BiggerPockets Money Podcast - Proof You Don't Need a High Salary for FIRE (Teacher Retires at 50)

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Think you need a six-figure salary to retire early? Think again. Middle school teacher Andrew Luman is achieving financial independence and retiring at 50—all on a teacher's salary. In this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast, hosts Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench unpack Andrew's complete FIRE strategy, proving that early retirement isn't reserved for high earners. In this episode, you'll learn: How Andrew discovered the FIRE movement and started his financial independence journey Building wealth on $35,000 a year: Andrew's early budgeting strategies The power of a high savings rate and how to achieve it on a modest income House hacking explained: How Andrew used a multi-unit property to eliminate housing costs Real estate investing for teachers and average income earners Portfolio breakdown: Andrew's asset allocation and investment strategy for early retirement The four-day work week advantage and how it accelerated his path to FIRE Choosing time over money: lifestyle decisions that make early retirement possible Side hustles for FIRE: Which ones are worth it Cash management strategies for approaching financial independence Approaching your FIRE number: What the final stretch looks like And SO much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest is proving that teachers don't have to wait until 65 to retire. He's on track to achieve financial independence and retire early at just 50 years old. Today, we're exploring how an educator is building wealth on a teacher's salary and what strategies he's using to escape the classroom 15 years ahead of schedule. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my enthusiastic about five co-hosts, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here.

Super excited to talk about how a music teacher. teacher scales their way to financial dependence. See what I did there? Yeah, I'm going to beat that drum of music puns today. Just kidding. We won't go too far. All right, but we are so excited to be joined by music teacher, Andrew Lumen today. He is a few months away from achieving fire at age 50, and we are so excited to hear

his money story today. And sneak peek, it does not involve a pension. This is a private school teacher who is doing it without a pension. Andrew, welcome to Bigger Pockets Money. Thank you so much. Well, could you give us a little bit of a bad. background here? Where does your money journey begin and how did you discover the fire movement? About eight years ago, around 2018, a friend of mine texted me or emailed me, who knows at that point,

an article that and said in the text, this sounds like you. And it was a New York Times article about Vicky Robin and how she had inadvertently started a revolution without her knowing. And I'd never heard of her. Neither had he, actually. I remember reading through it and somewhere between that point of reading it and later that night, I had all my tax returns spread out on my kitchen table and was going through and trying to calculate everything I'd ever made in my whole life and just trying to get a bigger picture of what this looked like. And I mean, this is not that uncommon story now that I've been reading so much. You know, everybody has her as kind of a central figure often and I just thought this was a different way for me to frame the future for myself.

And I had never considered that this was even a possibility. I was happy in my job and, you know, still him and had with having a great life. But this just gave me a picture that was different than I had ever expected. And so like my friend said, it did sound like me. He knew me well. I took it from there as far as just like digging into every little avenue that I could to find out more about financial independence and what that meant for me. What was your job at the time? I'm a teacher. I've been a teacher now for, I'm going my 25th year in the school I'm currently in, but I was a substitute teacher before that at a bunch of places. I've been doing this most

of my life. My partner is also a teacher as well. I was teaching middle school, which is I'm still there now. I guess elementary school is the technical term for it because I'm, I mostly focus on fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, but I have also taught our pre-K and our kindergarten and our first grade as well. So two teachers aren't a lavish lifestyle. You're not making a ton of money, right? You are correct. And, you know, I've always said, and we, we, even before the financial independence movement kind of took hold of us, we've been about like time over money. That was a conscious choice for us of saying, we want to have time. my dad was a wonderful loving father. He was a traveling salesman though he would go away on weeks

and I remember riding in the car when I was really young and on the way to the airport on Monday mornings and my mom would be driving again to pick him up on Thursday evenings to be gone Monday through Thursday and I remember thinking as it getting older I was like I don't want that I want to try to be around for my kids I want to try to have a life that allows me to be there for them and teaching was one of those things that kind of caught my eye as a possibility. Stumbled into teaching in a lot of ways too, but it was something that's really worked well for us, especially since my partner's also a teacher. We have the same holidays and our kids go to school where we're at.

So it's been able for us to utilize those vacations for sure. So tell us about what was your household income when you started this journey? I was a full-time sub when I first started, and I think I remember making $40,000. maybe even lower than that, maybe 35,000, and feeling really excited about that at Fires in our life. And we live in a high-cost living area. So for us, it was great because we wanted to stay here because we had a lot of friends in this area. And we went to school around here. And we loved it.

But it wasn't a lot to make it worthwhile for our living. And in fact, a lot of our friends who have been teachers or other professions have had to move out and go to somewhere different where the cost of living was less expensive. So nine years ago when you started in earnest your FI journey after this article about Vicki Robbins was forwarded to you by your best friend ever, because he did such a great service to you. It's true. When you were sitting there and you had all of your tax forms spread out on the bed and you were going through everything, what was your financial position? Because again, your two teachers, unfortunately teachers don't make a ton of money. They should.

