BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 57: Financial Freedom, House Sitting & Travel Hacking With GoWithLess

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

Tim and Amy were frugal—or so they thought. They spent less than they earned, so they figured they were doing it right. Then one day, they happened upon the concept of financial independence. Turns out, they had a LOT of room in their budget to cut... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast show number 57 where we interview Amy and Tim from go with less.com. Most people's standards looking in from the outside, we were doing all the right things. We were sort of living this American dream life. We live well within our means. We had a nice house. We had nice cars. We had nice things. We had a nice savings account. We were saving towards this goal of potentially retiring when we were 55. And then once we found the fire movement, we realized, well, we don't need all these things that we've had in our life. Then we realized, well, maybe if we just reduced our lifestyle and sort of deflated our life instead of inflating our life like we'd been doing historically that we could get down this path almost immediately. As soon as we saw,

we found this fire thing, I would say within a year, we were selling our house. No, even less. We were actually retired within a year of learning about the fire movement. It's time for a new American dream, one that doesn't involve working in a cubicle for 40 years barely scraping by. Whether you're looking to get your financial house in order, invest the money you already have, or discover new paths for wealth creation, you're in the right place. This show is for anyone who has money or wants more. This is the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. How's it going, everybody? I'm Scott Trench. I'm here with my co-host, Miss Minnie Jensen. How you doing today, Mindy? I am super excited about today's guest, Tim and Amy. I've known for a few years now, and I am so happy that we finally able to get them

on this show. I really love their story. They were high income earners who were also high savers, thought they were frugal, discovered that they could be way more frugal. And, and and have turned this idea of babysitting other people's houses into this amazing, like, travel hack that they use to travel the world for pennies. Yeah, Tim and Amy are just quite clearly responsible, capable folks that have had a very successful career were on track for that, even in early retirement before that 60, you know, age 65 benchmark that a lot of, you know, most people plan for. But they realized that the track they were on could be dramatically accelerated if they just

kind of changed their mindset. and they were able to, within a year of discovering the concept of financial independence, make the changes necessary to actually leave their jobs. And I think they're now set to be homeless. Yes, soon to be. Are they our first homeless guests? They might be our first homeless guests, yeah. Homeless, yet they travel the world.

No, they downsized their 6,000 square foot home. We're going to hear about that and how that kind of dramatically changed some of the picture for them. And then they now house sits around the world, which is an incredible hack to travel. You know, you can combine travel hacking to get a free flight or really cheap flights and then also be able to stay at someone's house for free at the expense of just maybe walking the dog or, you know, tending the garden. You're looking at a really phenomenal way to see large parts of the world.

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you also get Audible originals, podcasts, and a massive back catalog across business, health, parenting, and more, all accessible in one app. If you're looking to turn everyday moments into real progress, Audible has been indispensable 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. Tim and Amy, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. It is so good to have you on here. Mindy and I both know your stories, but it's going to be great to share that. with everyone who listens to the show. Welcome. How's it going? It's going great. Thank you. This is actually a bucket list item of mine. So I am super excited to be here. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Awesome. Well, let's jump right into it. In your minds, where does your story with money begin? I think it starts getting exciting once we started earning some of our own money. And that really happened when I had my first job out of college. So I grew up in a family that treasured experiences over stuff. And I didn't know it then. I didn't think it was so cool then, actually. I had a complete 180, but when I had my own money, I started buying stuff and I started using credit cards and I had an income and I was able to still save a little bit of money. So I got started with buying a whole bunch of stuff and I was on that path for about 25 years. I think as soon as I got a real job, as soon as I got out of college, the job I had had a 401k plan. And so as soon as that I saw the opportunity there to save, I was saving money.

So growing up, I was sort of beat into me. If you don't do the right things, you're going to be on the street. So I started saving early on and started moving towards, I guess, this path right out of college as well. Walk us through kind of when you kind of began aggressively pursuing financial freedom. Well, we stumbled into it by accident. So between the two of us, we made a nice, healthy income as a couple. And we had been decent savers. We also were good about not getting in debt. So even though I used to buy a lot of stuff, I did still stay within my means. So we were good savers, we were good earners, and we still spent a lot of money. Now looking back, it was too much money.

But we had a realization once we learned about the fire movement and learned about others who were able to retire early, that we started looking at our spending. So we tracked our spending. We did all sorts of things the right way. We thought we were being frugal. We were spending $150,000 a year thinking that that was a frugal life. Some people looking at our spending would maybe even think that it was a frugal life. And some of the thing, we went to the movie matinees and bought our own candy. that's not all it takes to live a frugal life, though.

But when we learned about the fire movement, we learned that, oh, we don't have to be spending $150,000 every year for the rest of our life. Once we kind of had the click of if we can dial in our spending, we don't have to work ever again if we don't want to. And that was the big shift. It's really learning about the fire movement. Okay. So your situation was basically, hey, we've had, we're having great careers, a strong income

generation, building up a solid nest egg for retirement, but, hey, we can do this much, much, much sooner if we make some drastic changes on the spending front, right? That's right. I think most people's standards looking in from the outside, we were doing all the right things. We were sort of living this American dream life. We live well within our means. We had a nice house. We had nice cars. We had nice things. We had a nice savings account. We were saving towards this goal of potentially retiring when we were 55. And then once we found the fire movement, we realized, well, we don't need all these things that we've had in our life. Our income just allowed us to have all these things. So it was the right thing to do to sort of to buy a bigger house, to buy fancier cars, etc.

And we were able to save all the while. And then we realized, well, maybe if we just reduced our lifestyle and sort of deflated our life instead of inflating our life like we'd been doing historically that we could get down this path almost immediately. I mean, as soon as we saw, we found this fire thing, I would say within a year, we were selling our house. No, even less. We were actually retired within a year of learning about the fire movement. You were spending $15,000 a year. Frugly spending $115,000 a year. I'm not judging. I'm totally judging, but for the purposes of people listening, I'm not judging. Where are you at now? What is your average spend now? And what does that include? And what did you cut out?

