BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 529: FI by 25: How to Buy Time and Freedom with a Few Years of Frugal Living

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Financial independence by the age of twenty-five?! Today’s guest started working and saving money at a very early age, which allowed him to buy the time and freedom to do the things he values most. Whether you’re twenty-five or fifty-five, applying some of these simple principles to your own life can propel you toward financial freedom! Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast! Today, we’re chatting with Gabe Bult, a YouTuber, serial entrepreneur, and real estate investor who reached financial independence before his twenty-fifth birthday—all by subscribing to financial minimalism and frugal living. The only thing stopping him from retiring early? Sheer boredom! Instead, Gabe’s day typically involves precious time with his daughter, a few hours making YouTube videos, and an afternoon spent enjoying his favorite hobbies and interests. YOU can have this life, too, but not without a little sacrifice, education, and discipline. Fortunately, it only takes a few years of ferocious frugality to get ahead, save for the future, and become “set for life.” And in this episode, Gabe will show you how to do just that! You’ll learn how to save your first $25,000 (and what to do with it), live for free with the house hacking strategy, and start a business that allows you to earn more and work less! In This Episode We Cover How Gabe reached financial independence by the age of twenty-five “Financial minimalism” explained (and why it’s MUCH easier than you think!) How a few years of frugal living can fast-track your journey to FI Living for FREE with the house hacking investing strategy Starting a business that allows you to earn more and work less And So Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group Network with Other Investors on The Path to FIRE Through the BiggerPockets Forums Finance Review Guest Onboarding Join BiggerPockets for FREE Mindy on BiggerPockets Scott on BiggePockets Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Apply to Be a Guest on The Money Show Podcast Talent Search! Find an Investor-Friendly Agent in Your Area Find Investor-Friendly Lenders Property Manager Finder BiggerPockets Money 468 - ‘Bar Rescue’ Host Jon Taffer on the “Secret Recipe” for a Successful Business Connect with Gabe on BiggerPockets 00:00 Intro 01:34 What Is Financial Minimalism? 04:38 A Day in the Life with FI 07:30 Gabe’s Money Journey 13:06 The Art of Entrepreneurship 16:30 House Hacking 101 24:34 Education & EXTREME Discipline 35:41 Connect with Gabe! 36:01 Become a Financial Minimalist! Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-529 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we're speaking with Gabe Bolt, a former FI adherent and serial entrepreneur who relentlessly pursued financial freedom for the freedom it gave him over his entire life. Yeah, Gabe is just an example of what can happen when almost everything is optimized for FI, including starting immediately out of high school, including relentless focus on self-education, including an extreme approach to frugality, including a DIY mentality, including serial entrepreneurship and experimentation, including long-term 10-year horizon for planning out future investments, including extreme discipline and financial habits. So really admire Gabe, if you can't tell, already and what he's built and the optionality that this gave him in life. This guy fired at the age of 24. So I think you're going to really enjoy this one. I certainly did and learned a lot from Gabe.

Hello, hello, hello. And welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Middy Jensen. And with me as always is my set for life co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Minnie. Great to be here with my first time home buying co-host and selling your home co-host, Mandy Jensen, two books by this great lady next to me on the camera here. As always, we're here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, to introduce you to every money story, including those who achieve financial independence before their 25th birthday, because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you're starting.

Gabe Bolt, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here. Gabe, your focus is on living a minimalist life. Can you explain what financial minimalism means and how your lifestyle reflects that? I first got into kind of like the fire movement and then as I started to learn this idea of minimalism, I realized there's a lot of like overlap between the two lifestyles where it's really

just about like getting rid of all the non-essential stuff in your life so you can focus on what matters. So for me, honestly, like financial minimalism is really just rebranded the fire movement of just like frugal living so that you can have money and time and energy and like mental space for the things that are important to you. Awesome. And is it is it the simplicity of the life story? that attracted you to this, or is it the math about why it's so much better of a way to approach fire, which I'm going to allude to here, that attracted you to financial minimalism? Yeah, I think for me, it was really about freedom.

So I realize that if you don't really control your life, somebody else will, and I was just working so much doing stuff I didn't like that I'm like, if I can just spend a lot less money and just simplify things as much as possible, I can have, really it was about having time to do the things that I really wanted to do. Like we have, I just had my second kid recently and I've been able to spend a lot more time with my kids. And that was an initial goal when I kind of got into this whole movement was like, I don't want to ever miss a soccer game.

