BiggerPockets Money Podcast - The Proven Path to Financial Independence in Your 40s

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

On this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, hosts Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench sit down with Dave Fleischer, a teacher who's proving that you don't need a six-figure salary to achieve financial independence. If you've ever felt discouraged because your FI number seems impossibly high or your current salary feels too small to build real wealth, this episode will completely shift your perspective by showing that financial independence isn't about how much you make, but how strategically you manage what you have.  Whether you're a teacher, earn a median income, or simply want to see how creative financial planning can accelerate your journey to freedom, you'll discover actionable strategies that work regardless of your income level and prove that YOU can follow this simple path to achieve financial freedom too. In this episode, you'll learn: How Dave and his wife became net worth millionaires at 39 years old. Can one move change your life? Living below your means is key to building wealth. If you can downsize your lifestyle, it is a cheat code. And SO Much More! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do you do when you realize your dream home has become your financial nightmare? Today's guest thought they had it all figured out. But when they crunched the numbers, they discovered that they were actually broke. That wake-up call sparked a complete financial transformation that took them from lifestyle creep, victim, to financially independent in just 10 years. Today, we're breaking down exactly how they did it, the brutal honesty, the tough decisions, and the strategies that changed everything. Let's jump into their story.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my passionate about financial education co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here and looking forward to getting schooled on how to achieve early financial independence. Hey, well, it was close enough by Mr. Dave Fleischer here. We have a goal of creating one million millionaires. You're in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you're starting. We are so excited to be joined by Dave Fleischer on today's episode, host of the financially independent teachers. We're going to talk to him about his own

lead-up to achieving FI and how if you're a teacher or a median income earner, there are options out there for you as well. Welcome, Dave. Thank you guys so much for having me on the show. Dave, what are you teaching in? And what grade are you in? I am teaching a mixture of ninth grade through 10th graders. And it's a state required in North Carolina economics and personal finance class. don't know if you've ever heard of IB International Baccalaureate. I also teach IB Theory of Knowledge as well. And I think next year I'm teaching AP microeconomics. So I've been teaching 19 years all at the same high school, started right out of college. And it's been a lot of fun to see the movement of personal finance kind of shifting throughout the country, I believe over 25 states now require for graduation a

personal finance course and I feel lucky every day to be somebody who gets to teach it. I don't even feel like I work. And that's an important point because I think a lot of people still complain about, oh, I didn't learn personal finance in school. What are they teaching kids these days? Well, they're changing it. And this is like a big, this is a big deal. I mean, more than half the students in the United States have at least one personal finance class before they graduate high school. Is that correct, Dave? I'd probably say yes. Definitely in North Carolina, every graduate is going to take that class. And it's not just a partial thing. It's a 90-day semester the same as you would take calculus or anything else. The meme goes, I'm sure glad that I took

geometry in high school because it's coming in handy this parallelogram season. That's starting to change here. And so great stuff. Thank you for the work you're doing on that front at the forefront of this. It's fun. I am just excited that more and more states are requiring personal financial education as a requirement for graduating high school. My oldest daughter is the first graduating class in Colorado that needed to take that course. And hers was, I think it was a half a credit. But it's better than, you know, what I was getting, which is this is how you fill out a check. Okay, well, that doesn't teach me anything about spending and saving and, you know, balancing the budget and all of that. So I'm excited that this is moving forward. And hopefully

soon all 50 states will require this. Spoiler alert here for people listening. You're pretty good with money and have built a substantial private net worth, you and your wife, while teaching for how long you've been teaching? 19 years. I think that that goes a long way in teaching economics and personal finance and gives you a credibility beyond the power position you have as a teacher versus against in the context of the classroom. Is that right?

Do you think that that's a, that's particularly helpful to you and an important part of having these lessons register with with kids i teach in a neighborhood school do you want them to know everything about you but at the end of the day i always try to lead with my kids i have nothing to brag about my wife never went to college i was a a 2.5 student in high school the only reason why i went to college is because i was a six foot six left-handed pitcher um other than that i wasn't really academically minded so if we can do it you can do it and i try to tell the kids all the time i'll show you our net worth not because i think we're special but because I want you to know that you can do it too.

But it is a weird spot because now like you'll see people and parents will come up to you and oh, hey, you're that millionaire teacher guy at Jacksonville High School. Like, how do I open a Roth IRA? So it's a lot of fun. And I'll even do a parent night where I have the parents come in and we'll show them how they can open up a custodial Roth IRA for their kid who's working and talk about the Jerry Bourne KLEP college test and things like that, how their students can try to graduate debt free.

So it's a little movement catching on and it's a lot of fun to be a part of it. of. Well, as a 6-6 left-handed pitcher, I can tell that, you know, you made millions of dollars from your NIL deal in college. But aside from that, could you give us the story of your journey with money? Oh, gosh. I have two amazing parents that, you know, they've been married over 40 years now. But they were, my dad worked for General Motors. He worked in a factory up in Northeast Ohio. Don't know how much you guys follow the politics and economics of Lordstown was a huge factory up in Northeast Ohio that it was going to stay open, it was going to close, what ended up closing. And unfortunately, that was kind of my life growing up. My mom stayed at home. My dad worked for

General Motors and kind of a subsidiary of that over time. But I felt like every couple years we were wondering, is dad going to get laid off? Is dad going to have to get a new job? I grew up in, I would say, probably more of a lower middle class family. Great benefits back in the 80s and the 90s. But my mom stayed at home and she chose to do that. that. So I would say as much as I love my parents, we had more of kind of a poverty mindset, of a lack mindset. The same house that I was brought home from the hospital to is the same house that I graduated high school from. We never moved one time. And, you know, our idea of vacation was riding in a car, a station wagon like Christmas vacation or something like that and going to Gettysburg

or Mount Vernon. Maybe it's why I'm a history teacher. And then I met my wife. Her parents were the complete opposite. Everything was driving around in the big neighborhoods, gated communities and dreaming. Oh, we could buy that and look at that boat in that driveway and real estate and entrepreneurship. So we kind of blended both of those worlds together when we met at 25 years old, but it was definitely some pain points along the way when you had two completely different mindsets. Did you talk about money with your wife before you got married? Oh, gosh. This is good comedy right here. So my wife's a real estate agent, never went to college. School wasn't her thing. She said she wanted to come and socialize for a couple hours and then go to work and make money.

So her parents are awesome as well. Two great sets of parents, but just different paradigms for sure. When I met her, this is back in 2008, she had a 2007 Hummer, H3 Hummer that was like a $50,000 vehicle in 2007. She was maybe making $75,000 a year as a real estate agent. And we had just met and had been dating for a couple months. And she said, well, I said, what are you doing today? She says, well, I'm going to test drive and escalate. I was like, why would you test ride and escalate? You have a brand new Hummer.

She goes, well, I feel bad because this one guy bought three houses off me in the last couple years. And he works at the car dealership. I'm like, so you're going to go buy an $80,000 vehicle because you feel bad. And I said, you know, if you test drive that vehicle, I said, we're done. Like I said, I can't. I mean, we had built a relationship a little bit along the way. And she said, well, I'm going to let you know that if you continue to rent, you know,

also done. So she goes, I won't buy the vehicle and you need to buy a house. So our, our relationship was built on being very blunt. We have a lot of fun back and forth. We like to kind of jazz each other a little bit, but she didn't end up buying the vehicle. And she ended up, my real estate agent, who I started dating, ended up convincing me to buy a townhouse at 25. That's a new one for us. The journey begins with a Hummer and a Cadillac escalade on there. Yeah. Remind us, are you still in the same location? where this journey began around 25? Absolutely.

Yeah, I moved from Northeast Ohio to Jacksonville, North Carolina. If you've ever heard of Camp Lejeune, home to the Marine Corps here. She's born and raised local here. And then I'm a transplant that's been here almost 20 years. So same spot. And what brought you to that, to this town? One of my college teammates was a baseball player, and he had a friend that knew a friend that said there were a bunch of teaching jobs near the beach in North Carolina.

and that kind of beats the snow in Cleveland, Ohio. So I said, hey, let me go ahead and do that. And I did it. That was kind of the first risk I took. And again, like I said, I grew up in a family of non-risk takers. You don't invest in real estate. The stock market, you're going to lose all your money. And I remember my dad always saying, hey, just save your pennies.

But, you know, our family can't afford that type of thing. So growing up, I had never been on a plane. I had never been to Disney. I'd never been to Florida. Again, a lot of our trips as a child were just day driving trips of maybe three or four hours. And I met my wife who'd been on, cruises in other countries. And wow, my whole mindset was blown. And now I think we've really blended those two worlds together nicely where we have balance. We have to take a quick break.

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Kickstart your well-being journey with your first audiobook free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash BP Money. All right, welcome back to the show. Balance is interesting. And you coming from one mindset and your wife coming from another mindset. set is very different. How did you strike that balance? You were, you were very blunt in the beginning. Don't buy that escalate and I will, I will buy a house and then you stay together. But I hear from a lot of people who have very different money ideas and money backgrounds that

there's a lot of money fights. Would you say that there were a lot of money fights or, you know, heated discussions in the beginning? Or were you guys both on the same page at making it work. Yeah. And just to be clear, I think when we met at 25, we had both been in long-term relationships that we were kind of at the point of we're not going to date just to date. We want to marry the right person. So the first week that I met her, she said, I'm never leaving this town. I know you're from a different state. So if you ever plan on leaving, like, I'm not your girl. So we were very upfront and blunt with each other right out of the gate. But I would say we didn't really have money fights because we weren't married. We dated from 25 to 28. We dated for

three years. But the one thing that brought us together was Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University. Our church had hosted FPU and my brother-in-law who works at the church had said, hey, I really think that you guys could benefit from this program. And we went through it together. And I would say at 25 years old, my financial education was probably like a D-minus. And her financial education might have been an F-plus. She knew how to make money, but my wife carried a continual balance of $20,000 on a credit card. So we are a crazy, funny couple. Like, we got to the point after three months of dating, she had $20,000 of credit card debt. And I actually took her credit card from her because she told me to. And I would go to Bank of

America and pay that off for her as we went along because she could not trust herself. And she still doesn't have a credit card to this day at 42. The financial peace university is often cited as a turning point for many on their journeys with money. What made you decide to sign up for that class and how to change things. I guess the fact that her brother had done it and we had heard good things and we were definitely not on the same sheet of music. I was making maybe 35,000 a year as a young teacher then. She was making probably 75,000 as a real estate agent, but she was over $60,000 in debt and I had a paid off truck and I had $5,000 in the bank. And that's what really spawned me to create financially independent teachers because I've lived this life. I had a girlfriend that made double

or more than double one I made, but I still had more money than she did, even though I was a teacher and she was out there making better money. So I think just, you know, we had some money discussions, no fights because we weren't engaged or anything like that. But I think we just both wanted to learn. And after we took that class,

just knowing the basics of insurance and a three to six month emergency fund, all the things we never got taught in school that thankfully we get to teach now. I felt like that was a really good, I don't think I realized it at the time, but it was almost like graduating from elementary, entry school with personal finance until I found the fire movement. It's tough because of the lower

income and the ceiling on income in many cases for folks in that profession to get ahead quickly. But you also see a lot of really good habits and disciplines with teachers. And a teacher, for example, does not need to drive a $50,000 car to impress colleagues. That they're real or not, there's a perception in legal and I assume broker circles that showing off the trappings of a high income lifestyle and high consumption with great suits, great clothing, and great vehicles can translate to business or there's at least a perception of that. Do you think that was at all in play in those first few years? I would say so.

You know, right now I'm driving a 2008 Ford Expedition with 209,000 miles on it. And we've had teachers on campus. I had another guy that I worked with. He drove a 1989 S-10 pickup truck. And I guess the color you would call it is maybe rust. I don't know what the actual color was. But most of the students didn't know it. But he also taught back when we had civics and economics, he had a $600,000 beach house and Myrtle Beach that was paid for in cash. He also had a Corvette in his garage that he never drove to school. But he had driven that truck for about 25 years. But that enabled him to invest and have those other opportunities. So again, yeah, teachers, most of us in especially states without a

union, we're not out here making $100,000 a year, although on our podcast, we've interviewed a bunch of teachers from New York and California that are making 120, 1.30, 140. But I would say the average teacher we come across is somewhere between $60,000 and $80,000 per year. But they can definitely make it happen. That was one of the things that I put down is one of the benefits of being a teachers, you don't have the pressure, the social pressure to impress people. You know, all your students think you're broke anyway. And a lot of teachers kind of have the mindset that they've taken a vow of poverty to be an education of, hey, well, it will pay the bills and one day I'll get a pension.

But I know I can't really make any money doing this. So you can kind of have that stealth wealth just based on the perception. When you went through Financial Peace University with your wife, was there any sort of aha moment? did you look at each other and say, oh, now we're both on the same page with money? Or did you take a little bit of your frugality and her living life to the fullest spending

and kind of meld them? Yeah, I remember we were doing some of the classes at her parents' house. There were some of the DVDs and we were watching. And I remember her mom saying, if you guys could just combine your two mindsets, you guys could be like a power couple or a super couple. Because she has vision.

She's a visionary. She's the hardest worker. I know that's a great thing about sales, right? As you can make as much as you can, there's no cap on it. Whereas a teacher, I know I'll never make $100,000 a year in North Carolina. But I was good at saving money. I was good at defense. She was really good at offense. When you relay it to sports, I tell my kids all the time, you know, defense wins championships. And the first thing you need to do is build an emergency fund. And you need to, you know, have different savings buckets, you know, whether you're saving for a car or saving for college, but my wife was really good at the offense and selling houses and buying real estate. She bought her first house at 19. So when I was 25 and we met and I was renting, her mindset was

like, what the heck, dude? I bought a house six years ago. What are you waiting for? And her parents were involved in real estate. Her dad was a real estate agent as well. So her whole mindset was you buy a house and it's four walls. She's not very emotional about a home. We could talk about our journey of how I think one move can change your life because we've lived in like nine houses since we've been married for 13, 14 years. Well, let's go back chronologically here. So you take Financial Peace University. What happens next?

What's the evolution of your money story from there? Maybe leading up to when you discover five. Compound interest blows our mind. That's one thing for sure. Compound interest blows our mind that I cannot believe that no one ever told me that when I was 18, all I had to do was invest $100 a month into a Roth, IRA and at 65, I'm a millionaire based on historical returns. That blew both of our minds. And she was like, what an idiot? What am I doing? I can't believe I just spent, you know, another $800 on a dress for a

wedding. And then it changed our mindset. We got married. So she bought her first house at 19, a little townhouse, a little two-two townhouse. She convinced me. I don't know if she threatened to break up with me or not, if she would have really done it, but she threatened like, hey, you need to buy it. Why are you wasting your money? I know that's one of the big conversations in the fireworld. Should you rent should you buy? Well, we're in a low cost of living area. She bought her first house for 74,000. I bought my townhouse in 2009 for 113,000. So she had a townhouse. She convinced me to buy a townhouse. And I did. And I did this thing called house hacking that I had never heard of at the time. I had to do it. I think when I bought my first house, it was 40% of my take home pay.

And I was like, oh my God, I don't know if I can make it. But I had a buddy that was also from Ohio. and he taught and coached with me at the school. And I said, hey, man, I'll let you stay for $500 a month. He couldn't find a place to rent for under $700. So it was a win for him. It was a win for me. We were both single young teachers in our mid-20s. And that ended up paying for my master's degree. He lived with me for two years. My master's cost $12,000. And that ended up getting me a 10% raise for the rest of my career. So the house hacking paid off. Sure enough, then again, I go ahead. And after three years of dating, I propose. And once we get married, my wife moves in with me. We didn't live to get before marriage. And we decided, hey, let's rent your townhouse out instead of sell it.

So I don't know if we ever really had a plan. We were kind of more accidental landlords. So we then rented her place out. It rented beautifully. There were no issues. People paid on time. We didn't have any of the horror stories that, you know, we hear about sometimes. And after a year in my little townhouse, we found out we're going to have our first child. We said, let's have a little more room than the little 900 square foot townhouse. We said, well, hey, the other one rented perfectly. Why don't we just do that with my townhouse? and then we built a little 1,600 square foot house together. So I went from being early 25 to owning no houses, the 25 buying my first townhouse,

getting married at 28 and at 29, we now owned three houses together, one that we lived in in our primary home. And then we had two that were each our previous primary homes, and we now had three properties just like that. Did you run the numbers on these rental, former primaries now contemplating them to be rentals? Did you run the numbers before you made them rentals to see if it made more sense to just sell it? Or did she just know that they would rent really well because she's in the industry? Yeah, I think her mortgage was 600 a month with PITI and we were getting around $750 a month in rent.

And at this time, by the way, we don't know anything about the fire movement. I don't know anything about the 1% rule. I don't know any of this stuff. She just knew, hey, mine makes 150 more than our payment is. So it's fine. And with mine, it was a little different situation because I bought an 09 and we're in a military town. And with VA loans and BAHs, with Marines getting paid to live off base, we were kind of in our own little bubble. So 2008 didn't hit us until the end of 2009.

We were like 12 to 14 months behind. And I bought mine for 113, but 18 months later, they were selling for 70,000. So at that point, I couldn't sell my place. And I literally just rented my place just to cover what the monthly payment. it was and we couldn't have sold it and we didn't have the cash to get out of that. So I just kind of took the approach of I'm not going to freak out. Let's just be patient. And my wife said, hey, the market goes up and down.

If we just hang on to this thing, we're going to let our renters pay it down. And then eventually, sure enough, about 10 years later, that paid off. And we sold it, did a 1031 tax exchange, pocketed that money and then bought a different rental property with it down the road. So it was definitely worth it. So we are exiting, you know, we're exiting our 20s with, three properties married and we have a kid. What happens next? What's the next milestone building up to the discovery of financial independence? The next milestone is we have another

kid 15 months later. So we have two kids in 15 months or so. So life is getting really busy at that point. And it was really interesting. Once we had my second child, if you're a high school teacher, it's kind of an unwritten rule that you're not just a teacher. Like you're a part of a community, you're involved in all these kids' lives, coaching, going to prom, doing all these different things. I was a head varsity baseball coach for almost 10 years, and I was working probably 70, 80 hours a week between that and my regular teaching job. And I could just tell that, you know, when making $1,500 a season to coach a sport and my wife is getting babies ready to go to daycare and she's making dinner and she's doing laundry and she's the breadwinner at that point,

I could kind of tell without her saying, like, maybe I need to step back and support my family. And at that point at around, I guess 31, 32, I decided to, quote unquote, retire from coaching and just still be a teacher. But I love being outside. I love cutting grass. So I started my own lawn care business. Nothing crazy because I get out of school. My contractual hours teaching are 630 in the morning, which is really early. Kids come at 7 and then we get out at 240.

The kids are out at 210, but we have to stay until 240. So I figured, well, I can just get a zero-turn lawnmower. you know, hop on that mower and by 5, 530, I could have cut three or four yards and make way more money probably in one month than I made an entire year of coaching. And that's when I found FI. I got sick of listening to my classic rock music, same songs over and over again. And I discovered this little purple icon on my phone that said podcast. Like, what the heck is a podcast? I'm not the best at technology. So I clicked on it. And then I think I typed in personal finance and then choose FI showed up. And I found Shoes FI and then I was hooked. I found Choose FI. Then I found, wow, Dave Ramsey has a radio show and people call in and tell them all the dumb things they're doing. And then he gets to yell at them. And some of those dumb things we've done, I need somebody to yell at me too.

So just being on a lawnmower, not only did that produce another $1,500 a month in income, but it was limited time away from the family, just plugging in from listening to music to trying to grow myself as a person and make our family better, man, you guys and choose FI and The Money Guys Show, those podcasts, I don't have a degree in finance. It's political science. But I feel like I've gotten a master's degree for free just from listening to people like you and the guests you have on your show. So we go down this rabbit hole. This is that at 31, 32. And I assume you're listening to these while you're mowing lawns. Yes. And so you're bringing an extra, what, let's call $1,500 a month if they're 18 grand a year. What's the portfolio look

like during this period? What are you invested in? What do you, do you, do you buy more rental properties by this point. At that point, at like 31, 32, between both of us, we have about $5,000 in the stock market. I just found out in my 30s what a Roth IRA was. My wife wasn't really investing. I had signed up at work for a thing called a 457B, which is deferred comp, which I remember a friend of mine, his wife was a financial advisor, a fellow teacher, and I asked her, should I do the the state 401k or the 403B. She goes, I think you should do the 401K. I think that makes more sense.

But I kept going back to this 40, 457 thing, excuse me, of if you separate service, you have access without a 10% penalty. That sounds really cool. So I opened to 457 and I did $100 a month for maybe three or four years, not much. So at this point, we still have the three houses. We're investing maybe $100 a month in our early 30s. But I really at that point, I would say maybe. I'm now a C-minus with knowledge of personal finance. But at this point, my wife being a real estate

agent, you know, having access like Mindy does to that MLS and you can see deals that are coming on the market, there was a local military family that they were getting orders and they had to go, like they had to. And they had a house that was coming on the market for like maybe $50,000 under what my wife thought it was worth. So we moved to that house. And it was a five-bedroom, 3,600 square foot house, which was way bigger than the 1,600 square foot house we had moved in after we found out we were having a kid. We lived there three years, and then we moved up into this bigger home. And we sold the other house. We didn't keep it as a rental. We needed that money for a 20 down payment. It did have a little bit of equity in there. And we lived there for a couple years,

and we were starting to gain some traction. I think we finally got out of debt. We had an emergency fund. But then my wife had a listing, and that's one of the dangerous things sometimes when you don't have self-discipline is you get a listing and it's a beautiful house, right? And you're walking through the house. And then your wife comes home and says, I have this listing. You know, I think maybe it should be our house. And it was in a gated community in the most exclusive neighborhood in our town. Back then, it was about 600,000. Now it would probably be around 950, maybe a million. And we put in an offer on that house. And that was the best thing we ever did was they said no. And we're like we were starting to climb that keeping up with the Joneses, even though I don't think we were

trying to compare ourselves to anybody, but it had a pool and it had a three car detached garage and was brick. And then we went home that night. We kind of went back to the drawing board like, well, this house is fine. And I said, hey, you want to watch Netflix and just kind of relax a little bit and not go out? And we watched a documentary from the minimalist on Netflix. And in that documentary, it talked about how 40% of a house isn't even used by most Americans. We said, we have a 3,600 square foot house with a three-year-old and a two-year-old, and we don't even use half of this house. What are we doing? This is stupid. We're going to make an offer on a half a million dollar house, and then we decided to sell it, and we moved into a duplex, 900 square feet.

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Awesome. Love it. The house hack on there. And I want to call out, before we get into the numbers on this, there's a couple of decisions that determine how fast you can get to financial independence, right? One is, you know, are you making the smart choice with a latte every morning or whatever, you know, your discretionary spending? But the big three are going to be housing, transportation, and food.

So the Hummer wasn't super helpful at the beginning of the journey here toward financial freedom. But you made pretty good decisions in the housing front, the house hack here, in there. And I think a $3,600,000, $600,000 house, I got to believe that the opportunity cost associated with that is like $60,000 a year, right, in terms of wealth creation that could be being made in, you know, $50,000 a year that could be being made in a stock market investment or other, you know, 8 to 10 percent yield, yielding return on it. And so if you move into a half duplex, maybe the duplex is even smaller than that house in terms of total square footage. I mean, you're just, it's just going to mint money. It changes the trajectory by at least two decades, I'd imagine. Is that, is that right? How am I doing?

Oh, for sure. It was 2017, Scott, 2017, we lived in a 3,600 square foot house, which, believe it or not, it was 238,000, what we bought it for, you know, 3,600 square feet five bedroom. That same house now is probably $500,000. But we were driving through a neighborhood and we were kind of praying about it. And we're like, this just doesn't make sense. And we felt like we're in our early 30s and we have less than $10,000 invested. We literally laid in bed at night and we read the millionaire next store. And our mindset was completely blown up from what we thought a millionaire looked like.

We didn't realize that a millionaire is driving a four. They're driving a Chevy. They're driving a Honda. They're not driving Hummers, right? They're not driving escalates. maybe some people are. But reading that book changed everything with that documentary. So we go from the 3,600 square foot house and we see a for sale by owner in a cul-de-sac. There are 32 units in this cul-de-sac, one street, a mile from where I work at the high school. And we ended up deciding,

let's buy it. It was $78,000, but we had $78,000 equity from that $3,600 square foot house, so we paid cash. We went from a mortgage and you take. of probably 2200 a month to having no mortgage and having utilities of probably 200 a month. So it was about a $2,000 swing or a $24,000 a year difference. And at that same moment, by the way, I think a lot of our friends either thought that my wife was doing really bad in real estate or we were like going bankrupt. Why would you leave the five bedroom home in the community where all the accountants and the teachers and the nurses live and moved to like a C minus neighborhood?

the cops were getting called with a lot of rental properties. Why would you do this? Our parents never told us not to do it, but I think they thought we were probably crazy. And we didn't have many visitors while we live there because we had a one-car driveway and you could only fit one vehicle in it and a one-car garage so nobody could even park to visit. But it was the best thing we ever did. A two-bedroom, 900 square foot. Our kids shared a room. They bunked up. They were about five and four years old. And I think they had a seven-by-ten bedroom. That was the size of their bedroom. And we had a decent size, you know, master bedroom there.

But that changed everything because we also made the decision, Mendi, at that point that we wanted to after we found you guys and choose FI, we want to live off one income and invest the other. And instead of, it would have been much easier to just, hey, let's invest Dave's teacher income of like 55, $60,000 a year. And let's live a pretty good life off of Stephanie's real estate income, which at that point had gotten up to maybe $150. but we did the reverse and I said, how about we live off my teacher income and I'll still do the lawn care side hustle for $1,500 a month? And then we're going to invest every penny you make into your SEP IRA, my 457 at work 401K. And then we're also going to buy more real estate. And here we are. Now we have nine homes and two of those are paid for. I absolutely love this, right? I think that a lot of people overthink the journey to financial independence and that one decision that you made there

with the how think about how many lawns you got to mow to make up for that single choice every month recurring on there in terms of in terms of the amount of wealth that it comes into your life the pressure that not having a mortgage payment took off of your need to generate income in a really meaningful way the explosion of wealth over the next several years from a cash flow perspective to the nine properties. I think you said you're a millionaire. We'll learn the specific numbers, I'm sure, coming up here in a little bit on the, it's, it's the most powerful decision. And I think that a lot of people, you know, they're saying, hey, it's really hard to get ahead in America. It's really hard to get going to that next level. It is. It is really hard.

But if you have two incomes and can afford a property like that, if you can downsize your lifestyle, even for just a couple of years to jumpstart that snowball with a house hack like this, it is a cheat code. It is, it makes everything else so much easier downstream. And I want to also say this, I did the exact same thing as you two years ago. When we were, we were kind of thinking about what the next move was for our family. We were actually in a rental at that point in time, in a nice part of town. We weren't sure how the next year or two was going to play out with certain things. And so we moved into one of our duplexes, wasn't quite, the environment that we were used to in our previous rental.

But man, that set up so much flexibility for a year or two. And we were able actually in a future year to then buy the nice bigger house and enjoy that fairly guilt-free. So I don't know how that's played out for you guys with it. But I can relate to your story so much here. That place has that street, that one street has 32 units in it. And now we own seven to the 32. And it's gone from a C-minus neighborhood, probably.

now to a B neighborhood because every time we buy one, we completely renovate it. We flip it. New roof, new siding, new driveways. I cut all those yards now. So I cut grass for free. So I don't have to pay anybody else. But it was just such a blessing to go from again, $2,200 a month in bills just for a house down to maybe $250 a month. And then we were able to live off my income. But my wife's income was going up over that time. I was getting raises as well. Now, we only lived there for one year. But We wrote a book called The Fit Position, and it's basically all the lessons we've learned from our podcast. And in the Fit Position, when we talk real estate, that's the title of one of the sections. Can one move change your life?

And so many people have a hard time downsizing. I've got to give my wife a lot of credit. Here she is. She's given birth to two kids. They're just over 15 months apart. And we go from having the space to host and have people over. and we poured a huge patio on the back. But at the end of the day, like in the minimalist documentary,

you can have all these nice things. But if you have to work 60 hours a week to be able to afford it, you can't have friends over anyway because you don't even have the time to host. So the freedom of having no mortgage. And again, at this point, we're just getting on our investing journey when it comes to the stock market. That allowed us to play catch up. So in 2017, when we sold that 3,600 square foot house and paid cash for this dupe

Our net worth, that's when I finally found mint, and I went back today and double checked. Our net worth when we moved into that duplex in 2017 was $215,000. And by 2021, four years later, we became net worth millionaires at 39 years old. Fantastic. I can't keep gushing enough about this decision because it's poo-poohed by so many folks. I'm not going to house-hack. I'm not going to house-ack. But a couple of additional observations I'm going to throw about your journey here.

One, I believe, or I think we know that money problems are a major cause of divorce or family breakups in America today. And I believe that really at the root of that is forced lifestyle reduction. That's what's causing problems is when the financial problems actually force people to change what they're used to in there. And one of the best defense mechanisms has got to be voluntary, both parties, agreeing to proactively do that to get ahead. So the fact like we live a nice lifestyle right now in a nice home that's much nicer than the duplex that we had lived in previously.

But we know we could always go back to one of our duplexes and be just fine with it because we've been there and done that and voluntarily downgraded at least once. My wife met me when we didn't actually have AC in the unit or heat more specifically. Remember that, Mindy? When we discussed that, that's one advantage. The second that you talked about here, and it's exactly the parallel. And I think a lot of real estate investors would experience this. You moved into a street with a bunch of rental properties for sale and have now owned a large percentage of those. I don't own properties in the same streets as where I've house hacked, but I'm under contract right now on a rental property right near an area that I used to live and know well because of that dynamic.

Because I used to live there specifically and get to know it is an immense advantage that begins to compound over the years. And you will continue to reap that advantage for a long time to come. We've bought three of those, by the way, in the last two months. We just closed on two weeks ago, and we bought one. We weren't ready for it. We've never spent a dime of our rental income, though. We've never spent a dime of our rental income on lifestyle inflation. Every time we get rent, it goes into a sinking fund just to get a down payment for the next piece of real estate.

So we've still kind of live below our means. We've done some things along the way. During this journey, my wife got diagnosed with a pretty aggressive. stage of breast cancer. And I think that was all like, not that you want that to happen, but shortly after we moved into it, we nicknamed it the tiny house, our little, our little half of that duplex. And we call it the tiny house.

We still call it the tiny house. Our kids call it the tiny house. But you realize when you're going through cancer at 37 years old, and you have little ones and they're in kindergarten and they're scared and is mom going to be here tomorrow? Is she going to die? you realize that so much more in life is way more important than I live in a five-bedroom house. It's 3,600 square feet. It was, hey, we have no mortgage.

We can go two hours back and forth to the hospital. And it just took so many other worries away when it came to calling off work, her missing deals with real estate or whatever, because we really didn't have any bills anyway. And that helped us get through that situation and made us much stronger. So we only did live in that duplex for one year and she's cancer free now. It's been about five years and everything is good. Thank you, Jesus. But we only live there for a year.

And then I would have never thought in a military town this would work. But we had some friends that said, hey, you know, we just opened an Airbnb. I'm like, really? In our area, like, who wants to come here to like the armpit of North Carolina? And they're like, well, you've got the beach 25 minutes away. You've got a hospital. You've got traveling nurses. And you've got 55,000 Marines.

guess what? Their friends and family love to come see them. So, um, again, it was paid for. And then we put that on Airbnb the next year. And now we make about 24 to $30,000 a year on Airbnb on that one property that we bought for $78,000. You kind of skipped ahead here. You said 200,000 to a million in four years. Can you give us the highlights, um, of, of acquisitions or, um, investment strategy along, along that journey to 2021? Well, if we rewind to my wife buying her first count house at 19. And then we rewind to her threatening to break up with me if I didn't buy. If I continued to rent when I was 25, those properties had started to develop some equity. And we sold each of those, did a 1031 tax exchange. And then one of those properties, Mindy,

kind of like you talked about, she had sent out letters. And the values have slowly been increasing. We know how it's gotten crazy since COVID. Not that they're like Colorado prices. But one came on the market in the cul-de-sac for, I think, $88,000. And it was actually one of my former students' families. And I said, hey, we know you have an Airbnb on that street. We have a rental there that we just don't want to deal with it anymore. Would you guys want to buy it? So we paid under $90,000 for it, completely renovated it, took those two properties that we had had, did a 1031 tax exchange and paid cash for that. So now here we are, we have two paid for properties. That became an Airbnb, be also making between $24 and $30,000 a year with no mortgage.

And I've always been the Dave Ramsey guy of I hate debt. We definitely don't have credit card debt. We don't carry any debt like that. And I wasn't really a risk taker with having a bunch of mortgages. But when you get two properties underneath your belt that give you some momentum, it's almost like you rode the bike to the top of the cliff. And now you're up at the top of the hill and you can just kind of ride downhill and kind of put your feet and hands up and just enjoy the ride, now all of a sudden, you know, we're a little more

comfortable with carrying what we have now of six mortgages on rentals because we have the history for three or four years of these two places that every year make between $24,000 and $30,000. So even if somehow we had a bad tenant situation or there were months where these other properties weren't renting, those two paid off Airbnbs would cover every other mortgage we have anyway. So it's enabled us to take a little more risk that maybe I wouldn't have felt comfortable with. If we didn't make that move to downsize from the big house to the tiny house and pay cash, that was the catalyst for everything. There's often a turning point that you can pinpoint in your financial journey. This one thing changed the trajectory or this decision made this decision

easier and then changed my financial trajectory. I love that so much. I hear people yelling at their radio right now. Yeah, but you did this in 2017. When was the last time you bought a rental property? Two weeks ago. Two weeks ago. Okay. And did you buy it for $78,000? Those same properties now, we bought one for, I think it was 144. And then there's a handful of three bedroom ones that are 1,200 square feet. We bought that for 170. And we put 25% down. But again, we've never taken a penny of the rental income to inflate our lifestyle or anything like that. Um, we've always just put it back into a high yield savings account. And fortunately, we had enough money each time one has come available to put the 25% down.

I've got one other spin on this stuff that I think Scott will like during this whole process. I hope everybody's falling along. I apologize. I get excited sometimes. We bought the house that we're in now, our single family home. And it has a detached three car garage that we converted the attic above that into a four 150 square foot apartment that we rent to travel nurses via furnish finder, and that pays for our actual mortgage every month. So we've never paid for a mortgage in the house that we live in.

That covers our mortgage every month. So that became another Airbnb. So that turned into three Airbnbs at that point. And now we're up to five Airbnb's, nine total properties. Four of them are long-term rentals. And five are on the short-term or the medium-term rental game. We had no idea what this was going to turn into. But 2017, again, like 215,000 net worth, 2021, it gets up to a million. And as of like this week, obviously depending on the market, we're at about like almost two million. We're about 40,000 shy of two million net worth. And that all happened from 2017 to 2025 and eight years. And I'd always heard people say that if you really, if you really focus and you make hard decisions in 10 years you can get to five. And I really think that in that 10 year stretch

from probably, I guess it was like 33, 34 to 43 or 44, we could be five if we want. Last month was our first, we hit a $15,000 a month in rental income last month. That was the most we ever brought in in a month. Now, we do have mortgages of about $6,000 on those rental properties. And we do have to pay an Airbnb cleaner, but I would say that our cash flow is probably about $6 to $7,000 a month on our rental properties right now. I want to caveat something with this 10-year grind. I don't think we're going to meet the person who starts that 10-year grind with a house that pushes them to their financial limits.

I don't think we're going to find the person who grinds it out. I think unless they hit it with an entrepreneurial venture or have one of these super high-tech, you know, high-paying technology. jobs out there. I think that essentially everyone who gets there in that 10-year horizon will live well below their means with a specific regard to their housing selection. And I don't think you could have done it without moving out of that house. No. No, and even my wife has a high income now. I mean, she, when we met again, she's making 60 to 75,000 back in like 08, which who knows with inflation what that is now, maybe 100,000. And then she climbed to 150. But the key is we've always

tried to basically live off my teacher income. And again, we had less than 10,000 invested when this whole process started in 2017. And as of now, I think in the stock market, we're up to about 835,000. So our next big goal is to be stock market millionaires. We're not there yet. But we really started to get concerned of, you know, just being in real estate. We want to have more balance in our portfolio of more of a 50-50 split. So, you know, that's, that's really our next big goal is to try to get to a million on that. So read between the lines that means you've contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the stock market over the last couple of years to build a position from basically nothing to 800, that almost a million at this point because of the real estate decisions that

you've made and keeping your lifestyle expenses flat in the face of rising incomes. For sure, you know, here I am teaching these high school kids. And I'd say 90% of the high school kids that I teach have a way nicer vehicle than I have in the parking lot. I tell them that all the time. like they know my net worth. I'll pull up. I convert it over from mint to credit karma. And we'll say, hey, let's take a look. What can you do? So guys, you know, keep in mind, I'm driving a 2008 in the parking lot. You know, I'm not what I drive. You know, material things don't define me. But the most important thing that defines us as a family is we want our ceiling that we get to to be our children's floor. And we want them to start out. And now that we have these paid for houses, we say, worst case, if you know what hits the fan, my son and my daughter each have a paid for duplex that they could live in.

Worst case, and we know that they have a house that's paid for the rest of their life, you know, if that's something that they earn, if they're good kids and they're, you know, being good members of society. I think that if you want to retire early as a teacher, I think you got to go back to housing. I just don't think we're going to find the example of a teacher who was able to do it without housing, at least not with a family in there, without that as a core component, just to get the ball rolling early on in there. Do you think that's right? Yeah. And I think having a partner on the

same page, if you are married, my wife is awesome. And she really doesn't care at all about the money stuff. Like, I remember I was like, hey, you know, we're up to 350,000 net worth. She's like, just talk to me when we hit a million. I don't even want to hear anything else. She goes, we're so far behind 350. That's nothing. Like, we should have had that years ago. But, you know, I always equate it to like an above ground swimming pool growing up when you're a kid. And you get out there and you and you and you and buddies want to make a whirlpool and you get four or five kids walking around the above ground swimming pool in the same direction like 30 times. And then eventually you can kind of pick your feet up and it will just carry you around four or five times. But I feel like so many of us, someone created a whirlpool, but we're the person walking in the other direction where the current's going the other way. And it feels like we're going to drown. It feels like we're not going to make it. It feels like we're not going to make it. It feels like we can't even walk one lap around that pool. But when you have a spouse who's on the same page willing to make sacrifices, my wife, you know, God bless her. She's probably one of the top three real estate agents in our county. She does really, really well, but she was driving a 10-year-old Ford Flex with 200,000 miles on it. And people would always say,

why are you driving a Ford Flex? Why don't you go get that escalate? Now, you can afford it. You can pay cash for it. She's like, no, I'd much rather buy another rental property than have a nice vehicle. I thought you're going to say it was a 15-year-old Hummer. No, no, she, we encouraged her to get rid of that fairly quickly after I came in the picture. Yeah. One other question here about the portfolio is you've, you sacrificed living in the duplex. You now live in a house with a detached three-car garage with a ADU that has rented out to traveling nurses. So that's got to feel like an upgrade pretty substantially over the duplex. Is that correct? Oh, for sure. I mean, we have a beautiful home. You know, it's 2,700 square feet.

we did, you know, after the cancer thing, we did cash flow and put in a in-ground swimming pool there. So I think since the cancer thing, like I was extremely frugal. I was a miser. It was all about, I told my wife, in five years we can do this. And in five years, we can do that. But when you get diagnosed with cancer, you don't know if there's going to be five months from now. So I think along the way we've had to adjust. And again, that key word of balance, we were scorched earth, like probably saving 70% of our income. Now we, we, still save all the rental income or whatever, but I think we've definitely lightened up and we've gone on cruises and we got a boat and we put in an in-ground swimming pool. Now we use some of her

income to actually enjoy life and take the kids on vacations and do things like that. Try to be cognizant that you get these kids if you're lucky 18 years and we want to do as many fun things. My kids at 10 and 12 have already experienced more in life than I had experienced by 30 years old when it comes to traveling out of the country and going to pro sporting events and having a pool in their backyard going to Disney. But it took a lot of sacrifice to get there. But like I said, it's, it's totally been worth it. Can that one move, you know, does your house define you? Can you go backwards in lifestyle? My wife had the great attitude of people would say, well, do you really want to leave the house that you brought your babies home from the hospital to? Like, you have all those

memories. She goes, I have plenty of videos and pictures. It's four walls on a roof. As long as we have each other, I really don't care where we live. And I think her, mindset was kind of the catalyst behind this of it wasn't this emotional thing. It was a business transaction. I think that's really important to highlight here is you have to do scorched earth, I think to reset the trajectory of a financial position. It's a very common theme in the truly early or rapid financial independence stories, but you got to move out of it after a few years, right? Maybe one, two, three years at most in that to reset that balance and go back. back into it because the point is not to live like that forever and amass millions and millions

and always be deferring. And it sounds like you guys hit a great balance of it triggered by both financial peace university and the discovery of the fire movement and the wake up call that life is short and precious. And you've got to be able to enjoy that with the cancer diagnosis. And it sounds like you live a wonderful life now. And I was going to I was just kind of jumping to because of the rental property portfolio and the snowball that you've got going and the pension that's going to hit in how long? It'll be I'll be 43 this year. So I got about seven and a half years. When my daughter graduates, her senior year, she'll go to my high school that I teach at.

Like my goal is to kind of, not that I would really want the attention, but I joke that I'll walk across a stage. When she graduates, we'll graduate and we'll be retired. So the critical piece is to get to 50. So I get that pension, get that free health care until 65. Could we be fine now? It'd probably be like kind of more of a lean five. You know, we, it sounds kind of crazy, but my wife and I talk like 20,000. We don't have a fine number other than like we want $20,000 a month to,

really be able to give back, help other people and enjoy life and travel and live a better life at 50 than we ever did at 25 and 30. Yeah, I think that's going to go really nicely for you on those next seven years. I think that portfolio has got a good shot at doubling the existing portfolio, plus you shovel in a lot more cash and buying a lot more properties to keep it going, plus the pension. It's going to be fun to see. That's going to be fun because you're already starting, you're already living it up with this. I think it's going to be that, like you said, I didn't put all those pieces together until you were going through the advantages for teachers. But wow, that's going to be a wonderful early retirement at 50. That's awesome. All right, Dave, this was a super fun episode. I really

appreciate your time. I see the, I'm listening to the Tim Buck 3 song. The future is so bright, I got to wear shades. I see such a bright future for you, such a bright financial future. When did you say you were going to be a stock market millionaire? Who knows with the market, but I would love to buy, you know, the end of 2026. Okay. Great. I see that happening. I looked in my crystal ball. It's, it's going to happen. Hey, I'll take it. I'll claim that. But I just, I love the message that you're sharing. And I thank you so much for sharing your money story with us. This was so much fun. Yes, you can become a millionaire. Even if you are a teacher, on a teacher's salary, you just have to do the work. So, Dave, thank you so much for your time today. And where can people

find you online. Our website is financially independent teachers.com. And if you look up the financially independent teachers podcast, we're on Apple, Spotify, all the different places. We'd love to have other people join us. We have lots of teachers, other middle income earners. And we don't just have millionaire teachers on our show, although we've had, I don't want to say hundreds. We've had 218 episodes, but we've probably had 50 millionaire teachers share their story on our podcast on how a middle income earner can do it. And you guys can do it too. You absolutely can. All right, Dave. Thank you so much. for your time and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you guys very much. I appreciate the opportunity.

All right, Scott, that was Dave, the financially independent teacher. And that was such a great story. I loved his underlying message. Even if you are a middle income earner, you can still reach financial independence. And I think that that's just a message that doesn't get shared enough. Financial independence is absolutely possible for anyone, no matter when or where you're starting. Oh, wait, that sounds familiar. I loved that story. And I think that, It's like it was just wonderful getting a glimpse into each of like the key milestone decisions along his journey, which look, we covered the house hack. We're going to beat that. We're going to beat that until it's a completely dead horse because it is just so important.

And I know it frustrates people who don't want a house hack. That's too bad. It is too powerful of a tool to ignore. And it's too much of a cheat code for folks. If you're not going to do it for at least one year of your life, you're going to really such. That one year could set you could accelerate your timeline by 40 years to retirement. So we're obviously needed to hit on that one. But there were other really subtle, important points that he brought up that I want to

float back to the surface here, like the discussions, the blunt conversations he had with his spouse prior to getting married and early in their journey. Like the fact that he loved baseball coaching. And he gave that up because it wasn't reasonable at that point in his life with two young kids and with the goal of attempting to get ahead and build flexibility in the position. That's an immense sacrifice you can imagine. imagine for someone like Dave who really, you know, played D1 baseball and went in there. And that's, that's, that's, that's something that I think wasn't talked about or discussed enough that,

um, in there. And there's other sacrifices. There's lifestyle sacrifices. There's budgeting. There's discipline. There's the skill of becoming, um, uh, a sophisticated real estate investor. But that's a really big one that I think, um, you know, might make people a little uncomfortable, giving up a passion like that baseball to mow lawns to put your family in a better position that will pay off for the rest of his life. I bet it was a really hard one. Yeah, I'm sure it was, but also a really easy one. Look, this is going to make my family life better. And you don't have kids so you never, ever, ever spend time with them. You have kids to spend time with them. And he's working till, what did he say, 11 o'clock at night doing baseball coaching? I don't have that same passion for baseball.

But even if I did, I don't want to be away from my family until 11 o'clock at night. Then he's got to be back at school at 7 o'clock in the morning or 6.30 in the morning because the kids come at 7, which is strange to me as well. But he's never seeing his kids when he's a baseball coach. So you can have time to coach baseball down the road. You need to spend time with your kids. That's the tradeoff that he made. And now instead of coming home at 11, he comes home at 5. He can have dinner with his kids. He can help us when I put him to bed. And then they get to know him as a person. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm using the baseball thing because that was clearly his passion. Everyone's got a different, not everybody, but a lot of people have these different passions

that consume a large amount of time and resources or, or, you know, are just not compensated in a meaningful way. And I think, but I think that was an underrated part of the discussion, something that we didn't really harp on enough during the show. That kind of show, that shows how all of these decisions bled together, right? It's the sacrifice. Yes, we're going to sacrifice on the car front and the home front, and we're going to be disciplined with our spending. We're also going to be really consistent with how we spend our time in a lot of it. And that's what alignment looks like. And that's the type of sacrifice that's needed in a healthy relationship to move towards a really important goal like financial freedom. And the irony is you probably think in an example like that, you know,

put your own example in your mind as you're thinking through whatever parallel is in your life. But you think it through an example like that. You're helping these kids, shaping them, molding them. He's now able to do that amplified across teachers all over the country because of the success he's had in building his personal financial portfolio and help all these kids with personal finance decisions and helping set them up for life now. And so it all comes back in weird ways on those fronts. And I just think that I want to call him out for a large number of great decisions that he's made, not just the house hacking one. And they're not necessarily easy decisions to make, but they're great financial decisions that he's making looking down the road, not just thinking, how can I have the best life right now? How can I have the best life for the future?

And I think Dave Ramsey says it best, live like no one else now. So you can live like no one else later. And now he's a millionaire teacher with an awesome rental portfolio. I wonder what Carl will show up with at his graduation and his and his daughter's graduation at that point in time. 2008. What is it? 2008 truck. He has a 2008 something.

I don't remember what it was. Well, let's see. Whatever he drives at that point, it'll be paid off. But yeah, he'll live like no one else can. That's going to be an epic retirement for Dave in a couple of years here. Yeah, that'll be awesome. All right, 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 Indy Jensen saying, until next time, Lyme.