Yeah. So when we were spending $150,000, by the way, that $115,000, that doesn't include taxes. That doesn't include principal on the mortgage that we have. It doesn't include. savings. It includes savings. So that was just purely spending. We were, I don't want to say. That's investing. That's spending. We were flushing this money down the toilet. And so right now we're spending roughly $36,000 a year. And we live in a town home. We don't have any debt. We not even a mortgage. We don't have any car loans. We have zero debt. And our life now is an order of magnitude better than it was whenever we were out spending $150,000 a year. But as far as what we cut out, number one,

actually I had heard Scott on a program and it really clicked. So we had already been retired, but he talked about, it's not your coffee necessarily. It's your house. It's your transportation. These are huge. That was it for us as well. Once we sold our big house, we had a 6,000 square foot house that we had to, our heating bills were over $400 a month in the winter. And I had to wear layers and a hat. I was freezing in my $450 a month heating. Like this is ridiculous. And so once we got rid of that big house with the property taxes and the maintenance and all of it, we had to pay someone to professionally clean it because we had busy jobs and we didn't have time to deal with this big house and clean it. So we had to pay for that. And so the house, getting rid of the house was

huge. We had a rental property that was a small 1,800 square foot for three people. We moved in there. It was perfect for us. And now we use every inch of it. We had kind of a gas guzzling car. We got rid of that. And we had a car gifted to us by my parents and a five-year-old Toyota to Corolla, we now use that car because it's much cheaper to gas. It's cheaper to maintain. It's an easier, cheaper car. So we looked at some of the big things, but we really cut everything. So when we cut $6,500 a month from our spending, everything was under the microscope. $6,500 a month is what you cut. Cut. That's right. A month, not a year. People think I had a typo. No, a month.

Yes. Crazy. I assume that the housing was the biggest factor. in this, right? Can we walk through that? And you have a child, right? That's in school. We have three kids. One is still left. She's a senior in high school. But we have three kids. Just to clarify, Tim has three kids. They're my three step kids. But we've been real active. But you did this while, at least your youngest, is still in school, right? Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So let's walk through this. Can we kind of walk through the math on that, on the housing transition? How much, like, how much of a difference did that make? How did you, you purchase the town home outright or did you do that with debt? What was it like moving from a

family perspective. That's a good one because we had a teenage daughter. So she's now 17. This was four years ago when we downsize. So I mean, so here she is like a midteen. Our old home was like a big giant. It was like a, it was a fancy house. And so if she would have friends over, her bedroom was bigger than some of my old apartments when I was living in New York City or in Boston. And so her bedroom at seven years old was gigantic. And it was kind of like a cool thing. Like her friends come over. She has like this fancy house and this big room and whatever. So I didn't know how that would be for like a 13, 14 year old to make this big transition. She has been phenomenal.

So not only has she embraced it, sees really good lessons being played out. We talk about this like every day. But now in our old home, our big house was a ranch house. So we could scream from our bedroom to her bedroom. She couldn't hear us. That's how far away her room was at like seven years old. So now we share a wall. And it actually made our relationship closer, which as a teenager, I think that's pretty

extraordinary. So kudos to her for rising up to it. But it's only helped us because instead of being so spread out around the house, we're now, like people say it when they have tiny houses, and certainly this 1,800 square feet isn't close to a tiny house, but the less space really close, it made us closer. Yeah. And our big

house, it was almost 6,000 square feet, just to give you some perspective. But we went from 6,000 to about 1,800 square feet. What'd you do with all your stuff? We gave most of it away. And I'm sure we'll be talking about that was one big purge and downsize.

We're doing another one in 2019 for our next chapter. Oh, well, I'm very excited to get to that next chapter. But before we do, I want to kind of talk about the emotional aspect of quitting your job early, downsizing so significantly. I downsized from 5,000 to 1800. And it's, I have hoarder tendencies. So it was a huge shift for me. but I also was like, I really want to get rid of all my stuff.

It's empowering to finally like rid yourself of all that like I have as people who have listened before. Well, no, I still have a lot of stuff. As you guys know, you've been to my house. You've seen all my crap. We still have a lot of stuff. But, you know, let's talk about the emotional side of it. Were you ready to quit when you discovered?

Because you were on this path to quit when you turned 55, were you, you know, when you discovered, oh, we could quit now. Were you ready? Was that easy to quit? So I'm going to say, just. real quickly. So I didn't leave my work at the same time Amy left her work. And so I walked away from my job, November of 2015. November of 2015. And then I worked part time for about 18 months. And so I was a little afraid to let go of my income completely. And we both were a little afraid to just cut the ties from all our

income. So when we did leave our work, that happened to be the biggest earning year that we had ever had. As a couple. As a couple, we earned a lot of money that year. And we decided to walk away. way. But we thought that my part-time work could actually support our life. It could certainly support our life just working part-time. And then I decided that I was just going to give that up completely last. He looked over at me and said, I want the life that you have. I'm out of here. And I completely supported that because we had had that one more, just one more year syndrome. Even though I had pretty high confidence that using the 4% rule, et cetera, our numbers were going to work. And Amy had a different take on that. I did. Now, so I retired at 4.

that was four years ago. So people don't talk about this in the fire movement. On the other side of it, so we didn't have any income. So for the past about a year and a half, we haven't had any income other than earnings from our investments. So getting to close to 50 and being on the other side of my career threw me into somewhat of a midlife crisis that I didn't expect at all. And so just no way. So I still think I'm like 25 years old in my head, but I'm not. And so I think that just being on the other side of my career was kind of a mental shift of like, oh, I'm old enough to be on the other side of my career. I'm not 25. And then hitting 50 this past summer was like, whoa. And I think I'm still kind of grappling a little bit with that. And that was kind of part one of the mental,

