BiggerPockets Money Podcast - This ALL OUT Entrepreneurial Approach to FI Got him to $5M by 30

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

On this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, hosts Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench sit down with Cody Berman to uncover how he achieved financial independence before age 30 and built a $5 million net worth through entrepreneurship, side hustles, real estate investing, stock market investing, and multiple income streams. Cody shares the mindset, strategies, and lessons that accelerated his path to FIRE, from leveraging unfair advantages and embracing failure to building passive income.  Whether you're pursuing financial independence, looking to grow your income, or searching for practical wealth-building strategies, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you reach financial freedom faster. Connect with Cody: Website: https://codydberman.com/ Buy ‘Retire by 30’: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GVPVB2KJ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codydberman To go beyond the podcast: Take the guesswork out of investing, taxes, and retirement. Book a free consultation with Domain Money Today: www.biggerpocketsmoney.com/cfp  Get 50% Off Your First Year of Monarch by using code ‘Pockets’: https://www.monarch.com/pockets Kick start your financial independence journey with our FREE financial resources - https://biggerpocketsmoney.com/ Subscribe on YouTube for even more content- www.youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney  Connect with us on social media to join the other BiggerPockets Money listeners - https://www.facebook.com/groups/BPMoney We believe financial independence is attainable for anyone no matter when or where you’re starting. Let’s get your financial house in order! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cody Berman first appeared on our show eight years ago on episode 26. Since then, he became a millionaire at 25 through a combination of hard work, exploiting his unfair advantages, and more than a little luck, all things he was already doing back in 2018. He continued to grow his wealth over the next five years through these same principles and ballooned his wealth to $5 million by age 30. Today, we're discussing his path, the option. that you, my dear listeners have if his path isn't the right one for you, and that early retirement is still possible in 2026.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my achieved five by 30 co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. We'll have to retire the word retired on this, but I'm excited to talk about that and this concept of retiring by 30 with a very special guest here with Cody Berman, who was on episode, I think I think it was 26, eight years ago here at Bigger Pockets. I think you might have been like just in college or just out of college at that point talking about the approach.

And so it's awesome to see you again. And boy, that worked as we'll kind of get to here. Can you tell us a little bit about what's been going on the last eight years? Yeah, what a lead up. What's been going on over the last eight years? Well, first of all, thanks for having me back. And I just watched that episode today in its entirety and I'm still cringing hard. So hopefully this episode will be a lot better than that one.

I had zero polish. I had just graduated college. I was living in Australia. I remember I rented out this like little kind of soundproof room to record with you guys because I was so excited. And yeah, it is cool to see that all the things that I talked about in that episode. I didn't know exactly what I was going to be doing to make money

or exactly what I would be investing in. But the stuff did work. I increased my income. I decreased my expenses. I invested the gap. And I was able to hit financial independence just about three years after we record together at age 25. And now I'm age 30.

I have my book, by 30 and I've done a whole lot of different side hustles since then I have kept a nice healthy gap between my income and my expenses and I have invested aggressively into things like the stock market and real estate and I guess we can just take that in any direction because I could talk about my last eight years for an hour plus. So one of the things that I loved most about episode 26 and if our listeners have not checked out that episode, I highly encourage you to check it out because Cody is the epitome of taking advantage of your unfair advantage. He had a disc golf company that he started in college, right? Cody, college or high school?

College. Yep. I started my sophomore year. And he partnered with a friend. And the friend happened to be in the army or the military of some branch and happened to have access to CAD software. So when they needed to make changes to their discs, they could just have the partner do it on his CAD software, on his off time, which is a huge expense if you don't have this unfair advantage. And then continued this disc golf company. And if I recall correctly, because I didn't just listen to it, but it stayed in my head. If I recall correctly, you were generating all of your living expenses just from the work that you were doing at that. disc golf company, which I believe worked out to like five hours a week. Some of that is correct. So he was not in the military. I can't do the stolen valor thing.

That's a no-no. He was a mechanical engineer. So he had access to the CAD from his work. Okay. That was my mistake. No worries. No worries. I just don't want to be stealing valor here on this podcast right off the bat. And in terms of how much it was bringing in, I think at its peak, I was taking in personally about $2,000 per month in profit. So at the time that was covered, my living expenses because my living expenses were extremely low. But to fast forward, that actually, we could talk about this a lot today. That was not the business that made me millionaire, allowed me to achieve financial freedom, but it was the business that was the stepping stone for all the other businesses and all the other side hustles and all the other things

to come. So like what that business was was just the foundation. It was so many learning lessons, so many failures, so many things that I didn't know that I didn't know until I tried it with this disc golf manufacturing company. And when better to fail at a business than when it doesn't count. Like, you weren't using this to sustain your life. And if it didn't work out, you would be homeless. You would be starving. You were also in college.

So if it didn't work out, you could still live in the dorms or with the apartment or whatever. And you would still have food and you would still have, like, you had a big safety net, which is one of my favorite ways to start a small business is to, not need the income to survive. Yeah. The path to doing this very early involves some kind of outlier outcome, right? An investment tailwind that takes off a career that is in really explosive income categories, entrepreneurship, joining a startup, those types of areas.

