BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - How to Build Your 2026 Plan (Retire with Rentals Faster)

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

By the time you finish this episode, you’ll have your exact plan for financial freedom through real estate, starting in 2026.  See if you can answer these questions right now: How much money do you want to make every month? When do you (realistically) want to retire? How much real estate will it take to get there? And which strategy will actually get you to the finish line? If you can’t answer all four of those questions, you’re like 99% of real estate investors—buying properties just to “build wealth.” While “building wealth” is worth striving for, it’s not actually a true goal. It's what keeps investors working longer, unsure of when or if they’ve “made it” or how much farther they have to go. If you do one thing before 2026, do this: define your financial goals. Today, Dave shows you exactly how to do that. You’ll learn the formula to calculate your financial freedom number, how much real estate you’ll need, how long it will take, the one- and three-year goals you should set now, and the best real estate strategies for your situation. You could be retired in under 10 years if you start in 2026. What are you waiting for? In This Episode We Cover How to actually retire with rental properties in 10 years (or less) with a personalized strategy  The best real estate investments for those with low money or little time  How long it will take you to replace your income with real estate  2026 goal-planning that is achievable and gets you closer to early retirement  How it’s possible to double your money in a matter of years by reverse engineering your investments  And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1209 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

You're probably ignoring the single most important part of your investing strategy. It's fun to talk about door count and markets and strategies. But what are your goals? Why are you putting your time and money into real estate in the first place? If you can't answer that question with a clear vision of where you want to go, nothing else really matters. So today I'm going to help you set your financial goals for 2026 so you can find better deals, see better returns, and accelerate your path to financial freedom.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. I'm Dave Meyer. Thank you all so much for being here. I want to ask you all a question to start this episode, and I want you to be honest. How many of you actually have a specific financial goal? And I'm not just talking about, oh, I want to be financial free. I'm talking specifically like, I want 10,000. a month in cash flow by 2035. Like, how many of you have that level of goal? I think if we're all being honest with each other, it's like basically none of us.

Maybe 2% of you have actually gone out and done this. And that's okay. It took me probably eight years of investing in real estate and being really into personal finance before I figured out that I really mattered whether or not I had a financial goal. And that might be okay at the beginning of your investing career. to be perfectly honest. But if you want to build a portfolio of low risk, high upside investments

over a sustained period of time, you need to have a plan, you need to have a strategy, and in order to have that, you need to have good goals. So today, what we're going to do is talk about goal setting and how to do it the right way. I'm going to break this down into three really actionable parts, and you all should just follow along. I'm actually going to break out the whiteboard and show you some really simple tools, like actual things that you could do, either as you're listening or later today when you go home, go and actually do this so that you have these financial goals, especially as we head into a new year, you can have these specific goals and build a plan backwards from those goals. The three parts we're going to go over are first the long-term goal.

And this is the most important. We're going to spend most of our time here figuring out why you're doing this in the first place. Where do you want to be 10 years? from now, 15 years, 20 years. I know everyone has this vague notion of being wealthier or having more time. That's not good enough. What you need is a specific goal, and I'm going to help you get that today. The second part is defining a one-year goal because once you've figured out the long-term vision, then you need to sort of back into more achievable, more actionable things that you could do in the next year. And then part three is a three-year vision. So we're going to do long-term, big picture, then one year, then three years. And as you'll see, even though very few people have

actually done this, it's really not hard. By the end of this podcast episode, you're going to have these three numbers. And I promise you, it will help you a ton as you formulate your strategy as an investor. So let's get into it. First up, we're going to be talking about our long-term financial goals. And there's basically two different questions that I want you all to answer by the end of this section here. Number one, how much money do you want? And number two, this is the one that people miss, is when do you want it by? The key to doing this the right way is finding something that is tough, like you want to be a little bit uncomfortable. You don't want to be, oh, for sure, I'm going to be able to hit that number. But you want to feel like if I execute my plan well,

if I am diligent, if I work hard, I'm going to be able to hit that number. That's sort of the magic balance that you're looking for here. So these are the first concepts. The first question is how much do you want to have? And the second question that we want to answer here is how long, right? Those are the two things I said. So let's start with how much. There's different ways that people can answer this. You could answer this through net worth. You can answer it through cash flow through in your portfolio. For me, the way that I think about it is the after-tax money that I need to support my lifestyle. So I recommend that people think about it this way.