I don't ever want to do this stuff that a lot of people do because they have to send their kids to daycare and they have to do these different things. And that's because they have a nicer house and a nicer car and they're always buying stuff and all this stuff. And I realized that every time I bought expensive stuff, I'm like, well, I was happy for like five minutes and then I donated it a year later. So, you know. So I want to highlight what you just said. It's about time. So many people here, F-I-R-E, financial independence, retire early and focus on the retire early part. It's not about retiring early. If you love your job, stay at your job. I'm financially

independent. I still work. And it's because I love my job. So having, I also have like way older kids than you do. So, but spending the time with them when they were little was so important. to shaping who they are now. And if that's something that you can do simply by reducing your expenses on stupid things that you don't even care about that you donated a year later, why wouldn't you choose that? I mean, you're choosing to have children. You should choose to be able to spend time with them as you can. And this is not mom shaming anybody who goes to work or dad shaming anybody who goes to work.

I'm just saying if you have the opportunity, why not take it. Exactly. And I think like that's why I kind of realized in the past like year or so that maybe the fire movement wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. It's because I don't actually want to retire. I want to be able to work as much or as little as I want to on something that I enjoy. But if I don't work for more than a couple days, like, I honestly get a little stirk crazy. And it's, I have an addiction. It's a bad thing. But like I get to do something I love now because I love to do it, not because like I have to do it. And before I just wanted to get out of that cycle of I have to do this if I'm going to like eat and

my family's going to eat. And so that's really what attracted me as well. Well, let's let's let's take a step back here. And can you describe who you are, what you do with your time, how old you are, and just like what a Tuesday looks like for you, Gabe? I think that will be really interesting and appealing to a lot of folks to kind of get a glimpse into your world. Sure. I'm 28 years old. So pretty much I'm a YouTuber. I make YouTube videos. I do one video a week about like finance and productivity and stuff like that. But I was able to structure in a way where I can mostly do, if I do just the baseline of what I have to do, it takes about five hours a week. So if I wanted to, I could work five hours a week. I generally work way more than that because that would be incredibly

boring. But most of the time, you know, I'll get up. I'll spend a couple hours with my daughter and then I'll go work for a few hours. And then I'll take the afternoon off. I'll, I've been getting into saunas and cold plunges recently and, like, working outside businesses. And then play with my daughter more. And then maybe work a few or more hours in the afternoon. and that's generally like almost every single day looks like for me. Awesome. How long have you been doing this, this kind of lifestyle? So I've been doing YouTube for five years.

I got my first house hack like six years ago or something like that. And then the extreme frugal living, which isn't as extreme anymore because I think that's like a season. It doesn't have to be like forever. But that's probably been over 10 years that I've been into like this whole idea because, you know, my mom recommended rich dad, poor dad. And that's kind of like what kicked off this whole. thing, which I don't even know what it turned into now. Okay. So when you say extreme frugality,

I hear a lot of people saying like, ah, this isn't for me. What does extreme frugality look like for you personally? And how long did that period of your time last? Because I really like that you say it doesn't have to last forever. Yeah. So that lasted for me probably once I read Rich I Portad and that was kind of like the first book that kickstarted everything. And then I was like binging bigger pockets for a while and a bunch of other podcasts. So that probably was, lasted until like two years ago when I actually started to make any money. Because I realized, you know, like it was all the classic math that you hear that like, oh, if you, you know, invest this now, you'll earn like a billion dollars when you're older. And it turns out like,

I don't actually invest too much into the stock market now and that type of thing. But the frugal living really lasted like five to like seven years of just like the first year me and my wife were married. We maybe went out to dinner like twice, all of our clothes are from the thrift store, all this type of stuff because we both realized that like the sooner we can get out of this, the sooner like I can be home and not working three different jobs. And we can be there with our kids and we can actually start a family because we can't afford to like do that right now. So I think it was really having that end goal in mind just made it effortless for those years. And then once we were able to take advantage of all those things like buying rentals and

starting a business, then we don't have to be as frugal now and we can actually like enjoy our lives a little more. Stay with us. We'll be back after a quick break. 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 isn't just to look backward, it's to actually make progress. Simplify your finances with Monarch.

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for me over over 10 years. Kickstart your well-being journey with your first audiobook free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash BP Money. Welcome back to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. Well, let's walk through that journey. So you preface this by saying that your mom gave you rich dad, poor dad, around 18, it sounds like. What was life growing up around money? And how did you, you know, it sounds like your parents did give you a nudge in this direction here.

