What We’d Do Differently If We Started Over Today

Mindy:
Hindsight really is 2020. Today Scott and I are going to look back at how we both would adjust our retirement planning. If we had to start all over today. Spoiler alert, we might’ve done a few things differently. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my young at heart co-host, Scott Trench.

Scott:
Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here with beating heart of the BiggerPockets Money podcast, Mindy Jensen. At BiggerPockets, we’ve got a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting, including whether that’s today and from scratch. Today we’re going to discuss if we started over our journeys today, how we would do things differently in order to pursue financial independence, maybe than the journeys that we undertook at the time. So this will include, I think, setting off some ground rules for what that means, starting over exactly what stage of life, those kinds of things, and we will discuss how we would approach the fundamentals and how we would approach the tactics of our approach to financial independence. And spoiler alert, I am betting that there will be no changes to the fundamentals, but a lot of changes to the tactics that we’d pursue in order to pursue fire.

Mindy:
Scott, I would like to take a step back and because maybe the audience hasn’t tracked your every financial move, when did you first start saving for retirement?

Scott:
That’s a great way to start this off. Yeah, so I started saving for retirement in 2013, 2014. I started my job out of college late 2013, found Mr Money mustache and just was very frugal and bought my first house hack in 2014. Shortly after joining BiggerPockets as the then third employee, and I just kind of had things snowball on all fronts. I continued to keep my expenses very low. I invested in real estate in a booming market. I invested in stocks with anything left over, and I steadily increased my income by finding as many opportunities as possible. And then that has carried through, of course to today where I’m now the CEO of BiggerPockets and have a sprawling real estate portfolio and a big stock market index fund portfolio. Mindy, could you give us the very high level overview of your story and the key themes that got you to financial independence?

Mindy:
So what got us to financial independence are live-in flipping serial live-in flipping and taking that money and moving it into the stock market when we would sell a house. So to remind our listeners a live-in flip is when you move into a property and you rehab it while living there as your primary residence, if you own it for two of the last five years and live in it for two of the last five years, you do not have to pay any taxes on the gain up to $250,000 per person on title. So I am super excited about that portion of my journey because it is something that I completely have control over, even when the real estate market doesn’t allow me to have control, I still have control over my investment a little bit more so than a traditional rental property in my opinion. Would love to discuss that with anybody who wants to. But yeah, we did a lot of live-in flipping. We did lots of frugality. I mean, people who listened to the show know that I am not a spendy girl, and Carl, my husband, had a very high salary as a software engineer. And we’ve heard from people who haven’t necessarily had high salaries, but one of the best ways to get to financial independence is to have a high salary.

Scott:
And then I also want to call out that you guys made some very lucrative investments in certain technology stocks, specifically Amazon and Tesla, which I believe a thousand decked or something ridiculous like that, and became a huge percentage of your portfolio, right?

Mindy:
And Google, I should say this is not investment advice and you should definitely not follow my path, but we were investing in these tech stocks, the FANG stocks before a lot of other people were. We were part of Google’s IPO. We invested in Tesla in 2012. We invested in Apple as soon as they announced the iPhone, which was quite the game changer in the phone community. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of the iPhone Scott. And the reason that we were able to invest in tech stocks comfortably is because my husband does research all the time. He’s constantly consuming information about tech stocks. So I do have something to say about that a little bit later when we talk about what we might’ve done differently. But we were able to reach financial independence in under 1500 days after we of course started the blog called 1500 days and we’re halfway there to begin with. We were lifelong casual savers.

Scott:
And Mindy, let’s start the conversation from there. So what I’ll do is I’ll go back to set for life the beginning of my journey, which is someone who’s starting from scratch, no debt, no assets, median income, right? Perfectly average from the beginning of that and say, what changes from my journey to 2024 starting today and how does that approach begin, right? If I’m starting my job now in 20, 24, 7, 20 13, 11 years ago, and let’s start your journey from that when you started 1500 days point and you said, okay, here, we’re going to finish out the play here from this portfolio and let’s talk about what we would do differently there. Do you want to go first or do you want me to go first?