after tax income. Because all of us are going to be tax differently. Real estate has a lot of tax advantages. So if you're using real estate for a lot of your income, you might not need to earn as much as you would in a normal job because you're going to have those tax advantages, which is why I prefer this after tax income thought. Now, for those of you who don't have a budget or don't really understand what your spending is right now, that's probably a good place to start. I would recommend you have a budget or go onto your banking app. Like it doesn't need to be super complicated. Most people, if you have online banking, go and look at your online banking and figure out what your average spend is per month.

And this is a great place to start when you're figuring out what you want your income to be. And I want to be clear that you can't just make this number up. Like you could, but I don't recommend it. Like it would be easy to just say, again, I want $30,000 a month in after time. income. That's a ton of money. And maybe you do aspire to that. And if you've thought about this hard and come up to that number, that is okay. But there is risk in overshooting here because if you say 30,000 and all you need is 20,000, that means you might work in a job or build your portfolio longer than you actually need to. We want to find the balance of getting what we want out of our lifestyle and

making the most time for ourselves. And so if you're working unnecessarily to achieve an income that you don't actually need, that kind of goes against the purpose, right? And so I really recommend just starting rooted in what you're actually doing today. Now, I expect for some people who are listening and watching the podcast right now, they might be okay with their current income. You know, if you are established, you like your lifestyle. That's really all you have to do is figure out your budget and average spend if you're comfortable staying at this level. If you are not and you want to expand your lifestyle in some way, I would just say try and be specific about that. So if your budget right now is $5,000 a month, I wouldn't just randomly say $10,000. I would just spend 20 minutes

thinking about the things that you would want that you don't have now and how much more that costs. It's really not that hard. I actually have, as part of my book, start with strategy. There's a Excel file that goes through this and that actually helps you calculate these numbers. So you can do that, or you can just do it on a piece of paper. Honestly, it's not that hard. So I'm going to assume that our budget and what we want is $7,500 per month. But there is one more advanced move that we need to do, right? Like we want $7,500 a month in today's dollars. And I know this is going to get a little bit nerdy, but this is, I think truly the number one mistake people make in setting their financial goals is not accounting for inflation. This is a big picture stat, but the value of your dollar, on average,

gets cut in half every 30 years. Just think about that for a second. So if you are near my age, I'm 38 years old, I probably will be retired at 68, hopefully. In 30 years, if I was making $10,000 a month, it would be the equivalent of having $5,000 a month today. Now, this is a big problem that a lot that people face in retirement, and I don't want all of you to face that problem. So I want you to adjust upward your goal to account for inflation. For us, in our example here that we're following along with, our goal is going to be $10,000 per month. We're going to adjust up for inflation from $7,500 because we want to make sure that our spending power stays at that $7,500 level well into the future and in the future, you're likely to need at least $10,000 to be able to do that.

I'm not doing this in a very precise way. I'm doing $10,000 because that's a nice round number, but adjust upward your goal to account for inflation. That's the main thing here. So that's step one in figuring out how much you need is what actually you need to fund your lifestyle. Step two is going to come where we figure out what our equity goal is in our real estate. So we need a real estate equity goal because even though the way that you're going to replace your income long term is through cash flow, I personally believe that it's easier to think about this by thinking about how much equity you actually need. Now, I'm not one of those people who doesn't think cash flow is important. I only buy deals that cash flow. But I am not focused on

cash flow early in my career because what I believe and what I know based on all of the analysis I do is that the best way to have cash flow later in your investing career is to have a lot of equity. Once you have equity, once you have money, cash flow is super easy. So I'm going to extrapolate our goal out from we had $10,000 a month, but for this calculation, we need to do annual. So what I'm going to do is say that we want $120,000 per year in cash flow. And then the next thing I need to look at is what cash on cash return do I realistically believe that I can get 20 years from now. And I know that's hard to project, but it's going to be somewhere

between 5 and 8%. I'll tell you that. That's the number you should be picking. I like 6%. I think we'll be able to do better than 5%. 8%'s a little bit higher. This is not deals that you've held on to for a long time saying you can go out and buy off the MLS. You can buy an apartment building and get this number. This is equivalent to what anyone who's familiar with commercial real estate would call a cap rate. And so I believe 20 years from now, I'm still going to be able to buy six caps. And that's a 6% cash on cash return. So all I'm going to do is divide my annual goal of 120,000 by 6% cash on cash return. And what I know from that is that I will need $2 million in equity to be sure, pretty much