Can you give us a little bit about your upbringing? Yeah. So my parents didn't do the best with money. They had some credit card debt at some different points. And my dad during like 2008, he was a real estate agent, which was great. until it wasn't great and then he didn't earn any money. So it was definitely very up and down with childhood where he had some times of like nothing and sometimes like where it wasn't bad, like definitely weren't poor. But he, yeah, we never really talked a ton about money as a family.

And at the age, I was 11 when my dad started a commercial cleaning company. So I started working five nights a week from the age of 11 until 22 or something like that, which I wouldn't recommend. But that gave me a really good work ethic and really good like I work really hard for this money and I don't want it to go away. So that's still some some issues that I have now, I believe. But that was kind of like my initial kind of growing up with money. And then my mom's like, you should read this book because we didn't. And it's too late for us to start some of these things now. We're having a hard time to because it's a lot harder when you have a family. You have a house, all the stuff to make these changes. So she kind of wanted to kick us off. and then just hearing those different ideas of like, oh, I didn't know what assets and liabilities were and all this stuff really kind of like got me addicted down that rabbit pole because I was homeschooled and I cheated through most of school. So I know that like college was not really an option for me. So at 18, I got my real estate license because I was Googling like highest paying jobs that you can work from, you know, like without a degree. So I became a real estate agent. That did not go well. But anyways, that was kind of like my initial upbringing with money. Yeah. So, so you know, you said you're not going to go to college because, um, you know, of your your homeschool strategy that you were employing at that point in time. How did you go about building both those first couple of years? And was it just, was it just this extreme frugality and just letting the pile grow a little bit bigger?

When did investing? Yeah, I was, you know, working full time. I was a real estate agent. I was working during construction. And I probably didn't have a ton of time to spend money. So I was just being very frugal. And then I learned about that idea of house hacking, I think at like 18 or something like that.

So I was pretty much saving up my first 25K, kind of like I didn't read your book till I was 23 or something like that, but it turned I was like the exact same thing that I was doing. So I saved up my first 25K and I bought my first house hack at 22. And that was like my initial thing that allowed me to go from living from free at my parents to living for free at this house hack. And that kind of we just kept the kept the ball rolling and kind of went on from there. Awesome. And I want to dive into this 18 to 22 year old period. Love the house hack by the way. Um, um, period here. What did your income growth look like?

Because that's, I think, something that, you know, is always really interesting to say, okay, there's the college path and then there's the just go to work right out of high school and begin building the career. How did that trajectory go for you in a general sense? Yeah, I'm trying to remember, like, what my income was. It was not good. It was below the median because I had, yeah, real estate. I think, like, I was a real estate agent for like eight years or so.

And I definitely lost money during that time because, like, all the upkeeps of doing it and then I would do like one or two deals a year. That didn't really make me a lot of money. I was working full time. So I was making, you know, maybe 30, 40K a year from the full time cleaning company and then maybe another 10 to 20K from like side hustles and stuff. It was not a lot of money. But I also looked at it as like I can either go for four years and lose $100,000 or I can like work and at least like be at ground zero when I'm like through this whole process. And I had no idea what to go to school for. And I was like, I don't want to go do this thing that absolutely hate, which is, you know, study for something I don't even know

and spend all this money. Like, I'll just figure it out on my own. And that's what eventually led me to like trying so many different businesses until I found one that I was able to build, which for me was YouTube and something that I liked. But a lot of that was just trial and error of like, oh, I'll start this business. And I'm like, well, that was horrible. And then you start something else, but you gain a skill from each one. And that's kind of like what kind of built it for me. Yeah. So like, so it sounds like during this four year period from 18 to 22, You emerged with somewhere between $120,000 and $200,000 in total income for that time period and a house hack and multiple experiences and your real estate license, which you say it doesn't use, but you have multiple house hacks. I wonder if those things are related in some indirect fashion there and from a comfort level.

