BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 5 Kids, Modest Income, and $1M Net Worth in 7 Years

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

In this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, Dave shares how he and his family went from no real savings to building more than $1 million in net worth in just seven years while raising five kids on a median income. Dave explains how he used side hustles, aggressive saving, minimalism, DIY skills, and strategic investing to dramatically improve his family’s finances.  Dave also shares how paying off the mortgage, investing in tax-advantaged accounts, controlling major expenses, and having regular money conversations with his spouse helped transform their financial trajectory. His story offers practical lessons for anyone trying to build wealth, increase their savings rate, and create more financial freedom without needing an enormous income. To go beyond the podcast: Interested in a Flat Fee Financial Planner? Go to biggerpocketsmoney.com/fipro Get 50% Off Your First Year of Monarch by using code ‘Pockets’: https://www.monarch.com/pockets Follow BiggerPockets Money on Social: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BPMoney Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/biggerpocketsmoney Connect with Dave: http://www.davesguitarmusic.com/ We believe financial independence is attainable for anyone no matter when or where you’re starting. Let’s get your financial house in order! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dave Siemens is a professional musician, lifeguard, side hustler, and now a millionaire at age 49. His financial journey started about seven years ago with a net worth of $150,000, mostly in home equity. Today, we're talking about Dave's money journey from struggling to make ends meet to discovering financial independence and finding creative ways to turn his time and skills into increased income. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my hustler co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, many. Let's dive in or rock and roll. Dave, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast.

It is an honor and just a privilege to be here with you guys. Your career and story is just remarkable with a large number of side hustles, really cool ones in particular. And I don't believe you've ever earned more than about $100,000 a year from your main source of income at any point during this journey. and I think it's evolved in many convoluted, complicated ways while producing a lot of fun along the way. Is that the right way to summarize this before we get into the nuts and bolts?

I think that's a fair way of saying it. Let's start from the beginning, and can we hear where your money story begins? You know, I always wanted to be a rock star, and I just remember reading an article back in the 90s about if you do what you love, you never have to work a day in your life. And I've really followed that. I thought, you know, I'd rather live in a studio apartment and have an eviction notice than not know I didn't try.

And as I got into my 40s with a wife and kids, I started thinking, I love this. I'm happy to work really hard all the time, but I don't know how this is going to work in my 50s, 60s and 70s. And so I started transitioning into a role as a full-time teacher. And after a few months, I just felt an urgency that I needed to figure this money thing out. And so at that point, I started just aggressively, you know, trying to self-educate. I just thought if I could just pay my house off as quickly as possible, that would give us so much breathing room. And that's how I stumbled across bigger pockets in early 2019.

It sounds like that pivot point in 2019 is really important we need to dive in there. But before we get to that, can we hear a little bit about what led up to that moment? What were you doing before that? And what kind of wealth position had you built leading up to this, this aha moment that it's time to get more serious about money? I'd been working as a full-time musician. I went to the University of North Texas and got my degree in music performance. And then I just started around 2000 just performing in the Dallas area and just always happy to live paycheck to paycheck. You know, along the way, I've met my wife, got married, had five kids. I started working as a lifeguard, you know, and that was,

that was kind of nice, you know, during the day. It was a little more stable, you know, sort of getting fancy things like paid time off and flexibility in my schedule. That seemed to complement, you know, my work as a, as a musician. Tell us about your work as a musician. What kind of music do you play? I have a lot of tribute bands. I've got a Guns and Roses tribute band. an Aerosmith tribute band, a Kiss tribute band. I also play a lot as a solo artist. I teach lessons, and I also do singing telegrams. Oh, wow.

I want to call out that Guns for Roses. I haven't gone through the whole stack, but Guns for Roses, at least, you have like three million followers for this tribute band, and it sounds like you've been all over the world, right? I was looking at your website. 26,000 people attended one of your largest performances for Guns for Roses. Is that right?

This is a serious, awesome band that we're talking about here. Yeah, people. tend to just go crazy for guns and roses. And I think we do it really well. We try to replicate the authentic looks and sounds of the original band. You know, people, people are willing to bring us all around Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, all kinds of places. And, you know, we get to fly out and get treated like rock stars for the weekend, you know? What sort of money does that pay? I mean, typically for me, as a musician, you know, doing that sort of thing, I'll make $5 to $700 a night. Okay. So that's not small potatoes, but that's...

still a lot of travel to do that. And I will say that that's after expenses. Oh, okay. Well, that's good. You kind of implied you got serious here in 2019 about the next chapter of wealth building. What did your position look like at the time when you made that transition? What did you accumulate it to that point? If I had to be honest, I think early 2019, our net worth was probably around 150,000. Almost all of that was home equity. We bought our house as a foreclosure in 2004. And then my wife had a little bit, In her teacher retirement, I had a little bit in my retirement with the city. I had put some money into a variable annuity when I was in my 20s. If you have a good exit strategy, please let me know.

I don't think there is one. Did you continue putting money in there? Or was that a one and done? No, no. Yeah, it was a one undone for sure. Yeah, okay. But yeah, that was it. It was almost exclusively home equity.

