BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 223: How to Become Set for Life Through House Hacking, Frugality, and Maximizing Your Income with Scott Trench

Episode Date: April 20, 2017

A lot of people want to achieve financial freedom—but many who start the journey never arrive. So what’s the best way to truly set yourself up for success in achieving financial independence and wealth? That’s the topic of today’s show, where we sit down with Scott Trench, author of Set for Life,to discuss some of the simple yet powerful, tactics people can use to increase their income, reduce their expenses, and lead a legendary life.   In This Episode We Cover: A little bit on Scott‘s background The path to early financial freedom How to house hack your way to a portfolio of properties Tips for using the BRRRR method How to invest despite what the market situation is An introduction to the book Set for Life The three stages of wealth mentioned in the book What you should know about the “financial runway“ The bonuses that comes with the book A discussion on making more money The importance of finding a job you love How to get the set of skills you need to succeed Scott’s advice to those who are getting their first deal And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Podcast 099: 3 Personal Finance Bloggers & Their First Real Estate Investment with Scott, Lauren, and Philip (podcast) Ben Leybovich’s BP Profile Jered Sturm’s BP Profile How to “Hack” Your Housing and Get Paid to Live for Free (blog) BiggerPockets Podcast 217: How to Work Less and Earn More Using the 80/20 Rule with Perry Marshall (podcast) Your First Home Purchase Could Be a Horrendous Financial Decision. Unless… (blog) Investors: Don’t Shoot for 100+ Properties. Aim for Bigger & Better With THIS Strategy. (blog) How I Went From $0 Net Worth to Qualifying for $1M in Real Estate Financing in 2.5 Years (blog) Am I Missing Something, or Is Real Estate Investing Really Not That Hard? (blog) Books Mentioned in this Show Set for Life by Scott Trench (email [e-mail]) The Book on Rental Property Investing by Brandon Turner The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki Tweetable Topics: “It’s not just about being thrifty or cheap; it’s about being smart.” (Tweet This!) “Because we were responsible financially, we were able to take risks.” (Tweet This!) “Understand that what I’m doing today is what I need to get to the next level.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Scott Scott’s BiggerPockets Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 223. That's why I wrote Set for Life is because that is what I believe is, hey, here's the piece of like, here's the step-by-step guide to reducing your expenses. Here's the philosophy around income production and investing that will help you actually make that transition. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others

who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everybody? This is Josh Storkin. House to the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. What's up, man? You know, things are going really, really well for me right now.

You know, I got a little baby girl who's learning how to walk. And, you know, it's great. Oh, and you have to talk about your baby girl when I was going to give you a hard time. Yep, exactly. Now you have to. She is so cute. How about you?

How's your, you and yours, your family and all that? Oh, they're so cute, man. They're cute. You know, it's really cool. This week, my eldest is eight in second grade. She built a wire sculpture. And it was selected to go to this art exposition. And amongst, you know, artworks from lots of mostly older kids.

She was one of just like a handful of kids picked out of her entire school. and it displayed with artwork from kids all around the city of Denver. It was really cool. It was proud Papa moment. Yeah, I was going to say proud daddy. Look at that. Yeah, that was awesome. That's very cool.

This week, you know, my daughter got food all over her face because that's all I'm proud about right now. That's awesome. That's awesome. Man, today we got a show, dude. We have a show. This is a long show. It is.

But I want to encourage you guys, I mean, this is a longer show. But if you have to break this on the two halves and listen on your commute to and from work, listen to the whole thing. When we start talking about things like, I mean, we start with real estate. We get into frugality. And then we talk about how to actually increase your income. If you have a job right now, how to like, you know, 2x, 3x, 5x it. I mean, there's some cool stuff in this.

We talk about wealth building. We talk about increasing your income. We talk about looking in the mirror at who you are and what you do and trying to figure out if that's the you that you want to be. It's fascinating. This is probably one of the deeper shows we've ever done. just in terms of mindset, philosophy, and we tackle a lot of amazing topics. I think this is very relevant for anyone and everyone.

So definitely stay tuned. It's going to be a good one. That it is. But before we get to the show, let's get to today's quick tip. All right, today's quick tip is nice and simple. We actually are launching a new book here at Bigger Pockets. It is called Set for Life. And in fact, we're talking to the author today, Scott Trench.

And so today's quick tip is very simple. go to biggerpockets.com slash set for life and pick up a copy of this book. We talk about it later in the actual interview, but trust me, you guys are going to want to buy this in the first week. If you guys enjoy books, not just on real estate, but just wealth building in general, you're going to want to get this book. And there's some amazing bonuses if you buy during the first week. That's very important. We're actually trying to hit a bestsellers list and you guys can help us by doing that. So go to BiggerPockets.com slash set for life.

And that'll give you links to Amazon. You can go to Barnes & Noble, all that good stuff. So there's your quick tip, set for life. Cool. Awesome, awesome. Managing properties can feel like a full-on circus. You're juggling vendors, tracking payments, chasing approvals across multiple properties, and maybe a few HOAs,

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This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. All right, guys. So today's show, we're going to just dive into this. We are talking to Scott Trench, the man, the myth, the legend. He is actually a legend in his own mind. It's quite funny.

I got to read this real quick. I know you usually introduce a guest, but I want to read this because this is a cool little phrase here. It was on the back of the book. Actually, he's got a copy of the, I'm looking at the back of the book. And says, Scott Trench is a perpetual student of personal finance, real estate investing, sales, business, and personal management. He's a real estate investor, an executive and an online corporation.

I don't know what corporation that is. Salesman and an author. He's a proponent of different kinds of money management, one that involves frugality, calculated risk, and a lot of hard work. That's pretty impressive. He's got an impressive little resume there. He's got an impressive resume. He's an impressive guy.

He's somebody that you and I both look up to. And I'm definitely honored not only to have him work here at Bigger Pockets, we're honored to have him on the show. And frankly, I'm ecstatic that he wrote this book. It's incredible. But let's get into it. Let's talk about this stuff. All right, Scott.

Welcome back to the show, man. Holy smokes. Look at you. Two-timer. It's good to be back. It's been a while. It has been a little while. Yeah, you were back on what, number 99, I think?

Yep, it was three personal finance bloggers and their first investment property. Fancy, fancy. Well, people want to listen to that and go back to BiggerPockets.com. So I show 99 and listen to a little bit of your story there. But today we're talking about something a little bit different. But for those who have not heard that episode, why don't we give a quick, quick recap. Who are you? And how did you get involved in real estate? So my name is Scott Trench. I'm the VP of Operations here at Bigger Pockets. And I wanted to get into real estate because when I

graduated college, I was welcomed into the real world by a cubicle job crunching spreadsheets. And that was not exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. And now you have an office crunching spreadsheets, right? Now I have an office crunching spreadsheets, but it's a little better, you know. I get to work here at Bigger Pockets, help billions of people achieve financial freedom. So, yes, I wanted to move towards financial freedom. And so I started saving my pennies, becoming very frugal, and listening to a show called The Bigger Pockets Podcast. Nice.

I hate that show. Those guys are jerks. At least it's one of them. Well, you guys told me on that show, I don't know if you remember this, but you told me, go out and network with as many people as you can. And so I started meeting people for lunch. I started meeting people for coffee in the morning. I started meeting people for beers after work.

And one day, I happened to run into Mr. Dorkin here while networking with some real estate investors. Yeah, actually, it was, it was more like, you know, I was at work and you creeped up on my office and like totally fanboyed and it was freaky. And you were like, oh my God. And I was like, sir, can you please go away? Yep. And then I didn't. I followed up probably like three or four more times. You know, no, it was great. It was great. Okay. So yeah. Yeah, keep going. Keep going. How did you get to the real estate. Yeah, one thing led to another, and I followed up a few more times. I got an interview with you guys and progressed my real estate investing. Got a job here at bigger pockets, and companies grown, my portfolio is grown, personal finance position is grown, and yeah.

All right. Well, so speaking of that, you know, as we talked about earlier, today's kind of a different type of show for a few reasons. We've got you on here. You do have this book coming out that we alluded to. And this podcast is not just, about real estate. One of the things that we do here at Bigger Pockets is not just get people doing their first deal, their seventh deal, their 100th deal, but we also try to get them prepared

so that they can actually do that first deal or their seventh deal or their 50th deal. And you've gone and written this book set for life and it's fantastic. So we wanted to have you on the show not only because of the book, but we've got so many users on the, site who, you know, they're excited. They learn about real estate and they're ready to go.

The problem is they're not financially ready. And, you know, we thought it would be really appropriate to put together this book. You were super excited about it. And you're absolutely the single most passionate person about getting your financial ducks in a row that I've ever met. And so we thought it'd be great. So we're going to dive into that stuff in a couple of minutes. Let's quickly run through your actual real estate, why you started buying real estate. Why you started buying real estate specifically quickly and then dive into that first deal. And then, you know, I really want to frame everything that we talk about in terms of, you know, what other people need to be thinking about while they're building out their personal financial histories, while they're,

while they're making decisions on how they're going to live their lives and on how they're going to invest their portfolio. So let's just, you know, as we as we talk through this, you know, think about things in that frame of reference. Sure. So my goal, as soon as I realized, I don't want to spend the next 30 years doing this kind of work of 40 years, however long that a typical career lasts, I decided I wanted to replace my wage income with passive income. And I explored several means to do that.