100% sure that I could get the cash flow I need at the end of the day. So for me, this becomes my goal as a real estate investor. I'm sitting here in 2025 thinking, how do I get $2 million in equity by the time I want to retire? This is obviously just one example. If you said you wanted, I don't know, $150,000 a year in income, but you're a little bit more conservative and you think that you could only get a 5% cash on cash return, then you're going to need $3 million. for example in equity or if you only need a hundred thousand dollars and you're more confident that you're going to be able to get an eight percent cash on cash return was that come out to be that's one

two five million dollars so whatever these numbers are for you this is the financial goal i want you all to come up with how much equity does your portfolio need to be worth and i'm not saying the value of your properties that is not what i'm saying it's the equity you actually own in those properties, that's what you need to be calculating. So if it's $2 million, $3 million, $1 million, doesn't matter, figure this out for yourself. Okay, so now we have answered question number one. Remember, we started by saying, how much do you need and how long? We now know how much. We're going to use $2 million as our example. And we're going to get to how long now, which is what we call your time horizon. And this is super important thing that not a lot of people think about,

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Welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. I'm Dave Meyer going through how to set good quality financial goals that will help you formulate a great investing strategy heading into 2026 and honestly for the rest of your investing career. Before the break, we talked about just needing to know how much you want, and I recommend thinking about that in terms of equity. There's a couple of steps to that. As a reminder, figure out the after-tax income that you want, adjust it for inflation, divide it by the cap rate you think you can get, and that's going to get you that equity number that you want. We're going to be using $2 million as an example.

Now, the question then becomes how long? And this one is a little bit more of an art than a science because most people will just say ASAP, right? You want to be retired in three years or five years or seven years. And for some people, that might be realistic. If you were just trying to replace your income without any additional lifestyle enhancements. I would say that the average there is eight to 12 years. You could probably replace your income, assuming that you have enough capital to buy your first property today. So I think a lot of people

are in that situation. So eight to 12 years could be a good time frame. That's for doing pretty plain vanilla kinds of deals. If you're willing to be a little more active, maybe take on a little bit more risk, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, you can speed up that timeline. But for most people, I think we're going to be talking about something around 8, 10, 15 years. And they might feel like a long time, but I have been doing this for 15 years. And I promise you, it is really not that bad. And it is so worth it. Taking 15 years to achieve financial freedom is amazing.

I am sorry that people on the internet lie and say that they do this in three to five years. Maybe some of them do. But I promise you, the average person it takes 10 to 15 years, unless you want to take on a lot of risk or you're pouring 60 hours a week into this. business, 10 to 15 years, totally doable. You can probably do it in 8 to 7 if you're going to be even a little bit active in your portfolio. So just think about that for yourself, where you're starting out and where you want to get to. I'm going to just assume for the purposes of our example that we're going to start with, let's call it, $75,000 in savings that we can invest today

and that we want to retire within 15 years. Now, I understand that some people want to do it faster. And that is definitely possible. And this is the time to dictate that. If you want to go faster, you need one of a few things to happen. One, you need to be starting with a lot of money. I know that sounds really silly. But it's true. Like, if you have a million dollars, you're probably going to be able to do it pretty fast, right? Like, that's a lot of money to start with. The second thing you could do is try and increase your income. I did this by deciding to go to a state school and go back to college for a master's degree and try and increase my income to accelerate my financial freedom through real estate by making more in my day job. Some people might want to do that.