And then my wife's teacher retirement and a little bit in my retirement with the city. It sounds like at 2018, your wife was still teaching at that point? At that point, she was homeschooling our kids. Okay. What was your job? job set at that point in time. Was this a lifeguard or were you transitioning to being a teacher? Or what was that looking like for you? Coming into 2019, I think I was probably making 20 or 30,000 as a musician and then maybe another 10 to 15,000 as a lifeguard. My wife was at home, you know,

making a little bit, just teaching a couple extra students. What triggered the epiphany to begin kind of the next chapter of your wealth building journey? I just felt an urgency from just working so hard as a teacher, you know, that I thought, this is not going to work in my 50s or 60s, and I thought I got to figure this out now, and I'm willing to do whatever it takes. What changes did you make to your financial situation or your spending once you started in on all of this? Honestly, the biggest, most important change that I made was listening to you guys talk about having a money date with your spouse. Yes, yes, yes. And so one of my big resolutions, January 1st, 2020, was that I set a goal to just budget like a, like a beast.

And so I talked to my wife as like, I'd like for us to sit down and do a monthly budget. And we started talking about that. And she had taken a class at her church called Money Wise. And so she was, you know, she had seen me consuming all of this content. And she didn't quite understand it, but she was willing to listen. And so we sat down and we started looking at, you know, every month, the last Sunday of every month, we sit and we look at our income and our expenses and our net worth. And honestly, my wife and I being on the same page and having that money date and making a spending plan has been the number one,

by far most important thing. Thank you guys. The first step is just keeping score, right? And just looking at the numbers because there's infinite number of actions you can take to move your wealth forward. The ones that matter become very obvious and the ones that don't matter become very obvious as soon as you just basically keep score and have the numbers in front of you. So I think that's awesome that you guys started doing that. What did that result in in terms of changes to your spending or your income? It was amazing that we started using cash envelopes for certain categories. It flipped the script on our money conversations because up to that point, it seemed like anytime we talked about money, it was a fight. I would just work harder and then I would see that my wife had spent money

and I didn't feel comfortable talking to her about it because it seemed like, you know, it would become a fight. But once we sat down and made a spending plan and we allocated money for her to spend, she felt liberated because she had money that was set aside for her to spend on whatever she wanted. And I felt liberated because I always knew that it was going to be limited to a certain amount. And we would make cash envelopes for our restaurant spending and entertainment budgets. And so we could still go to restaurants. But instead of the kids coming to me and asking, can we go out to dinner? Like I would always say, yes.

I would just say, let's look at the envelope and see how much cash is in there. And so it got our kids on board, too, that, you know, they'd see like, we can go to Chili's once or we can go to Little Caesars five times, you know, and it brought them on. I never had to say no. I could always point to the budget and show how much it was in there. And it got them thinking about, you know, where can we get value? When you're ready to start your business, Northwest Registered Agent helps you do more than just file paperwork. You get all the tools to build a real business identity from day one, a business

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Finding a financial professional who truly understands financial independence isn't easy. That's why Scott and I created the Phi-friendly professionals list. This is a curated network of C-XPs and tax professionals who understand the fire mindset, early retirement, and wealth building. We're adding more vetted experts all the time. Find someone who speaks your Phi language at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash phi-pro. That's biggerpocketsmoney.com slash F-I-P-R-O. So it's not a couple money date. It's like a whole family money date. Once you start talking about

finances with your spouse, I don't love that it would start a fight all the time, but I love that you figured out a way to have a conversation so it's not ending up as a fight. That's what is it, money is the number one thing that couples fight about. And now you don't fight about money anymore, I'm assuming. I'm reading into your comments. I'm sure there's discussions. We have discussions all the time at our house too. But I love that you sat down. and have this money date with your wife, we have a how to have a money date with your partner document on our website. It's biggerpocketsmoney.com slash money date. It's super easy to remember. Go to our website. Go to our resources page. It's on there. It's one of the resources. It's just a guideline to help you

get started talking about money, especially if you're in the position that Dave was in with this, you know, oh, everything's a fight. I don't want to bring it up because I don't want to fight with my wife, well, this is how you don't fight. You come to the money date without this. Like, you spent too much money. That attitude is going to give you a fight 100% of the time, guaranteed. What sort of spending changes did you see in terms of like real dollars once you had this money date with your wife? Initially, when we started looking at it in late 2019, early 2020, looking at those things critically. At that time, we had five in our household, and we were spending about $300 a week on groceries and $500 a month on restaurants. And we were able to cut it back to $100 a month on restaurants and $200 a week on groceries.

And it just made us be a lot more intentional. Immediately, you know, it saved us $400 on restaurants and $400 on grocery spending. And that's, we just immediately had an extra $800 every month, which is huge. I want to know how you only spend $200 a month on groceries. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. I couldn't do this without my wife. She has been so amazing at meal planning and meal prepping. I mean, even now my son's just moved out last week.

And so now we're finally empty nesters. There's two of us. And we've increased the budget to $1,000 a month on groceries. But now that my sons are out, we've cut it back to $500. And that's, you know, saved us $6,000. $1,000 a year on grocery spending, which is crazy. You know, my wife is a saint as far as meal planning and meal prep and all of that. It starts with this increase of, let's call it, $800 a month in savings because of just

with food. You're sort of that one category there. What else is happening around that time? What happens to income? What do you invest in? I just have to take a moment and just say, far beyond the financial component has been the relational component. The fact that we have this money date and we sit and look, every month, as we see our

net worth grow, my wife feels more secure. As my wife feels more secure, she's more loving and more supportive. As she's more loving and supportive, I'm willing to work harder and self-educate more. And so there's the obvious financial component, but the relational component has been exponentially greater than the financial component is imaginable. I'm sorry, I know that didn't answer your question. I apologize, but I just, I had to get that in there. I love that answer, though. I love that. I love that this is just everything is different now. And that's great. What I'm hearing you say is you have a better life because you listen to Scott and Mindy. Absolutely. So we talked to Dr. Matthew Killingsworth from University of Pennsylvania. He's a world world world out expert on happiness.

