BiggerPockets Money Podcast - Investor Retires in 6 Years ($120K/Year) by Doing This

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

On this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast Mindy and Scott are joined by Beau Webb. Beau went from flying Blackhawk helicopters in the Army to achieving financial independence in his 30s through a diversified investment strategy that goes way beyond basic index funds. Beau built wealth through real estate, and savvy use of military benefits while still crushing it in traditional markets. But here's what makes his story even more powerful - he's living proof that you CAN retire early in just ten years if you save and invest strategically. His approach blends real estate investing, the smart use of military benefits, and disciplined plays in traditional markets. The result? Multiple streams of income that comfortably cover his lifestyle — all without tapping his retirement accounts. Beau's story proves that you can reach FI in as little as ten years, not by living on rice and beans, but by leveraging creative financing, making intentional moves, and thinking bigger than conventional financial advice allows. This Episode Covers: The exact house hacking strategies Beau used to build his first income streams Creative financing techniques that work even with limited starting capital How to maximize VA loan benefits for accelerated wealth building Why mobile home parks and self-storage became Beau's secret weapons Building multiple income streams that cover lifestyle costs without touching retirement accounts Diversification strategies across real estate and traditional markets The ten-year FI timeline: realistic expectations vs. extreme sacrifice How to leverage unique advantages (military or otherwise) for faster wealth building And SO much more! 00:00 Introduction to Today's Guest 01:14 Military Background and Financial Beginnings 05:42 First Steps into Real Estate 07:52 House Hacking  10:34 First Duplex Purchase 16:17 Expanding the Real Estate Portfolio 19:42 Diverse Investment Strategies 21:38 Seller Financing  28:28 Expanding the Portfolio 31:49 Achieving Financial Independence 34:36 Life as a Full-Time Investor 37:47 Connect with Beau! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest, Bo, went from flying Black Hawk helicopters in the Army to achieving financial independence in his 30s through a diversified investment strategy. He's built well through real estate, mobile home parks, and savvy use of military benefits while still crushing it in traditional markets. If you're ready to learn investment strategies that go far beyond basic index funds, this episode will open your eyes to what's possible. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen. And with me as always, is my real estate savvy co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy.

Great to be here. Always great to talk about the tenants of financial independence. All right, we are so excited to be joined by Bow Webb today. We recently did an episode on using military benefits to help soldiers achieve financial independence. And we are now excited to hear about Bose via journey today because whether or not you have military benefits to tap into, there are aspects of his portfolio and his journey that I think anybody can learn from. Bo, welcome to Bigger Pockets Money.

Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Mindy. Super happy to be here. I'm a longtime follower of Bigger Pock's Money and Bigger Pockes in general. So, humped to be talking to you guys. Awesome, us too. We are so excited to hear about this story. Can you tell us a little bit about where it begins and what you were doing in the military? Sure, yeah. I was about six years ago. I was a Blackhawk pilot in the Army. Before that, I had graduated from West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. I was from a small town in Texas. And I had been raised to spend less than I make, to work hard and save when you can. but around six years ago, as a young officer in the Army, that was kind of the extent of my financial literacy. I didn't know much about investing, didn't really have any interest in investing up to that point. But around that time, I was exposed to things like the fire community and bigger pockets and real estate. And a lot of things changed for me then. Awesome. Can you remind us a little bit about the start that West Point graduates get?

So let's talk about the day after you graduate the academy. What is a financial situation? look like for a typical graduate there? For all the Service Academies, West Point or Air Force Academy or the Naval Academy, you're not paying for school. It's totally free from a financial perspective, but you do incur a commitment to that respective branch of service. So for West Point, when I graduated, though I didn't have student loan debts, I did owe the U.S. Army five years of my life.

And then for me, I went to flight school and incurred an additional service commitment for my time at flight school. So it added a couple of years to that. But in terms of our pay, we commission as second lieutenants, which is the first kind of officer grade in the Army. And you're making, you know, it's around $70 or $80,000 a year right off the bat. And on top of that $70 or $80,000 a year, you also get allowances for housing and food. Is that correct? Yeah, you get a basic housing allowance.

That's tax-free. And then there's BAS. It's a different type of tax-free allowance that you get. And that's just kind of a different breakdown in your pay. Were you spending your entire salary and your entire BAH and your entire BAS? Or were you saving some of that? And for those who aren't in the military like me, do you have to spend your entire BAH and BAS? Or can you look for deals?

