BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 8 Rentals on a Teacher’s Salary by “Reverse BRRRR-ing”

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Within three years, this high school teacher bought eight rental units, giving him an extra $1,600/month in pure cash flow and helping him pay for his child’s future. Through a combination of affordable markets, “reverse BRRRRs,” and beginner-friendly renovations, Ben Vidovich has built financial freedom that middle-class America rarely achieves.  With his first child on the way, Ben knew he needed something more than the retirement account he was throwing his money into. As a high school teacher living in one of America’s most expensive markets, buying a rental property nearby was far from possible, and Ben wasn’t sitting on piles of cash.  So, Ben hunted down “affordable” markets across America, took the leap, and bought his first rental property, a duplex, for under $200,000. Three years later, he’s perfected the reverse BRRRR strategy to scale quickly, using local banks to fund renovations and rehabs on multiple homes, all from thousands of miles away. Now, he’s starting to buy these houses in cash for better passive income and the ability to leverage them to buy even more rentals.  This is a repeatable, middle-class investing strategy anyone can follow, and Ben is actively using it in 2025!  In This Episode We Cover How to invest in real estate on a middle-class salary (while living in a pricey market) The “reverse BRRRR” strategy that you can use to put $0 down on renovated rentals  Inherited tenants: worth it for the instant cash flow or problem for your portfolio? Beginner-friendly renovations that rookie investors can perform from out of state Is it worth it to buy rental properties in cash? How Ben uses paid-off properties as leverage to scale faster  And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1213 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This investor has acquired eight units in only three years. Now, he's cash flowing $1,600 per month and is on a path to financial freedom that would have been impossible with only his middle-class day job. He didn't start with a huge pile of cash or any other built-in advantages. Some of his Midwest properties cost less than $100,000, and he's buying and managing them all from his home in California thousands of miles away. This is a simple, repeatable investing formula, but it yields life-changing results. Hey, everyone, I'm Dave Meyer.

Been investing in rental properties for more than 15 years and I'm the head of real estate investing at bigger pockets. Today's show is an investor story with Ben Vidovich from Santa Clara, California. Ben is a high school teacher, and he's passionate about that job, but he knew it didn't provide the financial upside that he was looking for. So in 2022, he bought his first rental. property in Indiana. Since then, he's scaled a portfolio by repeating the same investing formula, buy affordable homes, fix him up a little bit, then rent him out. There's no tricks here, there's no gimmicks, just a proven path to a better financial future for Ben and his family.

During today's episode, we're going to discuss how Ben found the confidence to buy his first investment property in an out-of-state market he'd never visited, why he's comfortable buying properties with existing tenants in place and how he decided putting more money down could actually accelerate his timeline for purchasing additional units. Let's bring on Ben. Ben, thanks for being here. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Great to be here, Dave. Thanks for having me on. I'd love to start by just learning a little bit about you. Where are you from? What brought you into this world of real estate investing that we're in? Well, I'm from the Bay Area. I was born and raised here in California and still here to this day.

I've always kind of seen real estate at play. My dad worked as a property manager for some apartment buildings that are kind of in the family. So I've been watching him do that. Never really learned the business per se, but you know, I'd get in there and paint the walls and rake the leaves and that sort of stuff. So I think it was just something I grew up around. And then when I got older and I was about to have my first child, I was like, man, I really got to do something to change my trajectory. I work as a teacher. I love that job, but I needed to do something to change the course we were on if I wanted to provide a better future for my family, because as all the old

people say out here in the Bay Area, the valley has changed quite a bit. Did you go into teaching at a young age? Like, how long were you teaching before you realized you needed something else in addition to teaching to secure the financial future that you're looking for? Yeah, I joined a school and started teaching and I loved it. So I was doing that for a long time and was able to save a good amount of money. I always kind of lived frugally and somewhere along the lines. I think I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, like many people. And during COVID times, I read that and started really thinking about investing out of state just because there weren't a lot of options here. And so I spent the next, you know, maybe a couple of years in analysis paralysis, scouring the forums of bigger pockets,