And, you know, as you kind of think about it, what is repeatable and what is luck in the context of your journey? Like my journey, luck, obviously joining bigger pockets as an early employee and taking over as CEO, how do you separate that out in this area? Because I can see a lot of people saying, well, sure, I mean, you can talk about this, but it's outlier tales that you're betting on here. What is the median outcome going to be? It's funny because in our last episode, Scott, we talked about this. And I said one of my favorite quotes from you was talking about kind of the surface area of luck. And getting lucky is just exploiting opportunities that come your way. And so it's

funny that we're repeating ourselves eight years later here. But for me, it was just I tried so many different things. I tried so many different businesses, so many different side hustles. So it wasn't like I started one and it was the best thing ever and I got lucky. And then that was the thing that made me. It was, I tried 20 different things. I quote unquote got lucky with one of those businesses later on. But like, you know, in a different dimension in the alternate universe, it could have been another business that allowed me to put my income into hyperdrive. So yes, parts of it were luck. Like was I in the right place at the right time for like my digital products business that took off? Was my real state in the right place at the right time when I started investing there. Has the stock market

pin on a tear? Absolutely. So I did get lucky in all of those different dimensions, but if I wasn't trying at business, if I wasn't investing in real estate, if I wasn't investing in the stock market, I wouldn't even have the opportunity to get lucky. So is my 100% exact journey repeatable? Maybe not, but I've seen so many different examples of people doing similar things. Maybe it's in a different vertical. Maybe they have a different business. Maybe they do it in corporate. But people get lucky in all sorts of different ways, but the people who get the luckiest are the ones who take the most action. I think that there's a real weak spot in a section of the financial independence community that just doesn't grasp the entrepreneurial side of the journey, the path to fire,

because for an employee, it's a formula. You save and invest and you hit your number and then you retire, right? And it's very formulaic, and especially if you're doing it and passively managed investments. But in the business world, tails compound very quickly. You can sit on something and you can hit your number, and then six months later, you're way past it. Or, you know, and something else has evolved in that world. So I think the headline is you have a net worth of well over $5 million now at age 30. And it wasn't like, oh, I was going to, you know, I had my number here at $2 million. And you know, it's you blow past it in the path that you've taken here and have a lot of freedom.

And you take risks, right? There's going to be a different approach there. And I think that this is very incomprehensible to many other people on the other path. There's no right or wrong in this. It's just, it's just very challenging to wrap your head around. I'm like, how do I think about this approach here? Am I conjecturing this correctly with your business career that as these opportunities and these businesses compounded, it just shocked you away past your goal.

And now you have an explosively large number of options more than you're thinking you would have at this point? That is 100% right. You put that really, really well. And this is the types of people that I butt heads with hard in the fire community. And so kind of what I did to give people some real numbers. I know we're all money nerds here. We like talking about real numbers.

I did what I like to call a financial freedom sprint. So for three years from 22 to 25, I interviewed with you guys back, I think right after my 22nd birthday. So basically the three years after that last interview for people who listen to episode 26, that first year in entrepreneurship, I made $96,000. And I was grinding my butt off. I was working like 16 hour days. I had a billion different income streams. I had the disc golf stuff. I had the digital podcast.

I had a blog, podcast, freelancing, yada, yada, yada. So the next year, some of my stuff started to catch. And to your point, Scott, with entrepreneurship, things are more skisgap. Like at some point you hit like this hockey stick growth and all the work that you've been doing, even though it might not be working in month six or year one, maybe year two or year three, it starts to explode. At some point, some people hit that hockey stick growth. Yes, but that hockey stick growth is usually only possible in entrepreneurship. You don't typically get someone in corporate who has like hockey stick income just from corporate.

Maybe, maybe like your company's an IPO or you like you make some crazy career jump, but it's more typical in entrepreneurship. ship. You know how the change in seasons hits and suddenly you just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized? That same feeling hits me with my finances every spring. I used to have accounts scattered everywhere, making it hard to stay on track with my money goals. Let Monarch do your financial spring cleaning for you. One dashboard that gets your entire financial life organized. No more clutter, no more mess, no more scattered logins, just accounts, investments, property, and more all in one place. One thing that really surprised me was pulling up the cash flow view and seeing what percentage of my income was quietly going to

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in concept here as an employee and then CEO of bigger pockets. They're very parallel. So many, I think, employees, executives, or tech workers at fangs, for example, have experienced a version of what you're talking about here. Okay.

So, yeah, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know the exact percentages or statistics. We don't have to argue that. But for my certain case, from my specific scenario. So that first year, I made $96,000 in entrepreneurship. I was spending $24,000 a year. I was extremely frugal, living on $2,000 a month. I had a lot of role models like yourself, Scott. I remember meeting you at Camp Phi, and then I read Set for Life right after.

And I was just like, okay, I need to keep my expenses really low. I need to boost my income really high. So I had like a $76,000, whatever that maths out to. Yeah, $76,000 gap in that year one of entrepreneurship. The next year, my income doubled from my entrepreneurial ventures. And I made $198,000. Can you give us like at a high level the mechanics of that? You're not spinning out, pun intended, the discount, this golf company and doing this. This is another business, right? Yeah, this is several other businesses. But the one that took off the most of my digital products business, Gold City Ventures,

that started to take off in like mid 2019, 2020. That was a lion share of the income I was making. I was also doing a bunch of freelancing projects. I was also podcasting, blogging. What else did I have going on? I was just literally doing whatever I could in those early years to make money. That's why I like to call it my financial freedom sprint because I was just like, I did not let up.