Initially, I couldn't have even answered that question other than I could tell you that I was not spending all of it. But I wasn't totally tracking my expenses or my savings rate. But I definitely was spending less than I had come. coming in. That changed over time. But when it comes to the housing allowance, if you live on post or on base, sometimes you can have a spot by yourself or you may split that with a roommate or if you're married, but they will take your whole housing allowance for you to live on post or on base. If you choose not to live on post or on base, then you can receive that housing allowance

and then go and spend it as you wish. So if you find something that's much cheaper than that, pocket the difference and vice versa, if you're looking to be a high roller. This is actually a much higher effective starting pay grade than most people get coming out of college because you can effectively consider all of that allowance for housing and subsistence as tax-free. So it would be the equivalent of maybe $100,000 or $110,000-based salary for peers coming out. So it's a very, actually pretty good income. It sounds like you were saving some of it, but not very intentional at the very beginning of your journey. Can you give us a glimpse into what your peers, fellow graduates, what you thought they were doing? Were they saving or investing by and large?

Let me introduce one other pretty cool opportunity we had. It's called the Career Started Loan. And coming out for me as a junior and senior at West Point, had the opportunity through USAA to take a $36,000 loan. You pay it back over your commitment. So six years, or I'm sorry, five years. And the interest rate was 0.75%. So less than 1%. It's a way for them to kind of generate your business. And they know you have a stable income coming out of the service academies. Back to Scott's question, I did see a lot of my peers use that loan to buy troughs or to go on big trips in Europe, things like that. I did go on a trip in Europe, but I used the rest of it to save and ultimately a few years later to invest. Same thing for kind of the monthly pay. I think a lot of us are just in this, we were in this position where we knew we had more coming in than we were spending, especially kind of the single lieutenants at the time. And we knew that that wasn't really going to change. It's a pretty stable source of income short of, of something bad happening to you or you doing something very illegal and getting kicked out of the military. So the mindset was, as long as I'm saving a little bit, I'm all right.

And that's kind of where I was at initially. But then I saw some big opportunities for improvement as I learned more and more. Tell me about the career progression over the five years of your service. How did your career progress? And at what point did you discover financial independence? Right when I graduated, I went to Fort Rucker, Alabama, which is the Army's home of aviation. to learn how to fly. I spent about a year and a half there getting paid just to learn how to wiggle sticks and fly helicopters. So a little bit unique for me for the first couple of years. But then I went to

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as my first duty station after flight school. Even though you're an official pilot, you're still learning in the field and you're learning from very experienced pilots and you're leading in certain ways. I call it my first big boy job and I was learning a lot of lessons about what I was good at, what I wasn't good at. One of those lessons was that I really valued my autonomy. Being able to choose how I spend my time and what I spend my time on, which was kind of the impetus for me looking into things outside of that. And that led ultimately to coming across things like bigger pockets and books that taught me about real estate and investing and showed me that there was a different way for me to set myself up for hopefully future options and the ability to leave the

military in the future. But I still had a five or six year commitment. So that was kind of the timeline that I was working with to see if I could try to replace my ankle. Bo, you start out at Fort Rocker. I think that's like a six month usually training. No, it's like a year and a half. Okay. So we're there for a year and a half. And then you go to Fort Bragg. Are you promoted around that time? Yeah. Around that time is when I was promoted from second lieutenant to first lieutenant, kind of right when I arrived to my first duty location after flight school. Is that a meaningful jump from second lieutenant to first lieutenant? It's a pretty meaningful jump in how people look at your expected expertise when they see the rank in your chest compared to second lieutenant.

As far as pay, I said, I don't exactly remember what the jump was. It was probably $500 or $1,000 a month, so meaningful for me at the time for sure. It sounds like you discovered the fire community in bigger pockets and some of these resources around this time, a year and a half to two year mark. What changes around the way that you're handling your money? and you're also discovering that you value freedom. What changes around how you handle yourself and your finances at that point? One of the early books that I read called Set for Life. Never heard of it.

Most people haven't. But set for life helped me understand that if you're trying to make a meaningful impact on your savings, there are a few categories that you should really focus on. It's not skipping Starbucks. I mean, that has an impact. But it's like you would say, Scott, it's your housing, it's your transportation, it's your food. And for me, especially since we talked about kind of the housing allowance situation earlier, I saw that what I was paying for housing is the lowest hanging fruit for me to affect my situation.

So as I learned more and more about real estate, house hacking became the extremely obvious kind of first step for me to have a meaningful impact on moving the arrow as far as how much I could save. And this is in Fort Bragg, which is in North Carolina. Is that where you purchased your first house hack? Can you tell us about that deal? Before that, I was living with roommates and a rental. And so it was still somewhat, you know, I was probably spending six or $700 a month for my part of that house. But I realized that I could, I could do better than house hacks. What was your BAH? BAH, I think it was probably $12 or $1,300. Reminder for those who can't keep up with the acronym that that's basic allowance for housing. There's a lot of acronyms in the military, which I found out the hard way over the years as I've talked to people in this space.

Yeah. And don't quote me on these exact numbers. because this is kind of going off memory of five or six years ago. They don't have to be the exact numbers. That shows that there's a huge difference. You were essentially spending half. There are other people in your position that were spending the entire amount or even more of their BAH on their housing. And you chose to spend half.

What were you doing with the other half of that BAH? At that point, I was just kind of saving, and I didn't really know what for, but I was just kind of softening it away on saving. Do you mean like in a savings account that was paying, you know, a nominal savings, you weren't investing it in like the stock market? This is prior to me kind of diving in to becoming more financially savvy. But yeah, I was I was stocking it away.

What it ended up becoming was a down payment on an FHA loan duplex. And a little bit after that, an engagement ring for my girlfriend. So I found a use for all of that savings. Love it. Cash flow positive property, cash flow positive spouse. This is, things are starting to really go well. Just kidding. It's called wife hacking, Scott.

There you go. Oh, that's a new one. How did Bo go from a Black Hawk? pilot to financially independent in six years. We can't wait to jump back into his fire story right after this. 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 taxed refund can make the biggest impact.

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didn't use a VA loan to buy this house. Can you tell us a little bit about that purchase and everything that went into it? It was a duplex that a buddy of mine who was in real estate that I'd kind of taken out for for coffee and pizza and stuff. He came across it. And he said, hey, man, this might be what you're looking for. Because I had told people, like, have you guys heard of house hacking? This is what I'm going to do. This is how I'm going to save money. He pushed me this duplex that had just come on the market. I went and viewed it with the real estate agent that Zillow connected me with when I said I'm interested in this property, right? Did everything wrong initially. But it worked out. I put an offer in on the duplex using a VA loan for the asking price, which is $108,000 at the time in Fayetteville,

North Carolina. What year is this? It was late 2018. Yep. So yeah, different, different price point, and that's, that's been a big part of my journey. I was in markets where, yeah, the price point was a lot different than other parts of the country. So that was helpful. And this duplex, really nice, big, updated, fancy living arrangement for you? I wouldn't say that. It's two-bedroom, one bath, each unit. One of the units was pretty crappy, and the other unit was really crappy. So I lived in the really crappy unit and then fixed up the pretty crappy unit. As far as the FHA loan, I made an offer using a VA loan. Found out that the sellers had been under contract with a VA loan.

Maybe it was even a different property prior, and they just didn't really like the experience. So they had this idea in their head, which I think is not accurate that VA loans are harder to work with than FHA loans. So I said, okay, I'll put three and a half percent down instead of zero percent down. And they said they were okay with that. So that's just how it worked out for me. At that point, had intended in the future to use my VA loan, I was okay, just kind of I'm biting the bullet. I'm on that three and a half percent down payment knowing that I could use the VA loan later.

Okay, I'm a real estate agent and I live in an area where the VA loan is not that popular. We get veterans who are using it, but we don't have a military base close to where I service. So there's really not a lot of opportunity for real estate agents here to understand the VA loan. And there's a lot of pushback on VA loans. And let me tell you, the worst deal I ever did was an FHA loan, not a VA loan. So the VA loan is super easy to use. So long as the house isn't falling down. Like you can't have peeling paint. It has to have an oven. And I think that's kind of it with the appliances. It has to have an oven and you can't have peeling paint or like rickety handles on the stairs. Yeah, the handrails on stairs seem to be kind of the biggest thing. Yes. Meanwhile, the FHA loan, I could go on forever and won't, but they find a lot more reasons to make that more difficult. Totally agree. I want to call out a couple of things about your overall situation that I observed here.

First, if we were sitting here and you were asking about this purchase, I would say use the FHA loan or a low-down payment convention. loan instead of the VA loan because in your situation, you never know if you're going to get stationed to a much more expensive market at some point, reassigned to some much more expensive market. And that would be one where you'd want as much as possible that VA loan available to you. The cash, I imagine $3,500 or $5,000, whatever the down payment was, was not a material amount of money for you relative to your overall earnings or financial position at that point in time. Although it probably felt like a big deal, but you could definitely bring that cash. to the table for a purchase like this.

Is that kind of how you see it in hindsight, or would you have rather used the VA loan? You know what? That's exactly how I see it in sight. But at the time, I didn't see it that way. I just saw it as a necessary adjustment I had to make to give the sellers what they wanted. But yeah, I definitely see it as a benefit to kind of maintain your VA loan for as as meaningful of a purchase as you can make. Well, tell us about the payment and the rent that you received on this property.

How did it impact you financially from there? $108,000. on the purchase price, I put three and a half percent down. I put in, I think, 10 or so thousand into kind of just doing a light renovation on one of the units. My monthly payment, when you, principal interest taxes and insurance plus the PMI that comes along with the life of any FHA loans, it was $790 was my monthly payment. I rented out side one that I was not living in for $800.

I rented out the room in the side I was living in to a room. roommate, a buddy of mine that I went to West Point with for $300. So for that, I was pocketing about $310, plus that $12 or $1,300 for BAH that I didn't have to put into housing. And it instantly had a huge impact on my savings rate at that time. What was your happiness level like living in this property for this time? And how long did you, did you live in this property? Like, what I want to understand is it's a home run financial. We don't have to get into that. This is an absolutely absurd return on a $3,800 down payment. Was it misery? No, I had a great neighbor across the street named Gloria, who I got tight with, and I lived with a good buddy

of mine. I was pumped about what that meant in my bank account on a monthly basis. And I was a single guy at the time. I was at work most of the time. What's this property like today? Is it you still own I still own it? Did you end up refinancing out of that FHA loan at some point? Still have that same loan in place. It was a very low interest rate. The same tenants have been there on both sides for about four years now, and they're paying $900 per month each side. You're clearing $700, $800, $800 easily on this thing, you know, outside of the odd Kappex month, off to all your expenses. Yeah, and we've definitely had some Kappex.

It's on septic, and there's been a couple of leaks I've had to deal with. But overall, yeah, it's had very good returns and good cash flow. Well, and the Fayetteville market has gone up dramatically since you purchased it. Do you have any idea what it's worth now? You paid 108? Yeah, I think it's worth probably a little bit more than $200,000 or so right now. That's a nice doubling of your property. in just a few short years.

Do you think you're going to keep this property for a while, or do you have any plans to sell it? I don't have any current plans to sell it, plan to keep it until something changes. How does the journey progress from here? Obviously, it sounds like we're able to really stack a lot of cash at this point. Where do you take that? And how does your career and the next phase of your journey unfold? I, at that point, understood that using a primary residence purchase to turn into an eventual rental was an awesome strategy.

But you can only do that so often. And so I certainly plan to continue doing that as often as I could. And I went on over the next few years to buy two more fourplexes using my VA loans in Fayetteville. So those three kind of primary residence purchases there. But at that time, as you can only do that so often, I was desperate to find other ways to buy real estate with no and low money down to quote an old bigger pockets book. And one of the strategies that I didn't know anything about until that point was seller financing. Because seller financing kind of has infinite levers you can pool, it can be very negotiable with the right buyer and seller if you find a situation that works. And one of those opportunities is to convince the seller to let you buy a property for a small down payment. So that became like the number one thing I was looking for. I was looking for paid off homes where the owner was probably a landlord and hopefully a tired landlord might consider seller financing. And then I was looking for ways to kind of build trust to them and show them that I was going to take care of the property and do well by them and convince them to let me put

small down payments down. And that ended up working out for me. I got pretty lucky finding some good properties looking for that. And you're living very frugally during this time, especially at Fort Bragg in these house hacks, essentially the whole way through. So it seems like you're able to accumulate a lot, I would imagine you're able to accumulate a lot of cash, like maybe $40,000 to $50,000 a year, starting after that first house hack at least. Is that a fair ballpark? That's probably true, but I was dumping it into properties. I made some other purchases and pretty much dumped any excess cash I had into those properties in those early years. I could, consider that accumulation personally. That's going into an investment. I wish that I tracked it

more at that time, but I didn't. I just was kind of bank account, balance, finance. You know, I have some more cash. Let's look for another property. And that's, that's how I did it back then. One more question before we get to real estate. Were you doing anything else with any of this cash, any stock investments at all? I was blindly maxing out my Roth IRA. And I would just, I had all of that in VTSAX because someone had recommended the simple path to wealth to me. And that was my key takeaway. So I was blindly doing that. And then my TSP, which is the military or government equivalent of a 401K, they will match you or the government would match me up to 5%.

So I was putting in 5% into my TSP and investing that all in the C fund, which is just like the large cap stocks, S&P 500 equivalent. You said you were blindly doing this. Do you regret doing that? No, I don't. I don't. In fact, I still do it. but I just didn't really have a great understanding of what I was doing. I was just kind of doing it because it sounded like the right thing to do. And I still think it was the right thing to do. Specifically,

what I came to appreciate with Roth IRA contributions is that you can withdraw your contributions from a Roth IRA at any time, penalty free and tax free, which became valuable with me when I started to care about reserves and access to liquidity as my real estate portfolio grew. So I think it was the right decision. I just didn't really know it was the right decision at the time. And is that where your investments lie in real estate and the stock market through the TSP and the Roth IRA. Do you have anything else that you're invested in? At this point, yeah, my investment portfolio looks a little bit different than it did at that point. But as I was kind of in growth mode, it was mostly real estate. And then I was putting in kind of those minimum amounts into, or maxing out my Roth IRA and then putting in the

minimum 5% of my pay into the TSP. At this point, and I don't know if it's time to talk about this, but I'm in Bitcoin. I'm in private credit funds and I do private lending myself. So it's changed a little bit because my personal finance situation is different than it once was. But yeah, it looks a lot different now. How did Beau scale his real estate portfolio to $10,000 a month in cash flow? We'll be breaking it down when we're back from this short commercial break. Hintent, it's commercial real estate. 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

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first acquisition. Whether it's improving cash flow or exploring investment banking solutions, with Desjardin business, it's all under one roof. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us. and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk. Business. Thanks for sticking with us. Let's hear a quick overview of the real estate journey now. We have the three house hacks, the duplex, the two quadplexes. Can you tell us about the first deal outside of those house hacks,

how you got that done, and then give us an overview of the rest of the portfolio. As it escalated from there? So like I said, I was in search of seller financing opportunities. So I became pretty smart on being able to explain all the implications of seller financing and understanding how to look for it and the type of person that may consider it and just how to speak to that if I encounter that person. So I just started cold calling like crazy. I had a list from another investor of high equity properties. And a lot of those properties had out-of-state owners.

And small multifamily also was what I was interested in. So I just started cold calling. And the first one, I came in contact with a woman who lived out of state. She lived in Texas and she was a retired military officer as well. And she owned a five unit property in Fayetteville. And she wanted to make sure I wasn't just one of those other investors that's going to waste her time and throw her a low ball offer. Initially, it was kind of tough to keep her on the phone.

But over time, I was able to build some trust with her and just kind of explain my situation, explain what I was trying to do. And I kind of bought some of her time. And it just so happened that I was heading back to Texas. That's where I'm from for Christmas. So I said, hey, I'll be in Austin area. She was in San Antonio. I said, I'll drive a couple hours and come come meet you. So I did. And throughout that conversation,

I explained seller financing and it worked out well that she didn't need the money from a sale right up front. She kind of was just looking to make a wise decision. And we were able to work out a situation where she financed 100% of the purchase price over 30 years at a fixed interest rate, an appealing interest rate. I don't remember what it exactly was. And it's actually changed because she did a refinance with me a few years later, which I can get into. But I bought that five-unit property 100% seller financed, was just over the moon about it. And she was happy about it because she was getting a much better purchase price or sale price than what she had bought the property for.

And it was turning into a source of income that was secured by a property that she'd owned for years. And her gut feeling about me was that I was a safe bet in terms of another military member and someone that was not going to run the property into the ground. In fact, I was going to improve it and improve the value of her collateral. So it turned into kind of a unicorn situation that was instill as one of my best properties. So over the years that I was the community manager for Bigger Pockets, I was in the forums all day, every day, and I would see people talking about, oh, I can't find a seller financed property. I love that you had a list. You don't just start calling people or calling listings from the MLS and say, hey, would you sell her finance? As I'm a real estate agent, and right now I've got calls from people saying, oh, would they sell her finance?

I'm like, no, it's on the market to be sold. They want to be done with it. But having a list of properties that aren't on the market, I wonder if she was even thinking about putting the house on the market. And you said, oh, she didn't want me to be wasting her time like all these other people. There are so many people out there who want to, oh, it's worth $100,000. I'll give you $40. Well, great. I would make that deal all day too, but that's never going to happen.

You have to make it attractive to them. And getting it for a low price is not nearly as important as getting it for 100% financing. It's not like you paid double what it was worth just so you could get 100% financing. I mean, how much do you think it was worth when you bought it and what did you pay for it? So I did get a good price on it, but I gave her a higher price than she was asking. So I think I bought it for around $150,000, which is a crazy price. For a five-plex? So listen, this is a monster home, right?

So this is an old home that had been converted into five-one-bedroom. room or studio-style apartments. So it was a unique property, and she was having issues with the tenants she was renting it out to. I don't know. It was attracting tenants that were not working out well for her. So she gave me a price, and I said, essentially, if you can finance it at these terms, you know, I'll give you even more than that price because I think that's what's fair. And she was, she was happy to do that. I saw it as an opportunity to get into the Airbnb market, which was, that was kind of a new strategy at the time. But I thought that there was an opportunity to turn those all under pretty inexpensive short-term rentals. They were very profitable when I did do that. So I kind of

changed the situation in terms of who was being rented to and it became a very, very valuable property to me. And I think a lot of people kind of started doing that in that area because it was a desirable area. And the property values drastically increased over the next two or three years. When I think about the 100% solar financing stuff, I think that for a lot of people, this concept is a pipe dream, frankly, and it's not really realistic. And I think that that changes in a situation like yours because if someone says, hey, I want to buy a a property with 100% seller finance and whatever, I'll laugh them off most of the time. But I'll listen if a captain in the army from West Point gives a call. And that person is living in a crappy

half duplex to save a bunch of money on there, clearly saving everything they've got and has two or three years of real estate experience under their belt is not way over levered relative to their situation and is making 70, 80K a year plus those two things. I don't know if this person, this seller knew or understood all of those things about the underlying bet that she was making around there. But to me, those scream really good odds compared to this person has no job, no source of income, no other things in motion, and now I'm going to be collateralized in my loan against just the property. Did that play at all into this dynamic with the seller, or how did you perceive your ability to convince people to give you seller a financial?

of this sort. I think you're exactly right. I'm not pushy when it comes to kind of negotiating with real estate, but I do try to be mindful of the picture that I'm sending to the seller and that the different things they may value in what a potential buyer may have, especially with seller financing, because you need to understand and trust in the person you're selling your property to because you're not just walking away from it completely. They are now your borrower. They should look at you kind of the same way that bank looks at a lender. Give me one more item on this. Could you have paid, Could you have put down a substantial down payment on this property if required? I could have put down definitely more than I did, more than that 0%.

But at that time, I probably didn't have a ton to put down also. I probably had maybe $10,000 or $20,000 that I could have put down. And I explained to her, and I told her that. I said, there's some issues that I want to get after in this property. If I buy it, there was kind of some water intrusion issues in the basement. I said, you want to make sure that I have money to fix this property up. And that made sense to her. and one of the reasons she was okay doing that, zero percent down financing.

You got it. Okay. So there was cash that she put into the deal. It just wasn't in the form of a down payment. That's correct. Were you going to be living in this property? Did you have any plans to move into it? Not this property, no. I'm wondering how you would have financed this if you didn't do seller financing because it's a commercial deal. But if you're not going to live in it, then you can't live in your commercial property, can you for a commercial mortgage? I'm not sure about that. And I call it five units, but it's just an interesting property where it's probably looking. at as a fourplex. In fact, it says, like on the tax records, duplex non-conforming. So it's kind of an interesting property. I don't think that it would be looked at as a five-unit apartment building. And if it were, there's probably some changes I could make, take down a wall and turn it back into four. But in my journey at that point, four or five years ago, that's probably a wise

question to ask. And I was not asking those questions yet. I was just excited to get what I was pretty sure would be a good cash flowing asset, putting very little of my own money into it at a good price. So after your house hack and your illegal cash flowing fiveplex, well, how does the rest of your journey? Non-conforming, Scott. Not illegal, non-conforming. The journey went a lot faster than I had expected it to. I kind of set my sights on if I can work towards getting $10,000 a month in real estate income by the time, you know, five years from now. That will give me, I think, the confidence I need to leave the military if I still feel like that's the right thing for me to do and have income in to support my lifestyle. So that was the goal. All I was thinking about in terms of investing was how do I build up my cash flow to work towards this goal? And I told you seller financing specifically is what I was looking for. So there was another home that that came available in my neighborhood. When I say available, it was a for sale by owner and Sharpie, a sign in the yard, which I was immediately attracted to. I called it. It was a gentleman. I'm going to make this a long story short, but a gentleman that I got to know, he had military ties as well. Also his son just so happened to have. on to West Point. So we had some great connections and turns out that he had nine other properties,

10 total properties. He was in his 80s. He was looking to get out of the rental business. They were all debt free. He didn't have any loans against the properties. And they were well off financially. It was kind of a side hobby for him. So this was another unicorn situation I had kind of stumbled across where I was able to build trust with this gentleman and give him the purchase prices he would need to be willing to sell me all 10 properties. I put $500 down on each property as skin in the game. So he knew I was really invested. He understood I was not putting much down, but it was similar to what you talked about earlier, Scott, where I believe that this gentleman, his name is Mr. Taylor, felt like he was making a good bet and who he was selling the property to

and he was ready to be done with it. And I told him, I will make it easier for you than anyone else will. There's no renegotiation. There's no, you know, I'll come to your house and sign all these contracts. And that's what happens. Long story short, I bought these 10 properties for pretty much 0% down. And I did have to put in a lot of money to those properties once I bought them. But that was a huge kind of leap and bound in my journey growing towards that that cash flow goal. What year is this? 2020. It was great timing. Great. And you have one or two more years left at Ford Bragg after you purchased this. I had about a year and a half left after I purchased those. And by the way, my wife, All my friends that kind of knew I was dipping my toes into real estate thought that I had just totally lost it when I bought 10 properties and one fell swoop because it kind of looked like I potentially was putting myself in a position to be over my skis. But I went for it and it worked out.

And what was the total purchase price of this 10 unit portfolio? Yeah, I don't have the exact numbers, but it was around half a million dollars that I bought all 10 properties for. Again, this is a different price point market and values hadn't really started increasing. crazy kind of when COVID hit and after that it was around $500,000 total purchase price on these properties he financed them for 30 years at 3% interest it was another kind of home run deal for me but even with those terms initially they weren't they weren't cash flowing because they weren't they weren't getting market rent they had some deferred maintenance so i went in and cleaned them up and invested a lot into them but by the time they were getting market rent they were they were cash flowing very well and then similar to that duplex that i explained how it went from around $100,000 value to around $200,000 today. That's kind of the same story I've seen for any other

properties that I owned in Fayville that I bought around 2020. It was almost a doubling in the price from then to the height of the market a year or two ago. Let's also put that in perspective, right? I think people hear, oh, you got 10 properties for 100% seller financing at this point. But if you look at like a market like Denver, right, like my context in this one duplex is $500,000, right? And you're an Army First lieutenant at this point when you're purchasing this, you could have bought a house for 500 grand and probably qualified at that point with your income. So this is not an insane overreach in this particular situation and you weren't going in over your skis on it. And now you have how many properties and how many units?

So today, looking at my notes, I have 52 residential units. I also got involved in a mobile home park, a partnership. So I own third of a mobile home park. It's got about 46 units in it or 46 slots. I have an assisted living building that we rent to operators. So we just own the building, my father and I. And then we have five small commercial spaces, two small self-storage buildings in Alabama. So I've kind of branched out in terms of the different asset types and asset classes within real estate. But it was all in search of cash flow. And there's a lot of seller financing mixed in with a lot of those purchases. What is your real estate income from this portfolio? What's an approximation of the cash flow that you generate?

Gas flow wise today, my direct real estate ownership is spitting off about $9,200 a month, just from real estate. I'm also doing private lending with money that ultimately kind of extracted from real estate through some refinances and things like that. And that private lending is probably bringing in $4,000 or so on average per month. So very meaningful monthly income for me just from that real estate investment. That's awesome. That $9,200 include all the commercial in the mobile home park as well, or is that just a residential portfolio? It includes a mobile home park and all the commercial as well. So when I moved back to Alabama around that time, and this was a big shift for me,

my father, who's always, he was a business owner and he's financially savvy. He became interested in kind of what I was doing in real estate specifically. So we worked out kind of a partnership where from that point forward, kind of any deals that I found, I pitched to him. And I found a way to kind of work backwards on the numbers to where he's still going to get a 12 or 13 percent return. And then I'd have him put in as much money as he could to still get returns at that kind of threshold. And then I'd put in the rest, which was usually a lot less than 50% of the total cash needed.

So maybe some unnecessary details. But it worked out well and helped me to scale because I had my dad that wanted to scale with me and could bring some money to the equation. Well, if you paid off all your properties, all the debt and all the properties, kept all the partnerships in place and those kinds of things. But you paid off all the debt, what would the cash flow be at that point for this portfolio? Of the top of my head, I don't think that. It would be substantially more because to grow, you know, in my growth phase, I took on a lot of leverage. So there's still a lot of debt involved in the real estate side of the portfolio. And I pay a lot to debt service. But what I can tell you is that with that debt pay down, right now there's about $65,000 in principal paydown per year

on that debt just just from making those minimum payments that the tenants are ultimately funding. Is this your full-time job now? It is, yeah, for the past year or so my full-time job has been kind of managing the real estate portfolio and also spreading myself into other kind of asset types and kind of rebalancing the portfolio, if you will, and a little bit less real estate exposure. That's kind of the goal. What year did you leave the military? I left the military in 2024.

So, yeah, last year. Okay, so you went directly from the military to full-time investor, essentially? Correct. Is that immediately after your military? your five or six year commit or did you stay at any length of time over that? I stayed in about six months extra because we were expecting a child and it just kind of made sense to stay put for a little bit longer. What do you do for health care benefits?

So I do. It is not insurance. It's called health sharing, but I use crowd health specifically for our health sharing needs. It's a lot more affordable. There's some different kind of risk associated with it or just some different considerations. But for our family and the way we value health and how afford. It is. It made sense for us. What is your wife do for work? It's mostly a stay-at-home mom. She does a little bit of social media management and marketing for a couple of businesses. One is her father's restaurant and then there's another business. So she makes about $1,200 a month a month doing kind of those, I would call them, sort of side hustle kind of social media type things. But mostly she's a stay-at-home mom. And we have a two-year-old and an

month old. So she stays busy. Yes, she does. That's very busy on there. So congratulations. I got two kids. is around the same age here as well. We have this full-time job as a real estate investor. We have $1,200 coming in from your wife. You are a real estate professional, I take it. Does the depreciation on your portfolio give you very low AGI in this situation? It helps a lot. This is the first year that I'll be, or 2024 will be the first year that I'm a real estate professional because I wasn't able to be one while I was full-time in the military. And my wife also previously worked. So this is the first time that we'll be able to qualify for real estate professional. And yeah, it'll be able to offset almost all of the income. I hope, you know, that's, that's a market question for my CPA.

But that's the goal. I'd be really interested to see how that goes for you in the next year, especially if you keep buying lots of real estate and how you handle things like accelerating depreciation on properties you've been for a while. Maybe that option exists in some of them. That'll be fascinating and really interesting. Yeah. What does Tuesday look for you in this quasi-fire world that you live in as a full-time investor? Well, today is Tuesday. So this morning, I woke up early and I went and played pickleball and then I actually stopped at the Boise River on the drive back home and I jumped in the river and I came back and I sat in this here sauna for a little bit at breakfast with the family and then my wife and kids left to go to the gym and I spent a few hours kind of working on

real estate stuff and today preparing for this podcast. But, you know, I look at what's going on in my world in real estate and investing, and I spend some meaningful hours there. And then I usually wrap it up around three or four or so when the kids are done napping and go on walks or go to the park or things like that. Cook a healthy dinner and then usually chill on the couch to an episode of TV and go to sleep early. Pretty good Tuesday. Well, that's what's possible for folks. There's a lot of work that went into that. A heck of a lot of sacrifice, some luck and a lot of really good decisions and really smart investments that you made there. So congratulations on that. I'm jealous. I'm sure a lot of folks are about that. That sounds like a pretty good Tuesday. Thank you. I'd say,

I'd say a lot of luck, a little bit of sacrifice. Yeah, that sounds like a great Tuesday. I like to go to bed early part the best. Thank you for sharing this incredible story. I think it's an inspiration to really any officer in the armed services that wants to go and repeat. Maybe there's some timing factors here. Maybe there's some really good deals that you got here. But somewhere along this continuum from having very little following your five-year service commitment to having something along lines of what you've produced should be possible for many, many more officers, and that should be a goal of ours. All righty, well, should we get out of here, Mindy? That sounds like a good idea, Scott. Bo, thank you so much for your time today. Is there any place people can find you online?

Probably the best way is on Instagram. I'm at Real Estate Web. W-E-B-B, it's my last name, at Real Estate Web. I posted kind of my journey there, and I wouldn't say I'm super active today, but I'm always happy to respond to messages if you have any thoughts or comments on things we've talked about or want to connect, I'd love to connect as well. Awesome. All right. Thank you, Bo. And we will talk to you soon. Thanks for your time today. All right, Scott, that was Bo. And that was so interesting. I love the fact that he has strategically purchased his real estate, not looking to squeeze every single dime out of the profit. And I can't stress how good that is as a seller when somebody calls up, hey, are you willing

to do seller financing? Sure. Okay, I want the rock bottom price too. Well, that's an instant turnoff. So he's using these ideas of, like he's thinking outside the box. And he's what's it called 4D thinking? Or 3D thinking? I can't remember what the phrase is. But he's thinking about all the possibilities, all the benefits, not just, I got to get it for the lowest price. And I think far too often real estate investors kind of focus right on that. I just think the outcome that he's created is absolutely phenomenal. I mean, this guy is, is a multimillionaire with the $10,000 plus a month and passive cash flow number easily, plus any amortization plus any returns from the rest of his portfolio outside of real estate.

This kind of situation, this kind of option is exactly why we do what we do here at Bigger Pockets Money is every single person who has this, there's something good that's going to come from this, some contribution to the world, happier kids, happier family, healthier life. It's just fantastic to see. And I think that the lesson is that this is worth it, that the risks you take or the all-out approach that you take early in life can improve or go well in ways that you don't expect, whether that's in stocks, whether that's in real estate and these other areas, as long as you don't get in over your skis, as long as you're doing the fundamentals correctly of living way below your means and really investing yourself in whatever side business or rental property portfolio or work stream that can expand is going to look like. And I just love it. I think it's a fantastic money journey. I do too. I love that he's taking advantage of all the opportunities that he has. And I think everybody has different opportunities that they can take advantage of. And I don't want to say,

exploit, but I almost want to say exploit. And, you know, your opportunities, Scott, are going to be different than mine. Mine are going to be different than Bose. But you take advantage of what you can take advantage of. And, you know, you can get so much farther by just tweaking these little, like, he's not doing anything illegal. He's taking a loan, what is it, a career starter loan. And he did take a trip.

But then he also used it as his cash reserves and as to invest. I think that's awesome because he's got this opportunity to have a 0.75. percent interest rate. And, you know, anybody in the military who wants to get ahead needs to go back and listen to this episode again. I think a two-part open-ended question that I look forward to exploring with you in the next year or two, which is the fire community, at least the bigger pockets money community is clear. They like the golden ratio portfolio. They like low-cost index funds for their purposes. But what they really want is they want to keep growing post-fire. And they want a portfolio that allows them to do that in a way that they'll feel great about.

They feel great both about sustaining a baseline level of spending, a baseline level of fire, and they'll be able to see their net worth grow. And I think that's the question that we now need to answer is what does that look like for a traditional or passive portfolio in the stock, bond, gold, whatever world out there? And what does that look like once we think about layering in real estate into that equation? And I think those are the two questions that emerged from me from this. that'll be really worthy of exploring over the next year or two. Yeah, that'll be fun to brainstorm with you, Scott.

I think this is more closely aligned with my goal as well. I do want to spend more of my portfolio, and I have and will continue to build out this golden ratio portfolio. But I'm not sure if spending the maximum amount for the rest of my life is actually my goal from my personal net worth. I'm not sure it's yours either, Mindy. It is not my goal. It is my goal to be able to afford all the things that I want.

So let's help Bo figure out his goal. And then in the meantime, let's pose that question and see what folks come back with. We'll be reviewing the YouTube comments. Or you can send emails to Scott at biggerpocketsmoney.com and Mindy at biggerpocketsmoney.com. If you've got ideas on how to answer this question. Awesome, Scott. Should we get out of here? Let's do it.

That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying take care, polar bear.