As a full-time employee, it seemed to me that real estate was an incredible way to build semi-passive wealth, wealth where I could spend some work and some energy after hours and still achieve a really scalable return. And so the way I decided to do that is, you know, I started out with nothing. I had maybe three grand when I started my first job, which is wonderful. Many people start out with actually a lot of debt. But, you know, I was like, how do I go from this position to early financial freedom rapidly while working a full-time job? And in order to do that, the first thing that kind of struck my mind is, well, my rent, my housing expense is my biggest single thing that's holding me back from saving and accumulating more wealth. How do I eliminate that? And so I actually read a nice article, by Mr. Turner here, called How to Hack Your Housing and Get Paid to Live for Free, I think it was called. That was maybe three, four years ago. I mean, I was like, this is it. Bingo. What I can do is I can move into a owner-occupied duplex, which just 5% down. That was $12,000 for my first property. I'll get to the details of that in a minute. And I can wipe out my mortgage and rent expense,

my housing expense entirely. So I immediately set about saving as much as I possibly could so I could make that a reality as soon as possible. That first year, I worked hard, saved as much as possible, brought lunch to work every day, did all that kind of stuff, and saved up about 20 grand on my just under $50,000 a year salary. And with that 20 grand, I used that to buy a $240,000 duplex up in about November 2014. Fixed it up, got a tenant on the other side, got a roommate to help me out with my side. They were both two-bed, one baths. And so at the time, I was paying a mortgage of 1550, receiving 1150 in rent from the tenants, and then 550 from my roommate. So I was, you know, eking out 150 bucks there. And that probably broke even after all the utilities and those

kinds of expenses. That's awesome. That's awesome. So yeah, that's that concept of house hacking, which that article way back in the day was kind of what started that phrase, which now I hear people all the time saying house hacking. We coined the phrase. And now everybody's using it. Yeah. I know. So you decided to house hack this property. A couple of a couple of questions about that. First of all, is house hacking for anybody, do you think, or is it for guys like you single, you know, young? Like, is that the only people that's good for that? So I think it's most appealing to guys like me that are kind of single and young, but I think it works for anyone. And what I encourage, if you're looking to achieve early financial freedom,

regardless of who you are, buying a house, a home, a primary residence, that stretches yourself to your financial limits, you know, let's say if you make 80K a year, 85K a year, and you buy a $400,000 property. I mean, that is going to devastate your ability to progress towards early financial freedom. You're not going to be able to save anything. You're going to wipe out most of your cash position, most likely, on that purchase. And it's just going to be a year's long slog to really get back into position to begin saving rapidly and investing in real estate, for example. If you house hack, even if you just, you know, you don't have to house hack forever. If you just house hack a few times, you really set yourself up with a lot of passive cash flow. It's a really easy way

to get involved in real estate investing. And then you can use those former house hacks to buy that primary residence. So that's my plan. And I understand why that's particularly appealing to me as a kind of a young single guy. But I think it could work really well for a family as well. Many of my tenants, for example, are families.

You know, what's the difference between them living in this place as a tenant and versus as a house hacker? Well, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth over, you know, a decade or so. One of my buddies out here in Olympia, Washington, named Carrie, he's got four kids and they bought a duplex. they lived in half, fixing it up. And they just bought a second duplex. They moved from the one to the other one.

I mean, like, they've house hacked both these. They have a ton of equity, building cash flow in it. And now they can go out and buy their, you know, dream house, so to speak, if they wanted to. And they could even use the cash flow from those properties to cover their mortgage on their dream house. And so it can be done by somebody with a family. That leads into what I was going to ask, Scott. And so, Scott, you said you were going to parlay that first house hack. You parlayed that first house hack into the next house hack.

How does that work? Is there like a time? frame under which you should be holding on to that first property, or can you just go from one to the next to the next and keep getting these deals, or is there a strategy behind, you know, moving up to the next house hack? Well, you know, I think when you're starting out into, in the game of wealth creation, especially if you make an immediate income, like 50, you know, 50k, around 50K a year like I was, maybe a little bit more, it's really hard to start accumulating the wealth that you need to rapidly to purchase, you know, multiple investment properties,

at least in certain parts of the country. I know in POTO and Washington where Brandon is, you know, you can save it up in just a few months. But here in Denver, you know, ripping on me already. Wow. Yep. But here in Denver, if you want to buy, you know, a normal property, you know, it's 300 grand. So that's $75,000 if you're trying to put 25% down. That's a lot of money. That can take years to save up. As a house hacker, you know, you can, the advantage is you can put down a very small down payment. Like in my example, I put down $12,000 in that $240,000 property. How so low, by the way. How'd you end up doing it so low?

The reason for that is because I used an FHA loan. And that goes right back to your question, which is, you know, how frequently can you do this? Well, once a year is basically the answer. And the reason why is because the FHA loan or these low down payment conventional loans typically ask you to live in that property for at least a year as part of the deal. Part of the advantage of getting access to financing with such a low down payment is you have to live there for a year. And I kind of look at that as just like, hey, I'm signing a lease for a year, except this lease is actually going to let me build a lot of wealth. And once that year is up, you actually are in a far greater, far more advantageous position than other homeowners and renters in your area because you're now the owner of an investment property. Unlike a homeowner, you can move out and you know you're going to get a cash filling rental property as soon as you move out.

Well, as long as you bought it well. As long as you bought it well, yes. So this is, you know, I'm specifically referring to the case of buying an investment property. that would make sense as a rental from day one as a house hack. But if you do that, you have this really advantageous position. Again, you have that option to rent it out. You have the option to continue living happily there, assuming you bought in a place that you're happy to live in,

and you have the option to sell it. Most people only have one or two of those options. You have all three. So it's actually fairly low risk, but you do have to live there for at least a year. So what do you suggest to people who want to do that, and they want to do this to say three or four times, but FHR only allows you to have one FHR,

Loan at a time. And so, like, what do your suggestion should somebody refinance or what's, what's the plan if you wanted to do it multiple times? Think of it like a, like a Burr strategy. You know, you buy, you fix it up. You know, you buy rehab. You rent out the other side. You rent out your side when you move out. And then you're refinanced out of the FHA loan. And hopefully you've built some equity. If not, you know, there's a couple of things that are working together to help you kind of reach that 20, 25 percent equity mark in that property. One is if you buy a house hack that needs some work in it, you can improve the value, you can increase the value through some forced appreciation. Two, you're not paying your rent anymore.

So, you know, hopefully you're living for free and able to save a lot more money. You can use that to kind of buy your way out of the out of the FHA loan. And then three, you know, if you're in a good market, you know, Denver happened to appreciate a lot and I got a lot of help from that front. Tell me with the refinance. So the combination of those three things really helps out. And then what happens is that gives you access to another FHA loan. So in effect, you know, let's use Denver as an example again. You know, you're trying to buy another $240,000 duplex.

You're going to need 25% of that. That's 60K. Or you can refinance out of the FHA load and now you can just put down 12K. So it's in effect, it's like giving yourself an extra $48,000 of purchasing power if you can refinance out of that. Stop with your voodoo magic. Yeah. And of course, there are other loans as well.

I mean, like, I know some banks now, this maybe is a scary sign, but, I mean, there's banks today doing 5% down conventional loans, 3% down conventional loans. So that's not a paycheck. It's starting to come back. It's starting to be. Yeah. And one more.

Yeah, it's crazy. One more thing to add on to that. One of my favorite ways to house hacking on you and I've talked about this before is what's called the 203K loan or 203K loan. It's part of the FHA program, but it allows you to wrap in the repair costs into that three and a half percent down payment. So let's see you buy the house for 200. you need 50 grand.

Well, normally a guy would need 25% down plus the 50 grand. I mean, they're going to come up with 100 grand at the end of the day, right? But if you're house hacking, they take the 200, add the 50 to it. You got 250. And you pay just 3.5% down of that entire 250. So it's like taking the Burr strategy and house hacking and marrying them together and making this beautiful baby. I love it.

Yeah, I love it. And for me, you know, I didn't use a two or three, Kayla, and because I wanted to, you know, do a lot of the work myself. And because I'm a little bit of a wussy and didn't want to take on such a big project with one of my first purchases. but yeah, absolutely, that's a great strategy. Very cool. Nice. Yeah, that's great.

So, Scott, in terms of house hacking, I mean, you're in Denver, right? Denver is one of the hottest real estate markets in the entire country. It's expensive. There's a heck of a lot of competition. In fact, somebody at the office here was looking at a duplex. They said, I believe there were 17 or 27 offers on a property that they had looked at within like a day or two. So how does one find a market to house hacking? Can you still house hack in a market like Denver?

Can you house hack in San Francisco, New York, these tougher markets, or not so much right now when the markets are really screaming? So I'm going to answer this in a roundabout way with some philosophy here. So my philosophy is, you know, where am I going to be the best off in 30 years from now, right? Where a property is going to be more valuable than they are today in 10, 20, 30, years. And, you know, I think there's a couple cities around the country that are showing some growth that people want to move there because they just want to move there because of their great city. You know, you talk about Seattle, Portland, Austin, Texas, and Denver, Colorado, I think,

is right up there. And, you know, I believe strongly in the long-term prospects of Denver, Colorado. And I think it's really hard. I think it's really, it's really easy to, you know, predict the financials of a business or real estate investment over six months to a year. It's a short time frame that you can easily predict. I also think it's fairly possible to predict the long-term outcomes of certain markets over 30 years. What's really difficult is kind of getting those cycles right in the five, seven, ten-year timeframe. So is Denver in a part of a cycle right now where it's impossible to find a deal? I don't know.

The market could climb for another five, six years before it dips. And even at the bottom of the next cycle, I might still be better off buying today than if I, and if I, you know, waited until the next correction. So the reason I think that Denver is a place to purchase is because if you earn even around the median income, you can still buy property here. And if you believe in the long-term fundamentals of the city, I think that if you dollar cost average, and by that I mean buying one property every year so that you're not buying at the top or the bottom of any one cycle, that you'll do all right. And the biggest key is to maintain cash flow. My first rental property produces $2,600 a month in gross rent, and the mortgage is $1,400 per month.

That's $1,200 per month over the debt service, right? Now, I don't buy the 50% rule. I think my expenses come out to about more of like $4 or $500 a month on this property. But either way, that's a stable cash-flowing investment. I'm not going to lose my shirt investing in that type of property. And if I can average that out and continue to buy property that produces cash flow, I believe I'm going to benefit from the long-term appreciation in this market. I love that.

You know, one thing that I love about bigger pockets in general, kind of like the spirit of BP, is how, like, everyone learns from one another. And why I say that is because, you know, yes, I wrote that, you know, the post on house hacking that Scott learned from and then did that thing. But I've learned probably more from Scott than he's learned from me. And this is one of the things that I picked up with Scott. Yeah, is this idea of like, you know, I invest in Podunk, Washington. A lot of my stuff is here.

But me and Scott, I have talked for hundreds of hours, if not. not thousands of hours about real estate stuff. And I'm paying you to do something else. Exactly. How about that? It's all after hours, Jack. Yeah, yeah, it's all after. Yeah, sure.

But I've really come around to this idea of like when I asked Scott, you know, like, well, what if the Denver market crashes? I mean, his answer is always like, well, do you think it's going to come back? I mean, it's Denver. It's a nice market. And I'm more and more convinced that when you look for a solid, stable, growing market, you don't have to necessarily worry, oh, what if it dropped? a little bit in the next three times. What are the cycle I hit it at the wrong point?

You know, like buy good properties in great areas and you're going to likely be fine on average. At good value though. I mean, and I know we're talking long-term cycles, but like, you know, if Scott had paid for whatever the property he was just talking about and if his note was, you know, $2,500 or $3,000 a month, you know, suddenly he's probably overpaying a little bit or, you know, at least relative to the rents that he can achieve. And so, you know, granted, he can achieve wealth over time through pay down, you know, of his mortgage and, you know, tax benefits. But, you know, what if he had paid $3,000? What if he was upside down? You know, and a lot of people find themselves in that position because they're just not thinking about these things. Yeah. My philosophy is definitely

go in a long, in a market where you believe strong in the long-term profits, profit potential, and abide by these three rules. First, make sure that you win if the market continues going up by being invested. Second, make sure you win if the market remains flat and there's no appreciation. And third, make sure you win if the market goes down. So if you do those three things, you're pretty much covered. So if the market goes down, I'm in position to buy a lot more real estate through my personal financial position outside of real estate investing. Talk about winning while the market goes down on your holdings. And I think it's an important discussion that we don't really talk about a lot on the podcast. People assume, okay, well, I've got, I'm making X amount of rent.

And, you know, that's enough to do okay. So, you know, I paid, I paid, I was smart one on the buy side. And, and, you know, I make a hundred bucks a door after everything's set and done. That's great. But that assumes that rents aren't going to go down when the market and if the market goes down, right? And so, you know, sometimes people can find themselves in a position where they've bought a property, you know, okay, it looks good on paper when everything's good. But when things turn, even though they were smart and how they bought it, they were not anticipating that rents could drop. And so, you know, maybe immediately you're tied into somebody, but they go and they see, you know what, I'm paying X amount of rent. I could go somewhere else, get the same or better property for less because

rents have started a drop. Now you've got to go refill that and now your rent drops. Suddenly, you start to bleed. So obviously, if the markets tank tremendously and rents go down, you're in trouble. But is there any kind of way to protect yourself from that? So here's my philosophy. Rule number one, I have a lot of cash. So I have a lot of cash saved up that I've accumulated over the years. I purchase very conservatively. I'm not extending myself to my absolute financial limits to buy real estate. So I could survive for a year, two years, maybe if rents, you know, even if I wasn't able to get a tenant in there at all into either of my properties. So that's the first rule. The second rule is, you know, set yourself up for

opportunity when that market crash comes, right? And again, I think that that partially comes through with that cash position because, hey, let's say the market crashes, right? Sure, I might be out of my current properties. They might not produce a great cash flow. if the rents drop, I might lose my equity. But now I can buy more property at a great price. And that's, again, because of my personal financial position outside of my current real estate portfolio. And then the second piece is kind of generally what I'm doing, how my work ethic and what I'm trying to do with my career and things involved in real estate, that will also help set me up for success in the event of a market crash. I've got a track record. I got my

real estate license to help me with my real estate, with my business. Everybody I know, every single person I know knows that I love real estate and love talking about it, perhaps to the point of a little bit of annoyance. But never. I hope that if the market crashes, I'm putting myself in a position such that people will be like, all right, Scott's saying it's now it's now time to buy. It's time to buy. Let's go ahead and get involved there and take advantage of the opportunities in that market. So I think those are the two ways to set yourself up for success if the market goes sour. Love it. Right. Awesome.

So, you know, and Scott, that's your philosophies, I think, are why Brandon has spent hundreds or thousands of hours talking to you. They're the reasons I've spent probably hundreds or thousands of hours talking to you, probably on the clock, too, about these things. And they're the reason why the book is something that I'm super excited about. and we're so proud to get behind because, you know, as young as you are, I don't think I've ever met another person as well put together from a mental perspective as it pertains to wealth-building, personal finance. You know, granted, your inability to pick stocks is astounding.

But beyond that, the philosophies are fantastic. So you got this book coming out. We want to talk about some of the themes in the book. Can you give us a quick 30-second overview of the book and share with us, in your opinion, what's the best way for someone to become set for life at a young age? Awesome. So the goal of the book is to help someone that's from a standing start with little to no assets, who works a full-time job earning around immediate income, help them move rapidly towards early financial freedom. And we do that through three stages. The first stage is kind of accumulating that first year of what I call financial runway. So for example, and you do this through, mostly through frugality in the first stage. What is that? Fugality, saving. So for example,

a year of financial runway might be, if you spend $3,000 a month, that might be $36,000 per year in cash. If you have $36,000 per year in cash and no debts and your expenses are $3,000 per month, you can begin to take some risks. You can buy a property, like a house hack. You can make maybe quit your job and pursue a job that offers a lower base pay, but offers more opportunity. You know, for example, like a real estate agent. And then that brings us to stage two, which is going from that kind of one year of financial one way to maybe four or five years of financial one way. And I kind of bench that as the $100,000 mark. So if you have $100,000 in cash, readily accessible wealth, you know, it doesn't have to be in the bank.

It could be in stocks or bonds or something that you can easily withdraw from. you now have exponentially more options. You can go and start a business. You can buy a really significant investment or an outright rental property with 25% down. You could, you know, take a few years off and go and become an entrepreneur. And then that brings us from the third stage of the book, which is going from the first $100,000 or four to five years in financial one way to early financial freedom. And you finish out the journey by honing your investment philosophy, buying assets, buying building, and otherwise acquiring assets that produce passive cash flow and satisfying the financial freedom equation.

You talked about the kind of the three phases, the first $25,000 that phase. I wanted to go there. Is that cool, Josh? Are we good to go there? You can go wherever you want to go. Since when do you ever ask for my permission to do anything? I usually don't. I usually don't.

No. All right. In here, in the book, do you say, never. You just keep doing what you want to do. That's how we roll. You know, I believe in the beginning you're like, no, a podcast suck. We don't want a podcast. I just did it anyway and I forced you.

I tied you to your chair and I'm wrong about that. That's incorrect. This podcast is disaster. That's for sure. Clearly. And yes, I was a thousand percent against doing a podcast. No. What's wrong with you?

All right. So going back to our guest, because it's not all about you, Josh. You say in the book, Scott, that wealth creation, begins with frugality. It's in the section on how to get to that first $25,000, which for a lot of people, listen to the show right now, they're like, $25,000 seems like a lot of money. I could never get there. You know, that's going to take me 20 years to get there. And so, why do you- rocking some brand-new kicks, aren't they? They are rocking some brand-new kicks. Driving a decent car, aren't they? They are. They got their little Starbucks habit, don't they,

Turner? I love my Starbucks. So, all right, so why does wealth creation begin with frugality? And honestly, isn't frugality, just not very fun? So frugality, well, when I say this, well, remember, this book is written for a full-time employee earning a salary, right? Okay. When you earn a salary, it's not to say it can't be done. It's just that it's fairly inefficient. It's often inefficient to attempt to earn dramatically more income from those hours.

You know you're going to get more or less paid that paycheck if you show up and do your job well, right? So you have to focus somewhere else on building that year of financial one way so that you can begin to take risks. So the wealth creation journey begins with frugality for the full-time employee and not necessarily for someone like you, Brandon, who became a full-time entrepreneur and built a real estate empire, right? And the reason why it begins with frugality is because many, many users on bigger pockets, many of our listeners, they have great jobs. They're making 50, 60, 80K a year, maybe more, and they want to get started investing in real estate. Well, why can't they invest in real estate, it's because they have no cash. It's because they have no ability to

accumulate their, you know, preserve their paycheck. And so if you can start preserving that one, two, three thousand dollars per month at a time, you'll rapidly build out, again, that first year of financial one way and begin to get exposure to opportunities that will allow you to increase your income and buy significant investments. Can you explain that a little bit? Because I love this point that you and I, again, have talked about this before and I want everyone to understand what you mean here by that financial runway and then you can take risks. What are you talking about? So for example, in my case, right, I spent my first year building up that first $20,000, which for me was a year of financial one way because I was spending less than

$2,000 per month on my lifestyle. And with that first $20,000, I was able to do two things at the same time. The first was I was able to buy a house hack, right? And the second was because my spending was so low and I had a cash cushion. I was able to quit my boring job that I didn't like previous to bigger pockets and join this fantastic startup that was helping millions of people achieve financial freedom through real estate. It's not going to get you any bonus points, man. Don't tell you. Fair enough. But, you know, opportunities flowed from that decision. And, you know, those kind of options present themselves once you have cash saved up and are able to are able to live happily.

This is not about living like a hermit, but if you can live happily on a small amount per month, you can take advantage of different job opportunities that can offer scale. So I know one of the things that you talk about is, you know, finding jobs like commission jobs, like sales jobs, things like that, things that can potentially expand your ability to earn is one path.

There are other paths. Also, in cutting down on expenses, is probably one of the biggest ones that I think a lot of people have the ability to do, but oftentimes don't know how to or don't want to. So can we talk about that a little bit? How do people cut back? And particularly, you know, somebody like you, you're a single guy,

you know, you can cut back on booze and drinking and partying with the ladies. And, you know, that's one path. You know. Scott sounds like he has such a wild life. That's the biggest part of them. Have you met frat boy, Scott? But what about somebody who's a little tighter, somebody who has student loan debt, somebody who has some of these other issues? Where would somebody start when it comes to cutting down on their expenses?

Okay. So, and I have a whole chapter in the book that's specifically dedicated to how to cut major expenses from a typical American budget. And so where do we start when we're looking at how to cut expenses and begin to save aggressively? Well, you start by looking at the biggest areas. of your spending. And you know, you made this point, you know, booze, right? Or let's say, let's call it coffee in the morning, you know, lattes at Starbucks. A lot of people tell you to, hey, I want to cut out, you need to cut out those lattes or that, you know, happy hour every week that you spend with your friends. Well, you know, that's baloney in my opinion, because

that's, you know, a small fraction of most people's spending. Where is people, where is your money really going? If you're an average America, if you're a typical person, your money's really going to your house and mortgage payment or your rent. It's really going to your transportation costs and specifically your your expensive car, you know, a $30,000 plus vehicle. It's really going to your eating out budget, you know, when you order lunch, you know, three or four times a week, and that adds up over the time. And you can live just as happily on on food that you prepare yourself. That's delicious from the grocery store. Those are where your expenses. I've eaten your food before. It's not that good.

Well, you know. So real quick, to something, we had on the show a few, I don't know, a month back or whatever, Perry Marshall. We talked about the 80-20 rule, but how like, I guess never really put these two together together, but in your expenses, it's probably the same way. Like most of your expenses are probably situated in a few small things you have.

Like you said, eating lunch every day out, your mortgage, your car payment. It's probably 80% of your entire spending right there versus the $5 latte. Absolutely. I just listened to that podcast the other day. And while I didn't reference the 80-20 rule, the chapter, I break it out. Like, hey, 80% of the average American spending is in the categories of housing, transportation, food, health insurance, and pensions. And well, you know, there's maybe not that much you can do about the health insurance piece. There's a lot you can do about the 50% of your

budget that is housing, transportation, and food. Actually, I think it's more like two-thirds. So, and then the other 20% is going to be your entertainment expense or your, you know, education expense, even though that could be, you know, a big thing for someone with student loans, for example. For the average American, those are not big parts of their budget. So focusing your efforts on cutting out spending there is largely a waste of time. And it's not going to result in a material difference in the speed at which you approach financial freedom. But, Scott, I need my car and my car payment, my $40,000 Lexus, so I can drive to work, day because I have to earn a living. And my wife needs her car and her $40,000 loan, you know,

to drive to work as well. Like, are you telling us that we should not have cars? So this is where frugality becomes a... And I don't have a $40,000, Lexus. It's a journey, right? It's a journey. You know, just like building wealth through real estate, designing an efficient, awesome, low-cost lifestyle is also a journey you have to undertake. And it usually takes, you know, at least in my experience, six months to a year, maybe a little longer, to fully make the changes is necessary to begin preserving a huge amount of your income while giving up basically no happiness. So, for example, in my case, I start off driving to work, you know, over 10 miles every day, because that's what they could do. I started out of college, got a car, and did that.

Well, as soon as I kind of developed this mindset, I began making subtle changes. You know, I moved my, you know, I first moved my work closer to home. I was looking deliberately for jobs that were closer to where I lived at the time. Bigger pockets was less than five miles between my home and my work. And so I was able to begin biking to work. And then when I had accumulated enough to buy my first house hack, I made sure that that was also close to work so that I could really cut out my commuting cost for that exact reason. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting. And, you know, it takes work to do this. I remember when we first moved out to Colorado, you know, we had bought a house. and realize that like why do we need two cars? What, you know, like it would be easier if we had two cars. You know, we can both, my wife and I can both go where we want to when we want to. But we gave that up. You know, it was like, let's be a single car family for a while and save on the money.

We still needed a car because, you know, proximity, because we needed to go and get stuff and had a kid and all this, these other things. But making that conscious decision to cut out in different ways. Like, you know, it's not about being cheap, right? It's somewhat about being thrifty and cheap, I guess, are kind of different. But like, it's just about being smart, right? You know, you could still go take your friends to dinner once in a while. You can still do this. But like, you know, we have this discussion at work all the time.

Like all of a sudden we'll look and we're like, oh, everybody in the office, we've all been going out to eat like four days this week. And then we stop for like, what are we doing? We just spent, you know, $100 this week eating out, you know. And if we had packed our own food, we would have saved that money. You know, that's a few hundred bucks a month that you now pack away. Everybody listening to the show does this. Everybody does it. So think about these different ways.

And I think that lunch, lunch out is a perfect example. If you go out, you know, there's no benefit to really going out to eat lunch, especially by yourself or with, you know, the same folks that you go out with every day. It's great to hang out with them. but you can bring that into the office or do that at home. And I'm not saying to cut out the weekly happy out. I'm saying to cut out the weekly happy hour, but I'm not saying to cut out the going out with your friends kind of thing.

I love going out with my friends and I'll be happy to go and have a nice dinner on the weekend. But that's not my default option. My default option is to prepare my own food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and to make it healthy and reasonable. And that's just a great way to save. And Josh, you're talking about how you used to be pretty thrifty. well, I'd argue that that has exposed you to the ability to build, you know, in part to build a large business and be in the position that you are today. Yeah, absolutely. Had I not done that, and I got off track and thank you for bringing me back to my actual point, bigger pockets wouldn't be here because I wouldn't have been able to hire that first guy. I wouldn't have been hired to able to hire the contract. I wouldn't have been able to hire Brandon to come and join the company as the first employee. I mean, none of those things would have happened if I was,

not well yeah yeah exactly so so well i can't if i could jump in there too like the same thing like i wouldn't have been able to accept the job i mean like and i'm not saying this to be rude at all but like my initial pay was not a whole ton of money right but you didn't have a ton of money at the time i didn't need a whole ton of money at the time we worked like but both of us were frugal and so we made this work and we grew you know like so again like i think in all three of our cases the exact same story was there like because we were responsible financially we were going to make that risk, which was having you expanded earlier. I love that.

One of the things that, you know, since we're talking about saving money and being thrifty, one of the expenses that I tend to see not only young people, but folks of all ages, blow cash in a way that is just astounding to me. My wife doesn't drink. She doesn't drink at all. And so once we got together, you know, my desire to go out drinking, you know, pretty much went to zero. I'll have an occasional drink.

But I noticed when we were going out to a nice restaurant, my bill was, you know, close to half of those of other couples that we would go with who were buying glasses of wine, bottles of wine, beers, all this. Let's just split the bill evenly then. Don't you love those conversations? Oh, yeah, that was always fun. I just order a salad. Come on.

You know, that to me is one of the just easiest, easiest ways that people can save is like, yeah, have a drink before, have a drink when you get home. You know, you know, drinking out is so expensive and it could consume just an absolute ton of money for a lot of people. I know a lot of people who, if they were just to cut out their drinking expense, and these are people in their 30s and 40s, and these are not alcoholics either, they'd suddenly have a lot more money in their pockets. And I'll, you know, I enjoy, you know, some beers and some wine on the weekends. And I'm happy to spend that money, but I buy it from the liquor store and I'll have it with some, friends at home over dinner that we prepare, right? If I do go out, you know, well, I don't really

do this that much anymore, but, you know, back of the day, you know, you'd pregame before you go out. You drink some beers beforehand. And that way you wouldn't have to spend so much money at the restaurant or at the bar or whatever, you know, if you really want it to go out and have some drinks. And so it's just, you can do all of these things. Just be smart about how you do it and understand the cost of these things. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Cool. All right, so We've been chatting for a bit about you. Obviously, we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn't take a chance to plug the book here. So the book is called Set for Life, Dominate Life, Money, and the American Dream. You, Scott, are the title. It's available in hardcover e-book.

Scott is the author. He's not the title. What did I say? You called him the title, you know? My title is a trench author. All right, Scott, you're the author. The book's going to be available for $29.99 in hardcover. That's our first hardcover book, which I'm super excited about. This is our first hardcover book, yeah.

Sorry, Brennan. Whatever, whatever, whatever. It'll be available in audiobook. $999 as an e-book launching Sunday, April 23rd. And it is available for pre-order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble's Indybound, or ask for it to be ordered at your local bookstore and the library. That would be amazing. otherwise it's available to order on all three sites as of April 23rd.

Scott, do you want to talk for a second about the bonuses that we're going to offer? Yeah, absolutely. So if you buy in the first week or if you pre-order, you're going to get some exclusive bonuses that will only be available for free with the launch in the first week here. And those bonuses are going to include things like a six-part series on how to eliminate or reduce your debt. The second part of the second bonus is going to be,

interviews with various personal finance experts. We're specifically focusing on folks that are in their, you know, mid to late 20s, that have experienced incredible career success, retired early in their 20s, or have done some kind of unique things with their frugality and lifestyle design. And then the third bonus is going to be the audiobook with, which will be recorded by me, and that I'll be free and included with the purchase of the hardcover in the first week there. Awesome.

And so, again, this is for anybody who pre-orders or, orders in the first week. We really want to emphasize that. After the first week is up, you can buy this for, you know, not all the bonuses will be included and it's going to be a lot more expensive. If you buy it during the first week on Amazon or on one of those sites we mentioned, you will get all those bonuses. But you do have to email us at Set for Life, S-E-L-I-F-E at BiggerPockets.com with your receipt during that first week and we will make sure you get all the goodies. So again, that is set for life at biggerpockets.com. Just email your receipt to us. And we will get you. you all those bonuses ASAP.

We're trying to get on the bestseller list. We are trying to get on the best sellers list. Yeah. So those sales in that first week really count because it's one week that you need to sell in to make a list like that. And if you also, I forgot to mention, if you buy in that first week, we'll have an exclusive house hacking webinar for folks that bought in that first week or pre-ordered. We'll walk you through lots of the concepts that are involved in house hacking,

my specific case and a lot of the numbers and how that works out and helps you to build wealth. And if people want to say people want to learn more about the book in general what it's all about, what's all included, all the packages, everything. I go to bigger pockets.com slash set for life, S-E-T-F-O-R-L-I-F-E. And you can see everything there. Cool. So, Scott, who's the book actually written for? I mean, is it written for like old guys?

Is it written for a mountain man like Brandon? is it you know who who did you focus this for so this book is written for specifically a working professional that earns a middle to upper middle class income but wants to attain early financial freedom within five to seven years or at least make an incredible amount of progress in that amount of time and we're not just focusing on frugality frugality is only the tip of the iceberg it's the first section the rest two-thirds of that book are dedicated to the concepts of increasing your income by taking advantage of opportunities and exploiting the advantages that are unique to your personal situation, and then developing a sound investment philosophy that really kind of takes

into account risk versus reward. We talk about diversification. We talk about the core tenants of investing for early financial freedom, how to build a portfolio that will sustain itself indefinitely. And the goal of the book is to help someone that is starting with little to nothing, go from that position to early financial freedom. freedom in a lasting way. Nice. And, you know, when I, when I look through it, I see a book written for folks in, you know, college kids. I see a book written for folks in their 20s. You know, frankly, I know lots of people 30, 40, 50s, 60s who could stand to learn a whole heck of a lot from the book itself. So just because that's kind of the target doesn't mean that you don't stand

to learn anything from it. There's, there's so many great nuggets in there. Absolutely. And this book is also really great for college students that are about to graduate and want to hit the ground running as soon as they hit their career. There's definitely things you can start immediately from day one as soon as you start earning a salary. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Well, I was going to say, before we move forward on the show, I think it's time, Brandon. It's time for what, Josh? I think it's time for the random five. It's time for it's time. It's time. The Random Five. All right, the Random Five.

This is a new section of the show. We've just been introducing lately where we ask five random questions about our guest, just to get you guys know them a little bit better, completely not related to real estate or set for life. And why don't Josh, once you kick us off, ask the first question. Yeah, sounds good. So, Scott, can you give us your best Robert De Niro impression? You talking to me?

You talking to me? Scott looks exactly like a young Robert De Niro. It's this guy. Well, well done, Scott. Well done. All right. Let's see. Oh, I like this question.

Do you stand or do you walk up escalators? And why? All right. So this is my pet peeve. If you're the first one in line to the escalator, you better walk up the escalator. It's fine. You don't have to walk past somebody. or if there's like someone that's like five, six, you know, 10 steps ahead of you,

you can, it's fine to stand at that point because what do you do? Hurry up into their back. But if you're the first person at the, like, I have a walking boot on. I just got surgery on my foot a few months ago. And I walked up the stairs at the airport the other day, you know, the escalator at the airport the other day because I was the first one on. I'm not going to hold up the whole show here. And behind me, some perfectly two-footed, legged guy, just chilling there with this luggage

and holding up the whole hundreds of people. All right. Wow. That's my answer to that would. Now we know what pisses Scott off. Just if you ever end up on an escalator in front of him, please freeze and take a video of it. All right. So do you ever play the lottery?

You know, last year the big mega lottery was like half a billion dollars or a billion dollars or something crazy. Do you ever play? I threw 10 bucks in with some friends. Last time the lottery, I think it reached a billion or something like that. And so, yeah, we did that. It was fun. And then we didn't win, so we continued along with our evening. Nice.

There you go. All right. If you could get a tattoo or if you got a tattoo, where and what would it be? Oh, man. I'm pretty staunchly anti-tattoo here. What have you had? You are getting one, we'll say. Where is it going to be?

And what is it? It's a picture of your face, Brandon. I know, I better be. I might, you know, I might get, I might get, something, I'm a lifelong rugger, so I'm a rugby player. So I've played, I've played rugby since I was six years old. I might get, you know, a logo of one of my favorite teams, the New Zealand All Blacks or, you know, USA Eagles on, you know, maybe on one of my legs. So right there, we were really short shorts in rugby. So, you know, you had a tattoo there that only showed when you were playing.

He wears the short shorts to work sometimes, sadly. Yeah, it's a great show. Very disturbing. It's disturbing. All right. Last question of the random five. Scott, what was the most boring movie you ever saw? Oh, man, the most boring movie I've ever seen. I don't know. I fall asleep in movies that are boring pretty quickly within the first 20, 30 minutes. I'll replace it with another question. If you could experience any other culture firsthand, which one would it be and what intrigues you about it? So I would want to experience New Zealand culture. I would like, but one of one thing I definitely want to do,

at some point in the next five, 10 years is I want to take a backpacking trip through New Zealand. I want to go see not only the culture, but there's the beautiful scenery of there. And I want to kind of live among the people in that country and experience some rugby, that kind of culture. Again, a big passion of mine throughout my life. It's one of my favorite places I've ever been. It's amazing. So you'll love it when you do it.

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All right, so Brandon, I know you wanted to kind of take the lead on this last section of the show here. Sure, I do. Okay, so one of the things in your, book you talk a lot about. Now, I'm a big proponent of this, is this idea of, you know, we talk a lot about frugality already. We've talked about that. But then you mentioned that some people are maybe better off making more money, right? So let's go and dive into that side of thing. We talked about frigate. Let's talk about how do you make more money? And again, Josh kind of alluded to earlier with maybe a sales job or something like that. But what can you talk to us about how do you massively increase

your income if you're still working a full-time job? Yeah. So again, it's ridiculous to attempt to save your way to early financial freedom. It'll take you 10, 15 years, even if you're making 100K. So that can only be the starting point. That's where wealth recreation begins. Once you've got that financial runway developed, now it's time to begin scaling your income. And you have to, you have to make some hard decisions. It's just as difficult, and it's going to be just as personal as kind of the decisions you may make on that frugality front. But you have to accept, for example, let's say you're making 50K a year at a job at a corporation. You know, what the next step is at that job. You know it's going to be, you know, marketing and marketing

specialist two instead of marketing specialist one. You know that pays 57K instead of 50. Well, that's an inefficient way to progress towards early financial freedom if you want to accomplish that goal in a moderate number of years, five, seven, ten years. So you have to accept the reality of that situation and go and attempt to find a new line of work that will offer greater opportunity. A good example might be you join a startup or you go into a new career altogether, but you have to understand the cost of that is likely to be a reduction in base salary in the meantime. You're not going to make quite as much from your salary if you go and try to get something that will have a potential to scale. So for example, you join a startup. Let's say your salary goes down to 40K, but you now have equity in that startup. Or you become a real estate broker and you have no salary, but you have the potential to earn as much as you can possibly sell. So that's kind of the first step. You have to recognize I need to put myself in a position where that will become a reality and I need to create a financial position before that through frugality so that that becomes very easy. Yeah, I love that. I love that. You know, it's interesting.

One of my favorite questions that I ask job applicants who are coming to bigger pockets is if money wasn't an issue, if money was irrelevant, what would be your dream job? What would you be doing? And most people have a dream job that's different than the job that they're applying for. And that's okay. You know, the idea of the question is to kind of get to know, you know, to somebody's base. You know, who are they? And what is it really that makes them tick?

What's interesting is if you look at most people, most people are doing jobs that they don't want to be doing. You know, there's very few people who actually have a job that they love. And what I often run across are people who are making lots and lots of money doing jobs they hate or people making not a lot of money at all doing jobs that they hate. And yet both feel trapped. And it's fascinating to see the folks who are just making incredible amounts of money who feel trapped. And the folks who are not making incredible amount of money feel trapped. And at the end of the day, you know, nobody's trapped to anything, really.

I mean, obviously there's certain circumstances where, you know, you can't quit a job because you have medical bills and things like that. And I mean, it's so tight that you're just completely locked down for a while. But if you were to apply, you know, frugality and some other methodologies, you'd actually, you know, maybe in a year or two be able to change. But, you know, we all forget to look at ourselves and say, you know, do I actually love what I'm doing? Why am I doing this? You know, where am I? Where am I going? And I love the ideas behind this book because I think, you know, I don't necessarily think people want to stop and look in the mirror.

It's hard. You know, wait, I'm 45 years old trapped in a job that I hate. Well, you're actually not. You could go find another opportunity. You never wanted that job in the first place. Go find a job, a different job that maybe you don't like as much, you know, that's going to make you more money, right? Yeah. And if you were if you were frugal and you had some same.

savings, you could make that. Yeah. If you, which brings us back to the other. Yeah. If you want to, if you want to make that jump, you have to recognize,

again, your current position is just, you have to assess reality. Is your current position going to allow you to earn the kind of income you want to earn or not? And if it's not, you need to build a financial base and go pursue an opportunity that does. And you need to put yourself in an environment with high achieving people that will help you will achieve your goals. You know,

I forget who said it, but you're the average of the five people you associate with most closely. I think that's incredibly true. And if you associate, if you can put yourself in a position where you're working with your full-time job, your best efforts during the best part of your day with other incredible people like Josh Dorkin or Brandon Turner, I believe that will help you help folks become successful really rapidly. And they're out there. So go find that kind of environment and then expose yourself to luck, right? Income, there is no step-by-step formula to earning more income like there is to, you know, know, saving your pennies, right? You know if you cut back on expenses, you're going to accumulate more

wealth. When it comes to sales or, you know, joining a startup, whatever that is, there's an element of luck involved there. There's an element of chance. And you have to expose yourself to that chance and do what you can to increase those odds. So, you know, that's how you go about increasing your income. And we go into great detail into exactly how that is achieved and what you need to do to put yourself in those kinds of positions in the book. Yeah. One of the other things that I tend to see a lot, and especially this political season, I think it's really come to the forefront, is people saying, well, but I don't have the skills to do anything else. And, you know, I may take some flack for this and that's okay because, you know, I firmly believe it. But everything I've ever done with bigger pockets, I've taught myself. Every single skill that I've acquired for bigger power, not every single, but almost every skill, I didn't have.

had a podcast before Bigger Pockets. I didn't know how to create videos. I didn't know how to create a community. I didn't know how to hire people. I taught myself that. You know, I studied. I went, I found books. I found articles.

I taught myself. There's people in jobs that say, I don't have any skills. And what I say is, okay, we'll get out and get those skills. Go to the library. Go to, you know, there's organizations that help people with career building. You know, think about those things and figure out the same. skills, you know, the coal miners, you know, who are, you know, trapped in this, this horrible world where, you know, there's jobs are disappearing and technology is taking over. You know,

technology is going to take over all of our jobs. It can take over Scott's job, Brandon's job, my job, all of our jobs are going to go away to technology at some point or some parts of their jobs. So we need to be able to stop, recognize reality, because that is reality. These jobs are jobs, all the jobs, many of the jobs, truck drivers, card you know this stuff is all going away in the next 10 20 50 years so what's the next job what skill can i teach myself think about that and i believe that acquiring new skills rapidly and improving is the baseline for survival and in the job marketplace that's the bare minimum needed to keep your current job that might be paying an average salary right if you want to scale your income you

have to do that far better than the next guy and to give you another example of someone who's done this we have someone at this company who was in a career that he felt did not offer good prospects in a and also in the real estate realm. And so what he did is he went back to school and learned how to become a software engineer. And he's put himself in a position where he is a very good shot at creating a six-figure income for himself within four or five years. So that can be done mid-late 30s. There's no, no, you're never tool to learn new skills.

Yeah. Awesome. Love that. All right, cool. Well, let's give you guys one last. time here and I want to talk about Scott Trench's controversial blog posts. So, so Scott is a frequent blogger of the Bigger Pockets blog and he writes a lot of articles. And me and him back in the day used to kind of be, you know, friendly competitors on,

on who can get the most comments on a blog post. I think it was you, he, and Ben Leibovich. There was a three-way battle. We've all since lost to Scott because Scott gets like a billion in one comments on every blog post because they're all really, really good and controversial. And so, I wanted to talk about a couple of them, especially the titles. And I want you explain kind of what that post was about. Oh, boy. All right. So the first one, your first home purchase could be a horrendous financial decision unless.

Unless what? All right. So let me give an example here, right? I actually wrote a post about a similar theme pretty recently. Let's say you make 85K a year and you buy a, your lender tells you, hey, that qualifies you for a $400,000 property. You have $40,000 in lifetime savings. And so you buy a $440,000 house using your $40,000 in your max purchase.

Well, once that happens, you no longer have the ability to save cash because you have a huge mortgage payment, right? You've used up all of your cash, and you're stuck. You are now in a position where you have to continue working at your job or one that pays a very similar income. You can't, for example, go and take a job that pays $40K a year because you won't be able to cover your mortgage, but that might offer more opportunity. So that first home purchase basically screws you over for any type of significant investing you'd want to be doing on the side.

Before you can begin building wealth, you need to drastically increase your income, wait many years, accumulate many years more of savings, or sell the place off and start over. On the other side of the thing, you can do what I did, right? And you buy a house hack. A year after that, after that purchase, I now have a cash flowing rental property, some equity built up just like the homeowner might. And I was able to save that entire time, thousands of dollars a month relative to my peer, who was making more money than me, but has locked himself into a home purchase like that. So that's when I say, if your goal is really financial freedom, your first home purchase could be a disastrous decision if you purchase something that's stretching.

Controversial. Controversial. By the way, we're going to link to all these articles in the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 223. That's biggerpockets.com slash show 223. All right. Next post.

Let's see. Investors, don't shoot for 100 plus properties. Aim for bigger and better with this strategy. Very link baity, by the way.

This is a disagreement I have with Brandon or maybe he used to have with Brandon. Maybe he's coming around to my line of thinking. I don't know. I did call you yesterday.

And I said, Scott, I'm coming around to your thinking. So Brandon, like $40,000 units of a property, you know, $80,000 duplex, $120,000, $120,000, $1,000. It's almost Detroit. It's like Podunk, Washington State. It's actually worse than Detroit, probably. Far worse.

No, we're so much better than Detroit. We don't smell bad. All right. So Brandon now has, like, what, like 50 units or something like that that he's got a man, he's going to take care of. He's got a certain type of tenant in these units that are probably more management intensive than maybe a nicer place. in a different city. And wouldn't it be better? My argument is wouldn't it be better to have,

you know, maybe even that same amount of units, but all in five, six, seven properties that are all in one spot, really easy to manage, really easy to take care of? And wouldn't it be easy to kind of build that slowly in a convenient manner that is really conducive to your personal life? You know, my goal is large amount of passive income that I can consistently scale easily throughout my life. Right? There's no end to the game. You just, you know, when a property is, it becomes no longer a meaningful part of my portfolio, I will intend to sell it off and buy a nice new property that's conducive to what I'm doing at that time. And so my argument is, wouldn't it be better to have fewer properties like that than hundreds of $40,000 rentals that, you know, are pain in the butt?

And that's what the next question. Well, we talk about that. Well, let's, Scott. Well, hold on. I'm sorry, Perry Marshall. We talked about the 80-20, right? So there's this idea of like, yeah, when I look at my portfolio and when most investors do, there's a few that just perform really well.

And so I'm definitely like, I agree with that, that it would be much better to own that 20% that give you most of your income and the fewest headaches than to own a whole bunch. That said, the caveat on that is that when you're just getting started, if you need to get out of your job quickly, which I did. I mean, I had a horrible job. I bought anything I could. to get me the cash flow you needed to get out. And I don't regret that at all.

But now that today I don't need that cash fund. What's that, you know, the property is giving me a headache. What's all added up, it's like, what, two grand a month? It doesn't really make that big of a financial thing in my life. So I no longer need those. And so it kind of depends on your personality or not your position. So when are you going to sell them by? I am selling half my portfolio this year.

That's actually my loss. Oh, love it. We'll see. And yeah, I would say that, you know, my belief is I have a job that I love. And I'm very happy doing this. And so I am not looking to as aggressively as possible take on as much work as possible outside of that to build passive cash flow, right? What you call passive cash flow, right?

Instead, I can buy one property. It's always quote unquote passive. Until you hear Brandon ripping his hair out about the latest drama in his $40,000 house. Yeah. Yeah. Instead of, you know, let's say, you know, I can buy one property a year, stabilize it, and have a nice investment.

that I don't have to really worry about too much throughout the rest of the year, save up my cash through my career and what I'm doing, you know, the other cash flow for my properties and just buy a larger property instead of more properties each year. And that's how I'll scale my portfolio. It makes sense. It just shows that there's different,

what's the phrase different strokes, different folks. All right. Next question. How about this one, we'll do this one. How I went from, or one of your newest one, how I went from zero dollars net worth to qualify

for a million dollars in real estate financing in two and a half years. Which, by the way, a guy in the forums, Ryan Naylor said, quote, probably one of the best articles I've ever read on BP. Yeah, that article is amazing. If you have not read it, go to the show notes, biggerpockets.com slash show 223 and read it. Unbelievable. So explain it. I mean, this is kind of like what my philosophy is bringing about right here, right?

is because I focus heavily on my personal financial position and I house hack. And by doing those two things, it gives me access to a ton of opportunities. In this particular scenario, I again use, you know, especially in my mind, that's why I've used this example a few times in this particular podcast. But, you know, I use the example of Joey who makes the 85K a year and buys the $400,000 house. And I contrast that to me. Joey's lender is going to tell him, I'm sorry, Joey, I know you want to get involved

in real estate investing. but you have, you know, you don't have enough income to buy a property. You don't have any savings. Come back to me when you've accumulated $70,000 if you want to buy that $400,000 rental property. Otherwise, Joey's going to have to buy his $40,000 property in Podunk. That's probably more likely to annoy him than help him build wealth. Now, when I talked to the lender just last week, the lender tells me, Mr. Trench. You know, I see that you've got cash flow rentals here.

That's great. We can use the cash flow from these rentals to cover. the mortgage payments that exist on that. So you have actually, you know, that actually increases your purchasing power. I see you've got a good job just like Joey. That alone gives you a couple hundred thousand dollars in purchasing power. Let's tack that on. And by the way, did you know that as an experienced landlord, you can use the potential rent from a future purchase to help you qualify for financing? So, you know, I looked at those numbers and he was like, you know, if you, if I were to buy a house hack, I could buy up to like $800,900,000 in a quadplex with 5% down or less.

And I can put down 15% on like a duplex or something like that or a single family home and purchase well over a million dollars in real estate right now. And that's a result of, again, that experience as a landlord and that accumulation of cash over several years and just good financial habits, habits that we discuss at great length in set for life that have put me in that position to be able to basically buy as much real estate as I want. Now again, my philosophy is to be a little bit more conservative than that and keep my options open. So I went in a down market, win in a stable market, and when the market goes up. So I'm not going to actually buy all that real estate. I'm going to buy something probably

in the $500,000 range. But the option to do so is what makes this so easy. If you approach real estate from a strong personal financial position, it can be very achievable, very manageable, and you can just focus on finding great deals and not worrying too much about your business collapsing on you. Scott, how old do you? I'm 26. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. You a little, little brat. It's funny. At this point, it's a running joke around the office that like we all look up to the 26 year old who is wiser than all of us. But, all right, last article. Let's see. I've got a choice of two. How about this? Am I missing something?

or is real estate investing really not that hard? I think that's going to potentially piss a lot of people off, right? Yeah. So, in that article, I cite three people as examples. And these people are to be admired. You know, this is, I cite Brandon Turner, who's built an incredible portfolio from scratch, hard work, hustle, and sweat. I cite Ben Labovich, who had a medical condition

that forced him to build a real estate empire with creative financing. He was a musician before that and did not have access to a lot of money. And so he had to really hustle to syndicate. some deals and put together some cash flows so that his family could survive when his profession, when an income from his profession dried up. And then Jared Stern, who is one of the most impressive people ever even heard of. He's 26 and is already a multi-millionaire through real estate investing. And he's never known another way of building wealth. He started when he was 17 and built a huge portfolio. I'm not like you guys. I'm building real estate wealth the easy way.

Each one of those three guys, they had to struggle. They had to work hard. They had to put in time sweat. They had to risk lots of, you know, put lots of money at risk, use extreme leverage and creative financing. And the difference between those three and someone like myself is, I've got a great job, right? And so I can produce a similar financial result in five to seven years, the easy way by saving the money from my job, working hard, living frugally, and putting that money down on solid deals that I find with kind of more traditional financing. And both of those strategies work and have produced millions of dollars in wealth for many individuals. But if you're doing it with the sound financial position while working a full-time job,

real estate can be a side business and does not have to be a really challenging endeavor. There's always trouble. There's always situations you have to work through. But if you have the cash position, the self-education, and you're going to operate your property reasonably and intelligently, you can navigate most of those waters. Awesome. Awesome.

All right, man. Well, before we wrap up the main part of the show, last question here. As a young real estate investor who's found success in a challenging market, can you talk directly to those of our listeners who are young and are struggling to get that first deal? Like what advice would you give to that young guy or gal who's just, you know, stuck in a rut and just really struggling to get that first deal going? You know, my advice is it's not it's not linear growth, right? So many people think of like, oh, I'm going to build a real estate portfolio, and I want to get 100 units in 10 years.

I'm going to buy 10 this year, 10 next year, 10 the year after that, et cetera. Well, what really happens is people buy one property and then two the next year, and then four, and then eight, and then 16. And it's an exponential snowball of growth. And it's the same thing for every aspect of personal finance. You know, if you're just starting out like I was with three grand to your whole name, no credit history, you know, nothing. you know, that, you can't do anything at that point. You just have to slog it through for that first

year and save your pennies and work really hard. And once you have that, you know, after that first year, I had, I built my credit. I had $20,000 saved, and the option to buy a house was presented to me, right? I sat in that house for a year, worked hard, managed my property, collected my rent, saved my pennies, and, you know, next year I had the option to acquire another property. And then two years later, here I am, and all of a sudden I've access to a million dollars in financing and purchasing power, right? It's incredible. But it wasn't like I had $100,000 the first year, you know, you know, 200 next year, three, four, or five. It's, I had nothing. Then I had 200,000. And now I have a million. And it's, it's that kind of snowball of growth that you have to kind of foresee. I'm going to do

each step the first way. I know I don't have to build all of my wealth through fragility. I just use out as a starting point. I know I don't have to always be working a job to earn my money. It's just the point of the way that I will accumulate money so that I can invest and buy or build assets for myself down the line. And just kind of recognizing that exponential growth, I think is the key. Awesome. Awesome. It's great. Yeah, very cool. All right, well, hey, let's shift over a different part of the show, which we lovingly refer to as though. It's time for the fire round. All right, let's get these fire round questions. Of course, these come direct out of the BiggerPockets forums, which our users can get to by going to

biggerpockets.com forward slash forums. Number one, with prices skyrocketing, for those of us with a day job and who want to go passive, is there even a point to investing right now? Yeah, so I think that goes right back to what I was talking about earlier with the dollar cost averaging there. You know, if let's say Denver, for example, maybe at the top of a market cycle, if you buy right now and you're not going to be able to buy for another five years, that's a bad investment, right because you're going to be completely dependent on the market continuing to improve or remaining stable in order to continue to maintain your current financial position but if you're going to buy once every year to 18 months if you can figure out a way to do that such as by house hacking or you know

maybe you earn a high income and can save and buy those properties then my argument is you know I'm not smart enough to time the markets I don't know anybody who really is is that smart by by today buy tomorrow, buy next year, buy at the top of the market, buy at the bottom of the market, buy it consistently and build a business that works in all three scenarios. So when if you lose, or when if the market goes down, when if the market is stable, and when if the market goes up? Cool. Awesome. All right.

When should I pay my contractors? Should a contractor receive 75% up front or should they be paid in smaller increments? So I have taken on most of the work for my properties, do it yourself style, and I've hired a contractor only in a few instances, and they've built the after the work is completed. So I'm not a good resource for significant rehab work here. Okay. I can say on my property is like, don't give 75% down.

Yeah. That's a way too much money. Well, I mean, I think it depends on who's buying the materials. If it's a brand new contractor, I like to buy materials up front. And I might give them a little bit, like a thousand bucks or something like that. Like, hey, this is for your overhead whatever to get. And even that depends on if I've got them from a recommendation. and stuff.

But I always want to make sure I'm ahead. I was going to make sure that if they walk away, I win. Like, I don't want them to win if they walk away, like the guy who stole five grand from me last year. There you go. All right. Number three, this was an interesting question. So I was actually scrolling through the forums, looking for good questions to ask you, Scott.

And I noticed there was like five questions that were all the same, but had different town names. Should I invest in insert town name here? Should I invest in insert town name here? And it was all the people asking, should I invest in this town? What do you say to people who's asking? asking that question about any town in America. Should I invest in blank? So, you know, there's extremes, right? You know, if you're in downtown San Francisco, you know, that may not be a good place to

invest as a first time person making a middle income salary, right? Because you're not going to be able to produce cash flow and you're probably not going to be able to finance a property at that price point. You know, the same goes if you're living in, you know, a not so great neighborhood in part of a city. You may not want to tie yourself to that part of the country or that part the city for years or decades, as real estate investing does mean that you will be, you know, in part personally tied to that area. My belief, though, is that for a broad majority of folks, it's really wise to at least consider your local area. For example, here in Denver, by investing locally, I'm able to manage the property myself. To give you an instance, that duplex that produces

$2,600 a month in rent, I might pay $260 per month for property management there. Well, that property maybe took eight hours all of last year. I don't make more than $260 an hour. You know, Josh, maybe you can help me out with that. But, uh, but, you know, if I don't make $260 an hour, like, why on earth would I hire that out to somebody else, right? It's, it's, it's something I can easily achieve and it's good experience for, uh, as my portfolio scales. So I can save really big on that cost. I can go check out problems. Uh, I get, I can look people in the eye. And I believe there's a really big value to that, that directly helps with the, in, you know, investment returns. So if you're not at one of those extremes, I definitely think that investing locally

is the key. And again, if your market's hot or cold, are you committed to building wealth over the long term through real estate? If you're going to be one and done, you know, that's always, that's always a big risk when it comes to investing. So right on. All right. Last question of the fire round. The question is as long as an answer. I just graduated a little less than a year ago and I want to start investing. But a huge hurdle, I'm not sure how to overcome, is how to manage. my 100,000 K plus in student loans. Currently, I'm on a 10-year plan paying $1,100 a month. Currently renting a place for also $1,100 a month. This was before I chose to start being smart with money, but we'll be out in less than six months. I make about $3,200 a month, but obviously

have other expenses, food, gas, car maintenance, so on and so forth. I've got about $10K saved up currently for a down payment or emergencies. I'm really open to any suggestions or ideas. as to how to manage my student loans in order to begin my real estate investing career. Okay, so in Set for Life, I talk about good debt versus bad debt and that kind of stuff. And I also have a bonus content that talks about debt reduction at length. But the fact of the matter is that, you know, for many people, debt is either a non-issue, because they don't have very much or it's not significant. It's something that is all consuming.

They have many bad debts and lots of credit card debt and poor credit. credit score, or they're like this person that has a large amount of a single type of debt that's not necessarily classified as a bad debt that's hurting their credit score. And for this person with that kind of student loan debt, the answer is unfortunately fairly simple, which is you're going to have to, you know, first make sure that it's financed at the lowest rate available. So definitely check that out before, you know, before you do anything else. You can look at resources like SOFI to finance that. But then once you've kind of, once you've got that rate, it's now going to come down to hustle. You know, how can you get your life?

expenses as low as possible. How can you, you know, build up that reserve so that you can go and take on higher paying work or work with more opportunities? And how can you mitigate the consequences of having taken on that debt as much as possible? And that's going to be, that's going to be, you know, a slog and a grind. And that person's going to have to work really hard to get back to zero and then really go towards financial freedom. On the other side of the spectrum, if that debt is really low interest, you know, let's say two, three, four percent, that person, that person could also consider, you know, making the payments consistently and hustling as hard as they can to build wealth in spite of those payments, which are draining their cash flow outside of that.

So it's going to be up to that person, but either way, that debt is going to be a hurdle that they'll need to, they'll need to work hard to push through and it'll be disadvantaged relative to other folks. The biggest thing is try to avoid those kinds of big debts when you can. There you go. Yeah. Good advice. Whenever I see that kind of thing, too, I always wonder.

And I'm not down on the person at all because I know this just happens. But when you have $100,000 in student loan debt, I have to assume you then therefore have a degree. And it's probably something you could earn more than $3,200 a month doing if you hustled and found a better job. Not always. Not always. Not always. I know. Not always.

But that kind of goes to most people end up doing crappy jobs that they hate despite their degree. And frankly, you know, it's a debate I have at home with my wife. And we, I taught high school she taught. and we're both college educated and firmly believe in the value of certain types of degrees. I think the value of a college education has gone down dramatically in the modern economy. I mean, I think there's certain skill sets. Scott had talked about somebody who works for us who went to a boot camp, learned how to code through the boot camp, and was able to get a job that pays very well working here for bigger pockets.

I mean, there's opportunities like that that exist. that allow you to forego college. And I know college is cool and fun and all that, but in the modern economy, you don't necessarily need it. There's more options today, I think. And to piggyback on that point, history is a hobby, right?

And I'm a history and economics major because I liked history, but I chose a major. I was a history major too. I don't know that. I chose a major that offered me economics, right? The economics part of that, that added on to that. that helped me do that. And I also double-minored in finance and corporate strategy. So because of my

holistic thing, I was able to study what I really liked and really found interesting, which is a history part, and have an employable degree. And my argument would be, hey, if you're going to go to college and take out a large amount of debt, you'd better get a marketable degree rather than something that, you know, like a history degree that's not going to pay a lot. Right. You can always study history, English, liberal arts, any of those things on your own. And I love studying those things. I read a lot of books and stuff like that because I love it and find it interesting. But it's not, I don't pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for that luxury. Yeah. Yeah. That will help me increase my income. I agree. And I went through the same thing in college.

It's, you know, when I went into college, I went in with the marketable degree, which was the, the business major, realized I, I just didn't get along with the kids because I thought they were, you know, to cutthroat in B school at freshman year. It was just like, really? Really? Is this what the world's like? No, it doesn't have to be. So I left. It's like, what do I want to do?

I want to learn about anthropology. I want to be Indiana Jones. Like, I studied Anthro. Then I studied psych and start learning about the human brain and how things work. And then I stopped and I was like, what, what am I doing? What am I doing? Like, I'm going to leave college without any skills to give me a good career. and so I ended up getting a PolySai degree because I'm fascinated with PolySai and that's just the thing that I love.

But went back and ended up getting that marketing degree because I knew that would help me in the business world because I, you know, I wasn't going to be Indiana Jones and I wasn't going to be Sigmund Fruit and Freud. And, you know, I think a lot of people fail to do that. And it's not hard, you know, tell your kid, look, I'm going to send you to college. study anything and everything you want, but you have to also study business, engineering, you know, any of these skills that I think will allow somebody to do well. It just gives you a mix, right? It gives you the opportunity to try what you love. And if you fail and if you're broke, you know, starving artists, you know, now you have something to fall back upon. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, let's, let's wrap this thing up with our world famous.

All right, these questions are the same four. We ask the guests every single week. And Scott Trench, I know you've heard most episodes of our show, I'm sure. So number one, I'm not even going to ask it. You ask the question, Scott. What's the first question? What is your favorite business book? Oh, real estate book.

Come on. Whoops. All right. What's your favorite real estate book? All right. My favorite real estate book is probably the book on, you know, I work here, but it's also my favorite book, which is the book on rental property investing by Mr. Brandon Turner here.

Oh, nice. Thank you, Scott, Trench. I'll pay you your 20 bucks later. Nice, nice. All right, favorite business book, Scott. My favorite business book is the one thing by Jay Papazon. And Gary Keller. We always forget Gary. We shouldn't forget. Great book. Great book. And that's the book that we give to all of our new employees. It's fantastic. And I will say, you know, I love Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I love those books. And those definitely were some of the first ones that I read and changed my mindset. my big kind of pet peeve with them is they never really explain the how to portion of escaping the rat race getting out from that kind of nine to five job to a state of financial freedom.

And so again, that's why I wrote set for life is because that is what I believe is, hey, here's the piece of like, here's the step by step guide to reducing your expenses. Here's the philosophy around income production and investing that will help you actually make that transition. Perfect. I love it. What do you do for fun, Scott? I agree.

So what I do for fun, I play rugby. I used to play rugby and ski, but then I got involved in a rather serious foot injury through a rugby match and have been on crutches for about 10 weeks, just got off from two weeks ago in a walking boot. So once I heal up, what I would like to do would be play rugby, ski, hike, do things that are outdoors, cook, write blog posts for bigger pockets, that kind of stuff. Awesome, awesome. All right, my last question.

Scott, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from all those who give up, they fail, or they never get started? In addition to taking action, I think I'm going to go back to what I said earlier about that mindset of exponential growth, understanding that what I'm doing today is what I need to do to get to the next level, right? What I need to do today is I need to save money and hustle hard and sell more and help build this thing. And then what I need to do later will be completely different, right?

it'll be you know you'll need to focus on divesting some of those cash flow properties and building something that is more scalable or more conducive to what you're looking to do so awesome awesome it's great well scott thank you thank you for coming on the show thank you for writing this book i think you're going to change a lot of people's lives with with set for life i i really do mean that and uh thanks for sharing your philosophy because i as much as i say it to you i can't i don't think i can't I can say it enough. And I think, Brandon, you and I agree on this completely. Like, I think we both learn more from you than you claim to learn from us. And it's, it's astounding. So, so, you know, thank you for sharing and being there for us and being willing to share your philosophies with all

us. You guys taught me everything I know, so I don't know what you're talking about. All right, man. Take care, Scott. See in about three minutes. Sounds good. Maybe less than me, maybe one minute. So maybe. Maybe. Bye, guys. All right, big thanks again to Scott. Wow, that thing was, that was a long show. But, you know, like, I mean, we could have gone for hours and hours and hours more talking about this stuff. Because we do. That's what you and I like to do on the side is talk to each other and talk to Scott about, you know, personal finance and wealth building and money.

Yeah, not a week goes by that, Scott. And I don't spend at least an hour or two, they're just talking about all this stuff over and over and over. And I don't know, I love the way his mind works. I love the way he writes. I mean, this book seriously is fantastic. Just listening to Scott's interview was amazing. I mean, I pick up stuff every time I talk to him. So yeah, I'm super pumped to, you know, I have had that chance to talk with him in front of 150,000 people.

At least. At least. This show might get millions because it's so good. Yeah, this might be one of our bigger shows for sure. So all right, guys, well, listen, thank you so much for listening. We really do appreciate it. This was show 223 of the Bigger Pockets podcast. If you like the show, if you're a fan of the podcast, please get out there.

jump on iTunes, jump on SoundCloud, jump on Stitcher, jump on anywhere that you listen to the show, and do leave us a rating and review. Those really do help us. They help to get more exposure for the show. And of course, please do subscribe. And lastly, if you love it that much, get on social media, get on Facebook, Twitter, you name it,

and share this episode, share the link to biggerpockets.com slash show 223. Tell your friends, your family, to listen up and learn something. But that's it. Until next week, I'm Josh Dorkin. Signing off. And that's Brandon Turner. And we're signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. Simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the height, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com.

Your home for real estate investing online. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K, copywriting is by Calicokew content, and editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.w.w.w.com.

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