I was not jogging at all. I was just like, I want to hit five. I want to hit five. I was sprinting to my goal. So yeah, that second year, $198,000, I kept my expenses the exact same. Where were you living during this period as well?

Like, were you nomadic at this point? Or were you hunkered down in a basement and a dark room? So just post college, I moved back home for seven months. This is while I was working on corporate America, which is funny because I had even started my career in corporate America when I last talked to you guys in the podcast. But I lived at home for those seven months.

Then I moved to a, small apartment in Boston where I kind of not house hacked in a sense, but I shared a room with someone else. So my rent per month is only $450 per month. And then kind of in the middle of year two or year three of that financial freedom sprint, I started house hacking. And that's what like completely changed the numbers for me. And my expenses went even lower and I was starting to make money on the income front. I know it's kind of not of like I house hacked or I did a lot of different things during those three years. But you know, what's typically the biggest expense for most people in my housing was $450 was the peak.

in those years, $450 per month. I think house hacking when you're the one renting from somebody else is still house hacking. You're not paying the entire rent. Did you say you shared a room with someone? Yeah. So we had a three-bedroom apartment in Boston. It was $2,700 per month. Each bedroom was $900.

I split a bedroom. My rent was $450. Yeah. So did you split a bedroom with your girlfriend or just some random person? No, just my buddy from college. Okay. So Dave Ramsey has a really great quote. It's live like no one else now, so you can live like no one else later.

There are plenty of people who are in your same position or were in your same position. They're like, I'm out of college. I am not going to have a roommate anymore. I'm going to have the whole $2,700 rent my own self. You paid $450. Do you live like that forever? No. But you live like that when you're already used to living like that.

And you boost, like, did you spend all the rest of your money on like, beer and restaurants? No. Yeah, I kept all my expenses very, very low. Those first three years, my expenses rarely eclipsed $2,000 a month. Like the average was about $2,000 for those first three years of five. My financial freedom sprint from 22 to 25. So what happened with your business trajectory over this period as well? Yeah. So that first year, $96,000. Second year, $198,000. The third year, things started to take off and I made $403,000. And I still spent that same $24,000. So my gap in that year, 3 was 379K. And so that year I bought 11 rental units. I invested like 200K in the stock market. And it was at the end of that year that I proclaimed FI. I had like $3,700 per month that I was

bringing in in rental income, net PITI, CAPEX reserves, all that fun stuff. And then I had about 500K invested in the stock market. And then I had a mostly passive digital products business that was bringing in like 10K plus per month. Let me break down a couple things here because you just claim 400K in income. Rental units are being. bought, stock investments are being made, and we have 10K and passive incomes. That implies like 300K and actively earned income as part of that. Is that the right way to frame it? It's kind of like a blur, I imagine, with the business, you know, where some of it's passive and could continue, but a lot of it is you executing it. Help us understand that. So I guess the full financial freedom

snapshot. So right before my 26th birthday, my net worth was just over a million. I think a million and $35,000. I have the screenshot. Again, I had 500K in the stock market. So you using the 4% rule, I could live on like, what is that, $16,667 per month or something like that. We had the $4,000 coming in from my real estate portfolio. And then I had roughly $10,000 in passive income, mostly passive income coming in per month from my digital products business, which was a template library, it was courses and membership, all that fun stuff. Does that answer your question? Yes. I think you could even do it faster if you were applying your framework today the way you're talking about it.

So from there, we have a million at 25, and then we have jumped to 5 million by 30. Can you give us the high level overview of that extrapolation? Business continued to take off. My income continued to double the digital products business, real estate, and then my personal finance brand, if you will, which I'll just put like my podcast, my now book, my social media, all that stuff underneath it. Those became kind of my three main sources of income. The other thing started to just kind of peter away. And I'm kind of famous for being the side hustle guy before where I had like 30-series. of income that I tried. And then I really dialed in on these main three. Again, my gap was

growing like crazy. I think the biggest gap that I had was like 750K in one year. And I'm just pouring all that money into tried and true assets like real estate and like the stock market. I have a very, very small percentage of my portfolio and things like individual stocks. I have a little bit of crypto exposure. But it was just like make money in active businesses. Keep my expenses low. Put said money into tried and true asset classes. and boom, they've appreciated like crazy. And we've been in a crazy bull market. So to your point before, Scott, like, have I gotten lucky?

Absolutely. But because I was putting so much money into these markets, I had the opportunity to benefit from those gains. So this is all your income, Cody Berman's income. This isn't the 700 is actually split between partners. That's all me. Okay. What are your taxes like?