And components of the happiness journey involve that having a goal, having great relationships, making that kind of regular progress against it. And so I think money is like one of those things in life that is great to form a goal around, maybe not go to an extreme or crazy length, but to build a relationship and make steady progress against. It's like fitness or there's many worthwhile goals. Maybe that's what was happening for you to some degree is because there was the shared goal, now there's a shared cadence, there's productive conversations and that seeps out into it sounds like many other areas of your relationship and marriage and maybe your other family dynamics. Is that, am I getting closer, am I overshooting? I think that's fair. Yeah, it's just the

the camaraderie and rapport of, you know, working on our budget and our, I don't even want to call it a budget. I always felt like a budget was rear facing. I'd try to set a budget and then make mistakes and then eventually just give up. But making a spending plan, being intentional about where and how we want to spend our money as a couple and coming to that conversation together and as a family just was critically important. And, you know, along the way, my wife first discovered minimalism. And then I kind of, you know, stumbled upon Gabe Bolt. I know you've had him as a guest and Jacob Fisker with early retirement extreme. And I don't know, I feel like Joshua Becker is just one of the most overlooked in the financial independence community. He's got a book called The More of Less. And that

really, really gave legs to me on how to pursue minimalism in a satisfying, fulfilling way. You know, just doing my own car repairs, you know, living and appreciating what I have. It goes hand in hand with what you guys say about, you know, experimenting, you know, looking at those things that bring you value and then, you know, removing those things and bringing them back and seeing what you like and what you don't like. One thing I want to call out here is no one could reasonably call me a minimalist in my life today. But at one point, that was very true of my life. And I think that that's a component in the story of many people on the financial independence journey at some point, regardless whether it becomes a lifelong passion or pursuit or, you know, I think that many people

go through at least a part of the journey that's like that. And I think it's extremely powerful as a component of financial independence. It's wonderful, whether that's something that sticks around for life or whether it's something that is there for a few years. But what it does, what minimalism does that's so powerful is it empowers you to do everything, right? You now know you can fix your car. You now know you can fix the toilet. You can fix any of your appliances. And once you know how to do all of that, if in the future you ever decide, you know what, we're not going to be this minimalist, we're going to relax a little bit here. That's now a choice rather than a helpless state that many people have.

That's why so many people, I think, really relate to that with some portion of the journey there. Have you found that to be your experience with minimalism at all? Absolutely. When I first started, it seemed like a delayed gratification. You know, as you talk about and set for life, I love the metric of your hourly wage versus whatever the thing is. I changed to the catalytic converter on my car. I got a quote and it was going to be $3,300. Well, I bought it, and I think I spent $600 on the parts, and then I paid a friend $200 to help me.

And I got to spend the afternoon hanging out with him, and it saved us over $2,000. And I did the work myself, and it built this skill set and a satisfaction, changing oil with my kids on their cars. We get to sit in the garage or the driveway and change oil and spend time together. And that's a component that you just don't get when you go to the jiffy loop. So we're not going to get like a headline coming up. former Bigger Pockets Money podcast guest arrested for eaglio emissions, like a lot of converter self-instillation, right? Nope.

That's what's great about this is, yes, you get like these outrageous quotes every once in a while from contractors or from other folks to do work in your life. And you can be like, you know what? No, of course I'm not going to pay you that outrageous sum for this particular job. I know how to do it myself and know what it's worth. That's empowering for life. And even, no matter what your income is, no matter where you go,

at some point those items become prohibitively expensive to hire out, regardless where you are on your financial journey. And so it's just so empowering to have that mentality across life. So tell us what happened to this $1,000 a month. Where did you start directing that extra thousand back here in 2019, early 2020? We started pouring that into a Roth IRA. Like I set these huge goals. I remember listening to bigger pockets. And one of the pieces of wisdom that stuck with me was the phrase, Never say I can't. Always ask, how do I? And so I set goals in 2020. I said, I want us to max out our Roth IRAs and budget like a beast and pay off our house. And that just seemed like an impossible goal, but I thought, you know what? I don't want to say I can't. I'm going to figure out how do I?

And so we started directing that extra thousand dollars into our Roth IRAs early 2020. I just stuck with the plan, listen to you guys with J.L. Collins that when the market's down, everything on sale. So during COVID, we just kept dumping money into the Roth IRA. I love that. What were you investing in? Index funds. So I kind of, you know, split it between, we have it with Fidelity, and then it was just their S&P 500, you know, FNILX and FSKAX. And then a couple mutual funds, F-O-C-P-X and F-B-G-R-X, their Blue Chip and their NASDAQ mutual funds. So, you know, kind of Let's put in the difference between, okay, let me see how these high performing mutual funds do overtime versus, you know, these S&P 500 index funds. And it's, of course, paid tremendously over the last several years.

Are you still in all of those funds? I am, but pretty much just the S&P, you know. So this was a big goal. You know, $1,000 a month goes a long way to maxing out, certainly one Roth, maybe two. And you also wanted to pay off your house. How much was left on the house? That's a good question. Let me see.

I've got our budgets here. I love that it's in a spiral notebook. That is how I first started budgeting and tracking my expenses because we could not figure out what the hole was in our spending. We're like, why are we spending so much money? Why don't we start tracking it? So every time I would come home from, this was when I was a stay-at-home mom, I would come home from whatever errands I was running, I would walk in the door. There was a spiral notebook right there. It was the first thing I would see. And I'd write down all the things I just spent money on. And all of a sudden we're like, oh, we know where that hole went. Yeah.

No, I love hearing that from you guys. So this is, we started including our house in our spending plan with like our home equity. And it looks like June 2020. And at that point, we owed $38,536. Nice. What did you pay for that house? We bought it in 2004. The market value, the ARV in 2004 was like $125,000.

And we got it for $100,000. Okay. So you had 38,000 left in 2020. When did you pay off your house? First week of December 2020. Wow. Did you also max out your Roth IRA that year and your wife's Roth IRA? Both. Wow. Okay. So that is, I'm going to actually look this up. $6,000. Okay. So that's $12,000 plus $38,000. Where did this money come from? So some of it, my job as a lifeguard. I got furloughed from the city. And, And the day that they called it, my boss came in and said, well, I need to send you home. You need to go apply for unemployment. And so they were doing the extra $600 a week for unemployment. And then at the same time, in January 2020, I had been listening to you guys. And one of the things was if you want to learn real estate, one of the things you should do is get a job working in the real estate market.

And so my wife got a job doing property management in January 2020. And so she had started working and I was getting unemployment during the pandemic. And then I was doing gigs like online. So I would play online and have like my Venmo code and my cash app code. And I was doing some singing telegrams during the pandemic. You know, so I would do them socially distanced, of course. And I would teach my guitar students virtually, you know. And then I also started doing these TCPA lawsuits.

And so, you know, I think my first. big paycheck from one of those was in 2020. That was one of the things that caught by out. You are an active contributor in our Bigger Pockets Money Facebook group. And we were asking about side hustles. And you were like, every time someone called, I forget how it was phrased, but something to the effect of every time someone spam calls me, I make 500 bucks or something to that effect.

Right. And this is where the TCPA component comes in. So can you tell us about this particular side hustle? Because I think a lot of people would love to turn those spam calls into some extra income. So as I started, you know, listening to you guys and investigating side hustle. because as I felt more secure in my marriage, it was like, all right, I started feeling that every dollar I made wasn't just going into this empty pit.

Every dollar I was making could actually go towards paying off our house. You know, we were working as a team. And it was like, how can I make more doing side hustles? And so as I started talking to people, as you talk about set for life, like, put yourself in a position to become lucky. I started asking people about things. And someone at my church mentioned she had seen a news story about this guy, this guy with these telemarketing calls.

And as a musician, I feel like I always have to answer the phone because it could be a gig. And it's really annoying. You know, I don't want to buy your solar panels. I already have them. I don't want to get your extended warranty on my car, you know, all these things. And I watched the news story. You know, the guy was, of course, he makes it look a lot easier than it is because he's been doing it for 20 years.

But, you know, it was like, hey, here's, in a week, I made $10,000, you know, from these phone calls. And, you know, he sells his book. on the website and I read the book and I just dedicated myself to you know this I started you know doing the Tim Ferriss 80-20 analysis you know it was like once I got back to work at the lifeguard job I thought I can pick up extra hours working at the pool and at that time I was probably making 12 or 13 dollars an hour you know or if I can settle a lawsuit here for let's say if I got three phone calls that could potentially be $4,500 in violations even if I settle that for 1,500, which is a third of the statutory damages. That's a lot of hours working at the pool.

And so the 80-20 analysis on that with Parkinson's law and Pareto's law is, you know, it's worth my time to work on this lawsuit because it's going to be a very big payoff. So you're kind of like Batman. You're not the hero we need. You're the hero we deserve. One of those. You're not the hero we deserve. You're here we need in stopping these spam collars in the first place. So it's a real, like there's a real service to society for going after these guys and making it expensive. to call people that they shouldn't be calling. So what is the gist of this lawsuit? Because I also get quite a few of these phone calls.

So the gist is, if you're a telemarketer, by federal law, you have to check the national do not call list every 30 days. And the law has made it very difficult for them to make a living, you know, spam calling people. And a lot of people are on the national do not call list. So rather than being legally compliant, what they like to do is they download software. to spoof numbers, and then they rotate their fake numbers, and then they just have auto dialers that just make thousands of calls a day. They like to have a lot of them, not all of them,

but a lot of them like to have foreign call centers where they might have people working for, you know, two or three dollars an hour, answering phones, generating leads. And then once they generate enough leads, they turn that over to someone that's stateside, you know, to kind of call back and actually, you know, cash in on the lead. So how does one go after these guys? Not to get too much into the weeds, and the way that I do it here, section 227C of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, you know, says that if you receive these calls, they can be a $500 violation, and if you can prove willful intent, it triples to $1,500.

So if you've got two phone calls with a fake phone number, that's $3,000 in statutory damages. I record all the calls with my old iPhone 5, and I file them under Texas state law. And I typically do it in small claims. So let's say, for example, if I get multiple calls about my car's extended warranty, I'll typically just answer the phone, and I'll let them go through their spiel. And I'm just polite on the phone. And I take notes about what company they say they're calling from, and they usually have a similar call script.

And then let's say it's the third or fourth call about a car warranty. Then what I do is I might even have my spreadsheet there, and I'll check my spreadsheet. And it's like, oh, yeah, this is the fourth call. from these guys. And then I just buy the warranty, you know, and I put it on my credit card. And then once I receive the warranty in the mail, it has all of their legitimate legal information. And then I call back after I get that and I cancel it. And I get a refund back on my credit card. And then the guy's book has a form letter that was put together by an attorney. I send my demand letter. And, you know,

depending on how willing they are to settle, they might call or they might ignore me. And if they ignore me, which is what happens most of the time. I file with the small claims here in Plano, Texas. That sounds very believable to me. There's a bunch of calls. I go through this activity set, and then they do nothing. They ignore, completely ignore me. How do you actually collect? That's an excellent question. So typically, you know, I find their legal information, get them served. And I've been learning more and more of the last couple years how to enforce judgments. And small claims here in Texas goes up to 20,000. Usually, depending on the company, they're and if I've got them for $5,000, it's normally not worth their time to hire an attorney.

So most often, you know, they call me about a week or two before we go to trial and, you know, want to talk numbers and come up with a settlement. And, you know, once again, if it's $6,000 in statutory damages and I can get them to write a check for $4,000, it's worth it for me, you know, because I don't have to worry about collecting. Other ways that you can collect is through, if they own property, I can file liens against it. There's a lot of different ways. But, you know, I've learned over the years, I'm learning the legal system. How much have you collected or generated in this activity set? I sat down and looked at it. And over the last seven years, I believe I've collected about 80,000. $80,000? Yeah. Because somebody called you. Yeah. I love it. Because he keeps

a spreadsheet and entertains all these calls and has gone through and listen to what they have to say. This is not like no work to do this. There's a real process that you've installed here with real failure rate and 80 grand is a nice bonus. But that comes back to the story that we've been talking about here, which is your wealth building journey seems to have been built on a variety of these side hustles and various gigs or work that you have. It sounds like the last eight years have involved lifeguarding, music gigs, this. It sounds like there's teaching involved. There's lessons that you gave for guitar. Your wife is in real estate and property management. So it seems like there's like a large collection of side hustles or side bets going on at any given time. And this is one of those.

Yeah, correct. How much time do you think you've spent to generate that $80,000? I'm not sure. It's gotten to be over the years. There's definitely that learning curve, that S curve. You know, in the beginning, the first year I did it, I didn't collect anything, honestly. It was a learning curve. You know, I would send demand letters and I would collect data. And even the first two trials that I went to, I lost because I just didn't have good evidence and I didn't know the law well enough. I was in the right, but I just didn't know how to present the evidence and present the law. And that was okay. That's how you learned is from making mistakes. And, you know, small claims is a good place to do that. Yeah. Small stakes too. So $80,000 is a great salary for a year. Would you estimate you've

spent 2,000 hours doing this or less or more? Sure. Okay. You know, the first couple years, you know, I just, I learned how to kind of the detective work, like how to gather evidence, how to keep records, how to make the spreadsheet, how to take the screenshots and record the calls. Like I said, the first two trials I went to, I didn't have the calls recorded. And in Texas, that's permissible. You know, I don't have to tell them when they call that I'm recording it. And it's a one-party state. So I can present that, you know, unless they request it, you know, I don't have to give them that evidence. And there's a legal way for them to do that. So I can present that in court and it's completely legal and it helps, you know, show that they're the ones making the calls and I never signed up for any of that stuff. Just over the years, as I've learned the skills, just like any other skill. Initially, I didn't get much return for it as I was learning the skills. And then I started to get a big, big return. And then as I've gotten better at it, it's taken less effort. You know, so typically now I like if I can find someone that has several violations. I've got a trial this week. I actually have them for more than

20,000, but I just put it at 20,000 because that's the cap for small claims here in Texas. And with small claims, you don't have to hire an attorney. You can represent yourself. Correct. I mean, I guess you can represent yourself anytime, but have you ever hired an attorney to help you with this? I have a couple cases that attorneys have handled. And attorneys that handle these cases typically take 50% minus legal fees. And so it's a tough spot. So, So, you know, I've got a couple cases that they've handled, but it's really inspired me to say, you know what, I can do this myself. In fact, the last one that I had an attorney, I had to teach him all the laws and present all the evidence. And, you know, it's, I've gotten to where it's like, you know what, it's easier for me to do it myself. You know, kind of coming back to that DIY mentality. What if many people in the financial independence community, achieve financial independence. And then whenever their early retirement is interrupted by a spam phone call, they go, great, I'm going to make my 500 to $500 to $1,500. That would end this spam world pretty quick, or at least greatly reduce it. But let's go back to the meaningful factors in your story here. So 2019, early 2020, we have an

epiphany to begin building wealth. 2020 is a whirlwind of activity where you're starting this pursuit, head extraction is zero in 2020 for you. Your wife goes into property management. You have furloughed $600 a week unemployment from the COVID situation that's going on. you have gig work and online work happening. You are investing in your Roth and you pay off your house. Give us the overview of what transpired over the next few years and what were the big levers. Like was income coming in from some form of active work?

What was the meat of your financial journey over the last seven years since then? Well, Scott, I'll quote you and say, get to a 50% savings rate as fast as possible. And the big three, like housing, transportation and food, we wanted to get to that 50% savings rate as often as possible. You know, once we built an emergency fund, we didn't have to keep building an emergency fund, so all that money we could save, invest, and give.

And once we got to where we were comfortably at a 50% savings rate, like we learned how to live the way that we liked. And with my wife's support, you know, I was able to work on making more. You know, so and then that financial confidence that comes with a strong financial situation, you know, eight years ago, go, if I got a call about a gig, I might feel an urgency to take the gig. It's like, this is the

amount that I'd like to get paid, but I need the money so I could ask for less. But, you know, having a strong financial position, it's like, well, maybe I'd like to stay at home with my wife and kids, so I'm going to ask for more money. You know, a position of financial strength has put us to where we could get more. It sounds like the power dynamic flipped in your situation for your gig work, at least. What happened with the lifeguarding or the day work that you were doing? Yeah, the other side of that too is it's been so awesome to just study tax advantaged accounts, right? So my city job, we have a state pension. You know, I can put 7% into that and the city does a 2 to 1 match.

So every dollar I put in the city puts in $2. And then we also have a 457B. And so all of that money goes in, you know, pre-tax. And as I learned from listening to your show, you know, there's no retirement age. So whenever I want to early retire from that job, I have full access to that money. You know, with a strong financial position, we can take high deductible insurance.

And because I'm a gig worker for the most part, my city job is not full time, so I don't get benefits. So we have marketplace insurance. And we can take high deductible insurance because our emergency fund will easily cover that high deductible. And so our health insurance is very low. We have a high deductibles.

and stuff on our homeowners insurance, high deductibles on our auto insurance. And then just all the tax advantage stuff. And even, you know, we'll use the savers credit. You know, so I try to put as much as I can into tax advantaged accounts to bring our taxable income as close to zero as possible. And then put the rest in like Roth or taxable accounts and, you know, get the savers credit and to take full advantage of that. What is the savers credit?

So depending on your income, they will give you. up to a 50% credit on your tax return up to $2,000 for a married couple. And so, you know, let's say, depending on where you sit there, if you put $6,000 and Roth contributions count. So let's say if I put a bunch into my $457 and it lowers our taxable income to where, you know, let's say we have a $10,000 taxable income at 10%, you know, so that's going to be we owe $1,000 for income tax. but our contributions put us in a position that we get a 50% credit up to $2,000,

so we get a $2,000 credit, and that would just cover our entire tax bill. I actually wasn't aware of this, and that's kind of embarrassing, because I think a lot of the bigger pockets money listeners are just fairly high income, so they don't qualify for this credit here. And that's what makes your journey so remarkable is the low expenses that you maintain this entire way through so that you generated a substantial wealth. I want to hit that headline number in a second here over the last eight years from this $150,000 starting position through this body of activity.

And then it sounds like just general applied financial knowledge. And I imagine that knowledge didn't come in one big chunk. It was hours and hours of consuming content and going and researching and finding every possible advantage and stacking them up bit by bit. And that really compounded nicely for you. Am I again guessing reasonably close here for this? Yeah, that's absolutely right. I know you talk about the four levers.

Yeah, spend less, earn more, invest, or create. Yeah, he does it all. Yeah, you've done all of them. So what was the headline here? We're never earning up more than $100,000 a year from $150,000 in net worth in 2019, early 2020, what are we at today? Yeah, we hit a million in net worth back in April. Yes. Hooray, that's awesome, the double comma club.

Yeah. That was a huge milestone for us, you know, and that was. It was just unreal. How old are you right now? Forty-nine. Forty-nine. Okay. So you started your 40s, not doing bad necessarily with any of this, but not feeling like you were on the right track. And by the time you'll turn 50, you're well past $1 million in net worth, assuming that there's no market crash or anything like that, but you just absolutely crushed it here. Do you think your journey is repeatable? Do you think that your situation was particularly unusually suited to building this wealth? Or do you think that this is something a lot of people who are maybe starting their 40s or

even 50s can repeat. I think there's components of our journey that have just been a blessing and luck, you know, just being at the right place at the right time, you know, putting myself in a position to become lucky. Once again, I can't say it enough. You know, my wife being on the same page with me has been critical, you know, for us to just be accountable and encourage one another. And her skills as a homemaker have just been, you know, absolutely fantastic. But it's repeatable. you know, just taking the tax advantage and, you know, the side hustles and doing those things and just cutting expenses, but really, you know, for us, too, digging into that minimalism and not feeling deprived, you know, looking at those things as, you know, when I make salsa at home,

like, it's better than when I buy it at the store. When we make laundry detergent at home, it's better than what we buy at the store. We build our own furniture. My wife and I build it together. It's, you know, cost pennies on the dollar of something that we would buy. And it's become like a fun activity for us to do together. And I think it's repeatable. I think, you know, a lot of people just don't challenge those limiting beliefs. And, you know, it's been, it's been so satisfying. The story that I'm hearing is absolutely repeatable to somebody who's willing to do the work.

This was not just, I am going to sit back and let all this money come to me. This was, I am going to go out and find ways to earn in. income, I got annoyed by these spam calls. I get annoyed by spam calls too. Do I do anything about it? No. So guess how much money I've collected over the last eight years? A whopping zero. But you saw a story online. There's a lot of people who saw that same news story and did nothing. You took action and you are $80,000 richer because of it. I would actually say you're more than $80,000 richer because you took that money and probably invested at least some of it, which has grown. So you're more than $80,000 richer because you took action when most people don't. They sit on the couch, they watch the video,

and they're like, huh, that'd be cool. And then they never do anything. So yes, your story is 100% repeatable if somebody is going to do the work. This next question I have is, what is retirement going to look like for you? And when are you expecting to retire? Do you want to retire? That probably should be included in the question set, yes. I mean, look at his life, Scott. What does he want to get rid of? That's really hard to say. So, you know, I love the four-hour work week when Tim Ferriss talks about, you know, no one wants to have a million dollars.

They want the lifestyle that a million dollars pays for. And I feel like we've found ways to live a very fulfilling life. My wife is actually in the other room watching my granddaughter right now. And it's just amazing to have the freedom to say, I can go spend time with my granddaughter. I got this seat for my bicycle that I can put her on and take her for bike rides. That is so fulfilling to me. I can go around with my band and, you know, play my favorite songs and it helps pay the bills. I can go to the pool and hang out with my coworkers and talk about, you know, finances and, you know,

read my Bible and do all the stuff I would be doing at home for free. And, you know, most of the people go to my pool and pay to be there. I get paid to be there. You know, so retirement, I just think it's, you know, kind of more. doing what we want to do. We're happy with our house. We're happy with our lifestyle. And it's just taking more time to spend maybe more travel and giving more and, you know, spending time with our kids and our grandkids and just trying to share this kind of information with with our friends and family. I love this. I love your mentality. I love your happiness because there's a

lot of people who look at this, you know, financial independence weirdo thing and think, oh, I would be miserable. I have to give up everything. And you have a really great life. It sounds like you really enjoy the life that you're living now. Yes, you could choose to retire, but you also really enjoy doing all of the things you're doing. Why would you retire? When you're ready to start your business, Northwest Registered Agent helps you do more than just file paperwork. You get all the tools to build a real business identity for you. from day one, a business address, website, phone number, operating agreement, free guides, and more at no extra cost. Northwest registered agent has been helping small business owners and

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That's biggerpocketsmoney.com slash F-I-P-P-R-O. You're kind of doing for professionally the same things you were doing eight or nine years ago, but the power dynamic has totally flipped in your life where you're in complete control of the situation. So it really hasn't resulted in like you're still doing this, a similar job, you're still doing the band, you're still suing scammie phone callers. It's just now there's the options set as exploded and you decided, you know what? I really like what I'm doing here. And I can now, I can now kind of open up and see what's next. That's what financial independence, I think, is all about is it doesn't necessarily

need to lead to a huge external view of life changing. It's just a power dynamic and a happiness, security, relationship. It sounds like it's all improved as you've pursued this journey and cross the million dollar mark here. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, and we definitely spend luxuriously on the things that we get value out of. Like, I always only drink really good coffee. You know, I always, you can laugh at this, but the socks that I wear are $15 a pair, but they're really nice. They're really nice socks. My son, you know, got me on really nice soap. You know, things are like $7 a bar for soap, but I get value out of that.

And I don't get value out of having a car payment or an expensive car or a bigger house, you know. My wife does like if we go on a trip for our anniversary if I rent a sports car for the week, you know, and she likes that. But it's easy to rent a sports car for the week if I ride my bicycle to work. And I like riding my bike to work. It helps wake me up and it gets me some fresh air and a little exercise and it's amazing. Fantastic. Well, congratulations on a wonderful outcome here and a fantastic story. You know, thanks for sharing your journey with us.

It's just so impressive to hear what you've achieved here, never having earned over $100,000 in active income in a year, right? Is that the right statement? I think the last couple years, it's probably been a little over 100,000, you know, maybe in that 100 to 110, 115 maybe, the last year or two. And that's the aggregation of these multiple things you guys are doing has stacked up to that, yeah. And it's just still remarkably impressive. And congratulations of what you built and the wonderful, fulfilling life that you seem to have here.

And thank you so much for listening and sharing your story here with Bigger Pockets Money. We really appreciate it. And it's just, it just makes our day to hear about this kind of. outcome. Thank you guys so much for sharing the information and just, you know, challenging my limiting beliefs and putting out the resources and just, you know, making it seem approachable and just aggregating just, you know, all that information for, for people like me to access it and be inspired. And I'm just so happy that you took action. Thank you for hearing it and then putting it into practice. I love that. Dave, where can people find more about you and specifically

where can people find out where you're going to play in your next shows? You can go to my web, website, davesgatarmusic.com. And you can also find me on Facebook, you know, with my bands, guns and the number four roses and walk this way and Texas Kiss Destroyer, something like that. I don't know. But you can find me on Facebook, you know, under just under my name. Well, thank you very much. We'll check those out. Ever coming through Denver? We actually took a trip up through there a couple months ago, and I thought about you guys. we took a family trip and, you know, went and did some hiking. It was a lot of fun. Did the Manitou incline.

Oh, how did you like that? That was a lot of fun. That was a lot of fun. I gave up because there was no parking the day I went there. So I still have been elevator forever. I tried to go there once and it was no parking. So I went and did some other hike. I have to go back and try it sometime. I've heard great things. Yeah. Scott, when you go, take Carl with you because I don't want to do it. I love reading the reviews on the Manitue incline because people are like, wow, this was a lot of stairs. What did you think it was? It's like 2,700 steps or something. It's like at

altitude, straight up. So, yeah, not my idea of a good time, but I'm glad you enjoyed it. You know, and it was one of those things that it didn't cost anything to do. Yeah, they give out passes. You have to have a permit to do it, especially on the weekends, but you can get a permit, I think, either one or three months in advance. And it's free. You just have to, they don't want 9,000 people on these stairs. So they only give out a certain amount every day. It is a very interesting, fun, in air quotes, thing to do if you are in the Colorado Springs area. All right, Dave, this was so much fun.

I'm so thankful that we had you on this show today. I loved hearing your story and I really, really appreciate your time with us. Thank you so much. And we will talk to you soon. I love it. Thank you guys so much. Scott, Mindy, appreciate you guys and all you do. All right, Scott, that was a fantastic story from Dave.

what did you think of his side hustling and his just willingness to take action? Well, I think it comes down to what he said in the show where his big three, his housing, transportation, and food expenses were kept under really tight control for the majority of his wealth building journey. And I think that it's literally that simple and that hard for a huge percentage of people in a similar position. And I think that one of the things we didn't get to today, it's not to speculate on this one a little bit.

But one of the things we didn't get to is the decision to pay off the mortgage. versus invest, you know, to finish paying off that at last $38,000, I imagine that was at a low interest rate or could have been refinanced to a low interest rate at that point in time. But what paying off the mortgage did, I think, in his situation, is it made everything optional upside, that extra gig negotiation. This component of flexibility over here in my day job, I just think that provided that optionality there, and that may, in his case, have overcome the opportunity cost of not investing that $38,000 at what ended up being a very high return. We'll never know. It's not as simple as you could invest and get more wealth than paying off your mortgage. I think in a lot of

real world scenarios, and this may be one of those examples. I hear you saying that you are a team no mortgage, Scott. I'm team. It's not as simple as it seems, right? I probably would not have paid off a three year, you know, two and a half, three, four percent mortgage. In many cases, I have made the equivalent decision to basically pay off a six and a half percent mortgage. I think it just depends on that situation. And I think it's interesting that once those costs are very low, optionality explodes, especially if that comes with this embrace of the minimalism or I'm going to be able to do it myself mentality, which I think is the key to being able to have an outcome like Dave's on an income like Dave's household. It's really just a remarkable story.

It reminds me of another Dave. Dave Ramsey says, live like no one else now, so you can live like no one else later. And I really love that quote because Dave was living like no one else. Nobody else is going to be doing musical gigs and also being a lifeguard and also doing all these other side hustles, the TCPA payoff that he's getting with these spam phone calls. There's a lot of people who have no interest in doing that. But then they'll come up to Dave. They're like, wow, how'd you make a million dollars? How did you grow your wealth to a million dollars. Well, this is how you do all of these little things and they add up. I love his story. I have a question for you. I think that Dave's clear sophistication and self-education and

the action he's taken in a variety of, like, as the tax advantage accounts and how he's doing that, the savers credit, the opportunities that came with COVID, you know, to make the best of the situation with COVID and his furlough, you know, I think all of those stack really nicely with the complicated and varied income sources that Dave has as a musician and lifeguard and spam call sewer or whatever however we describe that activity set those things I think they really stack nicely with advanced personal finance knowledge accumulated over many thousands of hours of self-education perhaps in a way that doesn't that they don't stack quite as nicely with with somebody who is earning 80,000 dollars a year at a W-2 job right like there's just not as much mechanically to do

in one of those situations other than control the budget and move through the tax-advantaged accounts, as there may have been in this situation. Do you think that's fair? I think that's really fair, because let's take this person who's making $80,000 year. They're probably working at least 40 hours a week. They don't have time to answer that spam phone call and talk to the person who's on the line and take the notes. And they could eventually amass $80,000 in lawsuit money, but they would also have to go to court, which means they would have to take time off work. And Dave has more of a gig lifestyle where he can just not take a job on that day that he knows he has court.

So he can go in and do that. He can go do the door dashing and the Uber Eats. And he can go do lifeguarding. They need lifeguards during the day. They need lifeguards on the weekends. If you've worked your 40-plus hour job, A, you can't lifeguard during the day. you have to lifeguard at night and the pool may or may not be open for very much longer after you get off work. You're not going to want to do anything on the weekends. You're trying to recharge.

I think it very much coincides with Dave's more gig lifestyle. Everyone has their picture of what they think personal finance ought to look like, right? And it's nominated by the, I'm a W-2 employee earning a middle-class income. And here's the right set of actions. And I think what's been so interesting in the last few years here at Bigger Pockets Money is, hearing the different stories where that breaks. Because there's not really much controversial to disagree with for the traditional approach for an employee. It's basically pick your Roth versus your 401k. There's an argument about which marginal tax bracket you make the switch to Roth versus

401K depending on where you're at. It's straightforward. There's no, there's no argument, what best practice largely looks like in that situation. And then it really opens up once you get into entrepreneurial side hustle land where you have six jobs stacked at once. And it's very interesting, very fun. I'm sure many people also would have no part in it, and it's not really for them. And that's great. That's what makes personal finance personal. Yep. Scott, how many TCPA lawsuits have you filed? I have filed none. I've thought about 100. Yeah, I've thought every time they call, I'm like, no, I don't want it. I also have to answer my phone every time it rings because I'm a real estate agent, and it might be somebody asking a question about a listing that I have, or some transaction that I'm in the

middle of. I don't have the luxury of just not answering some random call I don't recognize. Well, should we get out of here, Mindy? I think that sounds great, Scott. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, but we are not done sharing information with you. We have a whole website filled with information, articles that Scott has written, articles that I have written, templates and forms and calculators, free resources for you. Everything on our website is free, Biggerpocketsmoney.com. We also have a Facebook group, Facebook.com, slash, groups slash BP money. And we would love to have the conversation continue with you over there. Reach out anytime. All right. He is Scott Trench. I am Indy Jensen saying good wishes, little fishes.

When you're ready to start your business, Northwest Registered Agent helps you do more than just file paperwork. You get all the tools to build a real business identity from day one, a business address, website, phone number, operating agreement, free guides and more at no extra cost. Northwest registered agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S. with over 1,500 corporate guides. These are real people who know your local laws and can help you in your business every step of the way. With Northwest, your business is set up to stand on its own from day one. That means your home address, personal email, and phone number stay private.

Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for. For free, visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money free and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registered Agent.com slash money free. When I was CEO of Bigger Pockets, Upwork was the number one place that we went to hire freelancers to power our business. One of the biggest growth hacks is realizing that you don't have to do it all yourself. Upwork made it easy to bring in the right freelancer when we needed them so that we could stay focused on what we do best. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing,

business operations, and more. It's free to sign up and posting a job is easy. Thousands of growing businesses already trust Upwork to hire flexible, high-quality, freelance talent for everything from one-off projects to ongoing support. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-r-k dot com. Upwork.com.