listening and reading everything I possibly could. And then like I mentioned earlier, as soon as I, you know, was going to be a dad. I was like, okay, I got to take action. We got to stop. You can only learn so much. Like at some point, you have to take a first step. You have to dive in and you'll get better from the practice and the implementation rather than just thinking about it all the time. And what about real estate in particular appealed to you when you sort of realized, hey, I need something to augment my teaching. What about real estate made you think that's it for me instead of going into another job? Or there are other entrepreneurial pursuits you could consider. I think it was the best avenue for the amount of time that I had and the amount of money that I had. So prior to investing in real estate, you know, my wife and I invested a lot is just into low cost index funds and we put most of our savings in that for a long time. And that was great. But then once you sell the index funds, which we did to buy a mobile home that we lived in for a while, like that's it. You know, you've done what you can with it. Whereas with real estate, you can keep saving the money and you can benefit from the cash flow, the appreciation. And there's just more ways that I think it's,

generates wealth than what the traditional path is for a lot of other Americans, which is just putting it in the market in some form or another. It's just that level of control is so nice, too. Again, it's kind of the idea behind flexibility, too. If you put in an index funder of 401K, it's kind of locked in there. But real estate, yeah, you can buy something, hold on to it for 30 years. You can also optimize. You can refi. You can just get more creative and have a much more hands-on tangible thing that you control and can really contribute to that financial freedom, which is such a nice part of real estate investing. Now, I don't want to be presumptuous, Ben, but I'm guessing on a teacher's salary in California,

the options for investing locally were not abundant when you were getting started. No, you assumed correctly. It's just, I mean, it's tough out here to buy a home with a down payment and then rent it out. That's just the reality of it in the Bay Area. It's really high costs of everything that you would have to put into the home to maintain it. and then you have property taxes, which are higher out here, interest rates went up. So, yeah, it's not really tenable.

So, you know, you run one or two deals analyzing it here, and you're like, okay, it's not going to work. So I turned just to other parts of the country in the analysis paralysis phase and eventually wound up in a southern Indiana, made some calls and as I finally took action and just hit it off with some different people that I felt good about working with and eventually was able to muster up the courage

to buy the first deal. that is a bold first step. It takes a lot of people's understandable time to get comfortable with the idea of investing out of state. So how did you go through that process of thinking about buying something that is cash intensive so far away without really being able to see it and feel it and have your hands on it? Yeah, it was weird explaining it to my dad. You're not flying out there.

You're not what? What? So it does take that. But, you know, I would say a lot of people have done it before me. So that gave me some confidence. I would scour the forums of bigger pockets to just read about what other people did and things I could avoid and, you know, just telltale signs. The long distance investing book by David Green was really useful. I just tried to apply all the steps from that like literally, you know, read a chapter.

Okay, look up the property taxes on this website and make sure it lines up. So I was just really trying to apply everything when I was finally taking action and it led to phone calls. And then as you start making phone calls, you know, you can kind of see who you enjoy speaking with. get a sense of who's going to call you back or not on the property manager side of things or agents, whatever. So that was all really critical and then just leaning into referral. So if I talk to you, Dave, I'm going to ask for some referrals and then I'll call those people and what do you guys think about working with Dave? And so there's a lot of that. And you can get pretty far with it. So eventually I, after, you know, having someone tell me no to a couple of deals who I was looking to

work with, who is a property manager, which by the way, that's a good thing. If they tell you, just don't buy the first thing. I was able to find one that, you know, looking back on it, probably overpaid a little bit, but it got me in the game. It gave me proof of concept, which is what I think all the newbie investors need really. And it's been rolling since then. So it really is true. That first one opens a lot of doors and confidence. I want to hear about this first deal. But before we do, you know, you could have picked anywhere in the U.S. You know, you're investing from California. What about this area of Indiana appealed to you? It felt, Affordable. It was not too big, not too small, about 100,000 people or so, diversified job