A lot. More than I'd like to admit. I try to optimize as much as I can. I've done things like designated Lauren as the real estate professional, and we've been able to offset our active income with depreciation that way. And we've done a lot of different tricks and strategies, but I have not been able to be one of those guys who's like, I make $5 billion of my income tax is zero. But we try to optimize as much as we can. But yes, I do have pretty hefty tax bills every quarter. And this wealth, do you put a value on your businesses or is this

excluding any of the value in your businesses? I put a very small, very conservative value on my main business Gold City Ventures, which is like one X EBTA for the year. Like, we're not planning on selling it. It's a very small percentage of my net worth, but I do include that. But no, nothing else. I'm not like, oh, you know, I could sell, you know, my podcast for 10x earnings this year. No, it's, it's mostly like I have my network breakdown, actually, if you guys are interested. I pull all the numbers for this interview. That'd be great. So it's, I'm just about $5.1 million in total. 41% of that is an index fund. So about $2.1.1.5.5.5.5.5.5. million. 34% is in real estate, about 1.7 million. Business equity, about 13% at 6663,000. I have about

$510,000 in cash, which is about 10% of my net worth, which is way higher than I'd normally have, but we're in the process of building our forever home right now. And then I have about 2% of my net worth in crypto, which is like just over 100K. Awesome. I'll call us out. Like, I'm eerie here with some of these. Like I have a very similar makeup for my position, right? My financial portfolio, 50% real estate, 50% stocks. You know, there's sometimes a bigger half, or depending on the market. But it's, like, very much bouncing between those two. On this, I mark all of my business interests actually to zero.

I mean, not because I don't think they're valuable. It's just because I just totally exclude them when I think about my wealth. I don't even put like a one-times or, you know, half-time EBITDA or anything on there. And those assets, then I have my house, right? And so that's the position. This is another point in favor of a lot of people, I think, who are, you know, at these outlier ends on the wealth spectrum early in life, you know, or even maybe potentially later, probably are very conservatively marking their wealth positions because these illiquid assets do not usually get

marked at a very premium asset value, I think, at least in the fire community. I find that very rare to find the person who is overvaluing these illiquid components of their portfolio. Is that what you see in your experience? Yeah, no, I think that's totally fair. I think most people in the fire community, I mean, there's even debates, is my house an asset in the fire community? Should I include it in my net worth. Most people in the fire community, from what I've seen, are just counting their index fund portfolio that they can withdraw from and use the 4% rule on. That's right. I separate. I have my net worth and I have my financial independence portfolio, my five portfolio, and that includes my real estate and socks. And I separate my house.

It's included my net worth, but it's not included in my five portfolio. I just imagine you're going to do something similar when you build your forever home here. So you have said that you have three current income streams, the Gold City Ventures, the Realist, state and your personal brand. Is that correct? Yeah, that's pretty much how I summarize it. Okay. Do you consider yourself retired? No. Did you write a book called retire by 30? Yes, I was just about to say people could see this big side behind me. It was intentional. It's to get to people going a little bit. I kind of used Tim Ferriss's strategy here. I did a lot of research before I named the book. And when he wrote the four-hour work week, like his intention is

not to get everyone down to a four-hour work week. Like if you go from 40 to 30, huge ways. Absolutely massive win. So like if you become work optional by 43 from reading my book, that is amazing. You don't have to hang it up at 28 in order for this to be a win. And to use the word retire, like retire just had a stronger kind of punch than financially free or fire by 30. That's like a little too obscure. So I went back and forth a lot with the editors here and retire was the one that was the punchiest. But retire in this context just means getting to the point at which you do not have to work for money where work because. comes optional. Because most people, even in traditional retirement, like someone works for 40 years, they hit 65, they quote unquote retire traditionally. Usually that person isn't doing absolutely nothing. Like, they're doing something else. Maybe they pick up a hobby. Maybe they start golfing all the time. Like, they're doing something else with their time. So that's how I like to define retirement is at the point where you can do whatever the heck you want with your time. Yeah, I like that. So how much of your time is spent on each one of these three income streams? It depends. It depends.

heavily on the season that I'm in. So I love to work in seasons. Like, I'm the type of person where I, even though I've hit FI, I enjoy working. And I butt heads of people in the fire community on this all the time. They're like, you hit FI. Why are you still working on your businesses? It's like, because I like to. It's like just because someone's fit, should they stop working out? Like, it doesn't make any sense to me. Like, yes, I've hit FI by the numbers. Does that mean I can't work in my businesses that I enjoy at all anymore? So for me, when I'm fired up about a project. Like, when I was doing the book launch, I was working some weeks, 60 to 80 hour weeks and people are like, you're insane. Maybe, but I was having a lot of fun

doing it. I was getting lost in the work. Other weeks, like, I'm actually leaving this Saturday from when we're recording this on a three plus week European vacation. I'm going to be working like 30 minutes a day, maybe just checking in on emails and slack and stuff. So I'll have months where I work 30 minutes a day. I'll have months where I'm working eight hours a day. It completely depends on the season, the projects I have going on, how much I'm invested, like how much I'm into a project. And so I can't give you just like a, oh, this is exactly how many hours I work every week or every month. It totally depends. Let's keep honing in on this word retire. We used to just use it as part of the fire acronym for a long time. And in the last

couple of years, we've really stopped emphasizing the retire portion of that. And we've basically, you know, there's still probably a few places we'll use it, you know, carelessly or in there. but we really start using it as a core term because I think that word is so polarizing on it. And so aside from the old editor thing, like, what do you think about that word in the context of what we're discussing here and what you're going to be doing with the next 35 years as you approach traditional retirement age? I mean, obviously I'm okay with using the word given that I named a book and dedicated years of my life to writing this thing. But I don't know, to me, like I said, retirement is just the point at which you do not have to work for money. you can go pursue anything that interests you. I hate hating on words.