Mandy. But the second thing was, so we left our house and had this plan that we would live on $50,000 a year. We didn't know if we could live on $50,000 a year. We had hoped. We had planned, but we didn't do it. And so we were selling our house with the intention that we would hopefully love it and that we could do it. But we didn't know. So we used to review our numbers together. Tim tracked everything, but we review it twice a year. One day in the car, I had a bit of a meltdown toward the beginning, like right when I had already left my career, I had a bit of a meltdown and said, Tim, we are living so extravagantly. I cannot wait for five more months to have our semi-annual financial review. I think that we are going to be blowing through this money. It feels like we're spending $115,000. a year. I'm like kind of panic that we got to go back to work immediately. And so we sat down with our numbers. Turns out we, so we needed to be at 50,000 and we turned out that we were closer to 36,000. And I'm not joking. Like our life feels extravagant at $36,000 a year. And I would have not believed it until I think I lived it. I think that that's that, to me, that seems like the number one shift that made a lot of this possible for you guys, right? Yes. How did that affect

the schooling, which school your child went to? Yep. So my daughter actually spends part-time with me and part-time with her mom. And so the school district that she's in now and then is her mom's district. And so it was just a few miles closer. It wasn't a huge shift for her in terms of school. Okay. And she wasn't in the school district anyway in our home. So we just moved a little bit further. We still have to drive her to school like normal. Okay. I see. Sorry. I don't know. These are questions. That's a great question. Because I'm thinking like, hey, if you're if you're listening to this and you're in a similar position, you're thinking about doing that, those are the challenges I think that people are facing.

Hey, great career we're moving forward. We're ready to go now if we make some drastic changes. What are the consequences of those? And it sounds like you kind of were able to work around all of those things that I think a lot of folks think, hmm, this is impossible for me for whatever reason. We stayed in the same town. And Scott, you asked the question, and I don't know if we answered this either, but the $6,500, I'm guessing at least $4,000 of that came from housing-related costs, whether

there's the mortgage or the insurance or the ridiculous utility bills that were four times higher, or the housekeeper or the yard work or the, just the things that come with having a house. Far away. The mulch. That's right. Far away. That was the biggest expense that made up that $6,500. Got you.

My next question then is, is in the process of leaving your jobs, how did you design your portfolio to produce income for you in your early retirement? Well, we went with low-cost investments. So low-cost mutual funds. So most of our money is in stocks and international stocks. Some of it's in bonds. So pretty much all of our money is invested in low-cost mutual funds. There you go. About 25% of our assets are, I always get this post-tax, so money that we've already paid taxes on. And most of that is Amy's. Most of my money happens to be in our tax-deferred accounts. And so we have this mix of tax, as most people would, a mix of tax deferred and taxable accounts. And so we're currently living off mostly Amy's money that

we've been saving. Whenever Amy went back to work after we got married, she didn't work for a little while. I was actually raising his kids. Yeah. We were saving every single penny that she made at her job. Not a nickel of her money where we spend that. We were only saving every nickel we say. That was in our big spending days. So that was just like an idea. We weren't we weren't so, even though we were spending a lot, we weren't just completely crazy with money. Every single dollar I earned went right to investing. No, personal finance is personal. And that was a percentage of your income is the way to kind of move forward this.

So if you have a high income, you can spend a lot and still have a save a huge percentage of that income, right? That's right. Okay. So I know that you alluded to a second chapter in 2019 after your daughter graduates from high school. And you do this thing called house sitting, which is a job, a vacation. Let's talk about that a little bit.

who is letting you watch their houses? Do you just have friends all over the world? Wow, that's like seven questions and one. So number one, it's a job? No, it's a vacation. No. We don't make any money at this. This is not a side hustle how we're doing it. And we're doing it internationally. So even if you wanted to make money at it, if you're coming into another country and making money, there are tax issues and work visa issues that you would need to consider. So we aren't interested in making any money at it, first of all. But even if we wanted to, We're always interested in making money. Well, that's not our goal.

Our goal isn't to make any money at it, which is good because we don't make any money at it. So number one, like I said, it's not a side hustle. It is a way, we call it the best travel hack in the universe. So we're both travel hackers and Tim is an expert travel hacker, but this is the best hack out there. And this is going to be our big chapter. So in 2015, when I left my work, we started doing part-time house sitting in the local Denver area to build up references so that when sits in places in the world that were really fabulous. We just did a sit in Manhattan, or actually in Brooklyn, just two weeks ago. We spent my turn 50, that 50th year,

birthday. We had that in France. When they won the World Cup, we were in France at a house set that was extraordinary. So we've been doing this part-time. But in early 2020, we are downsizing our stuff again to get rid of our home and our cars, stick our stuff, our few remaining things in storage, and travel the world like forever until we're sick of it, which made never happened. It may happen in six months, but we're expecting it to last for a long, long time. And we will be primarily house-sitting around the world for strangers. For strangers. For strangers. Why do they let, I mean, I know you guys. I would let you house sit for me, but why do strangers let you just come into their house? Isn't that amazing?

It's an amazing world. Do you want to answer that? I'll give it to go. I think it's all about the sharing economy thing. So people love their pets. And so they need somebody to come in and tend to their pets and try and make their pets feel like they're at home when they're away. The other option would be to board your pets or try and find some situation for them. And so people are looking to have just that their pets be taken care of. Also, their home, if you're gone for a month or two or three months, your home just sitting there empty, there could be issues with that. And so there are sites out there that we use one specifically.

It's called trusted house sitters. It's the biggest one in the world. And they vet you as a house sitter. And also they vet the homeowners a little bit. And so you know that the people that are coming into your home are going to be somewhat trustworthy, they have reviews, et cetera. So it's just like why would anybody let somebody come and stay in your house as Airbnb? It's similar, but you're not looking to make an income per se,

but you're looking to just have your house taken care of in a way that you would want it to be taken care of. Also, one of the questions that you asked was about, is this a vacation? And so we're asked this question often or people think when Amy says it's a great travel hack. It is. However, it's certainly not a vacation. and we wouldn't want to put it out there that this is something where you would want to, if you have one week a year, you're going to go get a sit in Maui and it's going to be this great sit, it doesn't really happen that way. Plus it's work.

So when you're on a house sit, you're taking care of a home. You're walking the dogs. And so I think this is an amazing. Why would someone have you in? First of all, it's free. So if you're gone for two weeks and you have two dogs, imagine, or maybe you have a horse and a cat, and the cat's not going to go to a kennel. And you don't have someone to come in every day to take care of your cat.