And it's like, it's really interesting to hear that like, okay, some people graduate from college with an engineering degree and go get a job at Lockheed Martin making $100,000 a year, or close to $100,000 a year. starting out. And some people get an anthropology degree and make $30,000 a year. And your option is definitely not a bad one. It sounds like a really actually, in many ways, an advantage to the career that you've pursued over the last 10 years in a big way. Is that how you see it? Yeah, for me, I think not going to school is one of the best decisions of my life, just because I know I'm like such a horrible student. And like my brother went to school to be a, what do you go to school for like fishing game or something like that? And he doesn't use his degree. And I know a bunch of other people who spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars or at least tens of thousands of dollars and don't use their

degrees. So I was like, I'm not just going to go to go. And I think I definitely learned some some pretty valuable skills during that time. I think that these four years are super critical. And I keep diving into them because I want to go after another angle here on this, which is, it sounds like there's a ton of self-education that's going on. And that's happening between the ages of 18 and 22. Is that right? Or a big chunk of that? Okay. And then you also said you mentioned you started businesses on the weekends or had all these side hustles. I'm a I'm a big believer in the idea of hey nine out of 10 businesses fail so the logical conclusion of that is to start 10 businesses. Is that aligned with kind of your approach and experience there? If so, can you tell us

about some of the things that didn't work out or petered out? Yeah. So it wasn't planned. It wasn't like, oh, I'm just going to start businesses because I have this whole idea like I was just failing at a bunch of things, honestly, and I didn't want to get a real job, but I knew I didn't want to do office cleaning forever. So I was just trying anything. And I was like, oh, okay, being a personal trainer, that would be cool. And then I was like, wow, there's a lot of studying that goes into this. And then I like, I actually don't like people that much. So maybe that's not going to be for me. And even real estate, I was like, oh, it's okay, like high cap, salary, all this stuff. I don't like people that much. So that didn't work out either. And then,

you know, like I started landscaping businesses when I was a kid. And then, I don't It was the whole thing. Marshmallow shooting company when I was like in late teens. But again, you have to sell the marshmallow shooters that you make and that involves talking to people. So it's a lot of stuff. Was this an invention that you had? It's, yeah, PVC pipes. And then you make like a marshmallow shooter and we would go to like different like out like homeschool events and like New Hampshire indoors or whatever those are called where it's like a bunch of DIY stuff.

And you could sell them and you can make them for like a couple bucks and sell them for like 20 bucks. but we never demonstrated how to use them because I was super shy, so didn't sell very well. I just see so many parallels between my journey and yours, which is why I'm asking these questions. Like, I wouldn't have been able articulated as try 10 businesses at that point in my life. But like when I was 23, which is more corollary to your 18 to 22 year old period, I was trying to be a tutor. I was driving for Uber.

I was doing DoorDash. I tried to start a winter gloves for driving business. I have fucking noodle around with a winter tire rentals business. here in Colorado. And I started Trenches T's, which is still on Facebook out there. And I had two shirts that were for sale. One was called, one was Buddha approaching a hot dog vendor. And he was saying, make me one with everything. And the hot dog vendor is replying with, sure, but change must come from within. I thought this was the best idea ever at that point in time. And I have another one that had a giant windmill. And it said, renewable energy, I'm a huge fan. And, and, you know,

That also did not sell very well. So trenches teas, go look it up. Maybe I'll get a sale today on there. There's no inventory. So good luck. Anybody listen to this. But that was my journey. It sounds like that's fairly paralleled to yours.

Dude, I started a T-shirt business too. That's so funny. Yeah, no, even now, it's still an addiction. Like, I have, like, four different YouTube channels and, like, just like, none of the other ones do well because I don't focus on them that much. But I always, like, every couple months, I'm like, ooh, that would be a good idea maybe i should do that and then i'll like start something new whether it's like a teacher business which i tried a couple of there is drop shipping like different things like i just

keep trying new things just because like i think i like that that newness of it so what are some of the ones that's so so actually let's let's pick up the story here you're you're 22 and you have a house hack and you're coming out of this i don't know if this is how you break out your journey but that four that four year period do things begin to change or what happens next yeah nothing really changes uh so we were we got that first house hack me and my wife got married right after i got it we renovating it for a few months. She wasn't working for like the first year we were married or so. And we were pretty much like renovating that unit that we were living in. I was working full time. Also a real estate agent. Also started my YouTube channel. Also was doing stamp concrete,

which was another business that I started with my brother and my cousin. So I was pretty much just like working constantly for the first, for those next couple years as well. So my income went up a little bit. We had very low expenses. But I was just saving up for. house hack number two and house hack number three just trying to like climb that ladder awesome so tell us about house hack number two and house like number three when did they hit what what years and what ages were did those come in yeah so it was like a year and a half later so that'd be 23 24 um was when i got my second house hack and so that one was when i quit my day job um because we were able to it was a triple the first one was a triplex the first one was a triplex we were able to live in one unit again

while renovating it and then renovated another four-bedroom unit and turned it into four separate Airbnbs inside of it. So rented out four bedrooms individually. And then the income from that was enough to pay our mortgage and our living expenses because it was making like $5,000 a month. And at that point, as soon as the Airbnbs were up, I immediately quit my job. And I was like, I'll figure something else out, but I am not doing that anymore. And that's where we got the second one. All right, what year was that, what was that event when you quit your job and set a game over? And where are these properties located? Yeah.