Like, it's just a label. If you have an issue with it, that's fine. And you can use different verbiage or different terminology for it. But I don't know. To me, it's totally fine. I don't have a problem with the word either. I don't think Mindy does either. But we just kind of have moved away from using it because it's kind of exhausting to go back

and forth about the word with strangers on the internet, you know, about whether that word applies in the situation or not. So that was more of the philosophical debate there. Yeah, I don't have any issue with the word retire. I have an issue with people focused on the RE part of the acronym fire. They're like, oh, I want to retire early. Focus on the financial independence part. Scott and Cody and I are all three financially independent and yet we choose to work.

Cody, do you do anything you don't really want to do? Sometimes, but I've really tried to eliminate or delegate the things that I don't want to do. Going back to the four-hour work week, which I mentioned. mentioned in my previous interview, that was the book that changed it all for me. And Tim has the deal framework where he delegates and eliminates tasks that he no longer wants to do. So I've tried to, I really try to fill up my day with the things that light me up and to reduce as much as possible the things that I'm not so excited about. Yeah, same. I want to go to a portfolio question here next. And again, let's break this dichotomy apart, right? So a person who's pursuing financial

independence as an employee is going to start at their base salary, increase that year after year, invest, you know, likely in tax-advantaged accounts. There's a very clear tilt towards Boglehead, passive indexing, probably rightfully so for this person. And there's every reason the world that these folks can retire in their 30s or 40s. I'm following a trajectory like that with a high savings rate. It works. It's not a controversial thing. It happens. And there's a formula for that. Within that world, I think that the FI community is hyper-focused on this concept of keeping the goalposts from moving and hitting their 4% withdrawal rate number in the portfolio, and then maximizing spend and this die with zero comes into play. That's a driving worldview

that I think is very, people are very passionate about. It's a correct worldview. It's not an incorrect worldview. It's just not the only correct worldview. And let's go back to your position here because your approach, the entrepreneurial approach, I think in many cases, fundamentally breaks how that works because unlike an employee who's approaching this this 4% number, let's tell it a whole $2.5 million target, they get there. There's a transition phase and they stop being withdrawn and decumulating. You know, that's a very clear mathematical progression. You're going to overshoot by a little bit. Almost everybody does overshoot by like a hair just to be conservative if they can and they're not forced out early. When it begins with drawing

conservatively, that's that's one thing. But in the entrepreneurial path, there's every reason to believe that those last few years of growth are going to see this huge compound. you're going to blow past your number, which I think also then circles back to what the optimal portfolio strategy is, because if you're going to blow past your number and you have a very high concentration of your wealth in a certain asset, how does that change the way you think about investing, especially as someone who's 30 years old? Because I imagine you're not moving yourself into a 60-40 stock bond portfolio or decumulating your portfolio at the highest possible withdrawal rate you can. You've mathematically optimized for over the next 60 years. There's something

else that you're going to be doing with your money. So I think I'm going to introduce a framework to answer this question, but then I'll get down to my portfolio split. So one of the first things I did in my book, because I think this is what's different from kind of what I talk about, what I preach, versus traditional fire, which is the save up your 4% or save up 25 bucks your annual expenses, and boom, that's your five number. Then you can withdraw, and you have, you know, this percentage chance that's going to last you for the rest of your life. So I like to bucket financial independence into two main strategies. There is the nest egg approach, which is the one I just talked about, about 4% rule. And the cash flow fi approach. And since you guys have probably a pretty big crossover

with real estate investors, this is one that a lot of real estate investors pursue. So cash flow five, let's say you spend $60,000 a year. You need $5,000 per month to live. Once you have $5,000 per month in passive or mostly passive income, that is financial independence. I'm someone who likes to have guardrails and who likes to have a more conservative approach. But like you could have in theory, like $0 in the stock market or in index funds, you could just be making $5,000 per month in passive or mostly passive income and hit FI that way. That is cash flow FI. The other way, and this was the way that I was first introduced to FI was like the Nest egg method. And I was like, well, if I'm spending $60,000 per year, that's times 25, that's $1.5 million that I need to

save up in index funds in a stock portfolio, which one can I get too faster? So I was like really attracted to this notion, this idea of cash flow FI. So to get back to your question, Scott, about like portfolio breakdown. For me, I like having both. I kind of have like a three-pronged approach to me hitting FI. I had like a small business that was bringing in passive income. I had my real estate portfolio that was bringing passive income. So those are both the cash flow FI route.

Then I also had this nest egg, this stock portfolio that I could withdraw from using the traditional 4% rule. I think I'm just a slightly risk-averse guy, even though I'm an entrepreneur. And so the three-pronged approach, the business, real estate index fund portfolio was what felt most comfortable for me. And then in practice, that circularity and that redundancy and that conservatism, I imagine allows you just invest it all aggressively. Like you can use leverage in the rental portfolio and then put it all at equities in the stock portfolio. Is that what you're doing? Yeah. I have a pretty even split like you. I'm like 50-50 stocks in real estate. I know I mentioned

the numbers earlier. It's like 41, 34 right now, but that moves throughout the year. And so yeah, I'm constantly reinvesting in index funds. At this point, I'm not buying as many personal properties, if you will. I'm investing in syndications, but I'm still getting my real estate exposure that way. Awesome. I think that that covers the discussion point there. And I think that the big thing for me is there's nothing wrong with all these different approaches for financial independence. But for someone to come in and say that your approach is not optimizing for happiness or freedom or autonomy is just simply incorrect. It's just, it's a viable approach among others. I think there's a lot of reason to be very attracted to it from the get-go here. I mean, this is not an extreme sacrifice, I imagine,