We've had cats that have been fed very specific things four times a day. We've had cats that have needed diabetic injections at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. exactly. This is like, that's kind of, who was going to take care of this? So, and the kind of cool thing is that people love their pets. So I had a house sitter come in. Sometimes we had, we met someone in the parking lot of somewhere. I had her come into the house. And I am a pretty trusting person, but I loved my pet so much that I didn't want her routine

disturbed. I had nothing to do with my house. I wanted my pet to be happy, and she would have been so miserable in a kennel. And I paid to have someone come in. We're free. So for people who are naturally trusting people who love their pets, there turns out there are a lot of them. And thankfully, we find a whole bunch of them and have really good experiences as a result. We watched some cats last year. I think the cats had four meal times a day, a very specific time. The cat was fed better than you are. Exactly. We had to mix in pumpkin. And so there's a probiotics. So people that have that sort of level of interest in making sure their pets are taking care of are the sort of people that are looking for house sitters, I think. And they generally are really

nice people. Very nice. So are you always taking care of a pet? Almost always. So there's a rare exception. For us, it's been exclusively pets. However, there are places that on a rare occasion we'll see on trusted house sitter. Somebody's looking for their house in South, they're snowbirds and their house in South America is going to sit empty for three months. And they want somebody to be there making sure they're not going to have squatters come into their house and things like that. Or tender garden or things like that. So we love pets and it makes it more homey. And so it's kind of a nice thing to.

So when people talk about living like a local, I think that's why Airbnb is so popular because people like that idea of living like a local. This is the ultimate living like a local. We've done a lot of Airbnb's as like as travelers. And we love that too. That's when we're really out doing long travel days. But when we're house sitting, you're kind of supposed to stick around quite a bit because you're, I mean,

many of the pets are very social. So dogs, you're not leaving a dog for 16 hours a day in most situations. And so we're supposed to be hanging around home. So it's nice because we can really, like we're really encouraged to stay home and catch up on our Netflix shows. And again, like you're not going to do this as your one week vacation. But if it's your lifestyle, fantastic. So how does somebody become a house sitter? Do you just say I want to be a house sitter and you just get on? And then the genie comes and you're granted the house sit. That's right. So we did get on a site like Tim said. It's kind of like a dating site. So we made this huge profile that talked all about us as a couple, talked about our experience, showed videos and photos and all of that.

And then what we started to do was local sits. So we did maybe up to 10 local sits so that when one was advertised, we'd say, hey, we'll come right over in the next day or two, like immediately. So normally they're around the world. You can't go meet them and you have to do an extra level of trust because this isn't like a face-to-face meeting before you commit. But in Denver, we can do a face-to-face meeting. And we're hopefully pretty trustworthy people in person. And people book us immediately. So we say, like, we're just going to come and start that right away.

So that's a really good way to get started is to do some local sits so that you can get references. We also have a background check. So getting on a site where you have this matching, getting some local sits so you get some references, this is the way to get started. How much do you think you save relative to have it to, like, if you wanted to go someplace for three months in South America and rent is a comparable. place. Yeah, so I guess one of the things that I think that we've realized is that we think we can be

on the road cheaper than we can be here in Colorado. How cool is that? We think it costs us about our house that's fully paid for our townhome that's fully paid for. It costs us about $1,000 a month just to be there in this place that's fully paid for between utilities, which we wouldn't have at a house set and HOA. HOA and taxes and things that just that cost money to live in a place that's paid for. We spend about a thousand bucks a month. We were in Europe this summer for... We estimate that we saved $6,000 just in July. We had a month in France. We estimated that that would have cost $6,000 because it had a pool. We had their cars. It was a beautiful house at a great area of Alsace, France. So we're estimating to save... And we've been in some extraordinary homes. We just, we've been in a

10,000 square foot home. That's not necessarily our goal is to be at these big giant homes. We just had a studio apartment two weeks ago in Brooklyn. That was great. And it was really easy to clean. And so, but we like to pick kind of expensive places to house it. So like Manhattan is a great one. France is a great one. London, Australia. So they're all over the world. But we kind of pick more expensive places where we might not be doing our Airbnb because if it's kind of cheap in an Airbnb, maybe we won't have the responsibility and we'll just go stay in vacation. So we kind of, and we'll see in the year or so when we hit the road what that really looks like. But we know that we've saved significant money just last week. I mean, we had four nights in Brooklyn. I

I bet we saved at least $1,000 on a hotel room, and it was a great dormant building and very convenient and safe. And we got a great cat. So that's awesome. You're living in an incredible lifestyle when you go on these trips, and it's really preparing you to really full time go into this in about a year from now. 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 tax refund can make the biggest impact. Because the goal isn't just to look backward,

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the transition that you were talking about, there. And specifically, what I want to know is, you know, you guys both had high-powered careers earning tons of money, living the American dream. Why do you think your peers that you were working with maybe didn't undergo the same shift? Why aren't they pursuing the same kind of change that you guys went and pursued? That is such a good question. On our YouTube channel, we say we're speaking to an audience that has no interest in hearing our message, which makes it really hard to speak to an audience. But it's tough. People, our colleagues, our friends, our peers, who are doing well now that they're at the peak of their income,

they look at us often like we're crazy. And so the reason now that we do our YouTube channel is to meet our tribe. And our tribe might be 25 years old. They might be 75 years old. But it's people who've said, I'm opting out. I understand that I don't need to work till I die. There's some value in having your freedom young enough when you could do something fun with it. So, yeah.

I think people are addicted to their things. And so it's like I've built this lifestyle that this in, I have, I have a lifestyle that I've built. I need this income to support this lifestyle, and I'm addicted to these things that the money brings to the table. I can always buy a new iPhone. I can go eat sushi whenever I want to eat sushi. I can travel whenever I want to travel.