The third option is to do it through real estate. And I know this is a very common question on here, but it's not required. But if you think that you could go and flip houses and make a ton of money, that might be something to consider. If you think you can wholesale in addition to your job or you can wholesale and make more money than you do today, also a decent option. If you think that you would be a great real estate agent and would be able to make more money than your current job, that's another way that you can do it too. And then the fourth option is to do value add real estate investing. And so that would be, I think for the majority of people listening to this podcast,

probably doing something like the Burr method. Because that's going to allow you to invest in relatively safe rental properties, but also build equity at the same time. And so just think about which, if any of those things you want to do. If you don't want to do renovations, you don't want to change your job, and you're kind of just, you know, want to coast, that's totally fine, but it's going to take you probably 10 to 15 years. If you want to shorten that to let's call it seven to 10 years, think about which of those things you can realistically do. Can you get more income or are you willing to put in the time and effort into doing things like the Burr method to grow your equity? faster. For the purposes of our example, I'm going to say that we have $75,000 to invest today

and that we're going to shoot for, let's call it, a 12-year time horizon. So that's what we got. That is step one of our long-term goal. That's all it takes. I'm blabbing about and explaining this, and we did this in like 15 minutes, right? So you can do this in your own time. Take 10, 15, 20 minutes, and figure this out. We know now that our goal, as a real estate investor, the thing we need to be focusing on when we set our tactics, when we pick what deals to do, what markets to invest in, our goal is to have $2 million in equity in 12 years. That's the goal that you need to set. And if you have this, I promise you, everything is going to get so much easier. It sounds so simple and it is. But everything will get easier if you start to think about your portfolio in this

way. Now, before we move on to the one year goal, which we're going to do in a minute, just do a gut check and make sure that this sounds reasonable. Like if you, Like, if you want to do the math, you could do that because I would recommend that. But if your goal is like, I need $5 million in five years and I'm starting with 50 grand, I'm sorry, that's just not going to work. If you're a rental property investor, you can expect your money to compound at somewhere between 10 and 25 percent, depending on how involved you want to be. If you're just buying regular deals, 10 percent is probably 12 percent is probably where you're

going to be. If you're going to do the burr, you could probably do 20, 25, maybe 30 percent. And so think about it. that and see if you're within that realm of possibility. If your goal is way bigger and you're going to need to compound at 50 or 60 or 70 percent, honestly, you can do that, but you're going to have to flip houses. It's the only way you can earn those kinds of returns in real estate. And that comes with risk and a lot of time that doesn't make it wrong, but that's how you're going to have to do that. So think to yourself, is it worth it to me to do flipping and take on more

risk and commit more time? Or should I just back out my goal a couple of years? and take on less risky, less time-intensive kinds of strategies. That's totally up to you. But just think about that before we move on to our one-year goal. So that's step one of your financial goal. And then we're going to move on to our one-year goal because obviously having that sort of 12-year vision isn't good enough. You need to start now backing into what you have to achieve this year to make sure that

you're on track for year two, for year three, for year four, and so on, right? So the place that you need to start for your one-year goal is by doing something what I would call a resource audit. And this sounds fancy and corporate, but it's not. It's just a question of how much time do you have to commit to real estate in the coming year and how much money, right? Everything comes down to these two questions, right? Our first year goal was what amount do you want in what time frame?

Our one-year goal is going to come down to those same sort of variables that we're dealing with. Now, we already answered the question for our example, which is $75,000, but for all of you out there, I really, really encourage you, if you haven't done this yet, think about what are your investable assets right now, right? Investible assets are not your total net worth. It's how much money you can responsibly put into real estate today. So let's just use an example and say, you have $50,000 saved up. You shouldn't invest all of that.

You can't invest all of that because, you know, budgeting experts say you need three to six months of emergency funds to weather a storm. You know, we're going into a difficult economic period, I believe, and so you probably want six months of emergency funds. And if you have kids, that might be even longer. That's up to you. But you need to set aside some money. And so it's not just the number in your bank account. That's not your investable assets. What you need to figure out is how much money you can responsibly put into real estate. So figure that out for yourself. But for our example here today, we're going to use $75,000 as an example. Now, time is another really important variable here, because again, if I wanted to grow as quickly as possible, I would flip houses. That is the best

way to earn a lot of money quickly in real estate. But I don't have that time. And I, in the example that we're going to use is going to say we don't have that time. We though are willing to put in, let's call it 10 hours per week for real estate. To me, 10 hours a week, you're going to be able to do a lot in real estate investing. You're going to be able to find great deals. You're going to be able to do value ad. You're going to be able to self-manage. You're going to be able to do a lot of things that you might want to do to maximize the early years of your investing or whatever, the next years of you're investing if you put in 10 hours a week. And so, feel, Figure that out honestly for yourself, though. If you don't have 10 hours a week, be honest about that.

