BiggerPockets Money Podcast - How Scott & Virginia Trench Think About Goals, Spending and Investing

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

How do Scott and Virginia Trench actually run their household, set big financial goals, and build toward financial independence together? In this episode, Scott and Virginia pull back the curtain on the systems and conversations that keep their family, finances, and future moving in the same direction. They talk about their approach to goal setting, weekly household and financial check-ins, dividing responsibilities, and making sure their money decisions support the life they actually want to live. They also dive into their investment strategy, including real estate, stocks, portfolio diversification, and how they adjust their investments as market conditions change. And of course, there’s plenty to unpack when it comes to building and protecting wealth, from proactive tax planning and estate planning to the financial tools they use to keep track of everything. If you’re working toward financial independence, investing for the long term, or simply trying to get more intentional about your money and your life, this episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how Scott and Virginia make it all work. To go beyond the podcast: Take the guesswork out of investing, taxes, and retirement. Book a free consultation with Domain Money Today: www.biggerpocketsmoney.com/cfp  Get 50% Off Your First Year of Monarch by using code ‘Pockets’: https://www.monarch.com/pockets Kick start your financial independence journey with our FREE financial resources - https://biggerpocketsmoney.com/ 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 Connect with Virginia Trench: Website: https://www.virginiatrench.com/ We believe financial independence is attainable for anyone no matter when or where you’re starting. Let’s get your financial house in order! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are so excited to have Virginia Trench back on the podcast for a behind the scenes look at how she and Scott think about goals, spending, and investing. We'll dive into their current portfolio, how they balance real estate and stocks, how their priorities have evolved, and what financial independence looks like for their family today. Yeah, just as a heads up, I know some people have asked, because of your great episode, Mindy, with Carl and the Money Guys, to hear about what I'm doing with our money. And so we're presenting the financial plan for the trench household in our goal setting process today. But I do want to disclaim up front that, you know, our position is very privileged. I got very lucky and had a lottery ticket

at joining bigger pockets as an early employee and watching that explode. And even to be able to be the CEO at age 27 and having that ride for seven years. That's something a lot of people don't get in their entire careers. And I had it as a very fortunate opportunity very early on. So I'm by no means saying that this is a realistic

or attainable or repeatable. path. You know, I'm not denying the privilege and luck that I've had in my journey. I'm just saying here's what the hand that we've been dealt looks like and how we're playing it and trying to add to the best of our ability with some real wins and some big mistakes that we'll learn from today. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my definitely Scott's Better Half co-host Virginia Trench. Oh, I mean my goal-oriented co-host Scott Trench. I don't know, Mindy. I think you're the one with the hair. goals today. So today I'm very excited that Virginia, my wonderful, beautiful, perfect wife,

is joining us on the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. You're really overselling it, I think. We're going to be talking about our goal setting process, our financial plan, and what we do kind of operationally week to week, because, yes, I've imposed an operational cadence on the household finances that I think Virginia really likes, actually. Yes, having imposed several household systems myself. Wow, Scott. You imposed a financial cadence. Nobody listening to this show is shocked. Okay, try not to swoon. I know that sounds so romantic. Really is the blue that holds us together.

Oh, oh, that's not even the most romantic thing he's ever done. Did you or did you not have an in-depth conversation on your honeymoon about your finances? To be fair, we were looking at a very romantic view while that conversation was happening. So context. I spent my honeymoon in different ways. This was 30 minutes of day two or three. That's all. But you know what?

I want to make a point. Carl and I got married 100 years ago. We did not talk about money at all, even though it is rather forefront in our minds now. And we've definitely made up for it by talking about money all day, every day since then. But before we got married and definitely on our honeymoon, we did not talk about finances. And I love that you guys did. You talked about money before you got married. You talked about money literally on your honeymoon.

And now you continue to have these money dates. And your goal-setting worksheet, Scott, that I'm sure you have seen Virginia, that blew my mind. Scott has always been, I don't know if you know this, but he's kind of cerebral. He's a burgo. Yeah, it shows. He's made this goal-setting document. And what was your check-in, Scott? You did like this daily check-in every day for like 47 years or something that I was, when I first saw that, I'm like, oh, why would you do that?

And now I'm like, oh, see where you were at 35 and where Scott is now at 35. Those are different places. So I really admire your consistency and your focus on these goals. I don't know that I have set many goals in my life and we're working on it. This is a, you know, it's a process. But can you talk to us about your goal setting cadence? Because goals and setting goals really informs how you think about your portfolio instead of this kind of like throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks approach that so many of us have. What does goal setting look like for your family now?

I think that there's no right answer to this. The answer that I have is goal setting starts with a reasonably clear, reasonably concise description in the present tense of the future state you want to attain. So this in practice is like a one-page vision. Right? You can call it, but if you don't like that term, you think it's to woo-woo. It's goals. We use the term vision. And it literally is a written-out vision. And we've literally posted this on the bigger pockets money.com website in the resource section in this goal-setting artifact that we have here. And it's our home is bustling with our two kids and our perfect, very handsome boy, our cat fred. We have an energetic, healthy, daily lifestyle with lots of laughter. So we read it all in the prison tents, what we want to achieve. And then we have a description of what our weekday looks like, what our weekends look like, how. our kids are doing, our community, friends and neighbors and family and holiday events and those kinds of things, we have our fitness goals in there, and then we have one paragraph on our financial situation. And that's it. This all fits on a single page, this vision, if you will. And we, as you made fun of me, we started that process with, I brought a draft

of it to our honeymoon that we begin to change, and we iterate on it every quarter as a little ritual. Yeah, I think it's free to say that you were more prepared for that conversation than you were for our actual wedding. But I say getting back to the vision and the goal setting, backing up to even step zero of this process. And what's changed really made this meaningful for us and actionable for us is having a set weekly time to sit down and not redo the whole vision, but check in on the most immediate things are important to us. And for us, the best way to do that is without our two little ones, because they are adorable. And I'm sure that we'll involve, we'll try to indoctrinate them into this process at some point. But they are, you know, 18, 17 months and three. So a little