I can live in this big house. I can drive whatever kind of car I want. So all these things that money buys, I think people, the idea of walking away from that and deflating your life is really unappealing to a lot of people. And for us, I can't tell you how amazing our life is. But it's hard. Like Amy said, our audience, the people who we were trying to like reach and say,

it's much better on the other side. Just trust me. Yeah, ditch your job. It's a tough sell. I don't know. What are your thoughts? I don't know. I haven't spent that long in that type of career.

I can say is that I, you know, a former life and a former job, it seemed like people just spend up to their income for the most part. So it's like however much income I make, I'm going to spend 90% of the job. that. And like once you start earning a significant income, you know, over 100K, 152, you know, really bumping up. And like nobody that's earning in that range that I've come across really is totally irresponsible. You hear stories about doctors who totally in debt and can't do it. But maybe. But they seem to be, you know, at least contributing to 401K, that kind of stuff, you know. Like they're not, is that, is that true? Is that, am I wrong?

No. Okay. All right. Fair enough. All right. So again, this is our demographic. And so, So I have a lot of, and friends have all kinds of situations. And so people have us look at their money a lot to kind of help them understand where they can go with it. I have friends who have made significant, significant money. Over half a million dollars in a year. You can't qualify for a credit card because their credit's awful. No joke.

And you would be surprised. Clearly you'd be surprised. I am surprised, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, there's these popular blogs for physicians. I mean, a lot of them are spending up to their income. And here's what I've, it's funny because a friend of mine on Facebook is an early retiree himself. And we had talked just about, hey, we used to spend $115,000. And here's what we're doing.

He fully assumed that because we were spending $115,000, that we were making $115,000. And he was a financial planner. And so there was no concept of you had extra money put into savings over and above this $15,000. That wasn't even like, and like I said, this was his job. And he was a fireperson himself, not like maybe in the mentality. of fire, but he had retired early because of his business. So if anyone would understand that, he would be somebody who should understand like, oh, of course they were saving extra money.

I spend all day, every day talking to people who are interested in the concept of fire working towards it. And so I literally never come in contact, really in the ordinary course of my life, with someone who is making more than six figures ever and is spending all of that. So it's very difficult for me to comprehend this, you know. I think that is awesome because you are surrounded by some amazing people. And that's shaped who you are. And I think that's great.

So, well, okay. So, man. Ask Mindy. Mindy. What do you think, Mindy? I'm going to go with the. Do you know anyone? I know lots of people.

And I'm going to go with a firm, no comment. No, I do know a lot of people. I actually read this really fabulous article. And I will link to it in the show notes because I can't remember what it was called right now. It was on Wealth Simple or something where this couple was in massive amounts of debt. I think she was making 70 and he was making 90 and they had a house that like their mortgage was 360. So it doesn't seem like they had this huge insurmountable like mortgage debt or anything, but they had all these credit cards and they had all these loans and they spent every dime that

came in plus and they would use this credit card to pay that credit card off and or well, pay the minimum payment on that credit card. And they were saying, like she was saying, well, I'm an attorney, but I don't work as an attorney because I took a job that would allow me to stay home with my kids. Okay, great. That's perfect. Totally get that. I was a stay-at-home mom. But as an attorney, you could make a lot more money. So maybe now that your kids are all in school, you could transition over to a different career, make a lot more money and pay off your debt. But they're so drowning in debt. She even said, I don't even know how much it is. I can't look at the cards. I can't look the statement. Well, that doesn't make the credit card bills go away. Not looking at them,

the ostrich syndrome doesn't help at all. So it was, it was really hard to read this. And then somebody posted it in the Choose FI Facebook group and people were really dogging on this couple. Oh, I can't believe. And, you know, I'm not really speaking highly of them either. But that's a difficult thing to admit. It's going to take a lot to fix the problem. I'd love for her to listen to this podcast so that we could, you know, help her with her issues. But, you know, the first step is to look at what you're spending and start with that. You said that you started tracking your spending. You're like, wow, we don't really need all this stuff. We can get rid of some of this stuff. And we can retire instantly just because we've always been good savers. Right. And Scott also

asked, like, why wouldn't everybody kind of jump in and do this? And I think fear of change is a big one. So we're making it that house sitting is this perfect rosy thing. Not always. So I moderate a really big house sitting Facebook group that I hear all the horror stories. And so there are horror stories out there. Maybe you go into a house of hoarders or somebody who's an irrational homeowner. Or I mean, there are certainly, or maybe it's an aggressive animal. Maybe the cat pee's on your bed every day. Like there's all kinds of things that might make this not so great. And so how we look at that is, number one, we have done a lot of screening. So we have been very fortunate that we found great ones. But we're ready. Like we know that we're not only going to have Rosie Fabulous. And

having that flexibility is just good as a traveler. It's good, I think, in life. And so being flexible, I think is our key to like, and if it happens, our mentality, we are expecting at some point, it will happen. And we're going to say, well, we're only here for two to six weeks. Maybe we're here for three weeks. We don't, this is not our life. Even if a cat pee's in our bed every day, that's awful. But it's over in three weeks and then we're off to something else. And it's usually wonderful. So many people do not. They're like, I've earned the right to not deal with that crap. And so we get that. And so I think that's part of it, is that people like, that's too uncertain. That's too inflexible.

I want my coffee maker. I want my own bed. I want my life. Like I want it, that I've designed it, that I've worked hard to earn it. We definitely get that. But we're saying, like our old life was, it was going to kill us because we worked really hard. I didn't get to see Tim because he was on an airplane every week.

So like we decided to opt out of that certainty for like some super uncertainty, which has brought in great adventure to our lives. I guess what I'm having trouble, comprehending in all this is I can understand, hey, I make a really high income and I want to spend pretty much all of that and enjoy a really, really nice lifestyle because I'm earning that money. That's not like a concept that it's difficult for me to comprehend, and I'm going to put away a basic amount of money so I don't go broke next month if I lose this or reduce it, right? Like that's a basic reason.

That's not even unreasonable. It's a personal choice that that person is making within their limits, right? What I'm kind of having difficulty comprehending is someone, in order to make $250, or $500,000, about half a million dollars a year, you have to be basically competent, I presume, for the most part. No, is that? No, you don't. You never heard of the Peter principle. No, please explain to me.