Because if you buy a deal that requires 10 hours a week of a commitment and you only have five, you're not going to operate that deal well. And this is exactly why you have to go through this process. Because I see so many investors going out there and just buying whatever deal. They buy a short-term rental and they don't have a lot of time to furnish it. And then it just winds up being kind of a crappy short-term rental and it doesn't perform. And then what's the point of doing that in the first place? So be honest with yourself about how much time you're going to be able to commit because that's how we're going to pick what deals that you should be doing in the next couple of years. So for me, if I'm trying to take a medium aggressive approach, which is what I recommend to most people, it's like you don't need to be really passive and really conservative. You don't need to be super aggressive. But if you want to do things like a burr or cosmetic rehabs on rental properties, those are fantastic ways to pursue financial independence.

If you have 10 hours a week, you're going to be able to do that. So think about this for yourself. Once you have an answer to that, I think sort of paths kind of start to diverge here, because what your answers are are going to really depend on what you're going to do in 2026. So I'm going to draw up actually a little quadrant here about the two different variables that we're talking about. So on one axis, if you're listening on the podcast, I'm drawing a quadrant. On the horizontal axis, I'm drawing time.

and on the vertical axis money. And where you fall in which quadrant, which box you fall in is going to really dictate what you should be doing in your first year. So if you're low on time, but you have lots of money, so you're in this first quadrant here, what I would invest in here is I would think about rental properties,

right, because you don't have a lot of time. You're not going to be able to flip. So I would think about rental properties, low leverage, because you have money, and so you're not going to need to put five or 10% down. So I'd say put 25% down. And then if you have time, I do cosmetic rehabs. Because you're not going to have time to do a big rehab because, again, you're falling into this low time bucket.

That's what I would look for. If you're just asking me and you fall into this bucket, you have money to invest, not a lot of time. Buy rental properties. Put 25% down. Do a cosmetic rehab. Don't think that hard about it. This is going to work. Next quadrant that you go into is a lot of time and a lot of money.

This is obviously a good place to be in, but what I would do is heavy into burrs. If I had both time and money, that makes a lot of sense to me because that's going to grow my equity as quickly as possible. But if I did a heavy burr, a heavy value at burr, that is going to take up a lot of time. But if you have time and money, I would go heavy into these burrs. The next one is high on time and low on money. The things that I would look to do are things like potentially wholesaling. I don't have a lot of experience in that.

But if you wanted to, this is a good way to make money. I would try and partner on flips and see if you can use sweat equity. Or I know this is going to be controversial. Make more money. I know that sounds silly. But if you don't have a lot of money, but you have a lot of time, go make more money. Whether that's doing a side hustle, investing in your education so you can increase your income, becoming an agent on the side. I don't know. But if you can make more money

with that extra time that you have, that's probably going to be the best way to help your investing career at this point. So think about that. Then we go into the last bucket, which is low money and low time. This is a tough place to be, right? If you don't have time and you don't have money, real estate investing is going to be very difficult for you. And I just want to be clear about that. I know there are tons of people on the internet who like to say you can get into this industry with no time, no money. I'm sorry, but that is not true. Or it is very, very rare. And I don't want to discourage you if you fall into this bucket because you can get from where you are today to becoming a real estate investor, but making a real estate investment is probably not the next

step in your journey. What you need to focus on is one, either freeing up time so that you can do those other things I just talked about. Or earning more money, spending time saving money, you can still educate yourself as an investor. You can save money and then invest maybe in a year or two. Your goal is to get your foot in the door. And so if you're in that fourth quadrant, figure out a way. Your year one goal is find a way to get your foot in the door. And when we get to our three year goal in a little bit, you're going to be able to have a little bit more exciting goal. Don't worry about that. But year one is going to be just getting your foot in the door. If you're in these other quadrants. The way I would think about it is try and figure out one, how many deals you can

realistically do and at what point. So if you're in quadrant one, you're doing these rental properties with low leverage, putting 25% down for cosmetic jobs, I would say maybe you could do one of those, right, is a realistic goal. One deal at I'm going to target a 15% annualized return. I do deals like that all the time. If I don't have a lot of time right now and I find a decent deal, 15% annualized return, that's fantastic. The stock market averages 8 to 9%. It's having a good year this year, but 8 to 9%. If I can make 15% on a low effort deal, I'm pretty happy about that.