So first of all, yeah, they're all in Manchester, which is New Hampshire. It's like the only city that has rentals in them that I could find. So that's where I am now. And then, yeah, so quitting my job was probably not the best timing. It was right during COVID. So whenever that was when I quit it, like literally a week later, everything shut down. So I was like, well, I hope I figure something else out. I was still running the Airbnb, so I was like cleaning the Airbnbs and stuff.

I had my YouTube channel, which was making like $500 a month, and I never expected that to be the thing. I was doing real estate, which that was making maybe 10 grand a year. Like I was doing maybe two deals a year or something like that. And I was like, I actually thought real estate would be the thing that I would like maybe transition into. But if worse came to worse, we would be able to live very frugally on this income from the Airbnb. So that's what I was like, I'm sure I can make 10, 20 grand a year doing other stuff for us to like live on. And then just like once I started sinking my time into, you know, my business, which was YouTube at the time, that's when that started to scale. But yeah, that's when I left my job.

Awesome. So same question I just asked you. What was your day to day like in 2020 during COVID in this context? Like how much leisure time did you have or did you not have any because you were pouring it all into a start? up. Yeah, I've never been great about having leisure time. Like, I could have had a bunch of leisure time, but, um, yeah, I just spent it doing other things. Um, that's something that I do regret looking back of like, I should have like, lived more and had hobbies and friends and like stuff like that, but I didn't have any friends. Um, and I was pretty much so, like a day in the life would be, I would be renovating our apartment or the other

apartment like that that was like a year for it was like constant renovations because it was two four bedroom units um so that was a lot of what i was doing you know youtube was probably um probably two hours a day or something like that and then spending time with my wife um doing a few other things um trying trying real estate i thought i was like going to a bunch of real estate classes because i thought that would be like this huge scalable thing and turns out again i don't like people so like If I knew myself a little better, I could have saved myself so much time and money. And then, yeah, that was, that was most of what I was doing is pretty much just like that year. I was, as soon as I quit, I was just like, I got to get these these Airbnbs.

I'm cleaning them like every day because we had four separate people turning over constantly. Literally the cheapest Airbnb is in the city. But they were booked, you know, 29 days throughout all of COVID. They were fully booked because it was so cheap. So that was most of what I was doing is keeping that running, coordinating. all that and then trying to grow my business. Were you making money off of the Airbnb's with them being so cheap? Yeah.

So even though they were so cheap, it was, since there was four bedrooms, it ended up being like $1,000 a month per bedroom, which was like $4,000 for that one unit plus another $1,000 for like the one bedroom we had upstairs. So that was like five grand total from that place while we were living for free. And then like $3,000 or so, you know, like it was like, it was like $5,000 total. Like $3,500 was like our expenses for keeping everything and mortgages taxes and sheets and that type of stuff. So I was making maybe $1,000 a month from that one plus $1,000 from our last rental or, you know,

close to that from our last rental as well because that was back before prices shot up. So both of these were super low interest rates, super cheap properties. Or not super cheap, but super cheap now. So that the numbers made a lot more sense then. Yeah. Okay. Earlier you suggested that you don't really invest in. in the stock market. And you've got, how many total units do you have rental real estate

wise? So two triplexes and then we're into like a duplex now. Eight units. One of them is yours. So seven units plus one for you. What else are you investing in? Or is that it? Yeah, I got to figure that out. So I'm saving up right now for my next one pretty much is what I'm doing. I have money in like, I do have some money in like, you know, stocks and some in crypto. But That's mostly just like sitting in both of those places until in high interest savings accounts until we get our next rental. But I don't really do the whole Roth IRA or that type of stuff right now just because like real estate makes so much more sense for me specifically.

It's probably not for most people, but like for the last 10 years I've like obsessed about real estate. So that's just for me makes so much more sense that I'll invest into other things for short term. But my plan is not for it to stay there. Okay. So you bought your house hacks back when rates were low. Does house hacking still make sense for you? So I'm going to try to be a lot more creative in this next one. So I don't want to live like in a duplex forever, honestly. Well, like with two kids, we want to have a farm type deal. That being said, how do we get a farm without having to pay for it?