young still to do this with us. So we go out to breakfast and we sit down once a week for about an hour to go through this in a more day-to-day, what are we working on now to make this all possible. The cadence there is we talk about wins and gratitudes, rose bud thorns, something great that happens, something great that you're looking forward to. So corny, I think I picked that up at like a youth group camp. It's great. It's great. It really is so cool. And I still use it to this day. Yeah. We each have three goals that we're working on at any given time in a quarter, and we just talk about red, yellow, green on those. We do a household equity. And we do a household equity check because I can be very spurt heavy with a clear skew towards not contributing

enough around very basic household maintenance items there. So I try to do a better job there. What is this expression? I'm shocked at how I'm like watching the gears turning in your head as you try to spin the CW positive possible. What Scott's really saying is that he can be a bit of a blundering presence in our house. Like there's evidence just, You can't see this because it's outside the camera vision, but there's like dirty bowls from lunch deliveries, like scattered all around the room, socks, like all kinds of stuff. So, you know, as I'm sure is common in many partnerships and many marriages, there's a division of responsibilities. One person can't do everything. Scott manages most of our finances,

so all of our financial decisions we make together. I am more of a dictator than a democratic operator when it comes to our household. Just like checking in on spending on a weekly basis benefits me and helps me, you know, make sure that we're meeting our financial goals. Managing a household is also a lot of work and we all have our blind spots. You know how the change in seasons hits and suddenly you just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized? That same feeling hits me with my finances every spring. I used to have accounts scattered everywhere, making it hard to stay on track with my money goals. Let Monarch do your financial spring cleaning for you. One dashboard that gets your

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little bit more, and then it gets a lot of, I resent my partner. So the household equity check is an excellent addition to the goal setting worksheet because we are talking about money. And You know what's really expensive? Divorce. How? I was like, and you know what's really expensive? I was like, what is she going to say next? Like, I don't know, ordering takeout because no one's cooking, hiring cleaners because no one's cleaning.

Oh, we're fully escalating it to like a divorce proceeding. Yes, that would be more expensive. I think this helps because like, because, yeah, like, yeah, like if I go months and there's no format for this, then that will just build up. And we don't, and this, this gives us a place where when there's a problem, we just talk. We just talk about it in our little weekly meeting. And I think an hour is overstating the time commitment of this meeting. We sometimes will occasionally go an hour on this meeting. But it's almost always 15 to 25 minutes at most.

Sorry, we spend an hour. There's a good amount of chat. Yeah, we just hang out. And then it's this. But yeah. Yes. And I would say to your point, Mindy, another format we use because we just, we love our formats and we love our cadences is we do a stop, start, continue feedback system. for each other. I think I picked this one up at a work conference a million years ago. A

continue would be something you appreciate your partner doing. So I would say, Scott, I love that you brought me a nice coffee in the morning. That was such a lovely surprise. Please continue doing that. And it's stop. It would be something one partner didn't appreciate. So stop with the dish adjacency. That's our current battle. It's like leaving things near the dishwasher. It's like a sense of presence here. This is where my plate is supposed to go. And then Stark is what to replace the annoying behavior with. That's how we avoid annoying each other. Okay, I've got one because my kids are older. They still do the dish adjacency, which is right in the sink. And sometimes I do, but also I'm the one who loads the dishwasher, so I'm allowed. Start having your older daughter

help load the dishwasher. Don't give her any sort of guidance, except like this is where the silverware goes. If she can't reach the top yet, have her put everything in the bottom, and then after she leaves and can't see you, rearrange it to where whatever it goes. Because then she gets in the habit of dishes go in the dishwasher. Hopefully, but probably not. You will miss this whole dish adjacency with her when the baby is old enough. And she's walking, right? She's totally. She can walk. She just chooses not to.

Okay. So when she's more solid, she can help too. with plastic, not with anything you want to keep unbroken, but teaching them from the very beginning, then Scott is quitting his dish adjacency because he's teaching the babies to help. And they do love to help. Oh, they love to help, but that goes away. I don't know. The older one really likes her blankets flat every night. It's very clear about wanting to turn off the light and close the door.

These are qualities that she got from her mother, not her father, in terms of the attention. to these small details that are so important. So the next step is start, stop, continue, as we discussed, that we do a kid sync and we check in on how they're doing, whether we're gonna sign them up for soccer or start this or cancel that, whatever's going on there. And then finally, from there, we get to the finance check-in

where what I like to do is go over the big picture. I had built a fairly complicated position. I spent a lot of last year simplifying many things, and that's resulted in a lot of logins and then having to move money here and sign this paperwork and all that kind of stuff. And now really that, that goes into just a check-in of all the transactions that have occurred in our Monarch account

in the last seven days or since the last meeting. We usually do this every week, but sometimes we'll skip a week. And how it compares to the same time in previous month. And then we'll, we'll just kind of go through and make sure that all the expenses are accounted for and we know what we're doing. And that process has resulted in significant improvement, you know, reduction in household spending to a pretty good degree over the last six months to a year. There's just some waste from the time when we weren't doing this and didn't have these processes in place. First of all, we've spent a lot of times. on goals, but I think this is so important to continue to discuss, is that you've got this

goal, you want your family to look like this, which you have outlined in your goal setting worksheet, which can be found at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash goals. And then you have taken that a step further and had a money date of sorts, which comes every single week, which I think is awesome. Having no kids around is key. If you have children, you should not be having a money date with them around because your money date is going to be distracted and you're not going to be able to hit all of these things. And like you said, it's a 15 minute-ish conversation. What I am really curious about is how you reduced your spending and how much did you say you reduced it by? A couple thousand a month, I'd say, you know, but it was, it's just like, oh, you know, these things all

added up here. We had these things piling up. And a lot of this is left over from, you know, my time as CEO when the opportunity cost of going through and cleaning up every dollar of spending was very large at that point in time running a large company and that we didn't have as much time together to spend or build these cadences during the week, for example. That was more of the issue. And I think it was like just household shopping, just making sure like, hey, do we, are we going to put a little bit of a pause on like, are we going to buy this thing? Or are we going to make sure that we're, you know, if we're going to go out to dinner, maybe we can go get the gift card to Costco on our shopping and, you know, that's $30 off.

It helped us identify the Costco slush fund that was ballooning our spending. And so we were like, okay, after noticing this pattern for a couple months in a row, we are making a list. Maybe Scott goes to Costco and not me because I cannot be relied upon here was this in Costco impulse purchases. And what else? You still need to join my Spotify duo. Oh, yeah. We're paying for two Spotify's right now. That's my miss.

And what else? Like it helps us catch subscriptions we don't use anymore. consolidated our entertainment subscriptions, cut back on our Amazon spending, all kinds of stuff. It's just these things we've learned pile up if we don't check in. And it's painful to look at a huge stack of a month's worth of spending. And it's a lot less painful to do that our week. Well, and now that we've just cleaned it up and eliminated much of the waste, the transaction count is much smaller too. So it makes it go faster. So that's been the most, I would say, impactful part of this is just going through it and looking at the spend saying here's where it was last

month here's where it is by category and as part of that i can look through and say okay here's a category here you know heating is kind of creeping up or heating and cool electricity is heating up electricity is cooling off heating up i don't know which word i'm supposed to use here that was an unintentional pun that i'm going going to roll with it but i'm going to change the thermostat and and the the automatic settings there and that saved it like 50 bucks a month so i just like to attack little pieces of it every month, not for like hours and hours, but like for like, hey, I'll look at the, the expenses, and then I'll make a little to-do, a couple to-does for the next week and, and plug them in. And so that's the cadence. That's how we like operate our household. And it's not like we run

it, you know, like this business 40 hours a week. We spend an hour and have a couple of to-dos as part of that. Scott, you mentioned Monarch as a way that you keep track of your financial situation. I also use Monarch. I really, really love the holistic snapshot, but also their recurring merchants tab, because that's how you find those unused subscriptions. I go in there every once in a while, I'm like, wait, why do I have two of this? Well, because Carl and I will sign up for it at the same time. Or why do I have two of this? I don't.

It's two separate, or it's biweekly charges. Or, you know, Claire has one thing and Daphne has another, and they're really not the same thing. But being able to take a few minutes to go in there and see everything. They categorize stuff as recurring that sometimes isn't recurring. It's easy to mark that as not recurring and it never shows up there again. But Monarch has definitely changed my understanding of my holistic financial picture because everything's right there.

I don't have to log into 47 different accounts and remember 47 different passwords and pick up my Google Authenticator to make sure I've got two-factor authentic. on this. It's just such a hassle to log in to everything. And I could just go to Monarch, log in once, and then there is everything. Once you set it up, everything is just right there. We like to see things in one place as much as possible. And that's what led us to consolidating a lot of our accounts. And the quickest way to get the most difficult version of Scott's personality is to put him in a difficult, like, customer service, login, send the code, remember the password, send it to this email address. He requires somewhat of a, like, nervous system reset, calming down period

after that, which is, should we segue to how we have deployed everything since we realized in one weekly check and like, oh, we actually need to move this money here into this account to make sure it's actually doing what we wanted to do and back in the stuff. Yeah, but let's still go into the financial plan then. So we have a net worth in the chubby fire to fat fire range. I know this is, you know, some people will be disappointed, but we're not going to share the specific numbers here, but we're going to give you a very clear shape and try to be as transparent as possible within that constraint. But you can kind of break this out as there's a paid off house and then a chubby to fat fire financial portfolio. And that portfolio is going to be broken.

out about 45% real estate, rental real estate here in the Denver area, about 45% liquid portfolio, which would include the stock portfolio, about 5% cash and about 5% side bets sleeves. That's a target allocation. Right now, it's like 46% stocks, 44 real estate, 6% cash and like 2 or 3% of those side bets, depending on how conservatively I want to estimate the value of those. And this does not include very important, components of our potential wealth, which include valuing the books that I've published or that Virginia has published, ownership interest in private companies, including bigger pockets, and some other assets that are there. It also does not include our two cars. It does not include

our donor advised fund that we set up in a high-income year. And then it does not include the 529 plans for our two girls that are not, if not fully funded for college and, you know, front-loaded in a significant way that could cover all or much of, of college education, depending on where they go, when they turn 18. That's the summary in a nutshell. Any response or questions there, Mindy, before we move on? I think it's fair to not include your cars. Like anything you don't want to include, then great, don't include it. This is your financial situation and you have an understanding of what is going on in there. But I think cars are a depreciating asset, essentially, although my card did go up by $4,000 since I bought it. Wow. But all the

other set that you don't want to include? Great, don't include it. You said side bets. What does side bets mean to you? We have positions in debt funds. We have positions in a commercial office building that I recently placed, and we have positions in various other syndications, including multifamily syndications that I mark very conservatively, and it's zero. They may be worth something there. But that's the majority of the side bets there. In the future, I intend to or hope to advise various companies using my skill set as a trained CEO and operator over at Bigger Pockets. And so I would hope to do similar side bets in those types of businesses that I would participate in or advise over time. So that will be where a good chunk of the future side bet

sleeve probably grows. And would that be like a consulting gig? Yeah, like you can think of a consulting gig or even like a board seat. That's something I'm interested in exploring in the future. So real estate's a big chunk of your portfolio. Are you actively looking for more real estate or are you kind of status quo? We're status quo on the rental real estate. So last year we made a big purchase that we talked about with the quadplex that we purchased. And then we also bought another duplex. The quadplex was in great shape. And the duplex is a little bit of a project. So the tenant moved out. And so we're now in the middle of that rehab right now. We're basically finished that. And so we're going to be putting on the market and looking for a tenant soon. Putting it on the market, meaning opening up for rental. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

How many rental properties do you own and what percentage of them are paid off? We have 19 rental units and 13 of those are in a partnership. They're owned with a friend and they're levered and that portfolio is kind of one part of the real estate portfolio. That's done very well for us. We also have these two properties that are completely paid off as part of that. Completely paid off. How did you buy those, Scott?

We had this amazing consultant. We engaged. Couldn't have done it with her. I want to. It's Mindy. Yes, I know. I know. Yes, I was Mindy. Mindy helped us by the properties, yes. But going back to the broader question that implies is we had the ability to generate a tremendous amount of wealth because I joined a startup as an early employee and became CEO at 27 years old and literally spent seven years in the CEO's seat. Not a lot of people have had seven years of CEO experience by the time they're in their mid-30s. And it's just a luck out. come there. I mean, a lot of people who have similar capability sets just never get an opportunity like that. So that's a winning lottery ticket. I am not trying to say that this situation is repeatable or attainable for other people. There's a luck component to it. We've tried to play the hand the best that we were able to do, but we're also very grateful and fortunate for the opportunities that we've had. We're not saying this is like the repeatable journey for a lot of folks. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. You prepared a lot and then took advantage

of an opportunity. So I don't want to just say, oh, it was a whim that it happened. It kind of was, but also you put a lot of work into making that whim happen. But what I was really meaning is about a year and a half ago, you were rather vocal about making a switch from the stock market to the real estate market because you believed that the market was overvalued. Has your portfolio shifted much since then? I'm actually kind of actively betting against you, Mindy, with the way that we have our portfolio set up because I do not trust the mega cap tech valuations. I did not like, I invest in the SMP 500 for 10, 12 years and put that almost all of our stock portfolio in there and was highly concentrated in that, that performed really well. And around early 2025,

I decided I really don't like that. I don't, that's not, that's not something I'm comfortable with. I was looking more crudely at CAPE ratios and other valuation metrics rather than the mega cap complex as a specific threat to what I thought was my long-term financial future. But yes, I made that reallocation. I'm at least very early in that reallocation. Denver real estate has gone nowhere or really down, although we've seen rents come, you know, really not that impacted in our portfolio, but we know that they're down from a market-wide perspective. So I'm at least early, and within the next year or two, that will shift to wrong, clearly, if things continue in this direction. So we'll see how that goes. Here's our cat,

here making an appearance. He doesn't prove of you betting against Mindy. So what I've also done is over the course of 2025, I continued to buy real estate, and I've begun moving or I began moving into factor tilts and other allocation sleeves. So small cab value was something that we talked about with Frank Vasquez, actually, last year. We had Ben Felix talk about that. And so I shifted a lot of our public equity positions into those towards the end of last year and into the beginning of this year.

And as of the last month or two, I've made one last pretty big switcheroo. And so our equity portfolio is now largely in an equal cap index fund, which people who are smart investors will note likely has had higher historical volatility than a market cap weighted fund. But my feeling is I do not want to have 40% of my wealth

in this mega cap complex of, you know, nine major technology companies that comprise literally 40% of the S&P right now as a today's recording. And I would rather have an equal weight. I want to own each deal one slice at each of those. Now, there's also a really good pushback about is, you know, an equal weight, equal cap index fund, the right way to express that. There are different, you know, adjustment factors that certain other funds can have. But I've chosen a fund called RSP for the now the plurality. It's not quite half of my stock portfolio, about 36%. I continue to hold 16% in VTI. And then, the remaining portion of the portfolio is actually in factor tilts for U.S. small cap value,

international small cap value, emerging small cap value, and international value, which include large cap. I'm actually doing that with a lot of Avantus buttons. So if you're following that, that adds up to about 100% of the portfolio. I also have a small sleeve of individual random stocks that I purchased in my stock picking days years ago, and I've held on, they're not very meaningful, probably around 1 to 2% of my position. I have not had a winner like Google or or Tesla or SpaceX like you have, Mindy. That's the stock portfolio there, and that's actually done really well.

That portfolio, I probably got very lucky in just the timing of learning about small cap value and putting my positions in there at the end of last year, but that was been a rocket ship for us. I think most people investing in the stock market are either, like when they go up, they're getting lucky.

They have a fortunate series of events that are happening, that are raising their stock market value. Again, what is that? Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. You can't take care of the opportunity if you don't have any sort of preparation behind you. I mean, I could just throw money in any stock,

but some of them go down. Some of them go down to zero. So I'm curious what individual stocks you hold, Scott. Before I get to that, because I actually have to go look. I haven't really checked it a while. They're like, they're such small positions and I haven't made any active moves in there for a long time. So I actually have to go and look at them.

I wasn't prepared for that question. But let me just ground the thesis one more time here, which is I don't like being concentrated in mega cap tech. And so I have attempted with this portfolio to buy everything else in the equity market, maintaining a 70-30, like the market-cap-waiting allocation to U.S. and international. And then I've bought into this concept of the factor premiums in value and size. Thanks to the great guest we've had, like Ben Felix. That is not saying other people should do that. But I like this for us because it puts 5% of our stock portfolio into the mega-cap tech complex on a holistically weighted basis instead of 40%. And I don't like having 40% of the equity portfolio betting on a very small handful of companies.

I like this better. I've been reluctant to do this episode because I'm not really loving the secondary bet I'm making, right? There's two decisions here. One is stay away from make a cap tech. I can defend that and feel really good about that. People can disagree, but I feel like I have a really good intellectual rounding in that. Then it's build this portfolio, which is a secondary bet that is making decisions that are different from that. And I have learned that from that mistake last year in buying rental properties, right?

It's one thing to move away from the large cap tech. It's another to buy that rental property in Denver. I can be right about Make a Cap Tech in five years, maybe, and I can still lose, depending on how the rental property performs. So that's what I'm trying to work through intellectually with the position here. But I feel pretty good about this portfolio and how we've constructed it in Virginia. I think I think likes the reasoning as well. Carl wouldn't. Well, you know what?

Are you married to him? No. So it doesn't matter what Carl thinks. It matters what your partner thinks. I've had to know Scott explain this to me many times to follow it. But yes. We have a diversified portfolio in index funds that make a decision about moving away from mega cap tech. That's what this is. It's not individual stock picking. You asked about the individual stocks, though.

It did at one time pick individual stocks, and I have like a small handful of them. Well, while you look that up, I want to share with our listeners who may not be on our newsletter list, which you can join when you go to biggerpocketsmoney.com slash newsletter. Scott wrote a really great article on our blog called Mega Cap Tech. Individually, each giant makes sense. collectively they don't. Is it an AI bubble? And this can be found at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash AI dash bubble. And in this article, you reference a really awesome calculator that you created at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash mega cap where you can, once you read Scott's article, you can see what he's talking about and start sliding around all of these different ideas that you have about these 11 stocks that are the fangs and the big, big, big, big tech stocks and see what you

think might happen. Next Friday, Scott and my husband, Carl, are going to have a conversation about their differences of opinion on this mega-cap valuation. Because in some regards, Carl's like, yeah, that makes sense, Scott. In some other regards, Carl doesn't agree. So I think that's a really great conversation that we're all about to have. And you should tune in if you are interested in this mega cap stock valuation. Because, I mean, somebody has to win and somebody has to not win.

And this mega cap calculator that Scott created brings up some pretty interesting feces. My belief is basically not that the mega cap tech complex companies are bad companies or that they're going to go bankrupt or anything like that. It's just, I believe that they're valued at a level that requires fairly preposterous assumptions as a group. Anyone could win. Google could win. You know, Tesla could win. SpaceX could win. But when you try to combine them all as one company, because there's a lot of, there's a lot of interrelations, it's just, it's just fairly preposterous that they can all win. Or that anyone could win enough to make up for the losses that will inevitably happen in other companies. So we'll talk about that in the circularity and all that kind of stuff. I'm not alone in this. I'm not even like particularly original in this framing. There's plenty of people who have this opinion and plenty of people who have counter opinions, and so we'll discuss it, and that's our mat. But hopefully you can see our portfolio is relatively conservative. We have a significant cash position that's at least a year, well in the maybe encouraging the 18 to two year mark in terms of our household spending.

We've got a portfolio that's diversified across all these different funds. It's not contrary to any individual stock. My largest individual stockholding is Crocs, actually, Crocs and Franklin Covee. I don't know why I bought Crocs and Franklin Covey at one point, completely. Robin. Red Robin, I have owned for years, and I have one share. It is worth $8.6. Oh, down five. Today. I'm down $0.35 today. I'm down $0.33 today. I'm down $0.33 on my holding, but that's been a rough ride. Oh, right. Scott is very passionate. Well, he's a niche passionate grill master. You master at the brisket and your buffalo wings are very good. Yes, I bought the Trager and then I bought the equivalent amount of Trigger stock there. That has gone very poorly for me in that particular investment. So there's just like a few things like that. They're a very small position parts of the portfolio, though, here because I can't resist.

And I enjoy turning my brain on for these analytics. But I've made a few thousand bucks across these individual stock positions over like 10 years. So it's not really that interesting. I think that if somebody is interested in following a stock, buy a couple of shares, by a hundred by $1,000 in a stock that you really want to follow. Daphne, my 16-year-old, has recently started following Navidia. I don't know why. She just got it in her head that this was a great stock to follow. All the stocks that we talk about, and this is the one, we don't even own Navidia except

whatever's in the index funds. We own a lot of Nvidia. Yeah. Okay, so we own a lot, but none individually. And she's like, I want to buy Nvidia. It is going up and I want to buy it. And I was like, well, okay, what do they do? And she's like, I don't know, but it keeps going up.

I'm like, well, so this kind of goes against all of my advice for people who want to invest in individual stocks. If you want to invest, you should do some research at it. At the bare minimum, you should know what they do. Frankly, I have a vague idea of what they do, but it's also, I don't own it, so I don't need to know what they do. She is also getting a Roth IRA, now that she's. She has her very first job at Taco Bell, and we will be matching her contributions dollar for dollar into her Roth IRA so she will be able to buy this Nvidia stock.

That sounds like a supreme approach to parenting and investing. I was talking to Carl and I said, oh, we should put it in her Trump account. Oh, wait, we can't. So, reminder, we did an episode a couple of weeks ago with the Jeremy Schneider from Personal Finance Club on the pros and cons of a Trump account. If you have a child who is under the age of 18, you have the opportunity to get up to $5,000 per year into their Trump account, their 530A account. And if they're born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028, you have the opportunity to get an additional $1,000 into their account from the government. They'll just give it to you. All the rest

of the 5,000, you have to put in. But I think that's a great opportunity for people who are looking to help their kids get a leg up. So go check out that episode that we did with Jeremy, very informative about all the different ins and outs of these accounts. Yep. And we've set up Trump accounts, which I actually have not added to the Monarch portfolio because they're very small. But I'll put those in and consider them like the 529 or DAF inside of this. So that's a good little to-do. One of the to-does I would have from a financial plan discussion is just like, like, oh, got to add those to the account.

Just a couple of points I want to talk about with the portfolio here. So we have the stock portfolio with the real estate. That's the vast majority of our position plus our cash and some of these side bets here. Over the last several months, our spending has been about three and a quarter to 3.5% of the financial value of that portfolio. And that's kind of like right where I feel much more comfortable. I get very uncomfortable when that number bumps past 4%. I know that there's plenty of research and people who debate and don't like the conservatism. but that's how I feel.

And that's like one of the reasons why I really like this meeting is I definitely do a better job of contributing around the house more consistently and those types of things. And I also like being able to say, okay, few, okay, our spending is here. And I don't like it because we host this podcast.

I don't want to be beyond these reasonably conservative rules of thumb with my own spending. So, you know, there's a little bit of circularity to that that I think is important to try to live our life the way that we talk about on the podcast here. And I get uncomfortable when we drift. And so that's been one of the valuable things for this we are living within this framework.

How are you tracking this? Do you have an idea like my net worth is $100,000 there for three and a half percent of that is $3,500? So as long as I'm not spending more than $3,500, I'm good. Yeah, exactly. It's just here's the number we want to stay under from a spending perspective each month and averaging that. Okay.

I think that's really great to just like, then you're not really budgeting. Because you have reached financial independence, you don't really. really need to budget, but you do need to have an idea of where your money is going so that it doesn't just fly out of your pockets. It's so easy to be like, oh, it's only a dollar. It's only $20. It's only $100. And then all of a sudden, that adds up real quick. And you're like, ooh, I thought I was spending $60,000 a year. And look, I spent $150 last year. And I didn't plan on it. Yep. So you got it. That's kind of one of the key goals for the meeting is make sure that we're tracking that way across the average for the year. We're really conservative and all this stuff,

right? Because again, and this because again, we have a, well, even with our portfolio, right, I mean, paid off a very lightly leveraged rental portfolio, the stock position here, the large cash position, some of the side bets, and then marking or not considering, not even factoring in some of the equity in the businesses, you know, other businesses in those things. So that's probably a criticism of our portfolio. And the other thing I don't love about our portfolio is the rental real estate concentration in Denver here. I didn't really have that framework a year or two ago around it, but I think it's less bad to own real estate here in Denver than it would be to have them across the country.

But it is a real risk that makes it harder to model the portfolio because of a geographic concentration. Forget Denver's specific promise or lack of promise. I actually am a big fan of Denver and like the area over 20, 30 years. But any geographic concentration with that part of the portfolio just changes. is the dials a little bit on the risk profile, the risk reward profile for the whole portfolio. So there's some things I feel great about our portfolio and the way that we've set it up, but I don't love all of it. And there's some risks that I'm reasoning to open about.

Tradeoffs, yeah. With the real estate, I don't think this is appreciated very much by a lot of people. But one of the thoughts I have around the way we've structured our real estate portfolio is we bought these things at like a six to seven cap, between six and seven cap. And so if you just look at a zoom out at long-term average, we should generate something around that in terms of annual cash flow from the two properties. And we should get something close to historical appreciation. If you stack three and a half percent appreciation with six and a half cap, you get a 10 percent return, but still a little too crude, a little too simplistic, but you're there. And so I should generate that from these properties for the foreseeable future. But I also have the option to refinance them at any time. I routinely go through and try to make sure I have financing available for the primary residence and the rental properties, you know, as an option. I don't know if I'll ever exercise it, but it's there. And I think that that's a very valuable part of the portfolio here that may be underrated by some folks with the payoff rentals. That option is worth something.

And I'm not paying very dearly for it in the meantime. I'm just collecting cash flow. So I think that's something to consider, and I'm not sure exactly how that will play out in the future. But I think that one day, that may be something we're very grateful to have. In a deeper session, maybe it's harder to get financing, but I should be able to get something, if, you know, not nothing from that portfolio. So that's, that's an idea. Where would you buy real estate if you weren't buying in Denver? I would probably move into the REITs space or maybe buy, maybe pick a market or two and buy a handful of single family rentals, enough to make a difference my portfolio, but not so much that it would

create another set of, you know, mad meter geographic risk. But that's, that's the question I struggle with is do I buy in Denver or do I buy a estate? And at the end of the day, you can see where I put my money. It's here in Denver. I just think that even if another market really does well for the next 10, 15, 20 years, I may actually get a better return in Denver because I can be involved in major decisions and go and handle it. One of the suggestions I would make when I was the community manager at Bigger Pockets and people were asking, oh, it's too expensive where I live, where should I invest, was where do you know people or what other markets do you know? Like, Scott, I know. know you grew up in Maryland, you know that state, you know that area. You may not want to invest there,

but that's a great place to start looking. Oh, maybe there is a great market in Maryland. I actually am incredibly unfamiliar with the rental market in Maryland. But I grew up in Illinois. I still know people who live in Illinois, I could look around in the different like Chicagoland area cities and say, oh, this actually kind of makes sense. And I used to live there so I can check it out. So is there any place that you know? Like, oh, didn't you go to school someplace that isn't Maryland? I have thought about this a lot, but I'm like, you know, I don't want to get on a plane and go deal with problems in any of those areas. And so if I'm going to own real estate, I'm going to own it in the area where I can, if, you know, like, let's say things go terribly over the next several years. The market tanks in my equity position there begins to dwindle. You know, things, we have some sort of historical disaster or whatever. Well, I can manage these properties. We could move into one if we needed to. We lived in one of them for, we've lived in several of them for many years. So that's a real risk mitigant, I feel, for our situation that I wouldn't get in if we had a bunch of problems. properties back east. Okay. And that's valid. That's something that you have thought of. This show

isn't just for you. It's also for our listeners. So if our listeners are thinking, oh, it's too expensive where I live, where else do you know, could you rent out a space? My friend Jake used to live in Ohio. His dad is still there. He owns rental properties in Ohio. And when there's an issue, his dad helps him out. So having somebody local who can help you out in an area is priceless. because property managers are great, but knowing somebody who can help you is even better. Let me go through a couple of other kind of key concepts from our plan here. So we've talked about the buckets of our wealth. We've talked about why we've made decisions and the optionality we think it provides

and how it provides a really great quality of life, I think, here, and we're very lucky. We have to talk about cash. So the cash is a small amount in checking, significant amount in the money market. And I also consider the small bond position that we have as part of the cash position. So just for anyone wondering there if we own bonds, we do own bonds, very small amount, and I kind of bucked into the cash position. I also think that the real estate is more bond-like for us and gives us that differentiation from the stock market, the lower correlation. So we get a little bit of that kind of risk parity benefit to some degree by having that real estate holdings there. On tax strategy, I'm very aggressive.

So, Mindy, just to draw a comparison to you, you have a lot of your wealth in the 401k pre-tax in SpaceX. I don't know if you've actually been able to liquidate SpaceX or not. or if that's coming up. We have gone the complete opposite route. We have very little wealth in the pre-tax bucket, much larger Roth position here, and much of our wealth is at basis, effectively, because I've been aggressively resetting that basis. And one of the reasons why I reset that basis is because I believe I'll have business interests. Virginia will have a writing career and those types of things, and we will not really be in a very low-income tax bracket, like some people in the FI community who choose to stop working entirely. I'm skeptical that that

that day will ever come that will really be in relatively low tax brackets. And so I like harvesting at the 15% capital gains bracket if I can. And so much of our wealth, we have very little capital gain in the portfolio other than the real movement from some of that small cap value stuff in the last year. And I may reset that at the end of the year. So I think that now is a great time to pay taxes. And I've been happy to do that because I think I'll pay much, much less taxes in the event that things go well for our financial position in the future. Or if the tax code changes with future administrations. I do not think that that will be friendly to somebody who has not harvested gains in a situation like ours. So that's the governing theory of that. This year

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The old process was miserable. Phone calls with an agent, a nurse coming to your house for a blood draw, then waiting weeks to find out what you'd pay for. That friction is exactly why so many people who should have coverage don't. Here's what I believe. Most BP money listeners need term. life and the right move is to build a ladder. A few term policies of different lengths stacked together so your coverage steps down as your mortgage shrinks and your kids get closer to being financially

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And it talks about capital gains harvesting. This is not something that Carl and I ever thought about. and now we sit on a good problem to have, but it's still an issue where our cost basis for almost all of our after-tax stocks is close to zero. Definitely for the bulk of the after-tax stocks. So when we sell, we're just paying all gains. But there are definitely years over the past 25 where we had space in our lower or even middle tax brackets that we could have filled up that we could have filled up that we were will be very different than our current tax bracket. So I want to encourage people who have never

capital gains harvested to look into this option and look into this idea. Because if you have after-tax stocks that have significantly appreciated, on the one hand, hooray, I've made money. On the other hand, the government is going to come calling. So if you have space in your tax portfolio, reset the basis periodically. I love that you've been doing that. I think there's a world where we could have had a significantly larger pre-tax net worth, but that this approach that we've taken will ultimately generate a lot more post-tax net worth for us to enjoy in our life and maybe pass on to our girls one day. So that's been my philosophy. That's a real debatable point. And I think that there's a certain aggressiveness or maybe even arrogance to that belief set that I bring to the tax

strategy, but I certainly biased towards the belief that this is a relatively good time to pay taxes for someone in our position. is right now. And I mean, you don't have to just sell everything and pay it all at once. Look at around the end of November, beginning of December. Look at where your income is, what moves you've already made, and see if there's any space at the top of whatever your current tax bracket is to take advantage of this. So, you know, next up is a state planning. We have all of our state plan set up, revocable trusts, all that kind of good stuff. I was worried in preparing for this episode that we were way behind on not updating that. But

we had a great setup for that and it rolled through and carried through and has all all the things that applied to our firstborn applied to our second child and so it was it was really well structured and there's there was just a few things to clean up and you know beneficiaries and that kind of stuff on some of the complexity of the accounts that we had that's generally up to date with maybe like a few to do is between now and the end of the year just to get that into into good shape one of the things that I think is interesting is the inheritance tax is way beyond our net worth but I think that's that's one of those things that could change at any point and so that's something I'll be looking at at is if some policy change in a future administration places taxes on inheritance at different

levels, we would begin a serious conversation about setting up irrevocable trusts to some degree as part of that. But that's not something we fired at this point. Ooh, I want to plant a seed. I got an email from a listener talking about South Dakota legacy trusts. Yeah, we're not doing anything like that. Well, not right now, but that a South Dakota legacy trust, in a nutshell, definitely do more research, helps you provide for future generations and you skip all of the 40% inheritance taxes when, like, you don't leave it to your kids. And then when they pass, they have to pay 40% inheritance tax to their kids and so on and so on. It kind of skips all of that. So it's an irrevocable trust.

I would definitely encourage you to read a lot about it, but it sounds like something I want to do some research on. Yeah, I think that that begins to apply when you get to your level of net worth and begin to think about, oh, well, if I double that a few times, I'm going to be in this problem. Maybe it's time to start thinking about these advanced tax planning structures. That's real big league stuff. So we'll see how that goes. Scott, you have 18 years between you and me. So what is the rule of 72 talking about in 18 years? you're going to double two times, two and a half times.

I think it's very possible that happens with our portfolio. But what I was trying to communicate is we're not there yet, but it's in the back of the mind if that ever happens to begin thinking about that stuff, especially if that tax law changes. And everyone's got an opinion on this stuff. I believe it's smart to err on the side of, they might raise the tax bracket. You may not be in a higher tax bracket later if you fire or stop working

or stop maximizing active income in the near term for some point in time. I'm betting on clearly and making high-stakes tax decisions here that tax brackets will go up. I agree. So let me see you here. Let's summarize. We talked about where we are at, Chubby Fat Fai. We talked about the portfolio. The high-level goal, just to restate it here, is to maintain financial independence in our spending band and give ourselves the option to let the portfolio continue to grow.

And if it does, then we may continue to increase our lifestyle. or maybe do some other things or continue to donate to our charitable fund or our donor-advised fund. But we would like that option. We don't want to rule it out and attempt to spend as much as possible right now. We have a comfortable life. We want to eliminate waste. We don't want to deprive ourselves, but we want to stay within the bounds of financial independence. And then if it grows, let that continue to let our lifestyle spending grow.

And that's that. We're giving up some maximum expected return in exchange for the floor on that. But we're also staying reasonably aggressively invested with our stock portfolio to, give us a higher ceiling on that. So kind of high floor, but with ceiling growth opportunity there. We talked about public. We talked about real estate. We talked about we have some controls in place here. We talked about cash and liquidity tax, estate plan. Oh, insurance. Last one to cover here, which is we have a small insurance policy that would pay off the debt on the levered portfolio. For me, we do not carry life insurance on Virginia. I have never filed a claim, right? Maybe we've

by one claim in 10 years on rental property insurance. So what I do with the rental properties is because I don't let to file claims because it's a pain in the rear and then your premiums can go up for a long time. And usually the claims aren't that large. So all of the premiums in our portfolio are at the highest possible deductible, like literally 20, 25, 30 grand. And that keeps our insurance rates much, much lower. It's a pretty big, pretty dramatic difference.

We forego a lot of the wind and hail stuff because it's like almost the same as the deductible. on these policies. And that's paid off huge for us. We've had a few roof replacements and that kind of stuff over the years, but I think that the premium savings across the portfolio is drastically overwhelmed that. So that governs all of our insurance thoughts here is what is enough to protect against catastrophe, but we're going to float any large deductibles or that kind of stuff. And that keeps our costs really low from an insurance perspective over that. And I shopped that pretty aggressively every year or two. I have a similar stance on insurance, but also, I would like to point out that you and I might be in a different financial position than somebody

else who is listening. One of the tips that I have heard from people who are suggesting increase your deductible is to have that much money, your deductible, in an account that isn't in the stock market, this is your savings account, maybe a high yield savings account, that is specifically in case you need to file a claim. Like let's say we live in the Colorado area, we get a lot of of hailstorms. Let's say your deductible is $10,000 to do a new roof. I mean, I've got a couple of roofers that'll do it for 12 or 15. So is it really even worth filing the claim when you're going to pay that much anyway? But have that $10,000 in a bank account. So if you do have stuff like, God forbid a fire and it's a significant expense to rebuild the house or remediate or whatever,

you've got your deductible already. That's not now a new burden for you to try to. and figure out if you are not already financially independent. Carl and I have the highest deductible that our lenders will allow. Yeah. And we also have a high deductible health insurance plan, of course. That's HSA compatible and do max that immediately. Yep. You max the HSA. Yes. Okay, Virginia, now that you have reached financial independence, how does it feel? I think Scott and I both are ambitious people. And we have a tendency to think about the next thing, the next thing, next thing, endlessly. So we try to really enjoy. It's a big undertaking because they just enjoy life. I think we're too anxious. We're anxious people. So it's just a matter of

being intentional with enjoying the freedom, the financial freedom that we have and being grateful for what we can do and the flexibility that we have, like going for a walk in the middle of the day. The gratitudes are so important as part of our weekly check-in. And we just, do stuff that's like big and small and that. Like just because we have that flexibility that Scott worked very hard for and there was a good amount of luck. We had the ability to slow down and say, I want to write down how grateful we are for how our youngest says the word shoes, which is ooze. She puts on her ooze. This is a real threat to early retirement. Yeah, the princess dress economy is out of absolutely out of control. For our oldest, she is obsessed with

these princess nightgowns, they cost maybe $15 each, but we frankly run out of princesses. And now we're moving on to Paw Patrol, Spider-Man. Short story long, answer to your question, it feels amazing, Mindy. And I get to pursue my creative career. We get to have wonderful family time. And it helps that we actually like each other. If we're going to join paddleboarding tomorrow, that's going to be fun. I was just going to ask, what does Tuesday look like for you?

Today's Tuesday, but let's use tomorrow as an example. because so tomorrow we're going to drop the kids off because it's largely a workday tomorrow for us at the local daycare. Then we're going to do a quick daycare. We like to do our dates if we can during that period because we're already paying for daycare. So we'll do that. And so we're going to get breakfast and then do a paddle boarding session. And then I have various meetings. We'll record two podcasts tomorrow.

It looks like. And I have work to do. Yeah. I've got a one-on-one with somebody. I've got a call with one or two team members. Oh, we should talk about that. Yeah. Then I'll work out.

and then I'll go pick up the girls. And Virginia will go in and do her little thing tomorrow. Yeah, we do that once a week, too. We call it our quote-unquote night off, a break from parenting duties. So one of us does pick up through bedtime while the other might see a friend. In your case, you are somewhat addicted to fah.

I'll go, like, get my nails done or something. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like a good night, like, okay, I'm going to hang out with my buddy and meet up with the football season's coming up. I'll probably take a lot of Mondays, for example, and go hang out with my buddies and go watch that.

And then on Thursday, I will do my night off. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drive up to Breckenridge and I'll do a little hike and then I'll go to a coffee shop and work for a little bit. And then I'll come home and might be there in time for pickup or bedtime or might be home a little bit later after that. This is as spontaneous as we get. Like, this is scheduled spontaneity to the extent that's possible

with two young children. Yeah. So I'll throw in work. I'll probably do some Claude coding for something for Bigger Pockets Money or a Reddit blog post or something like that as part of that data outing there. And then next week, I'll do it with one of the girls. So I'll take out Katie or Taylor. They love their daddy daughter skip days.

Yeah, we'll do a skip day and do that. That's a real luxury that we get to have here. And it kind of weaves in all this stuff. So that would be like the example for this week of how we would do that. And it is nice to be able to have that flexibility. Yeah. And as far as spontaneity goes with the three-year-old and the one-year-old, you got to plan it it's never going to happen. Same with dates, same with nights off. Obviously, I survived,

but we didn't do this. And I wish we would have because that would have given Carl an opportunity to bond with the girls even deeper and me an opportunity to not have to answer mommy, mommy, mommy questions every 30 seconds from morning until night. And I think that's really important that you're doing that. I love that you're doing that. That's what that means to us right now. And it's not perfect. We definitely don't implement this all perfectly all the time. And much of it came from lessons learned the hard way. But life is good. Yeah, life is really good. I love that for you. Okay, Scott and Virginia, I really appreciate you sharing all of this information with us. Scott, everybody knows where they find you. Virginia, where can people find out more about you and your books? Ooh, I, so I write psychological thrillers, and you can learn more at Virginia Trench.com. And I have a new book coming out in the fall. It's about a con man and women who will stop at nothing to take him down.

Pretty much the antithesis of sound financial advice. It's about a financial scammer. It's a thrilling read, and I'm excited for people to read it. I am excited to read it. Mr. Disappear is the title. So November 10th, Mr. Disappear by Virginia Trench. So check that out. And yeah, that's, it's a great, it's a great read.

It's like, the guy's like kind of like the tinder swindler. It's kind of how I think about it. I love that. I'm super excited for Mr. Disappear. And I really loved your first book, Our Secrets Were Safe. Thanks, Mindy. That's a bumper too. If you like psychological thrillers, head over to virginia trench.com and check those out.

They're also available wherever books are sold, right? Yeah. Awesome. All right. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Puckets Money Podcast. Before we go, I want to let you know that we have tons of financial information on our website, biggerpocketsmoney.com. We have a blog. We have a newsletter. You can sign up for that at biggerpocketsmoney.com slash newsletter. We have free resources and calculators and templates,

all designed to help you on your journey to financial independence. So hop on over to biggerpocketsmoney.com and check us out. Now that wraps up the bigger pockets money podcast. He is Scott Trench, she is Virginia Trench. I am Indy Jensen saying, bye-bye, Fruitfly. When the change in season hits, some people suddenly just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized, and that's great.

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