I don't want to do that job. I'm so thankful for people who do that job because I have two kids and they need to be taught. and I'm not going to be able to do it. But you're not making a ton of money. What was your financial position? Like, did you have investments? Had you been saving for something? Or was it just like kind of starting from scratch nine years ago? I think we had about $200,000 as our net worth at the time, maybe $150,000 in investments total at the time. And that was just because I was getting a little of a match in our 403B. We had bought a house. We weren't as underwater. as we were before because we first bought it was right around 08 so we lost some to start in the housing

crisis there and then when it came back we had a little bit of equity but not very much so really when I was looking at I was thinking is this even possible I didn't even know what this means to try to become financial independent I just read this article and started digging and understood this was a concept that seemed real but I really didn't understand what the path would actually take me down how I would have to make those steps so yeah we didn't have a lot at the time And like, again, on a salary of under $50,000 total household income, I didn't really think it was possible. Well, let's reframe that because you essentially had $200,000 in retirement savings on a salary of $50,000. That's awesome.

That is huge because there's a lot of people who are making $50,000 household income and they have $0 invested. So change that framing a little bit because you did have a significant amount. That is awesome. And that was over what, like 16 years of being a teacher? Yeah, that's right. So that was just by us kind of, I think we had 3% mattress. And that was just us kind of plugging away at it and not knowing what our stuff was invested in. But we were just doing it because I remember a teacher coming to me and say, I was like, what do you even do with this?

It was a guy maybe after being a year or two there. I was like, what do you do with this retirement? How do you? He's like, put everything you can in it. And I was like, you're crazy. You know, and right? And you want to be like, yes, thank you back then. but I didn't listen to him.

You know, I didn't know. But that was his thing. He's like, right now is the time to do it. And he's still there and we still talk. And I don't even think he understood as far as why. He just knew that that was what was important to help secure your life. Let's reframe a little bit, because, you know, you sound like you're, you're beaten up a little bit, this version of you from eight or nine years ago before you got serious about the fire journey.

But let's also reflect a couple of things. One is you're living in a high cost of living area with two teacher salaries and you've accumulated wealth. up to that point. Second, it's very reasonable to a degree for a two-teacher household to rely to some degree on the pensions that are likely accumulating over that period of time. And for many teachers, millions, millions of people, you know, and firefighters and police officers and other folks who are employed by some form of state or local government, it is very reasonable to assume that that is going to take care of a big piece of retirement there. So your position is not bad. At that point in time, it just sounds like there's a big switch that flips that allows you to

propel your position forward. Is that fair? Is that giving your eight or nine year old, you know, version of you more credit, fair credit? I think you're right. We were conscious about money. You know, I could go into the whole money scripts in the background of what my partner and I both had in our heads playing, but we are ones that our friend group knows that we've been a little bit more just cautious about spending in our lives and just trying to match like, again, we valued time more than we valued money. That was already a thing that was built into us before I even went down this path because we knew that time is what we did. When we were musicians, we're both musicians, and she'd my wife's an artist. And so we spend a lot of time doing things that are creative.

We enjoy doing that and we do that with our kids too. So for us, the focus was not on making money. We wanted to make sure we could live and live and people say comfortably, whatever you want to say about that. Like that was part of our journey for sure even before we started. So yes, we had a mindset that we knew. And I think that's why my friend knew it would click with us too, that it was like, oh, there's a way of kind of orchestrating or at least structuring, scaffolding, however you want to say it, your life, that you can make something where you could create more free time. You could create more time to do those things that you want to do, creative or not. And then one note on that, Scott, too, is that we're both in private school.

We don't have a pension. So for us, it is a different world to have friends who are teachers who have the pension and there's, you know, all kinds of things they have to do to correctly make their pensions possible for themselves. And we have our own healthcare savings account, but also 403B. So this has all been on our own, not out of a pension. Thank you for correcting that. There's an assumption I think people have when talking to teachers and I assume that it was wrong in this case. Yeah, because that's something, a pension actually is some, for me, at least I don't understand it really well, but I know that there's definitely something, there's not as much autonomy in a lot of ways. So we were able to kind of fast forward, I think,

because of the autonomy of the 403B and the HSA, we were able to say, hey, let's do more with this, and this is what that looks like. And so it gave us, you know, the ability just to look at it and control it a little more on our own. We had to take a quick ad break. But while we're away, we would love it if you would hop on over to our YouTube channel, which is YouTube.com slash bigger pockets money and subscribe. 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.

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200, 300k and net worth, you know, net worth of 200K and maybe 150 investments to financial independence today? We got to a place where after I started going through this and saying, I think this is possible. And the next day I'd be like, I'm not so sure. And the next day I'd be like, I think that we could do it. And my part would be like, okay, this is just crazy. And it's actually taken us nine years, I think, to get to a place where we actually feel comfortable, too. Which just expresses like the breadth of this journey and the depth of what it does to you internally and psychologically.

You really are cataloging and also considering all these options about who you are. When we started looking at this, I went through our budget. I made a budget. And I think we already had budgets that I kept pretty loosely. I've never been somebody who's balanced a checkbook. Even back when balancing checkbooks was something that was actually people did, I still was not a person who did that. I just knew as long as I had a little bit more than what I needed, I could be okay.

So occasionally when I go to the, you know, ATM to get money out when I was in college, I would just look and check my balance and be like, okay, I'm still fine. And I would kind of keep a running calculation in my brain. And it wasn't in these major shifts. You know, the older you get, you start to have bigger bills. you start to have kids. There's bigger things that bite off larger chunks. So for us, after we made a budget, we looked at our numbers and we realized, okay, what are the things if we absolutely had to cut everything at first? Just like we went down to just bare bones, what would that look like? And we

started calculating back and we said, how much could we put away? And is this worth it? Like, how is our happiness going to be after this? What do we really love? What's important to us? and I think we got to a point where we said, okay, I think we can save or invest a certain amount of money. And I think when we first started, we were looking at like 25%, or maybe even more than that to start. But the deeper we got into the journey,

the more became a reality, right? So then the more it kind of clicked with us as, oh, maybe that timeline can shrink. And we decided to go further. And I think at one point we got up to almost a 65% savings rate, which is huge, is really big. I'm going to teach your salary. Yes.

That's 65%. So, oh, we made a budget. And then we began, excuse me, is that a process or an event? Did it take you months to get to that, or years to get to that 65% savings rate? Or were you able to make a pretty big dent immediately? How would you describe that? I'm having a hard time separating myself from the now as opposed to the person back there right now.

You know, like right now I'm seeing this whole thing as being a giant process. And so looking back at myself, I felt like it was an event. I felt like we had crossed a bridge. You know, I felt like we had, we were all of a sudden on the other side going, oh my gosh, everybody come over here, you know? It became like this almost evangelical moment where you want to like tell everybody in the world. This is what's going on. This is possible.

That way that that actually came to a 65% was multiple things were converging. We had bought, this is our third house that we had purchased. Multi-family. Well, yes, third multi-unit. We'll keep it simple. And it was just at a place, I think we hit that 65%, right at a place where what we were paying for our mortgage started to get less than what our rents were. So we were also able to save more because now our mortgage was being paid for more by the rents, a rental income than before. As if it was when we first started.

So, you know, my friends are like, well, you have a rental income. Well, it didn't start out that easy. Like when we first started doing it, it was actually more scary because we're like, we have three burners, we have three hot water tanks, there's three refrigerators, there's three, or more than three toilets, but like, you know what I mean? Like you have three or four of everything, so the cost was bigger. And so we weren't 100% sure how that was going to work out, but the thought was eventually, you know, the mortgage stays the same, the rents will go up.

And that has been part of this journey, without a doubt, kind of an invisible threat in the background that we haven't been changing to make happen, but that's helped us a lot. I tell my friends all the time, there's no way we would able to stay in this area as two teachers in a high-cost living area without our multi-unit. It would not have been a possible. When we first started even looking at multi-units because we were teachers, we were approved for $80,000 at the two of us. Now, just to give you like context, we live north of Boston, and the average home is, you know,

$400,000. Back then, the average home price was at least $250, or $300. So we looked and there was nothing in the region that we could get. So what we had to do to start this process was to, we got together with another set of teachers, another couple who were teachers, and we bought what really was a single family. It was zoned as a multi-unit, but we bought it together. And we all lived in one house together to buy our first home and then spent two years working on it and fixing it up so that we could sell it and then split the profits. And then we took that money to buy our own places.

But that was huge. That was like people thought we were crazy. And in a lot of ways, it really is crazy. We wouldn't recommend it, looking back on it. But that's what actually got us to a place where we could do this house now. So yes, lots of things converged to make us exist right where we are now. And I couldn't have orchestrated it all myself impossible. But yes, that was the beginning of the event of everything kind of shifting.

Your story is the embodiment of Dave Ramsey's quote, live like no one else now so you can live like no one else later. I also did those, we call those live-in flips, and they're not the most fun way you can spend your life. But all of that money that I have made over all of these live-in flips that I've done, the money that you made has allowed me to get to a point where I will be living like nobody else. Well, I live in Longmont. I live like a lot of people here, but I'm not going to work until I'm 65. I'm not, I get to work here, like why, you know, This is a pretty awesome place to be. But my husband has been retired for, I think, eight years now.

And he is a much happier person because he doesn't have to go to this job that was like sucking his soul out. And you're a teacher. You can, once you reach financial independence, choose to continue being a teacher because you love it. Or decide, I want to go and do something else. You can go back to just substitute teaching. So you get a little bit of the teaching, but not all of the full time, all the time teaching. How many of your friends were buying houses with other couples so that they could then work on them for two years and then sell them? Like zero.

I remember people inviting me out, you know, when we were really in the thick of this. And, oh, I'm sorry, guys, I can't go out after work today. I have to go home and work on my house. I'm like, wow, that's so boring. And now they're calling me up. How'd you do it? Yeah. I guess we'll never know.

I just want to chime with it as well with the, you know, every time we have a guest on like yourself. who has achieved a pretty extraordinary outcome, you know, in a pretty short period of time without a remarkable income leap in generation, you know, often as not, it comes back down to house hack. And this seems to rile up the YouTube commenters a little bit. Like, where's the guy? No, stop. Enough with the house hack. It's like, sorry, guys, this is it.

Like, this is the largest expense in your life. And if you're going to live in a high cost living area, the other costs do not scale nearly as much as the housing cost. between Boston and Memphis, Tennessee. Right? So I just don't see how you're going to do it. If you're not going to be an entrepreneur, have some sort of side hustle, or be some kind of wild stock picker,

venture capitalist investor in these areas, which we have yet to hear a story of on Bigger Pockets money without doing some version of this. And I think that that's just a painful reality I keep coming back to, sorry YouTube commenters, as just like a reality. I don't know how other people are going to be able to do it

without doing some version of what Andrew did here. There's a sense that you can just make more money, which is totally true for a lot of people. But for us, we didn't want to leave where we were. We live like in a little town that's like a little sea village that's on the ocean. And for us, like, to be able to, I just took a walk today and I go down and walk down on the boulevard and it's on the water. And like, that's something where my kids are going to feel like, we grew up here.

They talk about this a lot. Like, they feel really fortunate. I grew up from Oklahoma originally, you know, and then Connecticut. My wife's from Western Massachusetts. So this is not something we've had in our life. And we chose to do this, even though we knew it was going to be tough. We realized there's no way we're going to be able to do this. We can't just keep renting for us to keep staying because the cycle's not going to break.

We had to make a change in one of the bigger arenas of our life. So you're right. The house was a big piece for us to make that difference for sure. How else did you invest? You know, it sounds like we have a budget. We have this very intentional, frugal decision on the housing to live in a beautiful place, but to keep those costs manageable and to defray them to a certain extent. How did you deploy the cash you accumulated to work towards financial independence from there? What we did is we took our money and just put in a brokerage account to start. I was just this was the easiest way. It was to how do we invest and doing a lot of reading and I read all the, you know, simple path to wealth, you know, choose FI, you know. Vicki Robbins book, we just put as much as we could at first into a brokerage account. And I opened it up through Vanguard, did the whole 100% total stock index fund, and remember thinking and just seeing, and I'm one who wants to like learn from people who have walked the path ahead of me.

So like, I think that's part of the reasons I love teaching is because I'm like, listen, you as a student can change, can orchestrate your life the way you want and hear some of the tips. So I was reading about everybody who had already done this, trying to figure out how to do this on our own. And a lot of it was just just start, just start investing. So I took that leap and we started just putting money aside every month. Then by doing the calculations, we could kind of figure out, if we kept doing this, we could have enough money by X, using the, you know, the Trinity study and the 4% rule and all those things of going through that and trying to calculate backwards. How much would we need? And then also looking at our rental income.

and saying, okay, if we had rental income this much, if we decided to keep this, so we're using the materials we have to bake the cake, right? We weren't sure what ingredients were going to be there when we were finally there at nine years, but we knew what we had in front of us, and that really started. And then as I got further along,

we started realizing, oh, there's better ways to do this. You know, for example, just keeping, instead of keeping our money in just a plain checking account, we moved stuffed over to a high-yield savings account. And, you know, when my friends was like, yeah, but that's like, you know, just a couple hundred bucks. So I was like, dude, if I could give you $100 right now, a couple hundred bucks would you take it? He's like, yeah.

And I said, so that one switch makes just a little bit more. And I know this is like the death by incremental gains in some ways that people are frustrated by. But at the same time, that's the only way we would have done this. We didn't want to change our prescription on life. We didn't want to change what we were doing. We decided we wanted to stay teachers. We really love our jobs. We wanted our kids to be here.

So, you know, even my kids, we go over to friends' houses and they're like, why don't we have a house that has a big backyard or has the woods? We live like in the downtown where we're buildings all around us. You know, we're an apartment in our building. And we said, well, you can't have it all. You know, like you get to have your downtown areas where some of your friends are going to come. And they would, sure enough, they come over here. You get to walk down to Boba Tea.

This is so cool. You know, and then there was that sense that we started saying everything's a tradeoff. Everything is a difference for, you know, so they're going to be able to pick what they want. But here's a chance for you to say, all right, chose this as a family so we could do these other things and just like as a side on this like yes we've picked time as over money i've rarely been full-time as a teacher i've worked mostly four days a week and so our salary that's one of the reasons our salary has been smaller probably too is because we've never had full-time pay i've always been about 80% um out of those 25 years so that's again was a

choice because we wanted to be have more time i wanted to have a day where i could like regroup do things for myself do things for our family. And my partner has worked, you know, part-time most of her life as well. So that's been how we've been able to exist and enjoy our lives at the same time. On the surface, four days a week sounds like you're going to get not only less pay, but also maybe fewer benefits and fewer other those compounders from a job. But I think that a hidden underneath that analysis, that looks bad in your spreadsheet, is the fact that that allows that at least a portion of that extra time to be devoted to other money-making enterprises. So maybe managing your multi-unit, maybe managing your investments or other things like that,

which actually produces astronomical outputs over a long period of time, if put to a reasonable use. Now, if you're playing video games all day, which I like to play video games. I actually played a video game right before this call. B-2. People thought I was making fun of gamers. I do that to make fun of myself here a little bit. But if that time is not used productively, then of course it's a loss in your spread. but if it is, it can't actually produce compounding return.

So it sounds like I see you nodding in agreement with this, that that may be your experience here. Absolutely. I mean, one of the reasons I think maybe in my mid-late 30s, I realized I've got to switch it up. Like we can't continue just to live like this. I can see the expenses are going to get bigger. I can see that we're going to need, you know, more.

So we tried to figure out other things to do. I got my real estate license for a while, was doing that a little bit on the side. I helped a lot of friends buy houses in that process. I still teach private lessons, you know, music, so I could do that on off times. I'm a wedding photographer, and I've done that a bunch in summers that worked out really well, where, you know, those are the best months times to do it around here in this area because New England. And that was where I knew, like, those, that day off a week, I would edit photos, you know. But it also felt like it was my time.

You know what I mean? Like I was spending it on my own thing. And that psychological shift was probably more important in a lot of ways for me to feel like I was living, even though financially I made a lot more money per hour as a wedding photographer than as a teacher, without a doubt. And that played in a lot. But now we're at a place where we're starting to shift that away and we're starting to simplify and not having to do many things like that. Now I'm able to choose that I don't need to do that. And I'm actually looking at my job now and thinking, what do I really love and what do I want to do for next year?

And it's given me the freedom to rephrase and reframe my moving on in my life. I love that. Your story is similar to our trajectory. You pile up a bunch when you don't have the kids. And then you start to taper down when you are closing in on the end of your FI journey. You're like, it was great to get me here, but I don't want to keep being this busy. I feel like becoming financially independent in an early age without one of these income, you know, at superstar advantages. It's kind of like developing any other very, you know, a high-end skill,

like becoming very, very fit or a professional athlete in these areas where it's an aggregation of marginal gains. You have to do the big things right, of course, working out, you know, whatever, or spending less than you earn, investing, and all that kind of stuff. But it's this consistent application or the aggregation of marginal gains over a very long period of time through self-education, a few hundred bucks here, a few hundred bucks there on top of these other outputs that got you to where you're at. I want to go back to for a second, the four-day-a-week component of your journey, which sticking out to me is presenting itself as a key variable, key advantage in your journey from both a mindset perspective. Hey, I don't want to work

full-time here and a time freedom. And I believe that that time, I'm hypothesizing before you back to me, that that time was used to fix up this multi-unit to progress your real estate investments, to generate side-hustle income that got you much more comfortable with all these different scenarios over time. Plenty of them failed, I'm sure, or failed in the sense that they didn't generate a better return than what your day job would have been. But I bet some did result in dramatic outperformance about in terms of what your wealth would be if you just work the fifth day. Can you go into more detail and tell me where you agree or disagree with that hypothesis? It's funny when people knew at school would find out like, oh, you're four days a week. I'd like to

work four days a week. And, you know, depending how good friends I am with, I'll be like, you can. You just have to get paid 20% less. And that's where they end the conversation sometimes. And I think I'm the type of person. My partner and I both have the type of people like to have projects. We like to be moving. We like to have things going on in our lives. And for us, it was hard to have the five day a week where I get the end of day of Friday. And I feel like Saturday is like I'm coming down off that a little bit. And then Sunday, I'm all of a sudden gearing back up. And I really didn't feel like that was treating my life with respect that I wanted and I we had to make sacrifices I mean to do that we've been a one car family our whole life that's been a hard thing my friends like how do you do that well we it takes some

maneuvering you know to like figure that out sometimes I live in a place where the train is 10 minutes away so if I need to I can take the train then I walk to work from there but it's like another 20 minute walk so I don't do it that often but if we have to like that's the kind of thing that's built in a little bit to make it work for us that four day switch was really like intentional prior to the F-I thing. You know, it was, this was for us really about wanting to have time that was ours. And I really, I'm resonating right now with what you said, Scott, about it not just being like this switch that you flip, that it's a skill set that you've learned. I'm, I'm really big into connecting music with finance in this way because, like, you learn a scale on the guitar. I have kids

that I teach and they'll learn the scale and it's like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And they're like, okay, what's next? I'm like, no, no, that's just. just the first beginning. It's really the practice of music is what we're trying to get to. And I think the practice of money is really what it's more about. Like not everybody who's wealthy is financially independent, but everybody who practice money well can become financially independent. There's a very big difference. That process is massive compared to the arrival fallacy of just having money. It becomes less of a binary thing and more of a, this is a skill set that you learn as a musician. I lean to forward to my kids all the time at school and I say, I have the secret to learning

guitar and they're like, what? And they lean to me more. And I'm said, practice. And they roll their eyes and they get really frustrated. But I say, this is really what it is, though. It's no more than what we have to do. And that is the work, right? That is the hard thing to actually do.

Making money a process is actually the difficult piece for us. It's been going through and just trying the little thing here and here and seeing if this worked and then keep moving forward. And so for us, that having that day off made all the difference for us to be able to have the time to really think through what our life was and how important these things are and what we wanted to do and what we valued too. One other thing that I'm picking up here, our I'm going to hypothesize next is, is with this time off, with this intentionality, with this devotion to the practice of getting

better with money, I'm pulling another concept here, which is this concept of independence, self-reliance, the ability to do a lot of things yourself. I would guess that that skill has been a massive transformation for you personally over this nine-year journey as well to the point where you're comfortable, perhaps, taking on a much greater set of responsibilities with regards to home improvement, you know, maintaining your finances, thinking through, you know, even maybe basics of estate planning or those types of things. Like things that I think maybe your previous self would have been helpless to take on.

10, 15 years ago, now do not scare you, which I think is perhaps very empowering. Is that also something that has happened over this journey? Absolutely. I mean, I just read Cody Garrett's like tax book or whatever that was just looking through it. I would never have bit off anything about taxes. That's like I understand finance and I feel like that's, it's like working on my car. I don't really ever have friends who love working on their cars. I have no desire to do that.

But like taking those bigger picture things now and trying to boil them down, I mean, that's what I do as a teacher. I just told my kids, I teach financial literacy to eighth graders. And I was just saying to them, like, if you don't understand it, that is my problem. Like, it means I haven't simplified it well enough for you. So trying to break it down into simplified chunks is part of the deal. And I still don't feel like I understand finance even after doing it for nine years like this because there's so many variables that have to do with me.

Like on day one in my class, I wrote out and say, I said, good personal finances, is not about the numbers. It's about, and I put a blank underneath there, and they talk about that for a while what it is, and ultimately I write you underneath here. That it's really about them. It's about, because I can tell them exactly what to do financially. Here's what you could do and make all these things happen,

but it's how it integrates with your life, which is just like music, right? Like you can hear a song, here at one point in your life, and hear it later and it have different meaning, and you can hear it in a group of contacts to other people and have different meaning. So music has that same kind of like organic movements that I think you end up kind of figuring out this has meaning now.

What does this mean for me? And this is more of a process than like I said, like an arrival. Like I've landed in this destination. So we have talked about your journey. Let's talk about the destination. You are almost financially independent. What do these numbers look like? And what does life after FI look like?

Will you continue to work? I'm working on that right now, trying to figure that out. I love my job. I feel very fortunate about that. It's not always been easy. And there's been moments where as a teacher, you're kind of like, I don't want to do this.

But actually, knowing that I have the ability to retire at the end of this year has completely changed my outlook on my job. I'm looking at it now in a light where what do I really want out of this? And I'm realizing that I love the unpredictability of students a lot.

Like that unpredictability, the classroom is like the definition of unpredictability. And I can go in and some of the biggest moments that I've learned from my life have been things that I haven't created on my own. So I'm looking at it with eyes that maybe this is something that I need and maybe it's something that I really enjoy doing enough that I want to stay with it, which is awesome place to be, but I don't have to. And that's also an awesome place to be.

Could you walk us through your portfolio? What are the numbers that support financial independence? Right now, I'm 100%. on total stock market index funds. My brokerage account is about 20% of all our investments. And then my 403B is about half. And that's also in index funds as well. My HSA is something I've been putting money in forever. I've been trying to, you know, tell other people the benefit of that of being like the triple tax advantage. And that's been awesome. So we've just been paying for our medical bills and pretending that we do that,

that's our money we're putting into our retirement. So if we get a bill for going to the doctor that's like $400, we pay for that with our own credit card or cash, and then we say that's, we're pretending we're putting this in our retirement because then that money just stays in our HSA. And we collect those bills, so at any point now we could just go and take those bills

and trade them in for the money that's on the HSA. My partner and I both have Roth IRAs, and those are probably, I think about 20%, as well of our total portfolio and I think other things that we have in there. I mean, like I said, our rental property as part of our end game here as well. And I will say that we have some backups on backups too. Like we've built into our retirement plan the flexibility that we know we can continue to work. That's purposeful, knowing that if we wanted to, we could just say,

hey, we can just get a job and pick up some extra cash here if we need to. Or we can stay a part-time work. But we didn't set this goal to be able to say, we're just going to stop everything instantly and do something different. We have been kind of structuring and building our life the way we want it for these whole nine years. So we're living in the moment as we're doing it on purpose, not trying to just hold back and withhold the whole time. We've traveled.

We just went to Europe for our whole family, and we do that every two years because we have friends who live in Croatia. And so we go and visit them every two years. And we save up credit card points. and my kids know that this is part of our lifestyle too, that we don't spend sometimes on certain things so that we can do this. And they love it and they want to do it.

So they're willing to kind of participate in that as well. You know, when we think about fire journey, you know, a lot of people are in your shoes where in the context of our world, right, where we're getting close to our fire number, but we're all in S&P 500 index funds or the equivalence of those, you know, maybe a total market index fund,

something that is very aggressive, a very aggressive concentrated stock portfolio. How do you feel about that? And do you have any thoughts about shifting to the more traditional retirement portfolio versus staying in a aggressive, with this more aggressive allocation as you approach your fire target? Right now, I am comfortable saying I'm going to stay in 100% in total stock market index funds. But this is something I've been toying with the past, you know, even two years of just why and what.

I don't mind the volatility because I do, like I say to my students, you have to have a belief in humanity. You believe that humanity is going to continue to make their jobs better and want to keep working if you're gonna put stuff in the stock market. I'm believing in the United States that I think that the companies here are going to keep doing better, they're going to try.

So right now I'm comfortable saying 100%, because the volatility doesn't bother me as much, because I'd rather take the risk of having it be in there and potentially making more and being able to have more, than doing bonds or I've looked at like risk parity, you know, and just trying to understand a little more about that. But it just, the complexity of that is not appealing to me because, again, time is more important.

The reason my friends are like, you just obsess over money. And I'm like, the only reason I do this is because I don't have to think about it. That is the truth is that I've learned about it so much because I don't want to have to think about it. And I'm at a place now where it doesn't stress me out. Like I've learned enough and I understand and we have now set our the wheels in motion where I don't have to think about it and I really appreciate that and the 100% in the stock market total index funds makes that that much easier for me.

So I think there is like a time is greater than money for me piece to that that. That me trying to understand a little more may not make that much of a difference. Even though you've heard me say we've been hacking off these little aggregational nominal gains over and over and over again, right? This one for me is just not been as big for. me to make that choice. If I were to look at your portfolio overall, it looks like you've got a, you know, a position that's like 60, 70 percent, you know, stock market index funds, which is what we referred to as 100 percent index funds. Then you also have a real estate component

to the portfolio, which is relatively lightly leveraged, I'd imagine at this point. And in the process of amortizing, could you give me an idea of what your real estate portfolio looks like right now, how much debt and how much equity is in it? Our house is worth somewhere, around $900,000, I think, and I think we owe like $150 on it. This property has other additional units. Is that correct? There's three units in it. Yeah, we live in one of the three. All right. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back in a beat. Really, Scott. 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

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Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money-free. Thanks for sticking with us. So if we really look at your portfolio, you know, we've got what's called 6040. stock's real estate here. You happen to live in a component of the real estate, and the real estate component is extremely lightly levered. It's almost paid off essentially, I imagine, with very low interest rate debt, which is why you haven't bothered paying the rest off. Now, we have a very different overall portfolio construction, right? That real estate component can be thought of almost as bond-like in its very lightly leveraged state, given where you're at,

and that justifies a pretty high concentration in stocks for the rest of your portfolio using traditional portfolio theory. So there you go. Without having to change anything, you know, we've kind of gotten into a much better place. I think in there, that's what I've kind of done with my portfolio to a large extent as well this last year is really, really allocate more to real estate to make myself feel better about not having about the stock market and how that plays around with traditional and 4% safe withdrawal rates. I also couldn't justify going super heavily into bonds with low yields and pretty long time horizon for myself. Oh, it makes total sense. I mean, even with like the new 4%, you know, being 4.7 with Bobergen and all that, just being

higher, we, I'm actually, I round that up. I'm going to make a little shamed face, but a 5% and just say that this is what we're going to do and we're going to take the 5% knowing that we have flexibility built in from a lot of different angles, you know, real estate being part of it, but also the ability for us to make some extra money. Like, we could stop work, you know, at the end of this year, which would be awesome. But again, you know, when you read any of the. blogs or we talk to anybody have something that's meaningful in your life they all talk about how

important this is and I've been looking at that for the past two years and thinking what do I really want to be about what I really want to do and so it makes me look at my job and think one of the reasons I got into teaching is because I actually love it you know I really have enjoyed being with students I really enjoyed being with kids I don't want to just give that up just because it is under the umbrella of work I need to understand what work means and and what that work looks like that can be significant for me in my life. So I have that as an option. So even if we were to stay on and work 40% or 60% or whatever it is,

then we're still making some extra money there. And we don't have to take that 5% we're going to take out, you know, when this whole thing starts for us. I bet wedding photography at North Boston is also a pretty good side hustle. Yeah, it's been great. It's been really good. I've enjoyed it. I haven't had to market myself much, but it's been really good in the long haul for sure.