for those first couple of years relative to the lifetime of optionality you'll have on a go-forward basis here. If you're in, you know, you're someone who's in their 20 to 25-year-old range right now, or maybe an older or a different life stage, do you think it's more or less or different from a repeatability standpoint now than it was when you started? There's headwinds. There's also tailwinds. I think now, though, it's probably easier today. And I have real examples of people who hit five faster than I did at 25 today just because of some of the tailwinds that we have. Like, it is easier than ever to spend up a business. Back when we started business, like building a website was hard.

Graphic design stuff was hard. Like now you have AI to help you. You have all these different resources to help you. Like you can literally start a business in a day now, which where 15, 20 years ago, it was way, way more difficult. Like even when I started my disc golf company back when I was 19, so that was 11 years ago at this point, it was so much harder.

Like I was learning HTML to like make an edit on my website. Now you can literally just type into Claude, like build me a website that looks like this website and it spits it out in five minutes. It's it's absolutely insane. So the people who are willing to learn the new technology and the new tools, like, man, I'm like, I'm excited and scared to see like how big people are going to scale. I mean, there's already one person company is doing like eight or nine figures and they just have like a team of agents working around them and all these SOPs and automations.

and it's wild scott. So like I think for the doers, the people who are listening to podcasts like this, who are willing to try something new and fail, they're going to hit five faster than I or you or any of us talking right now could ever have in our generation, in our timeline. I completely agree. And I think that the thing that you're going to have to stomach right now is, I think that that could be for many people much lower risk than the traditional

employment route in knowledge work has been, despite it seeming crazy because I think, think that like, hey, do you really need, you know, this, this person to code your website anymore? Do you really need an accountant in the same way that you did? No, you probably need the AI to do 95% of the accounting and then a quick pass with a real accountant for, you know, your bookkeeping or whatever. I mean, like, you're going to take risks either way with it. It's like, it's always been a risk to code something or, or keep your books or whatever, because a human can make mistakes. This, you can do much cheaper. And who knows what the accuracy level is going to be in some of these

things. I'm pretty impressed as an AI power user myself with what it can do and how accurate it seems to be from the work that I put through it. So I think that's right. And I think that should really give people pause about, hmm, I'm not entrepreneurial. I think you're giving up a lot to just close that door in your brain to these options here. Scott and I talk about your unfair advantage all the time. It's the thing that you have that puts you above what another person in the same position would have. For Cody, it's his fearlessness and his mechanical engineering friend from a hundred years ago. Cody, what is your unfair advantage in the printables, the Gold City Ventures venture? I think it's what you said before, my willingness to fail. Like, I will throw

out a hundred different ideas, whether that's a new business or within the confines of digital products and Gold City Ventures. I mean, I've created like over a thousand digital products. hundreds of them have fallen flat on their face. They don't sell at all, but like a couple of them did really, really well. And so you just never know. So I'm just willing to take so many shots at goal that like a couple of them are going to go in. That's probably my superpower. And to bring it back to financial independence, I think the fact that I started so early,

that was also huge for me. Like I had a lot of time. You'd mentioned this before, Mindy. I didn't have responsibilities. I didn't have a family. I didn't have a mortgage. I could just like kind of try whatever. My expenses were super low.

So I had so much entrepreneurial freedom and I had a lot of financial runway, which is something I learned from Set for Life, Scott. I think I just had the cards stacked in my favor to take these risks and to exploit my unfray advantages. I think that's right. I think I want to do a framework here from an entrepreneur perspective that is really important, which is when executives at bigger pockets would fail. It was because I'm going to spend a million dollars and six months building this thing and we're going to find out how it goes when it comes out. And the executives who would win launched 40 things in the same period, and two of them worked really well. And it was almost all of them were very low cost, right? And that's the framework here.

If you're going to go into entrepreneur, like that's, I think what you have to separate here. If you're going to go into a business that is I'm going to launch a rocket ship and compete with SpaceX, that's a very high failure rate. But if you're like, hey, I'm going to use AI to spin up a digital product and I'm going to do a hundred of them and iterate each time, that's a very, a completely different risk profile in the entrepreneurial world. I would push people toward the second option all day, unless you are a true genius solving one of the world's hardest problems and you're willing to take the very low probability of success for the enormous payoff. But I think that's what I'm hearing from you is you've just pursued tons of things and each failure costs you almost nothing but offered the chance to win. That's where people are like, oh, entrepreneurs have high failure. Yeah, if you try one, but you try a hundred and each one costs you almost nothing, then all of a sudden the probabilities begin to shift in a pretty dramatic way. Yeah, Scott, what's your quote?

If nine out of ten small businesses fail, start 10 businesses. Yeah, I think now it's, if nine out of ten businesses fail, you start 100 businesses. And then the odds of success become overwhelming if each one, you know, you don't actually literally put an LLC together for all these, but you try a hundred things. And then that's when you know if something's failed. And that's a quarter of work, one idea a day. Scott, do you remember when we met Cody Berman at Camp Fi in January of 2018? Because I do.

I seem to recall there was a pull-up concept. contest among anybody who wanted to do it. And do you remember who won? I certainly do. I certainly do. I like that guy. Yeah. Cody, do you remember who won? I remember I tied that other guy who owned a CrossFit gym and I was so mad because I wanted to win. No, I thought you won. No, I tied him. We both got like 23 or 24. Oh, man. I thought you won. I like your memory though. I like that memory a lot better, but no. I mean, we tied. We tied for first. I didn't lose. I just wasn't a clean win. I assume that the new home, the dream home is going to have a home gym. It is going to have a home gym. It's going to have a home office. It's on a lake. It's got all the things that we want. And that's

something I've gotten a lot better about. Like, for those three years, the financial freedom sprint, I was really bad at spending money. Like, very bad scarcity mindset ingrained for me from very early on. But I've gotten a lot better at turning up what remit safety calls the money dials. And so, like, we're spending a good bit on this forever home. We spend a good bit on travel and experiences where we don't spend a lot of money is the things that we don't care about. I'm not driving a Lamborghini, even though I could afford to drive one. It's just not something that interests me whatsoever.

So we have gotten a lot better about, like, loosening up the wall a little bit on things that matter to us. The home gym is so, is so huge because there's just no excuse. Like, even like on a bad day that you don't work out, you can just get like a couple of sets in between emails. And that makes such a difference in the compounding. So that's great. Love it. And yeah, I would definitely encourage folks to think about that as part of their five journey as like,

how are you going to stay fit? Because if you're privileged enough to go after financial independence, then staying fit is the number one thing to do to keep your health care costs low across a lifetime. It's still luck of the draw. There's still random chance that can blow that up. But that's the number one controllable thing that you can do. And you just feel better so you can enjoy the wealth you've created, that much more, that much longer. So Cody, tell us all the things. Where can people find you online, where can they find the book? Where can they find Gold City Ventures? All the things. All right, all the things. So my book, Retire by 30, right behind me. Retire by 30, book.com is where you can find that and some other fun freebies on there.

Gold City Ventures, my digital products business at Gold City Ventures Everywhere and Gold City Ventures.com. Me, my personal brand on every social media platform is at Cody D. Berman. And then I also have a podcast, the Financial Independence Show, wherever you listen to podcasts. And I think those are the main ones. Yeah, I also want to call out that I posted, I think that I had this Instagram post that was too cheeky a while back. I was like, if you want to retire by 65, save 10%, you want to retire by 25, you know, you want to retire by 35, house hack a few times. And if you want to retire by 25, you're about to get ripped off in a scam. I don't, and you've responded to that. I was not calling

you at that. I think, you know, if you want to retire by 25, you know, you're going to have to do some kind of entrepreneurial thing while you spend $2,000 a month and then reassess your options at 30. And Cody is a great resource for that and not a scam. Thank you, Scott. Yeah, I was like, Hey, come on, Scott. I don't think, I don't think of what I appreciated that. I didn't think about that. I was just thinking a joke. But, yeah, I think your approach has got a great,

is a great way to fire people up on there. And if you miss, you know, you probably learn plenty of things along the way and have more reps by 30 to approach your goals. So great stuff. And thank you for sharing this with us. Yeah. Thank you guys for having me.

And I love the content that you guys put out because I feel like it's so level-headed and even killed, whereas a lot of other people, especially in the real estate world, like, you know, it's real estate or die. Like if you invest in index funds, waste of money, retirement accounts or a scam. I love the kind of even keeled, level-headed approach that you guys bring to everything you talk about. And there isn't one way to FI. That was something

I wanted to make abundantly clear in my book. Like I featured a bunch of people with case studies. There's a million different ways. You can do corporate. You can do entrepreneurship. You can invest in real estate. You can start a small business. Like there's no one size fits all approach. So if you disagree with any part of my story today that I talked about, that's fine. Like you can do it your own way. There's a million different ways to do it. When spring hits, some people suddenly just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized. Whether or not that hits you, Monarch will do your financial spring cleaning for you. One dashboard gets your entire financial life organized. No more clutter, no more mess,

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E-T-H-O-S dot com slash BP money. Application times may vary and rates may vary. When you're ready to start your business, Northwest Registered Agent helps you do more than just file paperwork. You get all the tools to build a real business identity from day one, a business address, website, phone number, operating agreement, free guides and more at no extra cost. Northwest registered agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S. with over 1,500 corporate guides. These are real people who know your local laws and can help you in your business every step of the way. With Northwest, your business is set up to stand on

its own from day one. That means your home address, personal email, and phone number, stay private. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money free and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registered Agent.com slash money free. I feel like we are, or I don't know how to speak from Indy, but I feel like an extremist against extremists. I really cannot stand purity people who have like one way to do things on it and like one tool for it and judge the other guy's approach there. I used to judge, so this is an evolution for me for sure. But I think that that's where I'm where I'm at.