Mindy:
I’ll go first because what I would’ve done differently is focus more on index funds. So we first 1500 days the website with a net worth of $586,043 I think. I dunno why he’s got that $43 in there, but full transparency. So we started about halfway, a little over halfway to our financial independence goal, and this was when we discovered Mr. Money mustache and discovered the concept of financial independence. How

Scott:
Old were your girls at that point?

Mindy:
Our girls in 2013 were six and four.

Scott:
Okay, so this is probably like a lot of BiggerPockets money listeners, let’s call it seven 50 to adjust for inflation. So you’re starting from seven 50 in 2024 with two girls, a good high paying job and $750,000 in cash, which you can distribute across retirement accounts or whatever as you wish. What do you do? Go

Mindy:
Well, I would first max out my 4 0 1 Ks, any 4 0 1 Ks that we had access to, I would max out the Roth IRAs if we were allowed to. And remember, there are income limits for your contributions for Roth IRAs. I don’t think we would’ve maxed them out at that time. I wasn’t working. I was a stay-at-home mom and I think Carl’s salary was such that we could contribute to the Roth IRAs. Here’s something I didn’t do. I was a stay-at-home mom for eight years and I did not contribute to my Roth IRA for those eight years because I wasn’t aware that there was a spousal IRA. So that’s something I would definitely do differently. Taking that 750,000, I would max out my HSA because the HSA is triple tax leveraged, tax-free going in tax-free growth and tax-free when you pull it out for qualified medical purchases of course. And my family is in this really great position where we don’t need a lot of healthcare. We need more of a catastrophic plan. So I would absolutely have a high deductible plan. Let’s see. That is, let’s call this 50 or $60,000 that I’ve gotten rid of and now I have another $690,000 that’s going into a brokerage account.

Scott:
And what are you investing in? What are the stocks that you’re investing in this or is it still the fangs right now? Even after the big dropoff this week, it’s the first week of August here with the big selloff and a lot of tech stocks, the

Mindy:
Big sell off, it was the biggest sell off. I want to quote Morgan Housley. He’s like, this is the biggest sell off since that last sell off that you can’t remember. It was not a huge selloff. And at my age, I have been through multiple of these big selloffs. I was a sophomore in high school during 1987 when that huge drop happened. I happened to have an economics class, so we spent an awful lot of time talking about that. That was a 500 point drop and today’s was a thousand point drop or yesterday’s was a thousand point drop, but it was 20% in 1987 and yesterday was like, what, 3% or something.

Scott:
Well, if you could forgive me for calling it a big drop, would you still be investing in FANG stocks today with your 750,000?

Mindy:
Not all of it. We had not traditionally invested in index funds, and that’s something that we’re starting to now. I would probably put out of that 690,000 ish that I have left over, I would probably put 600 into index funds and I’d probably use the 90 to play in the FANG and individual stocks because it’s not such an enormous part of my investment portfolio. I would not put $690,000 into an individual stocks Before we get into how we’d adjust our retirement strategies today, a word from our sponsors,

Scott:
Welcome back. Okay, and what about live in flips? So remember, I think my understanding of your journey is that you crushed the play from that five 80 to, what is it, millions of dollars in net worth over the next, can I say the number that’s on your site? Sure. The 5 million plus net worth that you guys have today because of the combo of live-in flips and the stock market returns well, the income actually didn’t continue flowing in after a few years because Carl retired, I think from the software engineering role fairly shortly there. But so it was those two items, the FANG stocks and the live-in flips, that really seemed to be a huge driver for your portfolio. And it sounds like you would do some of that, but really wait much more to index funds. Would you still pursue a live-in flip strategy here in 2024, and you are very close to the market as a very active real estate agent. Do you see those opportunities for live-in flips in the same way that they were available to you in the last 10 years?

Mindy:
I do with a little bit of an asterisk. So right now we have very high interest rates and by very high, I mean like six and a half percent. They’re not super, super high. But I got a text message from my favorite lender yesterday saying, Hey, if you have clients that are sitting on the fence, tell them to start jumping back in. Now I predict September is going to have a 0.5 rate cut, and they’re already saying there’s going to be three rate cuts this year. So I would absolutely be doing live-in flips because I always need a place to live. So if the market doesn’t change, if the Fed says, you know what, we’re not going to do anything and the market just tanks, I still need a place to live so I can always live in the house that’s flipped. I just now live in a nice house instead of an in construction house.
But if I have just moved in here, I’m absolutely buying a garbage house and making it better because there’s so much upside. The house that I’m sitting in right now, having taken advantage of the last few years when prices went way up, I am going to have to pay taxes on the gain because I’m going to realize such a big gain. So there’s just a lot of to be made in real estate. Scott, I don’t see myself not doing a live and flip. If I was starting right now, how about you Scott? Would you live and flip?

Scott:
Would I live and flip? Well, look, let’s set the scene here. It’s 2024 and I’m getting started as a median income earner. So I was earning about $48,000 a year when I started my journey, let’s call it $65,000 a year. Now adjusting for inflation there. So I’m earning $65,000 and I have no assets and I have no liabilities. Maybe like two or $3,000 my bank account left over from summer jobs in college. How do I proceed to financial independence? Well, I would attack the same themes, the same fundamentals, but I would use probably different tactics. So let’s start with fundamentals, right? It starts with low expenses. The big three expenses remain unchanged for Americans across the decades. They are transportation, housing, and food. So if anything, the biking to work and driving a paid off economy vehicle are even more powerful in 2024 than they were in 20 14, 20 13, 20 14 when I was getting started because that of that inflation factor, gas is even more relatively expensive today than it was at that point in time.
And so a bicycle is about the same cost. I could probably buy the bike that I rode to work for many years for three, 400 bucks today just like I did at that point in time. So if anything, that would be even a further emphasis on that, making my own food, those types of things. And then the housing piece, renting with a roommate or keeping that expense low in the first year, obvious move that is timeless. But once we get that first year of runway, the first $25,000 accumulated. So I think it starts with the frugality component and accumulating cash and getting some flexibility into my life. No changes fundamentally to what I would’ve done in that first year as I start racking up that cash and I would still rack it up in cash. My journey is fundamentally different from yours, Mindy, because if I was starting over as a college graduate with no family and no obligations and those types of things, I would not be maxing my HSA, I would not be maxing my 401k, I would not be maxing my Roth IRAI would be accumulating liquidity because I think that that 25, 30, $40,000 for someone at that point in their life is so much more valuable outside the retirement accounts for things like a live and flip, a house hack, a small business venture, those types of things.
I wouldn’t do that forever, but for one, two or three years, I might emphasize that more than putting it into the retirement accounts because I’ll have the next 35 years to catch up to the retirement accounts. This is not for blowing it, but this is for taking a few calculated bets. So I would’ve still done that as well. Fundamentally might’ve taken a match if I was getting a really good match from an employer and that’s it. Everything else is cash in the bank account. Okay, so from there, what do I do with this 25, 30, $40,000? Well, I would not have bought the same duplex that I bought in 2014 as a house hack. That duplex I purchased for $240,000. My mortgage was a bank 1550 between principal interest, taxes, insurance and PMI with a 5% down payment. And my rents, if I rented it out and did not live in it would have been 2200.
So there’s a spread there of 600 bucks, probably break even or better even at high leverage on that property on day one. If I sold that property today to somebody for $550,000, which would be a bargain for them, they would have a 3,600 principal and interest payment alone in that same situation, and the rents would be $3,200 in aggregate. So it just wouldn’t have worked the same way. So I would’ve had to find a new tactic to make the house hacking work. I might have gone with the live and flip. I really like the A DU strategy. Colorado has recently introduced some laws that make a DU permitting much more favorable, and I’d be definitely looking for a lot of opportunity there. I think there’s a lot of creative folks who are able to do that. That’s essentially a live-in flip, right? You’re moving into a property and building an A DU Outback on there, which drives the value up.
Fundamentally, there’s a lot of similarities between that. I would’ve really liked that approach and I might’ve coupled that with a short-term rental or rent by the room strategy because the owner occupant advantages of a short-term rental strategy are very favorable. So I think that would’ve been a really good risk adjusted bet That would be one of the best risk adjusted bets I think I would be making in today’s environment if I was getting started over, started over. And I think that there’s a lot of really good opportunity to add value to drive cash flow from a strategy like that. And I think that there’s an off chance that legally they’ll allow folks to separate those parcels and sell off the A DU and the house as separate items within the next few years. I wouldn’t bet on it, but I would certainly factor that upside as a possibility into my analysis on a project like that.
So that’s probably how I would attack the housing problem of that being such a huge expense in my life on there. And then once I got that settled, I would do the exact same thing that I did, which is look for an opportunity at work, whether joining a startup, becoming a real estate agent, becoming a mortgage broker, buying a small business. I love the stuff that Cody Sanchez and Alex Ozzi are talking about nowadays. I love those items. I would definitely be doing the exact same thing I did 10 years ago looking for that opportunity, whatever it was for me, of course, that was BiggerPockets. I had the opportunity to join BiggerPockets as the then third employee. I’d absolutely be looking for an opportunity, something like that in a field that I was passionate about. And then once I got bearings under me and kind of got my career going in the direction I wanted to, had those things, then I would absolutely do the exact same approach that I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, which is regular investment in boring old fashioned long-term rentals. I’d be using a much bigger down payment than I did back then maybe to make sure I got positive cashflow. But I’d still be buying long-term buy and hold real estate here in Denver, Colorado, and I’d still be buying long-term index funds, and that’s exactly what I’m doing today. So long-winded answer. But that’s I think the biggest piece is around how I would’ve gotten started with housing because if you just have to play it a little differently to make it work as a house hack,

Mindy:
Absolutely. I mean, house prices are high right now and interest rates are high, which leads to a high monthly payment, which leads to way less cashflow. But I still believe that, like you said, Scott, I’m an active real estate agent. I am in houses all the time and I’m still seeing a lot of really dumpy houses that have a lot of room to rehab and get them back on the market either as a quick flip or as the live and flip if I’m going to skip the tax payments. And that’s mainly the kind of flipping I do. Although I do have another house around the corner that is currently a medium term rental, that’s also a great strategy. It’s one of the strategies that you can use to kind of get around the short-term rental laws. I am still renting fairly short-term, but I am renting 30 days at a time in this property that I will eventually move into. We just rehabbed it before people moved in. But yeah, I think that your strategy is a great way to think about it too. I don’t want to own a small business personally. I don’t want to do the work I am in my early fifties and getting a little bit lazy, Scott,

Scott:
And look, I’m going back to what I would’ve done if I was getting started from that position over here. If I was getting started again as a 33-year-old today with my wife and child, I might be doing things differently yet again of that approach. So I mean, it is all relative to your starting position. I think it’s just the tactics that change, again for me in each of those phases, or if I was getting started over today as a median income earner at the starting line here, but as a married man with a baby, I’d probably do something very different from the approach I just described. Alright, one last quick ad break before we give you a roadmap for starting to save for retirement in today’s market.

Mindy:
Let’s get back into it. So were there any specific investment vehicles that you wish you would’ve prioritized more?

Scott:
No. For me, yeah, I forwent a year or two of Roth IRA contributions or 401k maximizations. But there was the house hacks and the liquidity that gave me the opportunity to do stuff outside of those accounts. And so I think that that really enabled me to feel confident in changing jobs and joining a more unpredictable startup, for example, at that point in time. And that the returns there are just nowhere close to what I would’ve gotten from having them in the retirement accounts. So I feel very comfortable with that approach. And then Mindy, my regrets are in hindsight’s 2020, I would’ve invested in Tesla if I had known that it would go up so much, I would’ve picked those types of things. But no, I’m very happy with the textbook PHI approach more or less that I took with the index fund and house hacking, serial house hacking approach. So that’s worked really well for me and I would probably do it again, but again, I would probably have that shift to more of a live and flip with probably hunting for value in that A DU construction space. I

Mindy:
Like that you brought up the A DU construction space. So we are in a nationwide housing shortage based on a couple of studies that I have seen we’re either 4 million to 8 million housing unit short. So the A DU laws are starting to pop up in many states, and I opened up my crystal ball and predict that they will continue to pop up in more and more states as a way to try and alleviate the housing crunch that we have. And if I was a single person, I would be by the house that allowed for short-term rentals. If I couldn’t find one anywhere near me, I would buy the house that allowed for medium-term rentals. So minimum 30 day stays, build the A DU and move into the A DU in the backyard while renting out the larger house to generate more income to help cover the mortgage expense completely and also hopefully generate some additional income after I would get married. Then of course maybe things would change.

Scott:
That’s absolutely how I would invest as well getting started today.

Mindy:
Yeah, the moving it to the A DU after you build it, because you don’t need a lot of space as a single person, and you can rent out the front house for a whole lot more than you can. The A DU. Scott, I know how I’m going to answer this question, so I’m going to throw it to you first. In the context of pursuing financial independence, are there any lifestyle changes or spending habits that you wish you would’ve adopted earlier? I

Scott:
Probably would’ve lightened up a little bit earlier in my journey there, but for the most part, I’ve lived the lifestyle that I want to live for the last seven to 10 years, and I did not find that the pursuit of PHI really interfered with my ability to live my best life. Yes, I lived in a dumpy duplex for a long time, but I also, that didn’t inhibit me from spending great quality time with my friends, playing rugby, doing all the things that I really love to do. So I don’t really feel too much in the way of regret for much of that. The regrets are more the occasional missed trip because it was too expensive with friends. That would’ve been a great lifetime memory. I just met up with some of my fraternity brothers at a wedding this past weekend, and I was very bummed that I had dropped the fantasy football league because of the then a hundred dollar buy-in 10, 12 years ago. With that, that would’ve been a small price to pay to continue to keep more in touch with some friends. But it’s like those kinds of little things. There are a couple of those that bugg me, but for the most part, no, I am very happy with the trade-offs that I made in pursuit of phi.

Mindy:
Well, I wish that I could say the same, Scott. I have reached a level of financial independence that is way more than we had originally targeted, but we stomped towards our financial independence number and forwent a lot of things. We definitely didn’t go out with friends as frequently as we could have because we were working on our houses or we were, oh, I already went out to dinner this month, so I’m not going to go out again. And looking back, would that have changed our financial life? Not really to have Friday night with your friends every Friday night with your friends, is it going to change the trajectory of getting your house completed? And it’s not going to change your financial future unless you’re going to thousand dollar dinners with your friends and you’re making $24,000 a year. That’s going to be a little bit too much.
And maybe you should pull back on that a little bit. But we didn’t spend any money besides putting it into our houses. And every once in a while, taking a vacation this year, I have taken a three week vacation and a two week vacation, and those are the longest vacations I have had. But I could have afforded to take a longer vacation before we did a lot of weekends. I remember when I was pregnant with my first daughter, we flew from Chicago to Hawaii, a nine hour flight, stay there for the weekend, and then flew back. What’s the point of that? I got two days in Hawaii. You’re not even used to the time zone, and then you’re back in your old time zone again, which I guess is great for working, but it was such a silly trip. I could have afforded a whole week in Hawaii. It wasn’t going to be a lavish week, but we could have had a much longer time. That was our babymoon, and it was like two days. So we really didn’t exercise our spending muscle. And now it is so ingrained in us to be frugal to question every expense that it has become harder for us to spend, and our spending absolutely does not align with our net worth.

Scott:
Yeah, I’ve had no problem increasing my spending in the last few years as our baby was born and we got a new house and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I probably need to go back to working on that frugality bone a little bit more here. This is probably just a temporary thing with the new move. But yeah, we’ll get back into a much more sustainable pattern there. And yes, I still drive the Corolla and all that, but

Mindy:
I still have my Honda element that I’ve had since I bought it brand new in 2003, and it’s a great car. But yeah, I could have my husband, everybody knows that Carl loves Tesla. We just bought the Tesla in October. We could have bought it anytime in the last 10 years. And he kept saying, no, no, no. We’ve got two cars that work. We’ve got two cars that work. And on the one hand, yes, we’ve got two cars that work. We shouldn’t just be frivolous about this, but he really loves that car. I can’t even say how much he loves that car. So it was a great purchase and we should have done it earlier.

Scott:
Awesome. Well, I love the fact that for the most part, not much would change about your journey there. And I think that most of the queues are timeless. Again, only the tactics change you. What about different types of properties? Maybe for those live-in flips, you might have just spread, moved toward a little bit closer to the textbook index fund portfolio, but not even all the way. And that’s really all that would change for me. I mean, the PHI journey is so simple at its core, as we talked about on a recent episode here, but it’s so hard, right? It’s maintaining a huge gap between income and expenses, working really hard or developing a very valuable skill, and then staying at it for years while living way below your means. And you can invest really in anything in order to get to financial independence. Some will get you there a little faster than others, and it’s anybody’s guess what asset class that will be over the next 10 to 20 years.
But I’ll tell you what, I’m skeptical of the volatility of Bitcoin. I would not bank a major chunk of my wealth on cryptocurrency in simple. Interest in lending is not a good way to get to financial independence. I mean, unless you’re able to arbitrage notes and flip them for value, collecting simple interest is highly tax inefficient and not a good way for someone to get started or to aggressively pursue financial independence. It may be a good option for you when you’re close to financial independence and want to reduce volatility and begin living off your portfolio, but it’s not a good way to grow wealth. And that leaves you with stocks, real estate and businesses. You can also get creative with various forms of alternative assets inside hustles. Sure, if you can go after those, go for ’em, of course. But I mean from there it’s like what’s the right option there? My choice. Your choice. A lot of folks listening to this will be both or all three for real estate stocks and then plus maybe some business, some private business investments. That’s it though. There’s, there’s no fundamental differences. They will stay the same for the next 50 to a hundred years, I think, at least the way I’ll view ’em, which ones you invest in, how you do it, that will obviously vary with the times.

Mindy:
Yes. And I want to point out that just because we’re saying real estate doesn’t mean you have to invest in real estate. Not everybody wants to, and that’s fine. I like a diversified portfolio. I want to have some real estate, I want to have some stocks. I want to have zero Bitcoin, which is what I’m going to continue with. That’s where I’m at now, and that’s where I will continue to be. Although if I can go back to 2006, I might pick up a couple of Bitcoins because then that would be a lot of money. But I believe strongly in the financial future of America, which is why I believe in their stock market and their real estate market. And I don’t believe at all in the financial future of Bitcoin. So if anybody wants to lecture me on that email, somebody [email protected],

Scott:
You could just go on to my 40 minute rant against Bitcoin that I posted there and see all of the Bitcoin people who are making sure they take screenshots to tell me how wrong I am in 10, 20 years with it. But since I posted that for the record, it’s down like 10, 15 grand. And

Mindy:
If I’m wrong about Bitcoin, that’s okay. I’m still in the stock market. I’m still in real estate. I’ve still got small businesses locally. There’s a lot of other things. You don’t have to be invested in everything. So if there’s something that we are saying and you’re like, Ooh, I would never, then don’t find another way to invest, but the way to get wealthy is to be investing in growing assets.

Scott:
That’s right. Alright, Mindy, should we get out of here?

Mindy:
I would love to. As a reminder, we do have a website. If you do think that real estate is the way to go to biggerpockets.com and you can learn so much in our forums, our blog, we’ve got multiple podcasts and we would love to hear from you. So please go [email protected]. You can make a free account today. Alright, Scott, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. You of course are the Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen saying later, skater BiggerPockets money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. This episode was produced by Eric Knutsen, copywriting by Calico Content, post-production by Exodus Media and Chris Micen. Thanks for listening.