And I've enjoyed it. I mean, you can tell them kind of a people person. so it's a good place to be. So last question I have on your portfolio here. How do you think about your cash position as you kind of approach financial independence? We've tried to have enough for like an emergency fund that covers six months to almost a year, actually, for us. And that's, I think, more because we own a multi-unit that I want to be able to have enough on-call for when, you know, I have a guy coming tomorrow to look at one of the burners. you are already, you know, so it's just things break, things are breaking more frequently because we have

more things that can break more frequently. I think I'm a little bit more conservative in that, that we just want to have a little bit more on hand. But at the same time, that emergency fund becomes something that we save for, for our kids' education too, because they go to school, private schools like we teach in. And so every month we put money aside so when the bill comes, we can pay it. So we're kind of putting money into this fund. that's just like an ongoing extra fund that we just have because that's it's in the high yield savings account. So we know that we're going to get return on that. So that's where we keep our cash position mostly. I wouldn't say it were like it's not like we're keeping two years of expenses

and of everything, but we try to make it so we have enough no matter what. But I also look at our HSA and what we've contributed to the Roth as being really liquid. You know, so we have the ability to pull things out of both of those. I recently added up all of our bills that we have from HSA, and we have almost exactly the same amount that we have in our HSA right now. So we could theoretically take all the money of our HSA right now because we have bills that are associated with that amount. So I feel pretty easy to, you know, grab that money,

and it's pretty flexible for us already. So you have your liquidity situation really well thought through. It sounds like I love that approach with the HSA. I have not thought about that in terms of adding that to an emergency reserve. and being able to just have a one step, you know, process to reimburse myself with all that. That's a great concept. Yeah, I can take to my HSA card and I can go to the ATM and you can take money out with that, you know, or I can just go on an app and click and it goes right to my account.

I just kept not wanting to invest so many things when I didn't know a lot about it that I felt like it was going to be trapped and locked. So as soon as I found a version of that that wasn't, didn't lock the money in a way for retirement forever, even though we know that's not the case with 72T and S. see the step. But like, I knew that that was important. So having the Roth and the HSA were really key for me for sure. Yeah. If you structure your portfolio correctly or you put money into the different types of accounts correctly, you might not have to access your retirement funds early at all because they will just be there. Like the HSA, I do the same thing. I've got a big stack of

bills waiting to be reclaimed from my HSA. And I don't need the money right now. So I'm not taking the money out of the account. I'm just letting it grow. I've got it invested in a little bit more aggressive than just the total stock market index fund. We lean tech heavy in our investments, but I might even have the HSA and some individual stocks just because I want it to grow big because, like you said, it's triple tax advantage and I like not paying taxes if I don't have to. That's my favorite way to pay taxes. Yeah, what was the book? The tax book was saying, his big overarching theme was pay taxes when you pay the least amount. It's like, yep, that's it right there.

All right, Andrew, thank you so much for your time today. Is there any place people can find you online? Yes, I am at cadence of cash.com. That's my kind of music slash finance world. And it's just in its beginning stages. But I'm starting to be a little more writing about this process for me and also how we got to where we got. Music, money, and the rhythm of what matters most.

There you go. I love it. Andrew, thank you again so much for your time today. This was a lot of fun. And anybody listening who says you can't do it on a teacher's salary? Well, Andrew did it so you can too. All right, that was Andrew Lumen, and that was a very interesting conversation that we had with him. Scott, I was a little surprised that he didn't have a pension. And actually, I like that better for him than most teachers who are essentially forced into contributing to a pension. I like that he was able to put it in after-tax brokerage accounts, his 403B, and really direct it himself.

I wonder, you know, if in the next couple of years or decades, if you're going to see a lot more of this kind of a lot more, the emergence of a lot more private school or private school like educational programs, homeschool. There's programs in a lot of Republican states, for example, that allow parents to use funds that would otherwise be allocated to public schools for other education. purposes. Whether you like that or not, that's not the point of this, it's not a political discussion. That is likely to create changes in the educational environment for both parents and teachers, which will be really interesting, I think, in the coming years. And I think Andrew's approach to financial independence from a private school background is illuminating here. There's a little bit more flexibility that came into his life. And I think, and the approach that he could take, maybe than what would have been commonly available at public schools. And I think it was really interesting

to hear about how, you know, someone who's working part-time as a teacher, or not full-time, as a teacher in a high-cost living area was able to achieve this, and it really comes down to mindset. This is a creative individual who made incremental changes over a very long period of time to improve his financial position, and the compounding is absurd in this particular story. Congratulations to him, and I hope he just loves life over the next five, ten years. Scott, I don't have to hope that he loves life. I know he's going to love life over the next five to 10 years and beyond because he's loved life the last nine years that he's been on his journey. One of the best things about his story is that they didn't save and save and save for the future.

They lived in the now while saving for the future, too. I really love that part of his story. Well, should we get out of here, Mindy? We should, Scott. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying, don't pout, Sourcrow.