And I think like put a pin in this story. The advantage to your approach is that it can win by 25 or 30 in the way that you just described. And most corporate careers can't win to that level at that point in time. They can win. They have a higher probability of achieving a great outcome, you know, within the next decade from where you're at right now. But that's the challenge there. And I think that people should weigh that and say, yes, there's risks. There's real problems. This is not for everyone. There's, you know, there's a selection bias from Cody here. You know, it's possible you appeared on our podcast, you know, in some other form, you know, the version of you. And we just haven't had that person back on yet because they haven't talked about it,

right? So we have to, you know, you're here because you've been doing this for eight years. So that's real, but also it can work. And so you have to weigh both of those things to fairly assess what's right for you. Well, appreciate both you guys and thank you for having me on again after these eight long years. We'll talk again in eight more years when you buy the Lakers. Perfect. Mark it on calendar. All right, Cody, thank you so much for your time today. And we'll talk to you soon.

All right, Scott, that was Cody Berman. And that was his absolutely fantastic story. I just love having him on the show, even though clearly I haven't talked to him since 2018 on the show. He has such an energy and he has such a great story. He is just focused and he does the work. And I think that's the underlying theme that you can take away from this episode is that if you want to succeed, you have to do the thing. This is like another level from the approach that I mapped out and set for life.

I mean, he kept expenses of $2,000 went straight into entrepreneurship and hustled and hustled to earn a, you know, that first year's salary. I'm sure that it was also a slope where he was. he was earning much less than he would have earned at a regular job in those first few months and then just shot out of a cannon from there in the next 10 years. I think that should give people a lot of pause because, you know, I think entrepreneurship, this is what's possible from an entrepreneurial outcome. And it's not like you built a huge business and sold it, right? These are businesses he owns and operates. I didn't hear an exit come in there or a capital

raise or anything like that into this story. This is possible for someone who's wired a certain way and is hustling. And I think it, I think that it's a valid approach. And then again, like I said in the show, I think it changes the way that financial theory needs to be applied to a situation. Like, are you going to tell me that he is not maximizing his happiness because he has not converted his portfolio into a totally passive stock bond portfolio harvesting at it at four to five percent? No, you're completely full of it if you think that that approach would lead this particular human being to more happiness. And so you've really got to reset the way that you're approaching that, right? That's the right approach for many people. But like to call it wrong here is just

preposterously silly. And so I think that that's the thing that makes this fun for me is talking about this. And we don't have enough entrepreneurs, I think, on the show, because this is happening around us to a large degree. And I think versions of this story are possible for many people who achieve fire early in life in some capacity if they choose to apply themselves to business at some point. Yeah, I agree, Scott. I think that more entrepreneurial endeavors need to be featured on the show because it's not an easy path, but it is a very clear path to financial independence by being the boss of your own self and choosing your hours that you're going to work. Your entrepreneurial endeavor doesn't have to be a full-time job. It can be a part-time job that generates

enough income for you to max out your 401k or max out your Roth IRA or both. You don't have to work 90 hours a week in order to be able to do this. You just have to choose the right thing that fits with your skill set that you are going to enjoy that is going to generate income. And like you keep saying, Scott, if nine out of ten small businesses fail, start 10 small businesses. Yeah, there's a quote I saw recently from somebody. I can't remember who it was, but it was like it's amateurs who have one big, bright, beautiful idea that they can never abandon, and professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory or work after work to achieve success. I'll take credit for that quote.

That sounds like me. Well, should we get out of here, Mindy? All right, my dear listeners, that wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, but you are not done learning just because we have stopped talking. Hop on over to biggerpocketsmoney.com. We have a ton of new things on our website. We have a blog. We have resources like calculators and spreadsheets to help you on your journey to financial independence.

We have templates. Scott is furiously coding with our tech team to bring you new things all the time. And Scott, what's the cost? Free. We have a money back guarantee, but there's currently a way to pull out your credit card and pay Bigger Pockets money at this time. So thank you for listening and supporting us. If you want to support us, you can support our sponsors.

That's the best way to support Bigger Pockets money. If you buy one of our free resources and you don't like it, I will send you all that free money back. Yeah, I have a great pricing page for this, actually. Yes, there's different tiers of free. Tier one is free. Tier two is free. Tier three is free.

We just want to help you get to financial independence. The master tier, our most expensive product, has the complete Bigger Pockets Money experience. It includes everything in the builder and explorer tiers and includes our, you know, fire and real estate case study vault, the free only financial advice, just kidding. That's for entertainment only.

And then our actual emails, Scott at Bigger Pockets Money. Mindy at Bigger Pockets Money. And then I think you have an email for complaints, Mindy, that you've posted on the site at I don't care at tell somebody else.com that Mindy has put on there. And then, yeah, access to those tools. Yes. However, if you do find a bug or something weird in one of the resources.

Oh, yeah, legitimate feedback and corrections. That's that. We want that, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Send that to Mindy at BiggerPockets Money.com or Scott at BiggerPockets Money.com. Yeah. But complaints about my mustache, no, you know, like that's okay. There's a poll for that on YouTube if you want to do it.

And yes, most people will want me to do it. take it off. Hey, does your wife like it? She did not like it at first. She likes it now. Okay. If your wife likes it, what's that phrase? Happy wife, happy wife. That's right. All right, Scott. We have kept our listeners for long enough. Thank you so much for listening to us. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Indy Jensen saying do not let inflation fry your fie. When the change in season hits, some people suddenly just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized, and that's great. If that's you or if it's not you, either way, let Monarch do the financial spring cleaning this

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from day one. That means your home address, personal email, and phone number, stay private. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money free and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash money free.