Because I'm like after living for free for so long, I'm like, I never want to like pay a full mortgage. It just seems wrong. So we'll either live and flip that or we'll find a way to get something that's going to work where we can have an in-law or an Airbnb on the side or some other revenue stream that'll help us at least lower the expense on that. So probably our next home is going to be more of a foreverish type home that hopefully doesn't cost a ton of money. So house hacking for me is like I wouldn't move back into another triplex just because I don't have to at this point. Okay. And would you characterize your area as a high cost of living medium or low cost of living area? It's not super cheap. It's not like expensive, like a Boston type deal, but it's definitely not the cheapest thing around. So I guess that that made costs. And the first two house hacks were the cheapest part of the kind of the crappy city of New Hampshire or Maine, New Hampshire. And then we're on a little bit of a nicer side now. But the first two were definitely a lot cheaper places as well.

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Welcome back to the show. Gabe, I'm picking up a, again, the principles of frugality. Do it yourself mentality. It sounds like you're not afraid to swing a hammer and fix things up yourself. I imagine you self-manage, run all the systems. You clean the place or cleaned the place for a long time yourself as well, it sounds like. And there's this relentless pursuit of what I'm hypothesizing a relentless pursuit of self-improvement and self-education.

Is that right on the last point there in particular with self-education and self-improvement? Yeah, for sure. Like I think was it last year or the year before, I had kind of like, I was reading a ton of stuff for so long. And I was like, I'm going to take a break from like all this self-improvement stuff. And I really was not as happy as when I'm like, I want to get the best shape of my life. I want to get as smart as I can. I want to build this business as big as I can, not because it's, you know, because I want more money because I want to like give this my best shot and there was a lot of

the times that I've realized that like I wasn't giving life my best shot was when I was not the happiest so I have gone back to that you know reading almost like a book a week and trying to do this stuff just because like there was one page in rich dad poor dad that led me down all this stuff to reading all these books to all this stuff and like you don't know with that one page of one book that one thing that you hear on a podcast that like will literally change your life and so I like I'm constantly kind of looking for like that next little thing that just like unlock something. You get that aha moment that like literally makes the rest of your life 1% better. Do you notice that if you like I have the same approach there.

Again, another parallel here where a book a week is probably what I've averaged. I've noticed that when I stop reading like when I lapse on that like all the other systems in my life begin to break down. Like I don't work out as a relentlessly. My eating gets worse. I tend to have a beer or two in the evening. you know, those types of things. Do you notice that as well for yourself in there? 100%. It's like an anchor habit maybe where it's like for me, I read in the morning.

I get up like, dude, I've started to get up at five o'clock because I'm trying to like beat my daughter to waking up because if I don't, I don't have that time to read in the morning. And I like I have this morning routine that I had for so many years. I just really try to like, so I'll do whatever it takes to to keep it going. Because when I don't have that, when I don't read even a couple pages in the morning, like my day starts off different. And then, yeah, you don't have the motivation to go to the gym. It's like you're getting like a personal pep talk or encouragement from like some of these like great people in history or alive now. And when you start for me, when I start my day with that way, it really changes a lot about my entire day.

So for me, yeah, that is that is super important. I really try to like defend that even if it means getting up at five o'clock, which really sucks. It's just my life. I'm happier that way even though I'm less happy waking up, you know? So is it as simple as just like reading for a few? pages every day or trying to set in the goal of like one book a week or one book every other week, whatever you think is reasonable and then absorbing the information and patterns begin to emerge? Or do you think you have a superpower in taking action based on what you read and

what you're consuming leads to direct changes in your behavior on a regular basis? No, I definitely don't have a superpower because I'll tell you like there's so many books that I read them like four or five times. I'm like, I should probably do that. But I think for me, it's called like there's this idea of like the two minute rule where I just commit to the first two minutes of something so I'll commit to reading my book for two minutes in the morning and then generally I'll read for way more than that but when I can break down these habits into those small actionable throughout the rest of my life like even going to the gym like I'll commit to going you know putting my workout clothes go sit in the car and then if I go to the gym I go to the gym but

if not you know I'm free to walk out but so many times I can trick myself into like doing what I know is right for me by just committing to those first two. minutes. So that's something I try to do with that where this whole self-improvement thing kind of is like a cycle where if you kind of get off of it, for me, everything kind of goes off the rails. I have to correct your statement. You said you don't have a superpower, but I disagree because it is so easy to not put on my gym clothes, not sit in the car, not drive myself to the gym. It is a push to get that done. It's a push to get up early at 5 o'clock. Do you know how easy it would be to turn off your alarm and go back to sleep and let your daughter wake you up. So,