That's just an example. That would be one goal, I would say. If you're going to do burrs, I would say maybe try and do two deals and try and get maybe a 40% annualized return because you're going to be able to hopefully do a burr. Maybe you do two of them. They take six months each. Maybe they take nine months each. So let's just say you get into two deals at an annualized rate.

You might not realize all of that in one year, but just say an annualized rate of 40%. Or if I'm wholesaling and, you know, I'm in this third quadrant, remember that one is with low money, but high time. I would try and figure out how much more money you can make. How much can you save would be my year one goal? Not necessarily how many deals I can do. but if I'm in quadrant three and I have 20 grand, my goal would be something like $50,000 to invest next year. I know that doesn't sound as exciting as going out and buying a deal, but I promise you, if you save 50 grand,

next year you're going to be able to do a great deal and it's going to accelerate your career, probably faster than it is than trying to like get a little piece of a random deal or doing a really risky flip. That's my honest advice. That's what I would do if I were in that situation. Now, going back to our example of having $75,000 to invest and 10 hours a week, I'm going for the bur. That's what I would personally try and do. And so my goal, my one-year goal would be two burs. And then on my first burr, I think I'll only be able to sell that first one or refinance

that first one in the year. Maybe I'll do my start my second one within one year. But realistically, at 10 hours a week, I can only do one at a time. So I'm going to think about that's probably a nine-month project. and I'm going to say, I want to earn at least 40% on that deal. I want a 40% annualized return on that first deal. That's huge. 40% is awesome.

That actually would come out to, for $75,000. That's a $30,000 return, right? So already in year one, we've gone from $75,000 in equity that we need. We're trying to get to $2 million, and we've already gone up to $105,000. That may not sound like a lot, but if you're able to do that, I promise you, you are going to be able to hit your goal, and I will do the math for that. When we come back from this quick break, stick with us. Most investors spend more time chasing deals than reviewing their insurance.

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Sign up for free at Avail.co slash BiggerPockets. That's A-V-A-I-L dot CO slash Bigger Pockets. Welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Now that we've done our long-term goal and our year one goal, let's just extrapolate this out because you can basically do the strategies that I just said well into the future. And I know, like I said, you're going from 75,000 to 105,000 in your first year. I hope that sounds like a lot because it is. That's an amazing return.

If you're making a 40% return, you should be super happy. But I just want to extrapolate this out a little bit because there's this kind of magical thing in math called the rule of 72. And this says that if you take the number 72 and you divide it by your rate of return that you're earning, that's how many years it will take your money to double. If you take the number 72, you're earning on average an annualized return of 10% it's going to take you 7.2 years to double your money. Now, if you're doing the burr or cosmetic rehabs, which is what I think the majority of our audience should be doing, I think

hitting 24% annualized returns is very practical. It's not going to take so much time. You're going to still need to be able to put in some work, find great deals. But if you can get, let's just round it to a 30% annualized return. That's going to take work, right? You're going to need to do cosmetic rehabs. You're going to need to do burrs. You can't just go a regular rental property in 30%. But I'm just going to show you, like this is what I would do if I was starting with $75,000. I would just try and target this 30% annualized return every single year.

