BiggerPockets Money Podcast - Can He Retire in 10 Years? (We Ran the Numbers)

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

Is a $2M net worth enough to retire in 10 years? In this Finance Friday episode, Mindy and Scott break down a real “messy middle” case study—Karl, a high-saving household navigating early retirement planning, rising expenses, healthcare costs, and market uncertainty after doing everything right.  You’ll learn how to evaluate your FI timeline using the 4% rule, safe withdrawal strategies, portfolio diversification, and tax-efficient investing across 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, and brokerage accounts. They also cover sequence of returns risk, Roth conversion strategies, and how to balance active income with long-term wealth building. If you’re wondering whether you’re truly on track for early retirement—or how to turn your net worth into lasting financial freedom—this episode gives you the frameworks and numbers to find out. To go beyond the podcast: Kick start your financial independence journey with our FREE financial resources - https://biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources Subscribe on YouTube for even more content- www.youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney  Connect with us on social media to join the other BiggerPockets Money listeners - https://www.facebook.com/groups/BPMoney Resources from this episode: KFF Health Insurance Calculator: https://www.kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/ Rising Healthcare Costs in Early Retirement Article: https://biggerpocketsmoney.com/why-healthcare-costs-rise-sharply-with-age-in-early-retirement-and-why-early-retirees-need-a-bigger-buffer-than-the-4-rule/ Personal Financial Statement: biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources  We believe financial independence is attainable for anyone no matter when or where you’re starting. Let’s get your financial house in order! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mindy and I are so grateful for the following sponsors who make Bigger Pockets Money possible. When you want more, start your business with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools, and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business all in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest today. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They're the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S. with over 1,500 corporate guides, who are real people who are real people who, know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way.

Northwest makes life easy for business owners. They don't just help you form your business. They give you the free tools you need after you form it, like operating agreements, meeting minutes, and thousands of how-to guides that explain the complicated ins and outs of running a business. And with Northwest, privacy is automatic. They never sell your data and all services are handled in-house because privacy by default is their pledge to all customers. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money-free and start building something amazing. more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money-free.

When I evaluate debt funds, I look for things like first position loans, personal guarantees, deep experience by the fund operator, low fund leverage, fast liquidity, and consistent returns. These are some of the reasons why I'm excited to partner with Pine Financial Group. Their fund six offers investors exposure to real estate credit, largely for construction and rehab, with loans originated by an experienced originator with over $1 billion in origination volume. They offer investors an 8% preferred return.

paid monthly and a 70-30 LP split of everything over 10% paid annually. The lockup period is nine months with liquidity available within 90 days after that nine-month commitment. The fund is open to accredited investors only. The fund's minimum investment is typically $100,000, but Pine Financial is able to reduce that minimum for Bigger Pockets Money listeners to a minimum of $25,000. Full disclosure, I am personally invested in this fund through my self-directed IRA. Pine Financial is sponsoring this message and our podcast. Go to biggerpocketsmoney.com slash pine. P-I-N-E. Please note that returns are not guaranteed and may vary based on fun performance.

Ask any small business owner. They'll tell you that their finances get messy real quick. A bank account here, quickbooks there, tax and invoicing apps are stacked on top of that, and before long, you're buried in expensive tools behind on books and unsure where your business really stands. That's why there's found. Take back control of your business today. Don't wait. Open a found account for free at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash found. That's bigger. Pocketsmoney.com slash found F-O-U-N-D. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank, member FDIC.

This is the tool smart business owners are switching to every day. Join the hundreds of thousands who have already streamlined their finances with Found. Most financial independence content focuses on getting started. But what about when you've already done everything right and still aren't sure if it's enough. Today's story is all about the messy middle, from growing up with financial instability to steadily investing throughout the dot-com crash, the 2008 crisis, and COVID. This couple has built over $1 million in retirement assets, paid off a home twice, and reached a 50% savings rate at one point. But now with rising expenses, a new mortgage and questions about health care,

they're asking the same thing so many people in this same stage are asking. Are we actually on track to be work optional in the next 10 years, or do we need to be doing more? Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my keeping his primary residence co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy, great to be here. You're always bringing down the house with these introses. Love it.

We are so excited to be joined by Carl today about this Crossroads challenge that he and his wife are in, and we're excited to talk about how we can help for entertainment purposes only, of course. So without further ado, welcome, Carl. and thanks for the wonderful preparation and putting this personal financial statement together for us. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Mindy. I'm super excited to be here and have this discussion with you guys. I am too. Like I said, in the intro, you have some pretty impressive numbers in your portfolio. So I'm going to read through those numbers right now. So our audience knows where you're sitting at.

I see total assets and a total net worth of just over $2 million. I see a nominal amount of debt, $45,000-ish, combined financial. portfolio of $1.4 million. Your other property is about $591,000. So that is including your equity in your home. We've got a primary residence value of just over $500,000 with a home equity of $500,000, leaving a mortgage of just $37,000. We're going to talk about that. Your liquid financial portfolio cash of $170,000. I'm going to talk to you about that for sure. Traditional IRAs, $350,000. Roth IRAs $842,000. Yay. I love seeing so much in a Roth. I'm sorry, that's Roth accounts, IRAs, 401ks, etc. HSA $4,500. Total retirement accounts, $1.193 million. That is a pretty good place.

After tax stock portfolio, $83,000 and $57,000 in cash flow. So what this is saying here is this is taking his liquid financial and multiplying it by the 4% rule. And then we're also adding anything from the illiquid financial portfolio, which is very common among bigger pockets money listeners to get to what is the quote unquote cash flow of this portfolio. How much does this portfolio support in spending here? This portfolio is super clean, Carl. Congratulations.

It's a wonderful financial result of years, maybe decades of really hard work, consistent savings and financial sophistication that you bring to your personal financial situation. there's nothing unusual about it, right? We got a house almost paid off. I can tell that that's pretty much almost done here. And then we got our pretty traditional portfolio here with a pretty solid cash position. This is a really secure position. We've got nothing complicating the position.

No additional assets, no additional cash flow is expected here. So we can just work basically with traditional financial planning rules of thumb, like the 4% rule. So we have this calculation here in the personal financial statement. You filled out. By the way, anyone listening can go. to biggerpocketsmoney.com slash resources, and you can download this spreadsheet in Google sheets or as an Excel document and fill it out. We're showing it here on the YouTube video, but we're also explaining the numbers for those listening along. This $1.4 million

financial portfolio should, at a 4% rule, support something close to $60,000. So it's technically $57,840 is what we got here for spending. And that's going to go a pretty long way I'm going to guess once we pay off this mortgage for your lifestyle. So that's what we got on the assets and liabilities. Mind, do you want to walk us through the income and expenses? Yes, income and expenses. I see one job of 125,000, another job of 70,000 for a total of $195,000 in income minus deferrals, $45,000 for HSAs, 401ks, etc. The married filing jointly taxes of $32,000. Your estimated annual taxable income is $117,000, which is nice. Your estimated annual taxis liability is 15,000. Of course, this is for informational purposes only. The IRS is going to tell

you exactly how much that is. Or wait, they're not. They're going to make you figure that out. But that's a ballpark. I will also say, by the way, I'm having fun with this. I've literally now, for one of the other models, put in every single state's progressive tax code and then need to add in the standard deductions that different for states or whatever. So a future iteration of this spreadsheet, if you check back, will have a more precise tax estimate that actually treats all the different taxes and self-employment, all that kind of stuff there. But that's probably going to be a few more weeks, maybe a month or two before I get there. So this is just federal tax and does not include FICA and these other things in there for now. I haven't found with this as you can't tell.

I'm not yet. But this is just a quick estimate to give us an idea of how much cash is coming into Carl's life on an annual basis. Yes. Total take home pay is 179,000. Net after tax cash generation $134,000. Over on the spending side, you are spending about $96,000 a year or $8,000 a month. I don't see anything crazy in these expenses. I will say that they all end in zeros and fives. So I just want to make sure that this is actually what you're spending or rounded up. So that's a little bit of a homework assignment for you. But with $96,000 in spending and bringing home 134,000, you probably have these numbers pretty dialed in. So the key numbers we've got here, total gross income, $195,000, annual spending $96,000, total tax liability $15,000, net cash accumulation

for the year, $83,360. And that includes your 401ks, your HSAs, the pre-tax stuff, the after-tax stuff, et cetera. We've got a savings rate of about 42%. Does that sound about right, Carl, to you, all these numbers? Yeah, yeah, we're pretty close. I mean, I will say the expenses I rounded up on everything just to account for some of the unknown unknowns. Like, we're remodeling a bathroom right now. Didn't expect to, but there was water between the tub and the liner. And it's like, oh, well, might as well do the whole thing. Yeah, that's how those projects start. Pretty soon the whole house will be remodeled. Okay. So on your debt schedule, I see a primary mortgage of $37,000, a car loan, loan of 8,500, and those are at 5.85 and 6.63% interest and medical debt of 9,000 at 0% interest.

But if we go back to these assets and liabilities, you have $169,000 in cash. Just for the annoyance factor, I'd knock out both the mortgage and the car loan because clearly the mortgage is something you do not want to have. And why would you have a car loan if you don't even have a mortgage? Carl, you've got to be already doing that. That's already your plan, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. So I am also annoyed by the mortgage and have been. We moved into a new house just less than two years ago, and I've been aggressively paying it down. That's already down to roughly about $4,000, Mindy. I should have it paid off in the next five weeks. Oh, great. Okay, then. So what do you need our help with? There's a always a battle within. It's like, am I doing enough and where do I put money to be not only optimized, but optimized for what my goals are? And that is to be work optional before. the standard dates of being able to withdraw funds from a retirement account. Because as you showed, most of my funds are tied up in the 401k or the Roth 401k or the IRAs. And so I know this rule of 55, there's the 72T, that there's options out there.

I would like to have those not in place and use just the brokerage for the time period before 59 and a half to live life. And also, how do I budget the amount of money between when we retire and 65 for medical expenses? Because that's our big unknown. We don't know how big that cost is going to be and how to budget for that. Okay. And how old are you right now? 42 and 43.

Okay. So you mentioned the 72T. And one thing that I think people don't necessarily realize about a 72T is, yes, you can absolutely access your 401K. That's awesome. but you're 42 years old. You have to take that 72T money for five years or until you're 59 and a half, whichever's longer. Scott, do that math for me.

Is that 17 years of 72T? Yeah, I can see why you're not happy with that approach here. I think there's a whole bunch of problems with that in the fire community, but it is one option. And it kind of locks you into this path to a large degree. So I think that's why you're reluctant to take it and you want to defer that decision at the very least. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And we're just, we're looking to, you know, be able to pull from, essentially just from the taxable brokerage before the traditional retirement ages. Let's start knocking out some of these questions you have here because you came so prepared

with all of this, super clear, very clean finance stuff. So you said, how do we plan for medical coverage in early retirement? Right? That's the first one here. Let's start with that and let's knock it out. So basically what you can do here is you can go to this wonderful website at kff.org slash interactive slash subsidy dash calculator. I'll link to that in the show notes here. When you go to KFF, right, you need to put in your zip code and you need to be careful because health care premiums vary by county, which is a huge problem if you nerd out about the subject for a long time because some zip codes overlap into multiple counties

and building a model that actually does this is a very complicated process. Even KFFs is not perfect, although it's the best one I found online. We're going to put your income in early retirement at like $65, $70,000. which is just more than your spending once you pay off the mortgage. Yes and no. And here's part of the nuance. So we, yes, that once the mortgage is paid off, our spending is going to be somewhere around 65 to 75,000.

But in retirement, what we want to do for three months of the year is be snowbirds. We don't want to live here in the winters anymore. It gets cold. It gets snowy. We're done with it. So for three months of the year, we're also budgeting living somewhere else, which accounts for basically tackling back. in the mortgage amount and covering some of the medical costs here that we're going to go through.

Okay, perfect. So I'll put in $80,000 in income. What's great about the early retirement world is you can manage your income, right? Your spending can be different from your income in early retirement. So I'm going to put this, I'm going to intentionally set this actually a few thousand dollars lower to make sure that we're below the federal poverty line cliff that I believe will be the case here. So we're going to have a two-person household. We're not going to have employer coverage. and we're going to have two adults. We said 42. Yeah.

When we retire, it'd be about 10 years from now, hopefully. So it's somewhere around 53 and 54. Okay. Great. Okay. So 53, 54. And then we're going to have no children. Is that right?

At that point? Correct. All right. Great. So this is what we're looking at. Actually, what I'm going to do first is I'm going to increase this number to a high level. So if we're not getting the subsidy calculation, this calculator computes the subsidy calculation.

If you did not get a subsidy, and you chose a bronze plan, right? This calculator, you have to kind of know what you're doing to look through it so you can find the fire-related stuff. A bronze plan is going to cost you about 1381 per month at age 53, right? And this is what trips people up, right? This is the whole thing I've been harping on lately is if you guys are 42 and 43 right now, that number is going to be different here, and it's going to be $887, right?

Like, are those subsidies going to be around in 10 years? I don't know, but that probably should be. be plan A. So the way to do this right now is you'd literally do that every year, or every five years, and you kind of build out a model and say, here's the, how are so much my spending will ramp if I don't get subsidies for health care over this time period? And you also assume maybe not a pocket spend as well going along there. And you buffer that into your fire number. It's probably going to be like, you know, a few hundred grand, like maybe a hundred, 150 to 200 grand, on top of the 4% rule number that you're targeting with your core portfolio. So that's a complicated

exercise. I've got an article on that that I'll link to here in the show notes as well. That talks about how health care costs rise sharply in early retirement. And I do that for my own family, for example, using the Obamacare. Now, with this, you know, should we also budget for a year every five years that it would be max out of pocket into that as well? Because you can take the payments as far as what you're going to be paying for insurance every month. But then you also need to factor in what if something happens? And how do you budget for that as well? My opinion is that, like, we want to be realistic, not pessimistic in the fire world. And I think healthcare, I think that it's too pessimistic to assume you're going to hit your out-of-pocket

max every year. But it's realistic to assume that you're going to have some kind of hefty insurance premium and you're going to have some out-of-pocket max every year. Here's my article on I spent forever nerding out about this. Why health care costs rise sharply with age and early retirement for anyone listening here. And what I assume here is this is that ramp I'm showing you over the course of your, you know, you're going to retire somewhere here and you're going to see this ramp going through this period. A version of that with the two-person household. And then it's going to, you know, drop substantially once you get on Medicare at age 65, right? Then you have a huge drop off in cost. So you got to bridge this amount. And I would ramp both your premiums and,

your out-of-pocket average expenses here. The volatility of expenses, you know, do they hit earlier or late, is a risk factor, but in the really advanced mathematics of withdrawal rates, it's not that big of the deal to really delay or be a core part of your planning process, to assume, like, hey, you're going to hit your out-of-pocket max in the first or second year here and go on there. It can impact it, but it's not as nasty a variable as I initially assumed in early retirement math. And by the way, Karsden Jeske, at early retirement now, big earn. If you want to get your PhD in that, this kind of stuff here, you go to that site and you can check that out and he'll defend that particular argument really well, world class, world class

analysis over there. But yes, I think your base plan should be, I'm going to see my premiums increase and I'm going to see my out-of-pocket expenses increase as I age until I get on Medicare. The other factor, of course, is also like, yes, 4% is the standard for a 30-year retirement with most likely or hopefully a 40, 45 year retirement that we're looking at with trying to retire early, do we use three and a half percent? You know, I've heard different arguments as far as lower in that, the more years that you have in retirement. When you want more, start your business with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools, and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business all in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest

Today. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They're the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S. with over 1,500 corporate guides, who are real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. Northwest makes life easy for business owners. They don't just help you form your business. They give you the free tools you need after you form it, like operating agreements, meeting minutes, and thousands of how-to guides that explain the complicated ins and outs of running a business. And with Northwest, private is automatic. They never sell your data and all services are handled in-house because

privacy by default is their pledge to all customers. Visit northwest registeredagent.com slash money-free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money-free. When I evaluate debt funds, I look for things like first position loans, personal guarantees, deep experience by the fund operator, low fund leverage, fast liquidity, and consistent returns. These are some of the reasons why I'm excited to partner with Pine Financial Group. Their fund six offers investors exposure to real estate credit, largely for construction and rehab, with loans originated by an experienced originator with over $1 billion in origination volume. They offer investors an 8% preferred return paid monthly and a

70-30 LP-SP split of everything over 10% paid annually. The lockup period is nine months, with liquidity available within 90 days after that nine-month commitment. The fund is open to accredited investors only. The fund's minimum investment is typically $100,000, but Pine Financial is able to reduce that minimum for Bigger Pockets Money listeners to a minimum of $25,000. Full disclosure, I am personally invested in this fund through my self-directed IRA. Pine Financial is sponsoring this message and our podcast. Go to BiggerPocketsmoney.com slash Pine, P-I-N-E. Please note that returns are not guaranteed and may vary based on fund performance.

Found is reimagining what business banking should be by putting your bookkeeping, invoicing, and tax tools directly into your business checking account. They've automated things like tracking expenses, finding right on. and budgeting for tax time. You can even send invoices for free and pay your contractors. Everything all from one app. Found makes it easy to regain control of your business finances so you can get back to doing what you love. Take back control of your business today. Don't wait. Open a found account for free at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash found. That's biggerpocketsmoney.com slash F-O-U-N-D. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by

lead bank member FDIC. This is the tool smart business owners are switching to every day. Join the hundreds of thousands who have already streamlined their finances with Found and join us at Bigger Pockets Money. We use Found to run Bigger Pockets Money. Two of the people I admire most in the community here are Big Earn, Karsen-Gerski, who I think is done is the most rigorous analyst on 4% rule withdrawals, maybe in existence, right? Maybe even beating out Kitsis at this point, who's also fantastic. And then there's Frank Vasquez, right? who has a different argument and different take on the situation is much more aggressive. And I respect and admire both of those folks, but I think if you're looking for like, what's the

risk off answer? You know, I think you start with big earn and you look at that study and say, here are the risk factors that would, you know, yes, encourage you to have a slightly lower than 4% withdrawal rate through that early retirement. And then you counter that with, well, that also leaves me the pretty high probability of retiring or passing away with a very large estate in many of these cases. So there's kind of a push and take there. But I'd argue, and I'll even reframe it for you, you already are arguably at fire. Like within a few months, by the end of 26 this year, you could have your mortgage paid off and your car paid off. And then your, like, your portfolio would suggest that you're at the 4% rule at the end of this year. If 10 years pass

before you actually retire, this problem is going to be completely negated at that point, unless we get really, really unlucky stretch of market returns here. It doesn't feel that way. No, it doesn't because the numbers are so out of touch. And they don't seem real because they're for retirement. Retirements in the future. I looked up Michael Kitsis's 4% withdrawal article specifically to get this one image. This is starting at a million dollars. And this is how it grows. One of them grows to $9 million in year 24 after having taken out the 4%. So Michael Kitsis' research suggests the traditional 4% rule is often too conservative, frequently leaving retirees with excess capital.

Again, these are people who are withdrawing from the 4% and continuing on. There's a couple that go below the starting value. and in year 31, there is one that goes down below zero. One, out of all of these, I don't remember how many of these are, it's a lot. And that is the year that people retired into a position of incredibly high inflation, late 60s, early 70s, we had high inflation and prolonged high inflation. So we're in a situation right now where inflation is a little squitchy. So maybe it would be better to pull out at three and a half percent until you can see that, yeah, this is going okay.

You don't want to hit the sequence of returns risks where the market is way down right when you retire and you start pulling out. What amount do you have in bonds? We just within the past four months started a bond position within our 401 case. We are typically, I would say, 60 to 65 percent S&P 500 in our 401 case. Then we have some small caps, mid-caps, international. But I think we have like 3% bonds. It's very low because we just, we're not at the point where we feel like we can retire anytime soon. So it's like we're going to start slowly adding into that bond position, but it's nowhere near what a retirement age person would have.

Oh, so you have 350,000 in traditional accounts and almost 850,000 in Roth accounts. you can withdraw the contributions in your Roth at any time. Does that go for Roth 401K as well, Mindy? It does. I just looked it up because I wasn't sure. Just the contributions, not the gains. The gains would be taxable. I don't know how you figure that out because I'm not at a position where I'm going to

start withdrawing from there. But I mean, if you're maxing it out every year, that's pretty easy. You know, $7,500 last year, okay, well, I can take out $7,500, and it'll be fine. And I can take out the year before that was $7,000. I can take that out too. We switched over. So we used to be Roth IRAs forever in our 20s and our 30s. And then we started adding in the Roth 401K in our 30s as we built up a larger, you know, income.

And recently in the past just three years, our income has gone up more than, you know, what we could have imagined. And so we've gone more traditional. I would say it's 75% we put into the traditional now for maxing out 401ks and only like 25%. So we've made that switch to be able to account for tax efficiencies. I think that what's awesome about this is you are basically on the cusp of financial independence right now. And again, I'll go back to if you stay invested this way, market could go any which way or whatever. But if we get anything close to average historical returns over the next 10 years, you're going to

see this portfolio more than double adjusted for inflation. Plus maybe double again, depending on how much you contribute and add to the pile on this. You're going to have a paid off house, and it's going to start to be silly money at that point. And so this is awesome. This is a great situation. And I think that what the challenge is, if you came in and said, I want to retire right now, we'd actually have a fun financial planning challenge. At that point, it's no fun.

Like, there's no fun there because you're so far beyond it. You just, you have fun. You have to spend more and retrain your brain to spend more at that point in 10 years. If we get anything close to historical average returns. But in the current situation, I think there's a real argument to be made that we have to be a little careful because you can't quite be totally confident in your FI plan on there. But what's awesome about your situation is at this like 4% withdrawal rate, which you're right at, basically, once you pay off that mortgage and the car loan, even with a little bit

of snowburn, if you could bring in like $25,000 or $30,000 in active income in the first few years or in a down year, for example, that essentially totally negates the small percentage of situations that either run out of money or begin to see your account. dwindle as you approach traditional retirement age, which is a big challenge mentally for a lot of folks that would be for me. That's one option that's very realistic for you guys. You guys, I think literally might be able to be in a position where if you wanted to spend this amount of money, you could potentially sustain it for life if you bring in just a little bit of income and you would significantly de-risk your situation. Our goals and our focus is 10 years down the road,

mainly because our youngest son should graduate from high school in 9-ish 10 years. And so when he graduates, you know, and goes off to college. We're using that time as our, you know, exploring us time frame, you know, where we snowboard, not, you know, a second home. We're planning to bounce around to different locations, you know, explore different parts of the country. But we want to enjoy that as well. And that's why, yes, right now based off of basic needs and stuff like that, you're right.

We're probably close to that FI number, but we don't want to live a basic needs life. We want to live to enjoy it. And so that's where some of the new. nuance and why the anxiety builds up a little bit as far as our spending. So it sounds like you have a five number that's larger than this. You're living. Wait within your means now. But your goal is much bigger than that.

Do you have any idea what that looks like? Yeah. Our goal number is somewhere near a cash flow of between 110 to 125. And that would account for increase in medical costs as we discussed here. It includes snowboarding for three to four months of the year and being able to rent a place wherever we want for that time and be able to withstand our current bills and spending habits, which also includes some inflated costs because we do have two kids in sports and all this other stuff that probably goes away in that time. But I don't know, so I can't really plan for it.

You're absolutely on track to get to that point. That implies a $3 million financial portfolio, essentially. That will go a lot farther than what you're spending today. So it'll feel like a lot more once this mortgage is paid off, for example. That won't be a part of that, and you'll probably be debt-free by the end of this year. So what I'm reading here is, how do you protect what you've built while also growing towards that number? Is that the main crux of that question? That's the main part of that one. And also, how do I fund certain aspects? Like, do I continue to pile in as much as I can to the retirement accounts, like the IRA and the 401K? Or do I now set a bigger portion of that budget into the taxable brokerage, even though?

it's not as tax efficient so that I can have that freedom fund, that freedom bucket for those years before those retirement accounts can be withdrawn from. Yeah, I like that option. And it isn't like an all or nothing thing. It isn't all 401K or all brokerage. You can still, I don't know if you get any sort of company match, absolutely do whatever you have to do to get the entire company match. But then if you retired in 10 years, so then you'd be 52 and then. then you've only got like a seven year 72T. So you can start accessing those funds. That's a much different story.

I like the brokerage idea because that is you don't have to do anything with that. Those are your funds. You can pull them out anytime you want. You're only paying taxes on the gain. So if you sell a stock that's priced at $100 that you bought for 75, you're only paying taxes on that $25. But you still get the whole $100. So it's a lot easier to.

like manipulate that income for tax purposes, so you have a better handle on your taxes. I would personally in your position do what I could to max out the Roth IRA for sure. The Roth 401K gives you a lot of options. You can pull the contributions out at any time. But the after tax stock portfolio gives you like all the gains to. You have access to all the gains. What I really want to, you know, focus on that Roth since 66% of our assets are already in Roth and you know we want our spending is going to be a lot lower in retirement than it is

currently at our income levels this is our highest earning income years the past three years so I want to focus on bringing that taxable amount down here's what I'm thinking right so I'm going through this and I'm saying the 22% bracket for married filing jointly starts goes from 100,000 to 211,000 here right after your standard deduction and deferrals right you're going to be in that 22% bracket with a good chunk of this. I think that's right. When we talk about the middle class trap, right, in these other episodes, we're not talking about your situation, which I think is Roth heavy and really enviable here. We're talking about people who have it all in the pre-tax side of things. And then if they want to access it early, they have to literally stop working to move

into a lower tax bracket to begin accessing that money or doing Roth conversions, whatever. You don't have that problem. You did it right the whole way here. You maxed. out the Roth while you were in lower income tax brackets for years, decades, clearly, to get this going. That's an awesome position. And now in the higher income tax bracket, I completely agree, right? We want to balance across these accounts. But in your situation, in your timeline, with this Roth balance here, probably a good amount of principle, I would be focusing on this one. I would take your match, 401K. I'd be focusing on maxing out the HSA. We'd love to get that to 100 grand plus by the time you're hitting that retirement goal, that'll be a huge boost to you and it'll drop you

on there. And then I'd max out this 401k. And what's great about your situation is you don't have to choose and sacrifice because watch this. When we knock out this mortgage payment, you're spending drops to $66,000 per year. You're generating $134,000 even with a huge pre-tax deferral contribution. You're still generating $134,000 in, you know, after-tax cash generation. You're only going to spend $66,000 of that, you're going to build up your after-tax brokerage account anyways, even after going through this stack and adding a little bit more to your HSA and your 401K. So that's what I would be doing in this situation. I think it's very simple and straightforward from an order of operations, like very traditional

here. And it's because you did it right and didn't defer for 20 years to have a huge balance here right as you hit your peak earnings years and want that optionality. So I think we can do a very uncontroversial or very straightforward approach in your situation. And the wonderful thing is because once your expenses will be so low after you've knocked that out. And plus, by the way, you're going to have your vehicle payment down, right? So we can knock this down to like 150. So you're going to generate even more cash after that. When the mortgage is paid off, we're going to put all that into the brokerage, that $2,500 a month into the brokerage. So that's

going to build that up. Should we lower that $45,000 in deferrals to a smaller number to pump even more to that brokerage to be able to float those years before age 60. I think if you want to get really technical about it, I'm having a little trouble getting, because it's very complicated here, but we have the HSA is going to be like 8,500. You're going to have a match. And if you max both of these 401ks, you're going to get to something like $49,000 in 2026 or 27, the inflation is just equivalent. So if you really want to get technical, then I think that it would be hard to argue that

you shouldn't do that for every dollar over the 22% tax bracket. In the 12% tax bracket, then we have a different argument maybe. Because this tax estimate needs to be precise because it matters and it's not yet to the way it needs to be. But we've got the one big beautiful bill tax credit for child tax credit, which is going to change your taxable income a little bit as well. There's a couple of other nuances in your tax situation that I haven't quite nailed in this particular spreadsheet in terms of how things are treated in here. But I wouldn't be surprised if you did a more sophisticated analysis, you were like, I'm going to contribute, like somewhere in the $40,000 range, my 401k's, and that couple with my HSA is going to move my marginal tax rate on the next dollar into the 12% bracket.

And at that point, I think you've got a very strong argument for not contributing that to your 401k and building up your after-tax position. And again, I think the target that we want to build is we want these to be roughly a third, a third by the time we hit retirement, but we don't mind if the Roth account is by far the really big third. That's a great situation. So that's how I do it. And you want a little bit in your HSA as well.

That one would be really nice to bump up to 10% of your position if you could. I've been using that as kind of like a payment plan for the medical bills and stuff like that. I know it's not the FI thing to do, but that's where I put that money in the bucket, and that's the bucket that's paid for medical expenses. I would quibble with you there. It doesn't really matter because you're doing everything else right. But I think that's a great, like you've got a great situation here. As far as taxes go to, I will let you know that my salary is not a salary.

It's commission. I earn what I make. So I put in basically what is expected. But the variation in the past, let's just say take the five years, five years ago, our household income was like 125. Last year, it was more like 340. So it varies so much. And I mean, it just, it's hard to predict where I'm going to land each year.

What I might consider in that case is wait to contribute to these traditional accounts until closer to the end of the year. So this is perfect. You implicitly already do this. You have a large cash position that's going to be almost three years of expenses once you pay off your mortgage. Right. By the way, I don't know why you wouldn't just pay off your mortgage and your car loan with this

cash position right now. That will reduce your expenses. Five weeks, Scott. Okay. Fair enough. Okay. Now we're sitting there and we're saying this number is really variable, 125. So if that number is huge, then you max out the pre-tax and you say, I'm going to hit everything over this,

you know, you pick 22, 24, 32% bracket. I think in your case, I like the 22% bracket. But if you had a huge 401k balance already, I might just pay taxes on that and begin building out something differently. But you did it so right for the last 20 years or whatever that we can do the classic playbook in the situation. And then I think if it's lower than that, so let's say you have a bad year and it comes in like at 100, then all of a sudden everything's going to be in the 12% bracket and you can either you can just max out the I would still max out the Roth in your situation because this accumulation rate is so huge. Why not put the Roth contribution to the limit and then put everything else in the after tax brokerage. But I think you can choose and you can do that towards the end of the year when you have a better line of sight into what your, what bracket you're going to be in.

And I just do it 100% like when I did this at work, I would literally have a cash position like yours and I would have 100% of my paycheck going into the whatever retirement. account until it was maxed. And then I would make the next decision because if you're going to do it, you might as well put your foot on the gas and do it the whole way. I did that for a couple years. When we didn't have in between mortgages, when we paid off one house before we started the next, I would basically have 50, I think it was like 50% of my income going into the retirement. And I'd max it out by, I don't know, April, May and then have the cash flow to do whatever the rest of the year. That's perfect. That's changed with having the mortgage. Do you get a company match? My company has one where it's a safe harbor.

So it doesn't matter if we put in or not. They automatically put it in. My wife's, it is based off of, yes, how much she puts in. So I think she has to at least put in six or seven percent. And it's only if they have a profitable year. And they do it all lump sum in January or February or something. Okay. I want to just point out to anybody listening who has a company match.

Make sure you talk to your HR department. Some companies will only match when you're, you're putting in that paycheck. So you lump summit in the front and then you miss out on the match towards the end of the year. And you might not realize that until after you've lump summed it. So definitely make sure you if your company has a match, you know how they're matching so that you're maximizing your match as much as possible. I've heard stories of that.

I'm like, oh, my goodness. And you only learn this after you lump summit. So you miss out on the match the whole rest of that year. And that's an expensive lesson. I've never worked for a company with a match. So we always just front-loaded and just 100% of the salary went into the 401k until it was maxed out. That's right. Bigger Pockets did not have a match program because we did a safe harbor.

Yeah, you did a safe harbor. So that should be a good extent to sell more because every time you saw more, you also get the 3% more safe harbor. Yep. What's also remarkable is that this has been going on for a while, the sales job? No. So after we paid off our first house, that is when I was like, all right, I have now the relief. of like the stress and stuff like that of being able to have to pay for this mortgage that I was like, all right, let's try this position that, you know, I feel like I could do. And that's when our

income, you know, exploded for the last four years. And it's a great earning avenue for us. Okay. So you're asking us all these questions about how you're going to retire with three million bucks. I'm an optimist about this, you know, sometimes too much. But I think, I think in five years, you're going to be like, well, this is, this is dumb. Why am I waiting until 52 for this? because I have all this optionality right now. I can probably sell some things while snowboarding right now and live a very fire version of life in there. So I think that day is coming sooner than you think based on what I'm saying here.

Maybe don't retire, but, but you know, you just generate a little bit of the sales income that totally de-risks, you know, traditional. And that is an option that I have thought about, I've discussed. And I generally like my job. It, you know, I like working.

I like doing stuff. I like servicing, you know, for people. And, you know, if that comes with the freedom of, being able to live where I want to, then yeah, no, I could see myself working longer than even what the original plan is. You mentioned protect what we built. That was your second question when you came in.

What does that word protect mean in this context? We discussed the optimal portfolio mix and the taxable brokerage and various arguments there, but we did not discuss this question. It's a sequence of returns type of question. So we're here, you know, early to mid-40s now. And we have this 10-year time frame. So it feels to us, man, this is crunch time. Now we have to get our stuff to get it.

We both started investing in 2001, right as everything was tanking with the dot-com bubble. Then we both lived through 2008. My wife lost her job for eight months. I mean, we were living off of, I think, and my pay at that time got deducted by 25%. We were living off of $28,000 a year. We know what these cycles go through. And so we're just like, apprehensive, like, how do we avoid a 50% drop in the next 10 years? Because to rebuild that

back up is a very daunting task. Okay. So we got several options here. Now we're getting into territory. We don't provide specific investing advice here. Yes. But let me give you some resources. I love this question, right? Because, you know, here are other, here are risks I've been worried about, right? Like Cape, the cyclically adjusted price to earnings ratio, even when you, if you go to I've been going down the big urn rabbit hole in particular lately on this. And even with his adjustments, it's at a very high ratio. And that is a real threat to 4% withdrawal sequencing. And, you know, people argue that, but I think he's done really rigorous research on that.

You should definitely check out early retirement now and begin diving into that because that I'll get you more comfortable with these risk profiles. I think that one potential answer to that, or rabbit, various options to begin exploring to address this concern is, one, the Paul Merriman website. So we had Paul Merriman on recently. He is fantastic and has done a lot of research around growth portfolios. And he's got a couple of different portfolios. Let me see here.

Basically, you can factor tilt your portfolio. So you could say, you know, U.S. I'm going to tilt to U.S. and international. Or I'm going to tilt to, I'm going to have 25% in large cap growth like the S&P 500. You know, I'm going to have 25% in small cap value. I'm going to do the same thing, 25% in the international equivalence there. and you can do all these different variations on that, the whole market can go down. So you can lose big no matter what you're investing in here.

But you might get a little different flavor of those returns, right? Like the dot-com crash, someone who had a 50-50, you know, large cap and small-cap fund, had a very different experience for the next 15, 20 years than someone who was all in the SMP 500, for example, right? There's trade-offs. There's only trade-offs. There will be complexity with that. There will be rebalancing and there will be, you know, there's still return profiles that'll be different. that'll be different over that time.

But that's the rabbit hole to go down if you want to stay invested in growth portfolios for the next 10 years and maybe at least gets a different flavor of a return profile than just the SMP 500, for example, if you're starting to think about this word protect. The other option on the farther extreme is going to be something like Frank Vasquez's risk parity portfolio. So a risk parity portfolio is going to have, you know, exposure to a variety of different asset classes and we're going to try to get very different, ideally things that are totally uncorrelated or even negatively correlated with the portfolios. The problem with the risk parity

portfolio, and I think Frank has done wonderful research on this, is for someone who is as young as us, right? Your early 40s and I'm in my mid-30s, there's a real drag on the portfolio returns over the next 50 years that we might, you know, we might live in. So that portfolio might be suboptimal, might not have enough growth tilt, depending on how you build it. There's a bunch of different flavors of risk parity that you can build as well. But those would be the two things I'd point you towards in terms of optimal portfolio mix. Again, noting that once we start saying here's what to invest in, we begin to find ourselves getting in trouble here on bigger pockets money. Speaking of the risk parity portfolio, how's your $10,000 portfolio, Mindy, that you guys did and withdraw, what, $7 a month?

Or is it $40? It's $42 a month, which is over the course of a year would be a 5% withdrawal. I started with $10,000. I have withdrawn $42 every single month. And my balance right now is $11,015.97. So gold has been my biggest performer. That's what I'm selling every time I'm selling something trying to rebalance because it just keeps going up. And I didn't want to put gold in there, but Frank told me too. So I did. But yeah, I keep with drawing and it keeps going up. And this past performance is not indicative of future gains, but it's been a good one. Awesome. And it's only been since July, but it's, it's been a good performer since July. And we've had some up and down in the market with the war in Iran and the

tariffs and then there's no tariffs. And then so the market's been up and down and up and down. And it's still chugging along. I have more money in there than I started with. And I've been pulling it What's fun about investing is these three guys, I really respect all three of them. Frank Baskas, Paul Merriman, and Carston, Jeske from a bigger, all have conflicting opinions on what's best here. And I think they're all right in different scenarios for different goals and portfolio allocations. So I think that's fun. But that's the rabbit hole I'd point you down.

I'd point you towards. If I had to guess, I would imagine you'll find Paul Merriman more your current flavor. and you'll find, you know, Frank and Carson's conflicting arguments more appealing once you actually start trying to pull the trigger and live the fire lifestyle. That would be my guess, but I don't know what you'll end up to actually do in there. One of the things that I get caught up in all the time since I can, you know, choose my own flavor there is just all the different options. Whereas the 401K, you only have these options that the company provides for you.

In the brokerage, I am all over the place. I, you know, VU, QQQ, Q, you know, VYM, those are my stalwarts. But then I get into like reits and, you know, small caps, large caps, all this other thing. I have like 20, 25 different options when I know I shouldn't be in all of those. It's just any advice on how to control that urge to just diversify everything? VTSAX diversifies everything. Then you own it all.

I also kind of struggle with that. We are trying to streamline it a little bit more, but I don't know that we're actually going to do very much of it. Why don't you want to have all of these positions? I just think it's overkill. That's why I say I have those three core funds, you know, the S&P 500, the technology, and then a dividend fund.

And then the rest are just kind of like supplements. Do you enjoy having them or does it cause you? stress. No, I enjoy it. Then there's no reason why you shouldn't. I think it's not optimal. I have like reits and stuff like that. It's like in a taxable brokerage. I know it's not efficient, but that's where I get caught up is like, is that the right thing to do? I think that a good exercise. Something else Mindy and I are working on is an investment philosophy template. So we'll provide like a starting point of draft of like here are the things that we like at bigger pockets money. I'm in here. And we love index funds in the passive portfolio. And we also

love the alternative space in there, and there's a role we played in each of those, and we believe that a lot of people have unique skills or unique interests that make all these alternative plays very appealing for them, and the income from those reacts with what the optimal portfolio looks like for them in the context of more traditional finance, right? So like someone with a rental property may need a different type of traditional assets there. I think that if you write down an investment philosophy and commit it to paper, and you can imagine it as a draft, and sit on it for a year or two and evolve it. But that might be the tool you need to feel comfortable with your approach.

But I'd also argue that at this point, you're talking about a very minimal tax drag on your portfolio. If you make this decision right, what we talked about earlier and you have a good thesis for why you are deferring based in your income tax bracket, that's going to matter far more than 10% of this after-tax brokerage proposition being tax inefficient because it's in a REIT instead of having that income hitting your Roth or your traditional account, right? I mean, you have 83 grand in your after-tax portfolio. It's like 5% of your liquid financial portfolio.

Yes, as of now. And just with my goals, it's going to start getting bigger as we pay off the house because then I'm going to be funneling a lot more in there. I'd like the idea of making the mistakes while it's small and then getting more optimal as I grow it. The textbook play, I think, would look something more like having your income. if you have it, hitting in your traditional, your growth, long-term growth, hitting primarily in your Roth and the balance of the two hitting in the after-tax portfolio,

avoiding the active income in your earning years, if you can, hitting in that after-tax position. And that framework will get you most of the way towards tax efficiency, I think. Makes sense. How we doing? Still answering your questions here? This is what you're looking for? Yeah, I mean, you've touched on everything that's, that's, the key points here. The medical, that's the highest, you know, anxiety point that hits me each day.

And then the rest of it is just like, yes, should I be the 4% or the 3.5% which we touched on and then how to model that in between the tax deferred, taxable, and Roth. And we touched on that as well. So, yeah, I think we touched on everything. I think if you said I want to retire today and never earn another dollar, I would say your friend is bigger and over. at early retirement now and his more conservative case. And when you get to your goal, you're going to be fine at the 4% rule paradoxically, most likely, because you're going to have overshot to a certain degree. And I would also say that you can spend even more than that if you're willing to earn some active income, starting potentially much sooner, which I think is probably

where you'll, I would, if I had to guess where you'll land in the next four or five, six years, or just doing something you like or enjoy. And I bet you that if you keep your expenses, your core expense is this low, you're going to have that feeling of freedom very well justified within five or six years, my hope. We'll see. I would love to, you tell me if we're, if we're right on that. Five years, I'll have to check back in. We'll be here. All right. Carl, thank you so much for sharing your numbers with us and for sharing your time with us today. We really appreciate it. And we will talk to you soon. All right. Thank you, Mindy. Thank you, Scott. All right. That was Carl, and that was his specific financial situation and his specific goals. And Scott and

we're answering those questions, but I think there's a lot of people in our audience who have a very similar situation. Scott, what did you think of Carl's position and my comment that our audience has a lot of these same problems? I think you're absolutely right. I think it's a great challenge. And I think what's awesome about this challenge and what we're learning about investing and, you know, optimizing for some kind of early retirement is two frameworks, right? One is there's a very simple, path to building wealth, right? We know that, right? JL Collins, VTSAX or whatever it is, you know, we can't say specific funds or whatever, but, you know, like the S&P 500, boring old-fashioned index funds. And that's great. That is an optimal way to passively build

long-term wealth. Once we start kind of wanting to move a little more towards protection, however, that philosophy breaks down, and we need some other version of that. And there are multiple schools of thought that I don't know if I have my fully formed framework around yet, for myself, much less other folks, we have very good opinions from Paul Merriman, very good opinions from Frank Vasquez, and very good work done by Carson Jeske over at early retirement now. But I think that's where it gets a little more nuanced. That's fun. And the second major framework for someone in this position is, what should I be doing with my retirement accounts here? And I think that what we do know from Cody Garrett and Sean Mullaney is that the right

answer or is some kind of balance, having funds in the taxable account, having funds in the Roth and having funds in the pre-tax in HSA. That approach, when you have that framework in mind, you can begin to kind of move the needle there. And then it's what tax bracket am I in today and what tax bracket I'm going to be in tomorrow? And so it's always a custom, you know, analysis of what's the right answer. But if you apply those two frameworks, you can get pretty close, I think, on your own to getting a more right answer. It's always a guess in the end as to what's optimal. But in his case, I thought that his pre-tax balance was light. And so there's an opportunity to defer taxes now. And after he pays off the mortgage and the car, his after-tax

accumulation will still be huge on an annual basis building up his after-tax brokerage position. So that was my flavor on that. But I think plenty of people will disagree. And if you do disagree, please leave a comment here on YouTube. We'd love to hear different opinions on it. I think that this is a place where smart people can disagree. Yes, absolutely. I think that you are correct, but also his timeline is about nine or ten years. He's got such a great base. And I mean, he's two thirds of the way there.

So even if he just lets it grow for 10 years, it's probably going to, he's probably going to get there anyway. And that's actually not something I even thought about until I'm looking at these numbers right now and considering his timeline. he's got a kid who's not going to graduate high school for about nine more years. And a friend of mine once said, you are only retired, like truly retired when your last kid leaves school. You're not really early retired, even if you're not working. If you've got a kid in school, not homeschooled, but in an actual school, your location dependent anyway.

So I think he's going to just continue to put money into these accounts. Honestly, does it matter where they go? Not really. He's going to be in a great position. He will probably get to 10 years from now with five million of his three million dollars that he wants. I think there's a good chance he outperforms as well. And I, you know, me, I'm always very conservative and cautious about the markets and those types of things, which is why I'm so fascinated by these different schools of thought with Frank and Bigger and and Kitts and Paul Merriman and all that. So I think there's a really, there's really fun stuff going on there. But I also think that he's so close to being financially independent.

You can basically defray so much of this sequence risk if you earn a little bit of money, right? If he earns 30 grand a year, which should be no challenge for him in his sales role on some kind of part-time basis or for some certain clients in there, that's half his spending, right? You almost never have to sell a portfolio. You know, if his financial portfolio is $1.4 million and it generates 2% yield across that, then he's covered his entire expense set with that, which is between those two items there. He doesn't have to sell, even to actually liquidate any part of his equity position. And they're just a little off the cash flow between those two things. And he'll be in a low tax bracket. So that's the last piece, I think, that in situations like this, I would argue many people

are much closer to having the version of freedom that they want than they think as they're approaching this. If they start putting that into their minds. I would argue that as well, Scott. I think a lot of people are a lot closer and they've got this what if syndrome. What if, what if, what if? well, you know what? There's a lot of what-ifs that you can throw out there. What if the market crashes by 50%. I read this great quote by Michael J. Fox. It said something like, don't worry about

the worst case scenario. Chances are it's probably not going to be like that anyway. And even if it is, you'll just live through it twice. So don't worry about if the stock market's going to crash or if you're not going to have enough money for retirement. If you truly have, have the 4% rule money. I mean, what did it say? Kitsa says everybody's super conservative and they're way too conservative and start off at four, but then bump it up to 10%. There's so many different options for people who get themselves to the position of financial independence in the first place. I think they're really just borrowing trouble. What if I have almost a million dollars my Roth at age 42 and my kid, by the way, you see that the 80 grand in the beneficiary account,

which I'm assuming is the college fund for his kid who's nine years away from graduating high school, right? So, so I mean, college is funded. We're all set. What if I could spend the next 10 years doing something I'm really passionate about, easily cover my living expenses, and have plenty of extra spending money from the portion of my portfolio that is liquid right now? What if I could do that instead of grinding away for 10 more years? And my health, my wellness, and some passion project develops in an incredible way over that as 10 years. That's another what if as part of this. And that opportunity is going to pass, too. So there's only tradeoffs in personal finance. Yeah, and why do we what if the bad, but not the good? What if the good, too?

I always what if the good and people complain about me being optimistic. Okay. Scott referred to an article that he wrote on our website about insurance. I am going to include that in next week's newsletter. So if you're listening to this episode now and you're not subscribed to our newsletter, you can rectify that right now by going to biggerpocketsmoney.com slash newsletter. And if you want even more financial independence information, you can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at Bigger Pockets Money. I also put a call out here. I am now starting to get and find myself, I'm loving this. I'm having so much fun building like this, this tax analysis for personal financial statements. I want to model out health care costs as they rise so we can all

model this problem on BP money and all that kind of stuff. I'm going to do it over the next year or two. but if anybody out there is interested is very detail oriented and has a skill set in this stuff, I would love to reach out, happy to attach your name to it, or potentially we can work out some kind of small payment or whatever. But if anyone in the Bigger Pockets Money audiences loves nerding out about this stuff, I could definitely use help making sure painstakingly that these tax brackets are right, updating them every year, trying to figure out how to map health care costs to the right places there, all that kind of stuff.

That's a modeling challenge. It's very solvable, but it's a lot of detail work. And if anyone out there is interested in that and wants to help contribute to these free resources, please let me know. Scott at BiggerPocketsmoney.com. It will help me speed up the process here, which I tackle them in spurts. All right, Scott, should we get out of here? Let's do it. All right, that wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast.

He is Scott Trench. I am Indy Jensen saying chop, chop, lollip. When I evaluate debt funds, I look for things like first position loans, personal guarantees, deep experience by the fund operator, low fund leverage, fast liquidity, and consistent returns. These are some of the reasons why I'm excited to partner with Pine Financial Group. Their fund six offers investors exposure to real estate credit, largely for construction and rehab, with loans originated by an experienced originator with over $1 billion in origination volume. They offer investors an 8% preferred return paid monthly in a 70-30 LP-SP split of everything over 10% paid annually.

The lock-up period is nine months with liquidity available within 90 days after that nine-month commitment. The fund is open to accredited investors only. The fund's minimum investment is typically $100,000. But Pine Financial is able to reduce that minimum for Bigger Pockets Money listeners to a minimum of $25,000. Full disclosure, I am personally invested in this fund through my self-directed IRA. Pine Financial is sponsoring this message and our podcast. Go to biggerpocketsmoney.com slash pine, P-I-N-E. Please note that returns are not guaranteed and may vary based on fund performance.

Here at Bigger Pockets Money, Found eliminates the clutter for us by giving us one platform that handles it all, banking, bookkeeping, invoices, and taxes. paying for multiple subscriptions and dealing with clunky outdated apps. Found identified the tasks that create the most hassle for us small business owners, things like categorizing expenses, preparing for taxes, managing invoicing, budgeting, and they built an app that does it all for us, directly from our business checking accounts. Make it easy to stay in control of your finances and take back control of your business today. Don't wait. Open a found account for free at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash found. That's biggerpocketsmoney.com slash F-O-U-N-D. Found is a financial

technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member FDIC. This is the tool smart business owners are switching to every day. Join the hundreds of thousands who have already streamlined their finances with Found.