So maybe this is another thing that I think listeners and I would love to address. How does one go about making $500,000 a year without being good at anything or having a particular skill? I want to jump in here really quick. Doesn't mean you're not good at anything. Think about, so Scott has. Oh, you have to be good with money. No, no. but it seems like you can't be smart enough or capable enough to command that kind of income

and then so incapable at just basically managing your finance. That's what's difficult for me. I want to know who this person is. Think of all the people you used to work with at the other company you worked at. None of those people were incompetent or no one that I've worked with, I would say, is like, oh, I'm going broke from all of this stuff. It was just like, I'm not free. I don't have the ability to go free.

Right. Yeah. Okay. All right. She's right. They're driving their Mercedes. They're not saying I'm broke. They're driving their Mercedes. They're paying it with their, they're making their monthly payment with their credit card. Their lease payment, not their payment. And then they pay this credit card with that credit card and that credit card with that credit card. And then somebody offers them a loan. So they take that out or they take out their 401k loan or they don't even contribute to their 401k. And I mean, I feel really super judgmental right now. But it's so easy to. do it right. But, you know, I also think that there's this perception that being frugal means you can't have anything. Being frugal means you shop at a thrift store and you eat beans and rice and you have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and you are just and ramen and you are miserable all the time. And sure, you could do that, but personal finances, personal and you can do whatever you want and, you know, you spend money on things that matter so you can save on things that you don't care about. I mean, do you care about how fashionable you are?

Nope. Look at this shirt here. Actually, I met somebody at FinCon this year, and he was in his young 30s. He sold his company for something like $30 million, shared between him and a partner, and there were no assets. So he didn't have to pay anything. He didn't have to pay anything off. So he got like $15 million. It was all gone. And so he's now back in, he's doing other things and back in the workforce.

But in his young 30s, he said his ex-wife used to have a fashion problem. and she would buy high-end fashion. And it just went away. And so I think if you're, and there's plenty of people. And he was very successful and astute to be in other things to be able to grow a company to $30 million. But I think that it's interesting. There are, so people can be great at lots and lots of things and be awful at money.

And it doesn't mean that they're bad people. It just means they're awful at money. And that's, yeah. And hopefully they do discover down the road that there's a better way or a different way. And that's where we come. Hopefully. Yeah, exactly. Is there anything else that you want to make sure we share about house sitting, about getting

involved in this? Because it seems really awesome. But it also, like, I really want to make sure that everybody knows that this is, it's sort of a job. It's not like 40 hour a week job. I guess you could. You could probably find like work my farm. No.

Yeah. The cool thing about house sitting is that it kind of can fit anybody. So if you're a solo man or woman, it could, there are sits that are. Perfect. There are many pets that are skittish around men and only want one person. Maybe they have a small home, one person. And maybe they need a kind of a handy person. Maybe they have a guy who's like a good handy man. Maybe a woman obviously could be a good handy man too. Some have like, maybe they have two dogs and they're not good in the leash together. So they're looking for a couple. Some want to share their home with a family because maybe they have kids and their pets like the energy of children. I think it fits kind of everybody. You could be, we have millennial friends we've turned on to. this that are doing well. I have friends who are traditional retirement age, who are in their 70s who are doing it to great success. So it really can fit for all kinds of people, which I think is just amazing. Okay. I had a question that I wanted to ask you before we move on to the famous four. Do you miss anything from your $15,000 a year life that you want to add back or that you

feel as silly to add back? Not very many things. However, there's something that just based on something that happened yesterday that I want to add back to our life. I spent like three hours vacuuming the floor yesterday. I have a blister on my hand from vacuuming. So I want a housekeeper. So I'm trying to figure out how to fit this back on our budget. So Amy mentioned we have roughly 50K a year that we could be spending and we're spending about 36. So I'm pretty sure this next year we're going to add a housekeeper back into our life. Okay. Actually, here's the cool thing. It's probably going to be kind of cheap because we do have a really small place. And we do, because it's a small place, we live very clean and tidy just day to day,

but it's just like the deep cleaning. So cleaning the toilets and vacuuming. And we do have extra money. So that, I could see, yes. And professional cleaners, clean your house a whole other level. So I support that one. All right. Confession time.

This is something that I have added into my life in the last three to six months here. And it is very huge perk and not very frugal, but I definitely. definitely, definitely enjoy that, not having to scrub the house clean once a month. It's once a month cleaning. So I think that's great. Well, are you, Tim, are you looking to add back a daily cleaner, a weekly, a biweekly? A full time living in May. That might be a little bit more than $15,000 a year.

That's called a house sitter. That's exactly right. Every other week, I think. Every other week. Okay, so that's not like hugely expensive. and if you have them on a schedule, isn't there like some sort of discount? If you just have them come in once, it's not really a discount. But if you have them come back, like the more.

I think it'll take about three hours every two weeks. And so how much could this be? And if we hate doing it, why like, why not just outsource that? Because we hate it. Well, I hate it more than you. So my husband has talked about getting a house cleaner. I am not the best cleaner in the world. I also hate it immensely.

And I was in a mastermind group with a whole handful of people. And one of them had asked us, hey, you know, do you think it's okay? And everybody's like, yeah, whatever. It's your money. It's your personal finance is personal. And if you want a housekeeper and you can afford it and you're not going into debt for it, then get one. And I'll join you.

Wow. All right. So Tim had me do it. So 10 years ago, he had one when I met him. He had three children on his own. So he had one. And I'm already a neat, tidy person. I didn't think, first of all,

that they could do that much better of a job. And I didn't think it was a big deal. And I just didn't want people like dealing with my stuff. The first time we had it done, my clear glass shower, like looked like brand new. And I looked at it. I said, I am never going to be without a housekeeper again. That was when we were living large. So, but it was such a difference.

And it took one time to say, they cleaned the trash cans. Like they polished my trash can. This is the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, show number 57, where we're responsible with our money in every aspect imaginable except when it comes to housekeeping. We have earned the right. And so I have my own thing that I miss. And I used to say I miss having like a massage every, I don't know, every three months or something.

And I still do miss that. But what I, and I just added something back. So I used to have like a group training situation for like fitness. So it wasn't personal training. It was personal training, but with like a group of 20 people. So it wasn't the highest price tag. And I used to have that back in my old life. And Tim and I just signed up to do that for January, a 10 week.

challenge of what they call it extreme body shaping. This is awful. I'm really excited. Tim is not so much, but he's coming along for the ride. And so paying for that, we actually got a fantastic deal. So we got a really good deal on it. And I'm realizing like we better be as healthy as we can be. That's worth spending some money on. That is absolutely right. I'm going to end it right there and say, let's move on to our famous four questions. These are the same five questions that we ask everybody. Four questions and a command. The last one is a command. The first question is, what is your favorite finance book? And you can each answer this. We've got two guests, so we've got two answers. That's right. I'm going to go with

not a, I'm going to answer one that's not a direct finance book. It's a Dale Carnegie book, and it's how to stop worrying and start living. And so when I was younger, I didn't have them. So he's very well known for How to Win Friends and Influence people. Thank you. Yes. I'm like, this is a huge one. I've read that too. That was great. I was a salesperson my entire career. But the how to stop worrying and start living, like I said, it's not a finance book, but worry and that kind of emotion comes into finance massively. I read this and took his course, like an in-person's course in my 20s,

and that was part of the required reading. So the idea is like how bad could, like take your mind to how bad could something possibly be? I think money and fear is a big one. I'm never going to hear that one on the list of best finance books, but it's a goody. I'm going to go with Amy's answer. Tim's never read it. You know what the worst case scenario sounds like to me is earning $250,000 to $500,000 a year and then still being in debt. The amount of effort and, oh, that. I've changed. Scott's hold. Scott now has nightmares as a result of this podcast. All right. What is your biggest money mistake? So this was our biggest money lesson and our biggest money mistake.

I think it was buying the house that we sold when we downsized. So this was a- Not when we downsized, before we downsize. Before we downsize. That's right. I'm sorry. So it was over $600,000. Actually, I think it was $590.

We invested in this house. Plus a lot of extra- And then we spent a ton of money getting the house up to speed. We invested in the yard, et cetera. We spent another $50, $100,000 in the house. And I think we sold it for roughly what we paid for it close. No, I think we lost money. We probably lost money on this house. We probably lost somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 on this house.

So it was a great lesson in that we realized that real estate isn't always a win, although it can be an amazing thing. For us, it wasn't a win. Actually, that wasn't, I had the same biggest mistake, but I had a different lesson. And my lesson is that I don't want to live in a big giant house. So I thought that was my American dream. And I was wrong. I liked living in just the right amount of space. In that house, there were rooms that we didn't enter for over a year. Rooms. That's ridiculous. for us. We didn't need that kind of space. And I realized I had, I had to live it to know that I didn't want it. That is so true. I bought a house in the same town and I thought that it was my dream house, but it really wasn't. It had weird spaces that I didn't really use. It had other spaces that I needed to be bigger. Yeah. And now I'm in. I went from 5,000 to 1800. And I think 2000 is my sweet spot,

but there's four of us. It's right. So it was a huge mistake, but a great lesson. I love it. You know, I know this is selfish of me. I want to kind of chime in about some housing thoughts. I've been house hacking for the last four years since 2014 in various things. And at this point, you know, I feel like I can move on and potentially like rent a place. That's a little nicer and not have to house. I love my current place. But like I've always thought like, hey, I would love to live like in the apartment downtown. And I think what I'm kind of gathering from a lot of this stuff is that it would be a huge mistake to buy a condo and move in into like a really, but it wouldn't be that bad if you wanted to try it out. If you were thinking, hey, do I want to work towards the goal of early retirement living in that huge 6,000 square foot house? Can I rent it for six months to a year? And now you can see and figure out if that's for you. I don't know if that's a good takeaway from that, from what you're talking about. Well, here's what I would do is I would house sit downtown in that unit. Boom, much better. Wait. There it is. So that's where I'm going is. So we don't know where we're going to end up. We plan to put

down roots again in our future. We hope that it'll be in Colorado, Denver. We love it here. So we can't imagine loving a place anymore, but we are winter people. And so it's nice to try on another life. Go house sit downtown for a cat. And you have that answer for free. Love it. Kevin, our podcast producers, Triv, we didn't hear. He's right just house sit.

He's saying, why don't you just house sit and then hire a housekeeper, get the house cleaned every day, and then get the owner to pay for that. If they've already got a housekeeper coming in. We have plenty of houses that have housekeepers come in while we're there. Oh, there you go. Wow. Wow. Yes. This is a sweet, so this can be a sweet situation. Except for when you have the cat that peas in your bed.

We haven't had that, though. That's why we're still so excited. It's been three and a half years. We have had a dog that pooed freely throughout the house. Oh, that's a whole other thing. Oh, that's disgusting. You know what? It's like your babies. Like when your, when your daughter threw up on you, was it like disgusting after two years? It was just life. It's the same with pets. It was so gross. But it's not as gross as when you were single thinking about it, right? True. It's the same.

You get used to it. Yes, kids are great, aren't they? Okay. What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out? Don't fall prey to lifestyle inflation. That's a good one. I hear that frequently. And yeah, that's how you become a $200,000 a year earner who spends $200,000 a year.

Hey, from the guy who's going to get a housekeeper, right? Who has a housekeeper. Wait, live in housekeeper? No, I don't know, I live in a housekeeper. What a way I look like? That's not insane. No, I use TaskRabbit maybe once every two months and someone comes in. Oh, so that's a good tip because we've had the same person in our house.

We were going to call her. She's great and it's nice because we know her, but she might not want such a small job. So task rabbit's nice because it's like it's a three-hour job. So you don't have to take up a whole day. It's a three-hour commitment. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, I love it. That's given me a good idea.

we're going to look at that up as soon as we leave. Yeah, I'm going to look that up too because I don't know how to. We're holding you to it. I don't know how to hire a housekeeper. The show brought to you by task record. You have a new sponsor. All right. What is your favorite joke to tell at parties?