Because I'm starting in year zero with $75,000, right? Then in year three, we'd have $150K. In year six, we'd had $300K. In year nine, we'd have 600K. See how this thing starts to compound? And then in year 12, we'd have $1.2.2. million, and then in year 15, we'd have 2.4 million. So this is actually a really good example, right? I kind of set our goal arbitrarily earlier. I was kind of just coming up with this example

as we go. And what I came up with is I said, I wanted $2 million in 12 years. Well, now I'm looking at this and I'm thinking this probably a little unrealistic. In 12 years, even if I earned a 30% return, which is good, I would be at just $1.2 million in equity. That's still a great place to be. but it looks like my time horizon is going to be closer to 14 to 15 years. That's still awesome, right? I'm talking about being able to replace my income and earn $120,000 in after-tax income. That's just 10 grand to spend every single month in 14 to 15 years. I'm just starting with 75 grand, which takes time to build up, but it's not like you're starting

with a millionaire's amount of money. And I'm only putting in 10 hours per week into these. deals. If you want to accelerate this, you can find ways to make more money and put more investable assets, save more money. Remember, this, what I'm doing right here, 14 to 15 years, assumes I put no new money into my investments. I'm taking the 75K and I'm just extrapolating that. But for most people, you're going to be able to save money every month, put more money back in. That's going to help you get to 12 to 15 years. But that's what I want you to do at the end of this exercise is to be able to say, yeah, I gut check this. And I think that this,

this is reasonable. For me, I would say now at the end of this exercise, my long-term goal is $2 million. I'm actually going to say still in 12 years because I said 14 to 15 years would take it with no new money into it. But I think I'm going to be able to add some new money into it. So I actually do think 12 years is realistic. That is my long-term goal. My one-year goal is going to be, I'm going to round to 100K in equity. And my three-year goal, remember, I think that I want my money to double in three years, my three-year goal is going to be $300,000. That's my example. This is what I want all of you to get to. Know these three numbers for yourself. Because once you do, you can already start to figure out what deals you should be doing, right? If these are my goals,

I know that I can't just go buy on-market MLS deals. I am not going to be flipping. I probably don't want to do short-term rentals because although they can offer more cash flow, my goal is building equity. I know that my goal is building equity. And so that allows me to hone in on projects where I can do a burr or a cosmetic rehab. See how this is already helping me set my strategy just by knowing these numbers. There are so many great ways to make money in real estate. But I know my goal. So I know I'm going to do burrs and cosmetic rehabs. And I'm going to look for a market where I can do that for, for my 75K because I have enough money to get into a deal. And so I'm specifically going to look for markets where I can put in $75,000. For me, that's probably going to be somewhere in the Midwest or

Southeast. You know, if I put 25% down, I'm probably going to target a deal that is like $250,000 with a $50,000 rehab. Like that is something you can go out and achieve today. So I've basically backed into my buy box for next year. I know that if I want to hit my goal, I'm going to look in the Midwest for a burr cosmetic deal that is in the $200 to $250,000 range with the $50,000 cosmetic rehab. That's amazing. So many people spend so much time trying to figure out what their buyboxes, all these different strategies. You know, I'm coming up with this example in real time. Just using these numbers that I'm making up, I already was able to figure out my buy box just by backing into where I want be 20 years from now. And this is why I say that knowing these financial goals is the number one

key thing that investors need to do that most of them miss. Spend 30 minutes right now figuring out what these numbers are for yourself. And I promise you, your plan for the rest of 2025 and 26 and the rest of your investing career is going to become so much easier. Now, I think in this podcast episode, I have given you enough to be able to do this. But if you like this concept and you really want to get a crystal clear vision of where you want to go in your investing career. I'm going to be a little bit of a pusher and recommend my book, Start with Strategy. Literally, the whole book is kind of about this idea that if you set your long-term goals well, you can back into the right strategy.

So if you want to go deep on this, you can check out my book on Bigger Pockets. It's called Start with Strategy. It's also on Amazon. But hopefully, this has been enough for you to just do this by yourself. The book is just for people who want to go a little bit deeper. That's what we got for you guys today. If you have questions about this, please let me know. Or if you want to hear more content about this kind of stuff,

we always talk about tactics and strategy. But I think this stuff is so important, which is why I wanted to do this episode today. If you want more content like this, please let us know in the comments or hit me up on Instagram where I'm at the Data Deli. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the Bigger Pockets podcast.

I'm Dave Meyer. I'll see you 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. 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 Calicoe 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.biggerpockets.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 to lose. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results. Bigger Pocket's LLC disclaims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988, Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know, just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada.