BiggerPockets Money Podcast - FI With 5 Kids and Debt-Free in Just Over a Decade!

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Does FIRE seem impossible while raising a family? We’re about to prove that you CAN have it all. Emily and Joel are financially independent while raising five kids and still have the money to travel the world, take plenty of vacations, and sleep in without worrying about a job. They reached FI in just over a decade and did it without EVER having a high income. How’d they do it? One “financial superpower” allowed them to do what most people won’t. Emily and Joel started with $150,000 in student loan debt. Their accounts dwindled at the end of every month, so they began to pay off their loans with the “debt snowball” method. Fast forward a few years, and they were debt-free, but now they had a new challenge: building their net worth! Today, they’re sharing the incredible journey they took to go from personal finance zeros to heroes, the “why” behind achieving FI at such young ages, and how they did it all (including keeping expenses SUPER low) while raising not one, not two, but FIVE children. Think FI isn’t possible for you? Think again—copy Emily and Joel’s plan! In This Episode We Cover How to pay off debt FAST with the “debt snowball” method  Minimizing your expenses and how spending less gets you to FIRE way faster Why you DON’T need to cut out travel/vacations on your path to financial freedom The “financial superpower” you must cultivate if you want to retire early  What 100% of Emily and Joel’s portfolio is in and the simple path to building wealth Starting side hustles that pay for your life and why working while FI is NOT a bad thing  And So Much More! Links from the Show Mindy on BiggerPockets Scott on BiggerPockets Kyle on BiggerPockets Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Join BiggerPockets for FREE 50+ Rentals After Starting in Her 50s and How “Late Starters” Can Get Ahead From 150k in Debt to FIRE in Their Mid-30s (With 5 Kids!) ISI Team Camps Reach FIRE Faster with “Set for Life” Find an Investor-Friendly Agent in Your Area See Mindy at BPCON2024 in Cancun! The Simple Path to Wealth—Index Funds Explained with JL Collins (00:00) Intro (01:07) Six-Figure Debt and Dave Ramsey (05:58) "Snowballing” $150K in Debt (08:27) $1,000,000 FI Number (14:06) Financial Superpowers (15:27) The “Why” Behind FI (18:37) Serious Side Hustles (29:29) Did They Retire? (34:11) Connect with Emily and Joel Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-566 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fire in your mid-30s with $150,000 in debt and five kids? This might seem impossible, but Joel and Emily paid off their debt in under three years and achieved fire by age 36. I cannot wait to share with you how they did it. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and I am joined today by none other than the Kyle Mast. Hey, Mindy, it is so good to be here. I am so excited.

are in the right place if you've got five kids and you want to get your financial house in order because we really do believe that financial freedom is something that everyone can work towards, everyone can attain no matter where you are, how many kids you have or don't have or where you're starting. Today we are going to discuss how to pay down debt fast. We're also going to talk about understanding the why of your financial journey and how one side hustle could cover 200% of your expenses. Now, let's get into the show. Joel and Emily, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited to talk to you. Thanks for having us, Kyle and Mindy. Okay, we're going to jump right into it. Our listeners love transparency. So this is a question for you both. How old are you? Where are you living? What was

your job before you quit? And how much were you making? I'm going to go with Emily first. I'm 36 years old. I spent 10 years working as an occupational therapist in both health care and education. We live in Dubuca, Iowa. Yeah, right on. And I'm a teacher, physical education. I was in the classroom for 10 years of the social studies teacher. Emily was making around 50 grand a year. We'll add that answer into the question. And then when I started as a coach and teacher, we started at 35,000 combined there while Emily was in grad school. then, you know, teacher salaries around 50 grand. Okay, so rolling in the dough, how did you rack up $150,000 of debt?

What was that $150,000 comprised of? That was all student loan debt. So we didn't have any consumer debt. So we got married in 2010. I had just finished my undergraduate degree and was going right in the fall into a master's program. That was $25,000 a year. So by the end of all is where we got to the $150,000 of student loan debt. And we pick private schools, of course, because why not get a bigger bill?

Go bigger, go home. We started at $150,000 in debt, and that was a pretty big weight on our shoulders. And by happenstance, we went over to a friend's house in the area, and he threw us at Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, which really became our roadmap in the early stages of what we were doing. And we just started to snowball that debt. That's awesome. What was the age when you were at the highest point of your debt?

What were your guys' ages at that 150,000 point? We were 22 and 23 when we got married. So we did accrue more debt through graduate school. But, yeah, we started paying down debt during the time that I was in school. And so like Joel mentioned, we were living on teacher's salary and write those couple months before we met this friend and heard of the day Bramsdy plan. It was not a fun conversation that we just kept having over and over. We would get to the end of a month and have nothing, literally zero dollars. And we weren't, neither of us wanted to go down the consumer debt route.

We didn't have credit cards. We didn't want credit cards at that point. So we just kind of felt like we were on this journey with no plan. And that's kind of what gave us the plan. Dave Ramsey is great to get you from negative net worth to zero. And he's got plans to get you past zero net worth, but I'd like to stop following him then and go on with different plans. He was great. He was really, really good in the beginning. And then, yeah, we kind of graduated, I guess. I remember it was around COVID time. And it's kind of like, what do we do with our hands now? because we had paid off our home, but that's when we kind of started to, we stumbled upon financial independence that whole term, and that took us down a rabbit hole that's been a heck of a lot

of fun. I'm familiar with that rabbit hole. So what was your money situation outside of the $150,000 in debt? Did you have any savings? Did you have any investments? No, we had nothing. So we were renting, I think it was around $700 a month is what we were paying in rent. And we didn't have, any investments at that time. I was working in a public school, so we had a, you know, like a public pension program. So I guess embedded into that was a little bit of savings. But by the time I switched over into private schools, I think it had accrued about $6,000. So essentially zero. And then savings-wise, or, you know, money stores, we had almost nothing. I think once Dave Ramsey started, we followed his plan kind of right to the T. So we had $1,000 saved up for an emergency

fund. Yeah, and I had worked all through college. I just didn't have a job right away going into graduate school. I wasn't sure exactly what I'd be able to handle with the full course load. And so I don't remember, sometime within that first year, I did start working and worked 30 to 40 hours a week on top of doing graduate school. But it was a job that I could do my studying at the job. So it was a pretty perfect job. And it paid really well for that time of our lives. It was like $20 an hour. And that actually helped us because we had the Dave Ramsey plan, we were able to pay my last, my third year in graduate school in full, so the $25,000. We didn't have to take a loan out for that year. Tell me a little bit more, you know, Dave Ramsey, you guys touched on it a little bit. He does such a

good job of the roadmap. You know, you mentioned you had the $1,000. You know, he, there's all these questions that come up when you want to pay off debt. It's like, where do I start? Which one do I pay off first? How much should I have for an emergency fund? You know, what kind of debt is okay? what one is terrible. Don't ask you guys, how did it feel? Because maybe we can give some of these people some motivation. As you started down that snowball, and for those that are listening, the snowball is basically paying your lowest payment of debt first. So your lowest monthly payment has nothing to do with the interest rate. And the Dave Ramsey idea there is that it gives you a behavioral edge because say you have a $30 a month payment on a credit card. And you, you, you, you, you,

just need to pay $1,500 to get that credit card paid off. You hit that, wow, now I got one less debt. It's gone. And I have $30 to add to the next highest monthly debt, which maybe is $76. And you snowball and stack those. How did that feel for you guys once you started doing that once or twice with these? I'm guessing you had these student loans and they're probably broken up into different years. And for each of you, you have like several different loans. It's not one big one. like how does that feel and did you run into any like resistance for you guys making that difficult? Just, you know, thinking about someone who hasn't quite started it yet and maybe encouraging them

a little bit. Yeah, I would start with exactly what you talked about, the behavior part of it. So when we began, we were aimless. We were roadmapsless. And then we find this book and he kind of goes against maybe conventional wisdom of, you know, pay your highest interest first. So we just, we just followed it. And man, when we paid that first loan, it was like, holy crap, we can do this.

And then we roll that into another one. And it really became a game. It kind of gamified it, to be honest. So things really, you know, he talks about the snowball effect. It certainly was that way for us, where we just went one to the next. Any amount of money that we had left over, it went 100% towards that next loan. And just like he said, within three years, we had it completely paid off. It felt really good.

It helped with discipline. because all of us are going to struggle with motivation. Motivation's not going to be there some days. All right, stay tuned for more on Emily and Joel's journey to FI just after this quick break. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing.

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Audible has been a core part of my routine for more than a decade. I started listening years ago to make better use of drive time and workouts, and it stuck. At this point, I've logged over 229 audio book completions on Audible alone, and I still regularly re-listen to the highest impact titles. Lately, I've been listening to Bigger Leen or Stronger for Fitness, the Anxious Generation for Parenting Perspective, and several Arthur Brooks' audiobooks that have been excellent for mental well-being. What makes Audible so powerful as its breadth.

Beyond audiobooks, 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 10 years. kickstart your well-being journey with your first audiobook free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash BP money. Welcome back to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. Let's jump back in with Joel and Emily. Did you have a fine number when you first started, you discovered financial independence?

You're like, that's what I want to do. Did you have a fine number in mind? You know, when we started on the path, it was, you know, just even learning. There's so much misunderstanding on retirement. That's what we found in talking with our parents and talking with people that are kind of going down that path is they just don't even know what the finish line is. So how can they know when you've crossed it? So once we just found that 25 times our, you know, our annual spend, you know, it was a very definitive line. And, you know, we spend around 40 grand a year is about what it takes for us to kind of provide for our family. I think that's kind of what our superpower is. So a million bucks was kind of what our number was once we hit that. And then just

with compound interest, how quickly that can become, you know, more, which is pretty exciting. And I think paying off our debt and having a really tight budget and very intentional budget for many years, work to our advantage because then when we discovered FI, we were able to say, oh, we know what our annual spend is. And I kind of go off what he said in terms of knowing, you know, when can you retire? It's amazing to us how many people don't know how much they spend and what it costs for them to live each year. They just can't even answer that question. So I think even if you don't have debt, if you don't have a budget, it might be advantageous to kind of start there. That is something that is so surprising to me, the more I talk to people about their FI number

and their FI journey, the more I realize that it is so much about what you're spending. and being conscious of where your money's going. Everybody has something they can cut from their budget. It might not be something that you want to cut from your budget. It might not be something that you need to cut from your budget. But everybody has something they can cut back on so that they can stop spending so much money if they're in a pinch. Like they lose their job.

There's lots of things you can cut back on. Like, you don't have to go to the movies. You don't have to go out to dinner. You don't have to do, like, there's lots of things you can stop doing. But there's also a lot of things you can stop doing when you're on your journey to FI. Did you leave anything in your budget, like fun things that you left in that you're like, this is not going to come out? So when we were first married, you know, a young couple right out of college, we left $30 a month

in our budget for a date night. That was a, that's a true number too. Like that's what we spent. So we have to get creative on that. But that's what we spent for a number of years. We're going on our monthly budget of $30 a date. It's kind of laughable now. But we had that.

And then we also enjoyed vacations. I live for vacation. I really do. And we just have been really lucky that we both have families that enjoy to getting, you know, lake houses for a week in the summer. So there's kind of embedded we don't have to pay for that or not very much of it. And then we have a friend that had a house near Copper Mountain. So that became our kind of our winter vacation type of thing.

So because he had the home and lodging was provided and then, you know, getting really creative, finding a hack for virtually everything, like ski tickets in Colorado that are incredibly expensive. There's a way to do that a lot cheaper. And so, like, we would, you know, a couple hundred bucks. We would make sure we were having fun along the way. Dave Ramsey does talk about budgeting in for things that are in the future, right? So it's not like you have to cut out all vacations and all fun.

It's just you have to be intentional about it. And you have to plan ahead. Same thing for gifts or on the holidays or birthdays or whatnot. Not letting those things creep up. you know that they're going to come up, plan for it. And then another thing, kind of thinking even just to like the big three spending items on your day-to-day living, we kind of figured out ways to get creative with those when we were traveling as well.

So making our own food instead of eating out when we went to copper, allowed us to make those kinds of trips happen even when we were paying down our debt. Emily, you just said the I word, intentional. You have to be intentional with your spending and you have to find hacks, and you have to do all of this stuff. And that's what I think is so important and the difference between somebody who does reach financial independence and somebody who is leading the more traditional American lifestyle of not really thinking about retirement right now. And that's being intentional with your money. Because your life isn't really all that different from the traditional

American not thinking about retirement person and their life. Yeah, they probably have more stuff in their life, but you have a similar level of happiness because you are working towards a goal. You're like, I am purposely foregoing, you know, the latest iPhone and brand new clothes and a trip every weekend so that I can become financially independent and then get the latest iPhone and, you know, my expenses are all taking care of, monies all taken care of. I love that word intentional. And I think just, you know, Scott, who's not with us right now, but in a previous episode, he talked about artificial scarcity. We really live that way.

Like, we could be living pretty high life stuff, but we certainly are happy with the life that we've been able to build for our family. And it's, yeah, artificial scarcity is kind of a, you know, we give ourselves, you know, for the past, you know, year when we weren't working a W-2 job, you know, out of the business, we were getting $1,500 twice a month is what we were living off of. And we managed to make it work. And during that time, we, We visited seven countries and had all five of our kids at home.

And just it was a fun ride. Yeah. Okay. So I have like so many thoughts running through my head here. So I just want to like call out a couple things. So I want to highlight that $40,000 a year superpower that we don't want to skip over that. That is something that if people are intentional on the amount that they spend, you're not only, you're not only saving and paying down your debt and saving for the future.

But you're now, if you're learning how to live on less and make your money go farther, you are moving the finish line closer to you. You're not speeding up towards the finish line. You're doing that, but you're also moving that finish line closer because you don't need as much of your nest egg to create the $40,000 a year. And then I'd also like to say, I'm very much about family and kids and what you guys are doing, you know, even now the artificial scarcity that you're talking about, living in a way that your kids will just feel the aura of that, you know, even if you're not talking about it a whole lot, They will see how you're living, how you're producing, but also how you're spending. And they will glean that over time.

That's a very powerful thing to be able to show your kids that you can have fun. You can go to lake houses. You can go to different countries, but you don't have to be spending on really expensive things. You can have the same amount of happiness, probably more, not having the latest in tech or items because all that stuff just pulls from you all the time anyways. This is really cool. Let's jump now. We've got the debt thing going on.

what happened after you paid down the debt? Like, there's some other things to your story here as far as like side hustles. What's your why for the financial independence? And then what transition did you make as far as like investing other things financially? You know, I'm throwing a whole bunch at you here. But I want to, I'm going to transition from the, as Dave Ramsey would say, the gazelle intensity to living the way that you guys feel the purpose in your life is meant to be.

And usually people that go for financial independence, you have some reason, some why for that. Why are you doing it and how are you doing it? I'll start with kind of how we stumbled across fire. And I think a lot of us share a similar story that are kind of going down this path. And that is, you know, Mr. Money Mustache is a shockingly simple math behind, you know, early retirement. So that's where I started and got really excited and really motivated. But then in comes Emily to insert the why. So maybe this is where you jump in and say.

Because I was like, hey, we can be, we can, like six more years of living like this and like, we're done. And then Emily's. I was like, what in the world? I am not going to continue down this path. This is crazy. But then, silly story. But so since we had such a tight budget, there were things at the time. Let's see, we had two kids.

And there were just like little things that I wanted. Okay, wanted. Didn't need, but wanted to get for them. Once we paid off our debt, I got a couple of those things that I wanted, didn't need. they ended up in the trash like a week and a half later because they were just junky. And then I was like, well, there's literally just $20 in the trash. So that's when we kind of were like, okay, we can be more free with our money a little bit right now. But like, do we really want to?

And we did kind of have a different why when we were paying off our debt. It was because both of our parents had co-signed and we had seen how that didn't go super well with other people that we knew that the co-signer ends up saddled with the debt that people can't pay. So we didn't want to do that to our parents. So that was my biggest motivator is like I really just don't want to be in the way of what they want to financially achieve in life. And then when we are paying off our home, similarly, I just kind of didn't want debt. I didn't want to have to worry about that payment. And so then when we got through that and we had our home paid off, I kind of just felt like we could breathe and maybe loosen the reins a little bit. But then within those first few months, I realize that that's not really what it was about anyway.

Like, we had everything that we wanted and needed in our family and in the experiences we were having. You know, we kind of like getting creative with finances and, you know, repurposing things, buying things secondhand, going without things. You know, a couple years ago, our microwave broke. We just never replaced it. And we still don't have one. And there came a point when, or when I realized, like, okay, I'm going to be more open to the, financial independence and also a lot of the things within this movement we were kind of doing we just didn't know the terms or the lingo of it you know like trimming things along the margins we had been

doing that for years and years it just kind of gave us terms and gave us the next step so you paid off your debt that's only one part of the equation you know getting this debt payment out of here and then how did you accelerate towards financial independence so it was February 12th 2020 right before before the world shuts down, we had paid off our home. And at that point, it was like, what we do with our hands? You know, like, I thought, I was like everybody, like thinking they know something about investing in the stock market without actually opening a book

and, you know, whatever, that's when the whole fad of, you know, the essentially gamifying investing, right? So I felt victim of that for a couple months, but then my world completely changed with a simple path to wealth and J.L. Collins stock series. Like, I'm over here. Like, this was the thing. Like, I'm hiding.

Like, I can't wait to read the next post. And, like, I had all the answers, you know, in my head. Like, it just, things started to kind of make sense. So, you know, we could expand our investments. But honestly, right now, we're 100% equity. We're in VTSAX and chill. And that's where we're at. And we're feeling pretty comfortable.

And obviously, in the last, you know, 20 months, we've been killing it. So that's always nice. And we know things are going to change. But I think we certainly have. power over emotions when that happens, right? So like we saw our net worth drop quite substantially during COVID, those couple of months or whatever, but then having it rise again, like that really kind of solidified into us everything that J.L. Collins was talking about. And as you start to see these parallels between your show, Chusify, and just all, the whole financial independence world,

like kind of merging together, it's like, geez, like we've taken care of our expenses, the investment side like we wanted to, you got your W-2 income, you got your investments, you got real estate, which we went down that road, side hustle. So like, we were just trying to check the boxes in essence, and that's what we did. So VTSAX, the stock series by JL Collins, just for listeners who don't know what that is, it's definitely read his book talking about index fund investing, the simplest way to invest, really, that you can invest. But then, you know, I want to hear, I'm going to dig a little deeper. Like, where did the VTSAX money come from? Is this just like the margin that you have now from the difference in getting rid of your debt payments, so from your

normal jobs, or, you know, I heard real estate and I heard side hustles, you know, where's, where's this money that's being funneled into to your investments to achieve financial independence coming from? Another little funny story in a time. I've eaten my words through our financial journey many times, and one big one was the side hustle that is, I was wrong. That's the first summer after we were married, we started a business or he started a business. And I was like, actually, it wasn't a business at that point. Anyway, long story short, I was like, you need to get a real job and make some more money so we can kind of like have a little bit more. And daddy got a real job.

Yeah. It's a fine job now. So, yeah, to add to what Emily's saying, you know, we paid off our student loans in three years. We paid off our house in 55 months. And where do the money come from? 50% Emily's share. And then it's like each side hustle that we've kind of added, it's almost like having another earner in the family, to be honest. So like we have, you know, wrestling camps that we do, and they've really just exploded and just have had great growth and they've allowed us to do a lot. That money was in there. And then from that, just kind of talent stacking that. I started an additional side hustle. Each side hustle was met with resistance and not so much that Emily was like, I need to do a better job of communicating what the vision

and plan was. I just kind of started. I'm like, oh, yeah, I started a business too. And then it would end in a kind of not good. So I don't suggest going about it that way. But each one of those have really like, it's like cooking with gas at this point. Well, and I think what Joel has been really, what he's really good at is just taking the next step. He's like, you know, we're going to do this camp. Our kids can't afford to go to a camp that anyone else is putting on. So we're just going to do our own. And from there, keeping that same vision of providing kids with experiences in an affordable way, it's just really grown and taken off. And so he has been really good at like, I'm just going to jump in and do it.

I'm going to learn along the way. I'm not going to have the whole vision. I'm just going to have this step of the vision and then we're going to grow from there. Like that is how you need to start businesses because I am more the one who's like, I just want to have all of it in a row, right? And I would have held all of this back if it were in my hands. It's good that he just was like, okay, she's mad. That's right.

She'll get over it. She'll get over it. that's not a phrase you should ever say, Joel. I never did, but guess what? She did get over it. No, I'd never go down that path. And that's where the communication part came in, and I needed to do a better job,

kind of talking about the vision. And it's just, you know, when these things kind of start, and this is with any business or side hustle, you don't really know where it's going to go or what's going to happen, but you kind of have an itch there, so you just kind of go. And in both those cases, you know, last year,

I had two wrestling camps. We serviced, you know, 3,000 kids from, I don't know, 35 states coming from all over the country. And then, you know, I've got an online business as well. We could, in essence, just live off of one of those, which is really nice because, you know, a lot of times people talk about, like it being risky or whatever. With, like, just having one W2 job, like, that's really risky. One of our best friends just lost his W2 job based on downsizing, right? Well, now it's just a piece of the puzzle. We have to take one final break, but we'll hear more. about life after FI for Emily and Joel. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks, it can be a little eye-opening. That's why I like Monarch. It helps you see exactly where your money is going,

and more importantly, where your tax refund can make the biggest impact. Because the goal isn't just to look backward, it's to actually make progress. Simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, including budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth, and future planning together in one dashboard on your phone or your laptop. Feel aware and in control of your finances this tax season and get 50% off your Monarch

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So I'm hearing a trend here, and I love it when I meet these personalities of Joel, who gets these itches in his brain of things that he wants to start. I'm guessing you probably have like five other ideas in your head right now that you want to start at some point. Other people have these ideas and some people get them off the ground and some people don't. So there's two pieces to it. How do you get it off the ground? And you kind of address that a little bit. So, you know, you can touch on that real quick. But the second piece that I would really be curious on is how do you be a good husband and father to five kids when you continually add side hustles, additional businesses? And Emily, I'd love to hear you chime in on this

to on what has worked for Joel. You know, I think you guys make a good team, but, you know, I'd love to adhere the dynamic, you know, with these side hustles and how that shapes your life balance in general. It's hard to nutshell all this. So right around the time that we bought our home and we were about, let's see, seven or eight years into our marriage, the business, the wrestling camp business was growing. It grew at a pace that neither him or his business partner expected and it was really hard and I was working part-time at a in a rural health care setting basically what it came to and I was like gosh this just doesn't feel right like this doesn't feel like how I want my motherhood and how I want my kid's childhood to go we were delegating far too much

to other people and that's where basically it just was a lot of real love real talk conversations of like yeah exactly the point I'd heard I don't even know where I heard it from, but like when you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to a series of other things. And so we just started having a lot of real conversations about what does that mean moving forward and, you know, to the point where we are now. And it was challenging for me to, to accept. And it took a couple of years, honestly, for me to say, yeah, I'm going to step away from my career that I worked really hard to, you know, prepare for and that I had a lot of skills in and knowledge in. But I got to the point through a lot of prayer and reading and discernment,

really, that I was just going to pour all that that I have learned through life into my own family, because that when it came down to it was what was most important. So we still have conversations. And there are times when, you know, I just kind of have to pull them out of the weeds a little bit, so to speak, and be like, hey, what are we spending our time on? And are we being intentional with our time? Because that's really what financial independence has afforded us in these years with our kids being at home and being little, is that time is our only non-renewable resource. And how we were spending our time was not in line with our values. And where we were putting our energy, we were coming home, you know, with near nothing in the tank, getting short

with our kids, getting short with each other. And it's like, this isn't what it's about. And this isn't how I want to continue. And therein lies the why, which we didn't fully answer before. But that's really where we got into. You know, we've been blessed in many, ways, businesses continue to do quite well, and it's afforded us, you know, a pretty, pretty special life. And it started in that, you know, really last year is when we, you know, pulled the plug and traveled everywhere and just have been doing, you know, the homeschooling thing, which is just, it's such a fun thing to talk to people about because you get either like, yes, you're,

you're freaking awesome, or, you know, what about the socialization part? And then, you know. The homeschool question. You have five kids. They're socializing amongst themselves. And actually, you know what? I respond, it's like we're actually pulling them out because I don't want them to be socialized by the school kids. So I shouldn't say that part.

But yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of that. And I'm also a product of the school system, right? I mean, I love school so much. I went back and haven't left yet. So that was something that I really had to grapple with, too. But this is a whole tangent that financial independence has afforded us. but it's been a neat, neat area of growth that we've kind of gone down the last couple of years. I love that we've finally peeled back the onion of your why.

This is what I was looking for in this last like five or ten minutes. Like this is, this is the why. And everyone's why is different. You know, when people are looking at the financial independence journey, it's not about, the why is not financial independence. Some people think that it's like, then I can leave my job. It's so stressful. You got to have something ready after that.

I've seen it so many times that if you don't have something deeper than that, whatever it is, you're going to be pretty miserable when you're financially independent. You'll have accomplished an amazing goal. But, you know, knowing what you're going to do with that, like let's do some wrestling camps where we have impact on some kids. Let's impact our own kids. Let's impact our marriage. So thank you for digging a little bit deeper the last little bit and sharing some of that. I think that's what financial independence is about.

And that's why people should be pursuing it is you're here for a purpose. You know, this financial independence, you might stay in your same job. And that might be your purpose. But it just gives you the flexibility to pivot if you need to. So with this job that you have, this wrestling camp, do you consider yourself to be fully retired? I'm like you, Mindy. All right. Are we retired?

No, right? But it's given me just like what Kyle was just kind of alluding to. and what he was saying was like, you have the option, right? So I took the last year off a sabbatical in the educational world. I guess in my school's world, it was a one-year voluntary leave, not a sabbatical. I did go back, but I'm teaching one class a day. So I go in at 11 o'clock. I wake up every single morning with my kids.

I get to work out, see my kids when they wake up. You know, I've worked with my 9-year-old did his math today before I went to school. And then I go, and something that really does feed me is working with kids. I go into high school from 11 to, you know, 245, mentor some kids, and then I'm done at 245. You know, when I kind of stumbled across that term barista-fi, lean-fi, all those things, but really barista-fi, like, it really resonated with me. It's like, they wanted me to come back full-time, and I'm like, geez, you know, my kids are only going to be two and seven and nine and 11 and a brand-new baby as well, nine months old.

I told them, no, like, I love it. I really want to come back, but I'm only going to go part-time. they've been so good to me. They've met all of my things. That's the other part of this, you know, you can go down this whole tangent is like, you don't know unless you ask. First, I asked, hey, I want to take a year off. No one's ever done that at the school that I work with. And then I come back and like, I'd like to work part time. All right. Like all my friends, my colleagues are like, what are you doing? And like, this is what I want to do. Like, this is what really works well for our family. And I think it's a really nice balance right now. And will I go back next year?

Probably. But we're taking it one year at a time. Same thing. with homeschooling. It's the right thing for us right now. Financial Independence has given the keys to that. We're so lucky to be in the position that we are. Yeah, Kyle and I have a shared Google Doc with a little chat in there, and Kyle just posted. This family is the poster for financial independence. We need one of those. We want you, Uncle Sam, posters with you guys. So I don't know how to use AI and that image maker, but somebody grabbed their images and make that for me, please. Poster child, that's super nice, Mindy. I appreciate that. But we're, I think, more like, cliche. We're like, we did all the things that you were supposed to do. And I think the difference between our story and then some of our friends is like, we just took action on everything, right? Like, we trimmed at the margins. We maxed out 401ks. We maxed out Roth IRAs. We bought the rental house. We started the side hustle. You know, we just went through the list of the pillars of what financial independence is and didn't question it. Or I guess maybe we questioned a little bit. But it was just, we did it all. If we could leave with anything, it would just be to do the work, do the steps.

Like this, it's a tried and true thing that as, as Mindy and Kyle say, like, it's for everybody. Wherever you're at, start now, start working on your debt, snowball the debt. And then, geez, you just have, we have so many options right now. We can, we are designing the life that we want. And that's really what we've spent the last three years on is designing a life that, you know, a book that is worth reading, right? That's a story of our life. And, and not only is it worth reading, but we like to live that story as well. I appreciate so much you guys on this show. I just feel like this is something that a lot of people can relate to. And I especially appreciate, you know, you guys did it in this, this 10-year time frame, which is a time frame that just about

anyone can do something like this. We just did a Bigger Pockets Real Estate show a little while ago for late starters. And I've seen it in my practice, too, 10 years. is about all you need to make something pretty tremendous happen like this. You guys not only did it, but you are a model of teamwork and a model of balance. Not that you got it perfect all the times. I'm not going to put you too high on a pedestal that you're going to get knocked off of, but to be able to communicate through it and to be able to balance it and through the journey, work towards the right purposes, not getting so focused on financial independence that it consumes you completely.

and then you have nothing to fall back on. You know, through that journey, you were slowly making adjustments with the amount of time that you were working on the side hustle to the amount of time that you were with your kids, taking the year off, you know, these things that you were building together with the financial independence. And I just think it is so inspiring. And I just hope people will listen all the way to the end of this episode

and hear every little piece as we dug deeper and deeper. People need to hear this and need to listen to this because this can be done. Thank you so much for, being here and joining us for this discussion. Thanks for having us. It's been a lot of fun. Joel and Emily were on our YouTube fire series and we will include a link to that in our show notes, which gives a bit more information about their side hustles and how they reached financial independence. Joel and Emily, it was a delight to talk to you again. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your great story with our listeners. Okay, Kyle, that was Joel and Emily and that was

so much fun. I love what you said. This family is the poster for FI. Absolutely agree with that 100%. What did you think of their story and this show? I don't know what else I can say. I really wanted to thank them there at the end and make sure they heard the good comments that I'm going to say right now when they're not here with us after the episode because they just nailed this thing called FI on so many fronts. And mostly what I'm impressed by is when people nail FI on the non-financial front. That's numbers, that's strategies. You can read about it. You can do it. But like, they're communicating as a couple, as a husband and wife. They're bringing their kids along for the ride. They're sacrificing time at his job to put it with his kids, you know, and then he's developing

like a wrestling camp to impact more kids. Like, I just, I don't have anything else to say other than this is awesome. Like, look at what these people are doing, figure out what your purposes are, and just go for it. You bring up a really good point, Kyle. They are both on the same page and they have open communication. That's the key to this. If you are on the journey with a partner, you don't need to be on the same page, but you kind of need to be on the same page. Like, it's so much easier when you're both on the same page, or at least one of you isn't actively fighting the other one or sabotaging the other one. And, you know, they have that in spades. They are so good at communicating and being a family and being on the same page and moving forward together so that they can build their life together.

And we didn't really dwell on this very much, but they have five children. Granted one's a baby, but the baby still takes diapers and, you know, food and clothes and all of that, even more clothes than other kids because they're outgrowing them constantly. But they have five kids and they still reach financial independence in about 11 years. It can be done. It absolutely is possible. They mean, they're teachers. They don't even make any money. Don't even get me started on how criminal it is that we don't pay our teachers enough. But I mean, they did this on a lower income. They were making $100,000 combined. But again, they got five kids. That $100,000 is going to get each and up really quick with five kids in a traditional buy whatever you want kind of mentality.

when you really have to work to dial it in. Yeah, I mean, that right there, there's people listening and be like, this is, this is a hoax. You know, it's not even real. And it is. You know, people, people do this. I've seen it like in my practice in the past, I would look at people's budget and be people making a ton of money and have no money. People making no money and have a ton sitting in a bank account because they have good financial habits. It's real. And it is a, like he said in the episode, it's a superpower. That's not their only superpower. They've got a whole bunch of superpowers. That's just the one that he identified, but they just pieced it all together. Again, I mean, just a great episode. Absolutely. I'm so happy that we were able to talk to them again.

All right, Kyle, should we get out of here? Let's do it. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is the Kyle Mast, and I am Mindy Jensen saying, I'll catch you, Cactus Crew.