easy. So just because you're not taking action on every single thing that you're reading doesn't mean you don't have a superpower. So I'm sorry to say, Gabe, but you are wrong. All right. I'll put it this way. Like, I trick myself into doing everything. Like, I don't want to get up at five. I'm not a morning person. But I'm so depressed if I don't. Like, if I don't have my thing, like, it's all like self-preservation stuff where I do these hard things because if I don't go to the gym, I get super stressed out. And then I, like, I will have a mental breakdown because, like, I'm not doing all this stuff. So, like, I do these hard things because I know it's way worse if I don't do them. And when I kind of frame things that way,

it's even the same thing with like saving money. Like, if I don't do this, it's going to be bad. So, like, that really is, I almost like trick myself and coach myself into doing a bunch of the things that I do. It's not because I want to do them. It's like I'm scared of the consequences of not doing them. So how would you translate that into someone who's just getting started on their like money journey how you know you you like your your discipline is incredible right to wake up at five to read 50 books a year to live this frugally to self-operate a rental business to try your hand at so many different activities until you see which one stick and which ones you're passionate about how does someone begin trying to replicate the the journey that you've had if maybe

they're a couple years into their career and don't have the savings in the discipline and habits that are that you've built up here i'll just say what work for me is there's two things. There's like this why. Like what is your why for me? It was like wanting to be able to afford to have kids and actually spend time with them. And then realizing that like, dude, we came to the same ideas, like the same type of lifestyle. It worked, you know, like more or less for both of us. And like there's a proven path. Like when I realize that like, no, I'm listening to all these podcasts and all these people who are normal people are doing this exact same thing. If I just do what they're doing five to seven years, five to 10 years, I'm out. I can do whatever.

and then that happened. And it's like realizing that like it's not 30 years away. It's not 40 years away. If like if you can grind really hard for literally a couple of years, the rest of your life is just like so much easier. Even if you don't reach full fire, you can like, well,

what if you work three days a week doing something that you like and earn less money? Like you don't need to do this crazy big stuff. You can just not have the brand new house, not have the brand new car, not spend a bunch of money on different stuff. And kind of get to get to live this type of lifestyle without reaching the huge $2.4 million in the bank. Okay, let me push on this a little bit because I completely agree with you.

But I want to put myself in the shoes of 18-year-old Gabe or 22-year-old Scott. So I'm hearing what you're saying, but I'm pushing back and I'm saying, look, you bought your first house hack with a 3% interest rate mortgage at a time when you could make all these other things work. But like, if I were to buy your house hack that you currently own from you right now, I couldn't get the numbers to work in the same way and that path wouldn't work for me. What would you say to somebody who challenged you with that approach? No, dude, it's way harder right now.

But the cool thing is that there's not one path. There's building your own business like, you know, whether it's like anybody can start a YouTube channel. Anybody can, you know, start a cleaning business, which worked out into being like a much scalable business for a dad. Anybody can become a real estate agent. It's kind of heavy right now. But there's so many different things. And the more people I talk to, the more times I realize any of these things work. Maybe it's not real estate investing for you. Maybe it's something else. But any of these things work if you really go for it for multiple years, not for a couple months. Like why I failed everything is because I tried it for two months. And then I was like, okay,

well, I'm not going to try that. And then I try something else for two months. And then I'm like, oh, okay. And the one thing that I stick to for like, I didn't miss an upload on. on YouTube for five, six years, five years, I've never missed a weekly upload. And that's the thing that's done well, because that's the one thing I didn't quit. So there's a lot of paths you can go down. The main thing is that like you don't give up after two months because like, oh, the system doesn't, you know, like whatever. It's like, it feels that way. There's, there was literally like months where I was losing subscribers every time I posted when people reminded that I was alive. And like, it's the, that's where everybody quits on any business. There's any business goes through

that. And, you know, there's a lot of. And yes, it's harder for some things, but maybe it's easier for something else. And you've got to find that something else. I don't know what it is. Yeah. On episode 468 of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, we interviewed John Taffer from Bar Rescue. And one of the questions we asked, one of the last questions was, you know, what sets apart these bar owners who are successful with the bar owners that aren't?