industries. I got a good hospital system, good school system. There's a steel industry across the river because it's right on the border of Kentucky. So, you know, there's a good amount of people lived out there. So that was good. And then just the affordability was huge because on the first deal, I did do a 25% down payment and I had a 30-year fixed loan and that came with a certain loan payment every month and I just didn't want to feel like, gosh, if there's no tenants, what am I going to do? So the price point needed to be one that I felt comfortable with if there was a vacancy for a little bit. And just the people I ended up talking to there because I spoke with agents and other markets and stuff, just felt like I hit it off the best with them and really connected with some

people that had worked with other out-of-state investors before. So I didn't have to reinvent the wheel and took the leap of faith. I really like that approach of not stretching yourself too thin. Everything else you said about figure out where there's demand, something you can afford is so important. But whether you're investing in your own backyard or you're going to invest somewhere further afield, making sure that you are super comfortable, that you're going to sleep at night. If things don't go well, that is so important on your first deal, especially while you're still learning. You may have a little bit more vacancy than an experienced investor before you learn how to market things and how to turn things over efficiently, just not using every single dollar to maximize what you can buy and instead

making sure that you find something that you can comfortably hold, even if things go a little off track in the first couple months of your business plan, is such a good approach. And it sounds like you found a really good area of the country, Ben. So let's hear a little bit about this first deal. Did you have a very specific buy box you were looking for? Not entirely. I was just looking for something that was in a good area. I didn't want to get too risky with the location. So it had to be in a better part of town. And it had to be, you know, like, I think I had about 45,000 I wanted to spend on the down payment. So it couldn't have been any more than that. So I was looking like $200,000 as a price point and below. And after, you know, looking at some things here and there that

just didn't make sense. I found a duplex. Or I should say my agent found a duplex that I probably wouldn't have found on my own. And she sent it to me. And they wanted, I think, $2.10. We put in an offer much lower because it had been sitting a while. And I think we ended up getting it under contract for 170. Oh, wow. And this is in 22? Yeah, it was in October. It needed a new roof. So that's part of the reason why there was a discount. So that was a bit concerning. And it was like, all right, we'll see if this property manager knows his stuff or not. And I closed on it. And what I really liked about it, Dave, is that it came, this is not everybody likes this, but it came with tenants who were paying rent. And so not everybody likes inheriting tenants, but those tenants were paying rent that I knew.

would cover the mortgage taxes and insurance from day one. And those rents had a lot of room to go up. So I was like, if I can just get this thing, fix the roof and kind of hold on for a while, like eventually I'll do a turnover. I'll get the rents up. And then I think the first, you know, rent, everything's paid after the, you know, there was no roof cost. I think I got like $200.

And I was like, all right. And this is only going to go up. So that was in 2022. And I was pulling in just short of $1,500 on the rents. For both combined? Yeah, both combined. Okay. And then now in 2025, they're pulling in over 1,700. And honestly, I think it could pull in, you know, more than 2,000. But I don't really want to force a turnover if I don't have to. And, you know, everybody's paying on time. So we'll just kind of let that thing keep riding. So let's dig into this a little bit. You paid 170. You're getting 1,500. That's close to a 1% rule deal. So you're probably getting a pretty good amount of cash flow right off the bat. What did you put down 20%? 25%? I'd put 25% down. Okay. And then how much did that roof cost? Uh, only about $7,000, which, you know, out here and where I'm from for context on the listeners. Put a zero on it.

More like three exit. Okay. So you were probably all into this thing for what, 50, 55 grand, something like that. Yeah, including the roof. I think around there. Okay. And then talk a little bit more about inheriting tenants, because this is a debate. And I'm curious. And I'm curious. how did it play out for you? How long had those tenants been tenants in that place? And how did it work out for you now that you've owned the property for three years now? One is still there. We've increased her a little bit over time. Nothing crazy. She pays on time. She keeps it clean. So we got no issues there. And I just know that at some point when there's a vacancy, we'll get to higher rent. So I'm not worried about it. I think the people that perhaps don't love inherited tenants, they're trying to

maybe force appreciation and kind of a get in, get out, maybe a burr. Because I've been there on some projects where I'm like, ah, it's going to make this a lot harder if there's a tenant in place. But if you're just buying and holding, it's already kind of livable and the numbers kind of work and you know they're going to get better in time. I mean, as long as there's proof that they're paying rent, that's something I would ask for before you close on it is just, you know, proof of the rent roll. Yeah. I don't really have a big issue with it. And if my property managers don't have an issue working with those tenants, I'm all for it. I personally really like the approach that you're using, I do the same thing where it's like, I could buy this property

and having these tenants who I know are going to pay rent reduces so much risk. To me, the risk of having one of those tenants not be great is less than buying something with vacancy, especially in a market that you don't know, because you don't know how long it might take to fill. And so to me, the idea of just, hey, I know I'm going to be able to make my mortgage payments for the first couple of months. I could build up a little bit of a cash reserve. I could get this thing rolling well. That often outstrips the downsides unless you want to do that forced appreciation. Like if you're just eagerly trying to do a burr, that's a different situation. But for those of you who listen to the show a lot, you know, I like this thing called the slow burr, which is kind of the same thing.

It's like, I just wait until people move out to do the renovation. I'm not going to force anyone to leave. I want people to stay in an apartment if they like it and they're living there to To me, that's great, and it just allows me to be more opportunistic about the upgrades that I make instead of putting this time pressure on myself to get things done really quickly. All right. Well, this sounds like an awesome first deal. Congratulations. I'm pulling the trigger on this from long distance. But I want to hear more about how you scaled from there.

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I'm here with investor Ben Bidavitch talking about how he bought his first property while living in California as a teacher in southern Indiana. Ben, it's not like the first deal was solid, right? You're making good cash flow. It seemed like you bought in a good part of town. Once you did that, what was your next thought? Where did you go from there? Well, I have to credit my lenders for really helping me here.

And a key piece of information I gave them when I was kind of researching what lender to use on that first deal was I made sure I let them all know I was looking to scale. Like I didn't want to just buy one and be done. And the lender I used kind of picked up on that thread and they transferred me to their commercial side of the lending business that they run. And in commercial lending, man, there's just so much fun stuff you can do. So the second deal actually came from those lenders who are pretty connected. They invest themselves in the area. and they said, all right, Ben, we have this special loan that's called a subject to appraisal loan where you can buy a property and then also get money for the renovations.

And the funds you get are based on what it's going to be worth when those renovations are done. So it's what they described it as is kind of like a reverse burr, where you get the money up front. It's all kind of rolled into this loan. You don't have to do a refinance at the end. You get it up at front. And all of those loans that I have are less than $100,000. their 20-year adjustable rate every five years, which I know is not, you know, maybe the, not every investor loves that, but my kind of thought pattern is 20-year loan, less than $100,000,

even when that rate adjustment happens, it's not going to be a crazy difference because the loan amount is very small to begin with. And in those five years, like, you're probably going to get some rent increases over time, too. And it's adjusting on the new principle, not the original principle that you pulled out. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I, never really considered something like this. And I'm a big fan of fixed rate debt. But I do think there are applicable times to do it. I've used arms. I've used interest-only loans for certain times. And I think that's a really good point. I never really thought about that with an arm. You know, if it adjusts after five years and it goes from five to seven percent, like, yeah,

that stinks. But the amount when you're borrowing 80 grand, I don't know what that comes out to, but I imagine it's maybe less than a hundred bucks a month in difference. I think so. And I mean, just looking at the way interest rates have been, I mean, hopefully it doesn't swing big in the up direction, but it really hasn't been swinging all that much. It's been a slow trickle to come down to where it is now. So on some of these subject to appraisal loans, you can, because you're baking the equity into the deal by saying it's going to be worth this and the LTVs kind of already baked in at that 80%. I didn't have to really bring any money to the closing table because I just had to float the costs of the loan while I had it before a tenant got in there. So

my thought pattern is if an adjustment comes, I can always put a down payment and kind of recast the loan if I need to if the payment gets too high. So it's just been a cool tool that I've been able to use to help scale a portfolio without having to come out of pocket on a lot of the deals I've done. What did that do for you? Without that, would you have been capped out or sort of delayed in buying your second deal? Oh, most definitely. That second deal, like I said, I didn't have to really bring anything to closing because the margins were good enough that the bank was willing to lend the money. They knew all the guys that were going to do the work. They knew the property managers. And I kind of just got brought into the fold. I think because I was a strong borrower

and followed through on that first one with them and just kind of showed credibility and got the roof done. And, you know, banks know your information once you do a conventional loan with them. So they're like, all right, we can we can do one with him and see where it goes from there. And so the second deal was not really anything out of pocket except for, like I said, those monthly holding costs. And what did you buy? It was a single family, three bedroom, two bath, but it had a tenant that had been living in there for a long time. So the upstairs was pretty much unlivable, kind of a destroyed home by the end of it, sadly. And it took about six months to renovate because it was pretty big to turn, you know, turn it back into the three two. But again, another thing that I should point out here is I wasn't using

like a general contractor. I was working through my lender and they have their guys. that do in-house property management. So it's more of a property management company that's doing this turnover. So they probably are moving a little slower than a G.C. might have. But I was just making the loan payments on this subject to appraisal loan. And it was like 500 bucks. So 500 bucks a month for six months. And then after that, the tenant got in there. And that tenant's been there ever since. And it pulls in about 200 bucks every month now. So I think it's a win. If you can scale and just kind of hold on to assets. That's kind of my philosophy right now is I'm just kind of trying to grow slow and smart. And then, you know, as those principles get paid down and properties appreciate a little bit,

you can have some options in the future. I love slow and smart. Slow and smart is the way to go. You know, you've got plenty of time to figure this out. Do it in a way that makes sense to you. It's not stressful to you where you're learning and growing a little bit and not taking on more than you can chew. But, you know, a three-day roof job to a six-month renovation is a pretty big swing is kind of a unique situation where your lender is a property management company who's doing the renovation. Were you just letting them figure out the scope of work? Were they picking out materials or how involved were you? I got the scope of work and I asked the questions that I wanted to know the answers to like, hey, what are you guys doing here? But in terms of making decisions,

they kind of have a product. They have their own, you know, items that they always do in their rentals. So they showed me photos of different projects they had done in the past. I said, yeah, it looks pretty good me. I've lived in that. So I kind of entrusted them to do the work. It was a little more nerve-wracking than I thought it would be, but I was just patient and I would get photos periodically. So I knew it was happening. And it was pretty awesome when they finally got a tenant in there. And I didn't do any, I didn't really look at deals or analyze to do anything because I was like, let's just get this one done. I think that's really important to just go one out of time, especially in the beginning. What was nerve-wracking about it for you? Well, I didn't know how long it was going to take per se.

So, you know, a month goes by, two months go by. And I don't think people understand how slow real estate is until you experience it because it looks fast online. But it really is a slow game. How did you plan for this to make sure that you had realistic expectations? I don't know how much of a burden for you at that point, $500 a month was. Like, how did you sort of offset some of the understandable nerves that you have at the outset of the deal?

Well, I underwrote it with the broker who has done these before, and we used a really conservative rent estimate. I think we used like 850 for this three-bedroom two bath home. And then by the time we got a renter, it was a thousand. So we wrote it very conservatively. And then I think it was a 35K purchase. And then our rehab budget was another 35K, so all in around 70. And that's pretty much what the balance of the loan was. They rolled in the closing costs. And I'd say in the meanwhile, since then, I've just been trying to learn more about what it means to make good offers and get a little bit better on the investing side of things. So I don't have to quite rely on other people as much and can be responsible for the decisions I'm making too. I love this approach, Ben.

I got to say, this is a deal. Like, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I need to get into real estate. I just don't know how to do it. Correct me if I'm wrong, Ben, but this just feels like a very replicable model that almost anyone could do. Do you think this is something our audience should be concerned? considering if they maybe live in an expensive market, California, wherever, on the coast, somewhere like you. Yeah. I mean, I think you need to get interested. But once you're interested and you do some basic education and you kind of put a little work in to understand some of the elements of what

it means to have a good deal and whatnot, I mean, yeah, anyone can do this. Thank you for sharing that story with us. Because I do think, you know, I've done this too, investing long distance. buying something that's turnkey is not that hard, especially if you have tenants in place. But doing the renovation is kind of another level of nerves. And my recommendation is to just ask as many questions, even if you feel like you're being annoying, ask what the layout's going to be, ask them for photos frequently, ask them if they comparison shopped for a couple of different things. Even if they're trustworthy, just learning the process will make it feel less nerve-wracking

and scary. I think if you can ask questions and you see, hey, they're actually doing their due diligence, they're smart about this, they're thinking about it. That will calm a lot of the nerves. And if you do that and then realize they're not doing your due diligence, maybe you need to fire them and find someone else. But I think just staying really involved, even though it's far. And even if you don't know a ton about construction, just learn. It's your money.

It is your deal. Like use it as an opportunity to learn. So the next time you go do this, you're going to be feeling better about it and be more efficient about it. So those were two deals, Ben. How far apart were those two? I think that second one came about a month after the first one. Oh. So pretty quickly.

That is awesome. Congratulations. I've not heard many people being able to pull off two of their first deals in just the first two months. I want to hear how you've scaled from there to today, but we've got to take one more quick break. We'll be right back. When I bought my first rental, I thought collecting rent would be the hard part. Nope. The admin crushed me.

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Curious if you qualify, just head over to hostfinancial.com and find out. Stop letting outdated lending practices hold you back. That's hostfinancial.com where your property's potential meets unlimited financing. Welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. I'm here with investor Ben Vidovich talking about how he bought two properties in two months, basically in southern Indiana while living in California, a really cool, replicable model that almost anyone listening to this was an interest in real estate and saved up some capital to get started, could replicate. But obviously, you probably wanted to scale from there, Ben, having

two wins in just a couple of months. So where have you gone since then? Well, after that second deal, I did a third one, pretty much the same idea with the subject to appraisal loan. And then somewhere along the way, I read the small and mighty real estate investor by Chad Carson. And I was like, Great book. Yeah, maybe I should do a really big boring down payment. And so I saved up some money for a while, kind of took a break because I was like, you know, it's great to scale and kind of do it without putting a ton down, but you're also, you know, pretty leveraged. And maybe there's a little bit of margin because, you know, the bank went loan if there wasn't. But still, I wanted to, you know, try to see if I could do something a little different on the next one. And so then I kind of went full in on that.

My wife and I were in a mobile home. We had some money that we had used to buy that out here. And we were like, you know what? We can't really do anything with it. And, you know, this thing might depreciate it one day. I mean, probably not in the Bay Area. But still, like, didn't love it. So we sold and we went back to renting and we kind of redeployed that capital into buying one rental that is just free and clear, which has been really kind of a nice breathing room for our portfolio. And then we've been kind of going in between now, like, let's do some that are not really leveraged and trying to scale when leverage makes sense. Okay. So let's talk about that because, you know, Chad's friend of the show, I love Chad. And his approach is that it's often better to just buy fewer rentals and the less leverage you use, the less debt you take out on them, the fewer you need to buy because you can replace your income sooner. It's less operational headache. You have less risk. in your portfolio. And so sometimes making bigger down payments makes sense. So that's a very different approach to the one you were just doing where you're putting almost nothing down. And so what about Chad's philosophy resonated with you? And was it hard to shift from doing a high leverage deal to a no leverage deal? The resonating was the cash flow aspect and just having a little bit less risk. Because after doing two where I didn't really have a down payment, I was like, yeah, that's

awesome, but, you know, there's not a lot of cash flow. Something goes wrong, then, you know, you're kind of on the hook for it. So the next one we did, you know, the big boring down payment and the money's sitting in it now. And I thought, yeah, that could be a problem. What if I'm not using that to, you know, recycle the money more? But then this is where the commercial loans came back into play. This is pretty cool. So what I'd learned out there is the commercial lenders will let you buy another rental property using that same commercial product. And of 20-year loan. And you just have to bring your 20% in the form of cash or equity.

And I was like, wait, equity, I just made this big boring down payment. Can I borrow against that? And I said, yes, you can. So I, you know, basically deployed the money to kind of have more cash flow. But then I was also able to still use it to buy what became another duplex deal where it was, you know, kind of like we talked about earlier, inherited tenants kind of thing. and, you know, the seller wanted to get out, and he sold it to me at a good price, and we're just kind of waiting to do turnovers there, but I didn't really have to come out of pocket for that one

because I already came out of pocket on the one prior with the big cash down payment. So you kind of blended, like you're kind of putting, I mean, you're not really doing this, but you're able to buy one property using no debt, and then one putting 20% down. And so, like, you basically got two properties basically putting 50% down total. Yeah, it's kind of like one big down. payment that buys you two houses, but not in the same transaction. It's just kind of over time. So now that's given me confidence to kind of pursue Chad strategy a little more intentionally. Like, it's, it's all right to pay down some of this debt because I know I can borrow against it in a safe way,

and I can be very selective when I do that. So Ben, now we're sitting here, end of 2025. We're recording this. Where does your portfolio sit today? What does it look like? Got about eight units that are within my portfolio and then I have a couple more that I have acquired with partners. And it's all in the same market. So that's been fun to work with some other people there too. And right now we're just kind of wrapping up to end of the year projects that are going well. And then we have yet to sit down and kind of do some goal setting for next year. But again, just trying to be intentional and don't grow for the sake of growth, grow so that you can have security and instability in it. Just in an average month, Ben, what does your portfolio bring in these days in terms of cash flow?

Well, the number that hits my bank account is a bit above 2000 every month. But remember, you always have to set aside a little bit for reserves and whatnot. So I put about 20% away for that. And then the rest, I just reinvest. I'm not really pulling anything from that at the moment because I'm still doing projects and investing dollars into renovations at the moment. I love it. That's awesome.

Before we get out of here, Ben, I'm just curious. You know, you said you got started because you wanted to change your trajectory. You know, you were starting a family and felt that teaching wasn't sufficient for your financial goals. Is it fair to say that just three years into this, you have put yourself on the financial trajectory that you were looking for? Oh, 100%. I mean, I don't want to mislead people to say, I'm retiring tomorrow or anything like that. But there was no trajectory like that. I mean, we were putting money in the market and we all know the market's been pretty up. and down and that gives people a lot of panic. But real estate is pretty steady, very slow, and you can control so much of it. If you want to add value, you can do that. If you want to just buy and hold and let tenants pay down your debt and that increases your net worth, you can do that. There's just so many ways that you can make money in real estate, it generates your wealth in a variety of ways. And like, it's just super accessible. It's a tangible thing. You can underwrite it and have a fair degree of certainty that the numbers are going to be pretty close. And I don't think that's something you can do in other asset classes,

aside from maybe owning a business, but that's kind of what owning a rental portfolio is. Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Oh, likewise. Super glad to be on. Thank you so much. And thanks for all the great work you guys do here at Bigger Pockets. Oh, we love it. Love hearing these stories of people who are taking what we're learning here, applying it and getting on a better financial trajectory in just three years, Ben. Congratulations on all your success. Thank you all. so much for listening to this episode of the Bigger Pockets podcast. I'm Dave Meyer. We'll see you all next time. 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 Calico 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.com. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford

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