in and out of your life. If you want to hold your breath, you know, you can do that for a few seconds, but there's no real benefit to that. It'll always be there when you need it. You just need to have the right mindset. You need to have the right wherewithal to go get it. I love it. And of course, you get bookkeeping service for your business. Absolutely. I was like overwhelmed with all of this filing today. And I was like, yeah, Claire can help. And we pay them an equitable wage. So I mean, And our eight-year-old makes $5 an hour for the work she does. And our almost 13-year-old makes $10 an hour. So it's good for her if she works hard and she wants to make it.

And we would have paid that swimming due anyway, but we don't tell her that, you know. So she's earning the money. And now she's learning how to spend it, which was an experience I never had growing up, which is why I felt this powerlessness with money. And so hopefully we're empowering them to be able to take care of their money, to learn, you know, how to spend, how to save, how to give. And also, yeah, to not be afraid or feel powerless or feel like they have to over control it and hoard it. So yeah, they come to us now with like little lessons here and there of like, oh man, I must have spent 10 or 15 dollars, you know,

this month writing around town, you know, going to Sonic and getting a drink here and there. So it's like, yeah, learn these mistakes when you're when you're 12 and making $15 mistakes rather than when you're 21 making $15,000 mistakes and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, look at this new car I bought. It sounds like you had, you never made a big money mistake where you took on something that you couldn't handle prior to that, you know, over this. But it sounds like for many years, you didn't have this, that same kind of healthy, in control or mindset and relationship with money.

Within two years, you literally change your whole mindset, your whole position. And now you're passing it along to your children. And it's just, I think it's fantastic. And an example that hopefully some of the listeners here can learn a lot from. Because I think it really is incredible. We hope so. Yeah. You mentioned cash flow quadrant.

I want to just expand on that a little bit. Can you share with the listeners what that is? So we prepared for our, like the, I think it's famous for at the end, right? Did I get that right? And that was mine for the famous for. It's Robert Kiyosaki's book. And it's sort of, I think, like a follow-up to Rich Dad, Poor Dad. But I think it's so much more tangible and applicable.

Like, Rich Dad, Poor Dad is good if you're looking for a story, you know, with characters and all of that stuff. And then Cash Flow Quadrant is a lot more tangible. And it talks about the four different categories you can use your money in. And so what really is an asset? What is an investment? No, I guess, yeah, and sorry for stealing your famous Four Thunder there. but yeah it was kind of like how money flows in you know and whether like in those four quadrants it's either you're employed or self-employed which where and then then the other ones are investing in business and it just like like debby said it gives you the real tactics and just helped to really blow my mind one on kind of the the whole like what the rich do is they don't pay a boatload of taxes they do through legal methods you know find ways to try to minimize the their tax burden and all that kind of stuff. And so it was just real eye-opening to me to hear it that way,

you know, as far as how this money flows into the business and the business can pay for expenses rather than flowing into Chris's W-2 income, getting taxed. Then I get to pay, you know, that with after-tax money, you know, after I've already been taxed, you know, on it. And the story that really still rings true for me now, which is why I taught Claire how to start working on bookkeeping and filing for me a little bit, but is the man who carries the buckets. And so there's a man who needs a job, and I'm sure I'm butchering this, but he goes out and gets this job carrying buckets of water. And he takes the bucket of water from one place to the other. And it's hard work, and it's all day, you know, and he makes a little paycheck at the end of the day. But then there's the

guy who needed to solve the problem in the first place, who had water in one place and needed to get it to the other place. And instead of carrying the buckets of water himself, he found someone that wanted to do that job and needed to do that job. And that man is carrying the buckets of water for him. And so it was just like, man, I've been carrying buckets of water for people, you know, for over 14. I mean, I've been getting a W-2 income since I was 16 years old, you know, working hard for other people. And now we're kind of just, we're figuring out how to move that water for ourselves. Wow. I think it's great. That's fantastic.

So, well, the famous four questions are the same four questions that we ask everybody every single week. And what is your favorite finance book? Is the first question, which you have already answered, I am assuming, cash flow quadrant is your favorite finance book. So that was a really, really, really great illustration of the man carrying the buckets, which I'm assuming comes out of the book. It does. Yeah. And I think, Chris, you have a different book than me, probably, but that one was mine. Yeah. Millionaire Next Door was the one, you know, I read it early on when I wasn't, I wasn't making a whole lot of money, but it was just like, again, kind of giving that story of like, look, you don't have to, you know, this is not some elite secret and this elite club of people that are the millionaires. You know, it's just the person next door to you that drives the 10 year old, 15 year old car, you know, they don't keep up with the Joneses and all that kind of stuff. And it's been so long since I've read it, but it was really that first.

book that helped me to get out of the whole mindset of like I have to just hoard and accumulate and save, save, save. And then, you know, eventually someday I'll get to spend it, you know, when I'm 69 or 67 or something. I love the millionaire next door. And that's one of my favorite books as well. And it's just a, if you're not interested in finance, I've heard that some people can find a little dry and boring because it's very data driven. And kind of like, here's a millionaire. He's worked hard for a very long period of time, been consistent at what he does, self-employed in a kind of boring, you know, like talk about the diet. who owns a trash company, a janitorial business, like those kinds of things, and have just

accumulated a large amount of wealth by behaving responsibly over a long period of time and the data to back it up. I love that because that's what this is. There's no secrets or big, you know, a ha's in this whole thing. And then kind of to add on to the cash flow quadrant book on, in the Rich Dad series, there is actually a board game called Cashflow by that. That's kind of an interesting experience that you can play. There's like two little, circles that you're on. And one is the rat race and the other is the track. And your goal is to get out of the rat race.

And it's like, you know, have a kid, which slows you down. And then it's like by a due dad, like a jet ski. And you're like, oh. Yeah. And once you get on the fast track, it's like, beat the mayor. Go save 400 people in Africa. You know, you start with a charity. You start.

And it's like, you know, all these different things that happen as your passive income kind of exceeds your liabilities. It's a good way to kind of learn and maybe teach kids as well. some of these concepts. Yeah, yeah, cool. All right, so let's move on to the second question in the famous four, which is what was your biggest money mistake? Yeah, I would say, I mean, it's similar to this story,

but just kind of having that mindset of I just need to accumulate this big pile and never feeling comfortable or safe enough to do that. You know, so it's like, man, we could have, because we had, you know, maybe we didn't have 90,000 at the beginning of the housing crisis, but we had a decent chunk of change. And even though I was getting 2% deals in, you know, 2015, I probably could have been getting, you know, three and four percent deals in 2009 or 10.

So taking that long to take action and feel comfortable doing that is definitely my biggest money mistake. Mine, I guess, is the opposite. Like my mindset with money was of powerlessness. So it caused me to be in debt before we got married. And it made me feel like I, my worth was lower, you know, I could only achieve a certain amount of money that was as high as I was going to aim. And I certainly was never focused on financial independence or freedom until being able to overcome that sense of powerless with money. Whereas now

it's like, I know the money's out there. It's out there for anyone who who wants to find it and work for it. And if that's what they want. And I just have to go out and find it. So that's a great answer. What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out? Yeah, so this has probably been said before, but mine is definitely tracking. You know, just start paying attention to where your money is. And if that's in alignment with your priorities, then you're probably doing things right and you're living a happy life. If those things aren't in alignment and all that and you feel like there's something that you want to change in your life, there's some big goal that's out there. It's not hard.

Just to start, you know, just be diligent about it and start tracking. And you'll be amazed at what you find and prioritize those things that are really important to you. I completely agree with Chris, but you might notice a pattern with me. Mine is just mindset. Like something that maybe I haven't touched on with it is when we've started real estate, we wanted to talk to local investors and get ideas and any advice they might have. And we kept hearing the same thing from them that like, oh, it's hard. Tenants tear everything up around here, but we're sticking it out or I can't find anyone to buy my rental house.

so I'm still doing it basically. And so we had to decide from the get-go what we needed to do as far as wrapping our minds around it so that it could be a long-term solution for us in the search for financial freedom. So we had to really work on our mindset with, like I've said, you find what you're looking for, the homes we fix up just so like we would want to live in them.

We treat people the way that we would want to be treated. And we never think of the homes as like our homes. so we don't take it personal. If there's a problem there, that just happens. We're prepared for it. We know we're going to have some problems along the way. So we've really worked on that mindset from the beginning. And even if people aren't going the real estate route,

it's like, what's your goal? Why are you wanting to get there? And what kind of work do you need to do so that when things get hard, you can remind yourself of that and prepare yourself for that. Excellent. Thank you. What is your favorite joke to tell at parties? It's the hardest question of the four.

It is. It was one of those where this part of it gave me the biggest pause of preparing for this. I was like, oh, Scott. And I was like, maybe Scott won't be asking this question by the time we got there. But I was like, no, I think he's going to stick with this. No, it's sticking around. It's sticking around. It's my favorite part.

Yeah. Okay. You want me to go first? Chris has a tough one. He's trying to like actually stretch himself. So I'll do mine first. quick. We have a couple of bar jokes. So mine is a dyslexic man walks into a bra. All right. So the one I found that I thought was actually pretty decent was a pirate

walks into the bar and he's got a he's got a peg leg, he's got a parrot, he's got a hook for an arm, and he's got a steering wheel hanging from his belt. And the bartender looks over at him And he says, what's with the steering wheel? And he goes, Ar, she's driving me nuts. That made me my favorite pirate joke. You heard a lot of pirate jokes, huh? God collects them. Oh, no.

I once got into a pirate jokes battle with a real pirate at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville when you're on vacation. Wow. You picked the right joke, Chris. Who knew? That was even a thing. I did not. But yeah. I knew that was the thing because Scott tells pirate jokes all the time.

Oh, that's good. It's not just for the show. It's for every day. I was just going to say that there's a guy at my office that, yeah, he loves the dad jokes and puns. And I can imagine what it's like at bigger pockets. There's a guy at my office. He likes them too. Two guys.

Pirate walks up to the golf course and he says, I may tea Oh There you go Scott Very good Why don't you guys You Chris can't get into a battle with you

Because he only knows the one pirate joke You're gonna have to pause And I'm not to get some more real quick I'll retire as champion No that's okay You won You won you're the champion Congratulations

You win Chris's Debbie Where can people fight out more about you So I, we aren't super social media type of people like we shy away, but I have a blog that talks about all the ways we're finding freedom because of my illness. And it's called imperfect progress.me. And so I'm also on Instagram at the same thing, imperfect progress.combe. And if you go on to that, you can find our Facebook link and our Instagram link. Chris is on Facebook, but he might get on there. like once a month or something. But we'd love to connect with people. You know, we, we like that we've found freedom this way and we would love to help people find the same thing. So, absolutely. We will include those links in our show notes at biggerpockets.com slash money show 25. Awesome. Well, Chris and Debbie, thank you so much for reaching out and thank you so much for taking

the time out of your very busy days to talk to us. We really enjoyed having you today. Thank you. It was great. Thank you so much, Mindy, Scott. Have a great day. Thank you guys very much. This was great. Thank you. We've enjoyed it. We'll talk to you later. Okay. Bye. Bye. All right, that was Chris and Debbie. Thanks so much then for coming on the show. Mindy, I thought that episode was a big, almost kind of departure from what we've been hearing from a lot of other folks. This was really a family that had not been pursuing finances aggressively, had really been ultra-conservative in kind of saving up a large amount of cash and then had a mindset shift,

a trigger event in that diagnosis for Debbie that kind of caused them to aggressively pursue financial independence. And boy, have they produced some results in that time period. Yeah, that 16 units in, did they say two and a half years? That's just, that's amazing. They've replaced, they've doubled Debbie's income just by investing in real estate. And now she's able to stay home with her kids. She homeschools her kids. She's learned how to be a really great cook. And they've gone from this busy, overwhelming lifestyle to a very relaxed, as busy as we want to be lifestyle.

And, you know, they said the word intentional a lot. They live an intentional life. They do what they want to do on purpose. Life isn't dragging them around. They're going for what they want. And what I thought was kind of refreshing about how they discussed. this concept is they didn't use a lot of terminology that we like to throw around like fire, fire, 4% rule or anything like that. Nothing fancy. Their approach was nothing, if not

incredibly simple. You find what you're looking for. We're going to invest $60,000 and we're going to buy a property that produces a lot of cash flow that's local in a rural town. And we're going to put some sweat equity into it, scrub the carpet myself, and maintain it and go from there. and then we're going to repeat the process after what the savings from that property and our current job and go one by one by one over the course of several years. Like there's no fanciness here. There's no mathematical. I mean, Chris is obviously a very good spreadsheet wizard.

But the concept of this is so simple and so effective. Yes. This is absolutely achievable for anyone who's looking for it. Like Debbie said, you find what you look for. So if this is what you want, start looking for it. Absolutely. All right. Scott, shall we get out of here?

We shall. For the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, episode 25. This is Mindy Jensen, over and out.