And he said they didn't give up. Everybody that he's ever talked to, they kept pushing through. And, I mean, you're just another example. you, I'll try this for two months. You're probably not going to have success in anything in two months. And I'm not saying that to discourage anybody who's listening, but, you know, stick with it for a while. Obviously, don't stick with it if you are just bleeding money. But being a real estate agent, you're not going to be a top real estate agent tomorrow. That's just the reality of the situation. It doesn't mean you can't be a great real estate agent if you put effort into it. There's a lot of tips and tricks for

growing your business. But it also takes time, which goes back to my comment a few moments ago, you have the superpower to actually do something. Take action instead of just, well, that sure would be nice, but I'm just going to sleep today instead of getting up. And I'm not going to go to the gym because I don't feel like it. And and and, and. So I, again, you've got a superpower. Well, thanks. But there's actually this idea that really helps me called a three-year rule that I think I learned from like Matt Diavella or something like that. And, And it's this idea that if you're going to start anything, you should stick to it for three years or not started at all.

And that's what really helped me for the few things that have gone well for me is because I committed to that. Like it could suck for these next 51 weeks and it doesn't really matter because I'm doing it for the long haul. So when you like zoom out that way, that's what's really been helping me a lot as well on any habit. Like going to the gym's going to suck and you're not going to see any results. And then if you zoom out three years from now,

you're going to be like way better health. Like everything's going to be different. So that helps me with perspective. Love it. The two minute rule and the three year rule are awesome takeaways, little tidbits that I'm going to remember coming out of this and apply to my own life. Like, great, I don't feel like working out today. I'm just going to get on my shoes, start on the bike or get running for two minutes.

If I don't like it, I'll stop. I won't stop at that point. So there's a great little nuggets. I love it. All right. Gabe, where can people find you online? You just like look up Gabe Bolt on YouTube or on. On Instagram, that's pretty much the only places I'm at.

Yeah. That's Gabe B-U-L-T. Awesome. Gabe, thank you so much for your time today. This was such a great conversation. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. And we will talk to you soon. All right, Scott, that was Gabe.

And that was awesome. I really, really enjoyed hearing a different perspective on the pursuit of financial independence. I love his idea of extreme frugality. I love his reasons. for pursuing FI. I'm so frustrated by all these people who are saying, I want to retire early. Well, that's not the point of pursuing financial independence. Yes, you have the option, but are you really going to sit around and do nothing? I don't know anybody who sits around and does nothing and isn't productive in some way. So I think that the focus is on Gabe's story is back

to the FI part. I want to be doing these things that I want to be doing and I don't want a job to get in the way. It's almost like he's getting money out of the way so he can live his best life. Yeah. And, you know, I asked that leading question at the beginning, but, you know, around, is, are we, is, was he interested in extreme frugality because of the math or because of a value of minimalism and essentialism? And I think for him, it's probably, it seemed like more of the ladder on there, like just the value of it. But like, maybe you don't want to do that for, forever here. It's still the right mathematical approach to solving this problem early in life is extreme frugality because every dollar that you don't spend is another dollar you don't

have to earn, which will be taxed heavily. It's another dollar that your portfolio doesn't have to generate. So if you save $1 a month, that's $12 a year times $25, what is that? I'm going to lose myself here. 12 times $25 is $300 in wealth that you. you don't need to accumulate in order for your portfolio to sustain itself with a 4% rule. So, I mean, it's an incredibly, incredibly powerful mechanism. And if you can keep your expenses low, especially in your early 20s and accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, and get to the other side of this, then the opportunity, like, what happens is instead of working at a job and scaling your income

to the, you know, maybe six-figure mark if you're pursuing a scalable career there, you're actually going to start businesses, which can compound very, rapidly over a several year period and get you into places like where Gabe's at. So I think it's just the absolutely most, it's just, it's the most powerful single number on this journey, even if you're not like aligning or empathizing or really internalizing the, I'm going to live way below my means and be a minimalist. Doing it for a few years or being willing to do it for as long as it takes can give you the optionality to do whatever you want after you achieve financial independence. It's so.

powerful. It's the number one number in the financial independence equation. Like, you have to get that number low because it makes everything else in your life easier, including if you want to be, you know, worth millions down the road. Yep. I have nothing to add because you are absolutely correct on every front, Scott. Should we get out of here? Absolutely. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. And of course, I am Mindy Jensen saying gotta flee, bumblebee. Bigger Pockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. Produced by Hajar Eldaugh. Editing by Exodus Media,

copywriting by Nate Weintraub, and lastly, a big thank you to the Bigger Pockets team for making this show possible.