Oh, I can't. The two of, we don't have. So I'm going to talk your ear off at a party and learn about your entire life. But we don't have, we don't have. How lame is that? We neither would. I think that's why we're suited to each other because the two of us couldn't tell a joke to save our lives. I'm a little introverted, so I'm in the corner

with a beer, and then Amy's like working the room. So I don't, I don't. Isn't that awful? That's the worst. I'm sorry to your audience and to you guys. I don't have any jokes for that, but I will say that proper prior preparation prevents piss poor performance. But I couldn't, even if I was prepared, I couldn't deliver it. I just, I don't have that in me. I could be preparing and memorizing it. It would come out wrong and not funny. Hang on. I'm going to look one up because I know somebody tweeted a joke that was horrible. So Scott will love it. Oh, nice.

Why does the Swedish Navy have barcodes on all the ships? Why? You're going to love this. So they can scan the Navy in. Oh, nice. I love it. Isn't your audience happy I didn't have a joke. That's from military dollar. Thank you so much for that amazing joke that everybody loved.

Grown. Sorry, yes, the groan. Okay, tell us where people can find out more about you. So, yeah, we started blogging at go with less, L-E-S-S dot com. We didn't sit down long enough to write. So we moved it to YouTube. So we are vloggers, video bloggers, I guess, over at YouTube. and also go with less and there's no spaces.

G-O-W-I-T-H-L-E-S-S. That's the best way we do videos every single Wednesday about house sitting and travel hacking and our budget life, et cetera. Awesome. We will link to that in the show notes today, which can be found at biggerpockets.com slash money show 57. That's a money show 5-7. Tim and Amy, thank you so much for coming all the way downtown to Denver to join us today.

This was super fun. I love hearing about this house sitting. I never considered doing it with kids, but that sounds kind of cool. It is super cool. It's changing our life. So thank you again for having us. Bucketlist item, check. Check.

Love it. Thank you guys. Thank you guys. All right. That was Amy and Tim from go with less.com. Mindy, what do you think? I love their story. I love the whole house hacking or house sitting, which is, I guess, a form of house hacking.

and they get to go almost anywhere. What is it? Like Iran and North Korea they can't sit in and that's probably the end of that. So that's super awesome that they get to go. And, you know, it's nice to see the Eiffel Tower. But it's also really nice to just see regular people who live in France and talk to them and, you know, or insert whatever tourist trap and country that you want to go see. It's really cool to get to know people on a personal level in a different. country. And I think this is the second pair of guests, the second pair of guests that we've had on the show in a row who are using geographic arbitrage to really defray their cost of living. And they didn't even expect this, right? They went around and traveled and thought that they were going to spend a lot more than they ended up spending and found it to be really cheap versus Bryce and Christie, I think, who were really, you know, they kind of really understood that how much that would cost kind of going into it. I mean, they were still surprised as well. But I think that that's just a really big lesson. Like if you're interested,

in financial independence, there are so many ways once you've left that work environment to spend even less, but still feel like you're living way more luxuriously. Yeah, it has been true in my life as well, as soon as the girls are out of school in 11 years. I may be packing up this job too, but, you know, that's 11 years from now. I'm very excited to see, like, I turned it into a game, really. How little can I spend? I have a phone tracker that I made with the help of the waffles on Wednesday people. And now it's a game.

How little can I spend in a day, a week, a month, a year? And my husband's on board, too. And that's really key, is having your spouse on board. Yeah, I mean, it's clearly a joint partnership. They talked about how the money that they've each individually accumulated over the years is being allocated and spent and used to fund these adventures. So obviously, yeah, that's number one thing with couples it seems to be is getting both parties on board and really jointly working towards the goal and understanding what that life vision is.

Yeah. And by the way, I learned a lot today. I just learned that they, you know, I know they're intuitively that there are people out there that can't handle their money even though they earn large amounts. But it seems like that's limited to like really famous people who make it all really young and can't, like, handle it versus seasoned professionals who have been doing this, you work this way over a decades-long career. That's amazing to me. It's just so hard for me to to wrap my head around that level of irresponsibility. That's the new American way. Oh, yeah.

I hope that one of the takeaways that people are getting from show after show, interview after interview, guest after guest, story after story is that this can be so easy. If you can generate the median to upper middle class income for the household, we're seeing it. It's a super simple, easy process for almost every one of our guests. There's no magic source or, magic formula for this. It's just spend less, save more. And the hard, the hard part here, I think the part that really is the barrier that people need to break through is how do I get

to that maybe upper middle class income in the first place to start earning that level of income? And once that's there, if you're listening to there, you know that you can make the changes necessary over a period of a year or two to really begin aggressively saving and moving very quickly towards his goal of financial freedom. Well, let's put a call out to people who have tips for increasing your income. Maybe not the side hustle that we did with Nick Loper. A side hustle is great. Don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying that side hustles are great. But how do you increase your income in your main job, in your actual job? Yeah, yeah. Maybe that's a call from some guests to reach out that maybe have gone from earning in that 30, 40-ish range, kind of seeming like it's a set career path, but then been able to transition to that 70, 80, maybe even 100K plus a year income and how you did that.

That might be really helpful story. For me, I just got another job, but that's not always repeatable. Yeah. Yeah, so if you have a story of going from a lower income to a higher income that is repeatable, please contact us, reach out at money at biggerpockets.com. That's M-O-N-E-Y at BiggerPockets.com.

BiggerPockets.com. Yeah, and generally speaking, let's hear your problems. Like our goal here is we want to make financial freedom as accessible as possible to every single person that is listening. And so if we're not covering a subject that you think is really important to a lot of people and that there could be a repeatable solution that would help kind of help people, we want to know that and then we'll go and explore that. Yes, yes.

And again, email me at Money at BiggerPockets.com. Okay. Scott, should we get out of here? Let's get out of here. Okay. From episode 57 of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, this is Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. And we will see you later, Alligator.