$200K/Year & Early Retirement in 10 Years by Being a “Lazy” Investor

Dave:
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. Today’s episode is from the fire series, which originally aired on our YouTube channel. Dion McNeeley had such a great story that we wanted to share it with our audio listeners too. This episode is brought to you by Connect Invest real estate investing simplified and within your reach. Without further ado, let’s chat with Dion. I am so excited to talk to Dion McNeeley today. Does retiring in 10 years feel unattainable to you today? Dion is here to prove that it isn’t off the table even if you’re saddled with debt. Now, Dion is fully retired and has the flexibility to do whatever he wants to do. Sounds pretty great, right? I can’t wait for you to learn how he did it and to take his lessons and apply them to your own life. Dion, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dion:
Oh, thank you so much for having me here. Anybody who is familiar with me knows that I am a not so secret Mindy Jensen fan.

Dave:
Well, thank you. I’m a not so secret Dionne McNeely fan. Let’s go back to the beginning. How did you discover the concept of financial independence and the idea that you could retire early?

Dion:
I tried for a pension a couple of times. I tried the Marine Corps and they downsized after Desert Storm. I tried law enforcement and they downsized after 2008, and I think when I started working towards investing, my goal wasn’t even financial freedom. It definitely wasn’t, and ironically still isn’t generational wealth. I am not trying to create generational wealth. I think my kids inheriting something would take away their own personal drive. They will inherit millions. It’s just not my goal. I was trying to do the most important thing that I think we can do for our kids. I didn’t start investing until I was 40. I was a single parent with three kids. I’d just gotten laid off from law enforcement. I found out about $89,000 in bad debt in my name that I didn’t know existed until the divorce, and I thought the most important thing we can do for our kids is to take care of our finances so that we don’t become a financial burden to them when we’re too old to work. And so that was what got me started with the idea of buying rentals and at least a 10 year journey. Real estate is a get rich quick scheme. The really hard thing is convincing people that 10 years is quick.

Dave:
You can absolutely get rich, you can get very wealthy through real estate. And Dion, I have a feeling you’re going to tell us how. But before we do that, I want to go back to this $89,000 in bad debt. You said the word bad. What does that mean to you?

Dion:
So I have three categories when it comes to debt, and most people are familiar with two, a lot of people don’t believe in good debt, right? But there’s three, so you have bad debt, which to me is consumer debt, credit cards, personal loans, and when I went through my divorce, I actually found out about $313,000 in bad debt. But I found out that creditors will negotiate with you if you’re thinking you don’t even have to be committed to it. But just thinking about bankruptcy, many of them would take 20 or 30% of whatever was owed. And since I didn’t even know what these debts were, I was contacting the creditors to find out how to make the payments and ended up with out of 313 80 9,000 was what I was responsible for ultimately. And so to me, bad debt is that consumer debt. Then there’s also worse debt.

Dion:
In order to reach financial freedom and have the confidence to retire, I wanted to make sure all of my worst debt was gone. And to me that was anything with an adjustable rate, anything with a loan reevaluation period, anything with a balloon payment or with a high interest rate. At the time, interest rates were around five to 6% for mortgages. So I figured anything above 6% was my worst debt. And so I split my disposable income into two categories. The first one was I wanted to save for a house sack. The second was I wanted to get rid of the worst debt. So I was making minimum payments on everything and then half of my discretionary income went towards my worst debt, and it did take several years to get rid of it, but that happened while I was acquiring rental properties. And that first one, I had a really bad debt to income ratio.

Dion:
I was only making $17 an hour. I had the bad debt and luckily a lender told me there’s no way that you could buy a house unless you had something like rental income on your tax returns. So what I did is I took my kids as a single parent with three kids. We moved from my house, which I kept through the divorce. I was good about keeping custody of kids and my house never been good about keeping a girl around. So I moved from the house into an apartment and we rented the house out for two years. So this did a couple of things. I got laid out from law enforcement and I started teaching at a CDL school only making a little bit. It was a $17 an hour job, but two years in the new industry to become lendable. Two years to work on my credit score, two years to save the little down payment that I needed and two years to get rental income on my tax return so that when I bought that first duplex, I was actually bankable.

Dion:
I still had bad debt. I was working on acquiring good debt. And when I talk about financial freedom being possible in a decade, these 10 years, I usually get the response of it’s really hard to do. There’s no way you can do it now. And yes, when you talk about financial freedom being 30 minutes or 30 days, you talked about the get rich quick scheme. If you start today with a 10 year journey, that means you’re in the graduating class of 2034, and a lot can happen between now and then. So for me, it was starting with a 10 year plan, and if you’re starting today, it needs to be a 10 year plan. Now, it might go faster. Maybe you have less debt, maybe you make more money, maybe you make smarter decisions. But if you plan for 10 years, you’ll be happy if it happens sooner. If you plan for two years, you’re going to be too enticed into taking risks that outweigh the returns and it could blow up in your face

Dave:
To the people who are listening saying, oh, it’s hard. Yeah, you know what? Financial independence at any income level, any debt level is hard. It’s not impossible. It’s not this overwhelming burden. It’s this overwhelming freedom, but you’re going to have to work for it. It doesn’t just pop into your lap and I think 10 years is a really good timeframe. Of course, if you’re making $12 an hour and you’ve got $400,000 in student loan debts, you’re probably not going to make it in 10 years. I’m sorry to break that to you, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about $89,000 in bad debt and $17 an hour and instead of saying, well, I guess this is just my life, you decided I do want to be able to buy a house and do this house hacking thing, so I am going to move out of my house into a rental, which is considered a downgrade and shouldn’t be necessarily because it’s just a move. But you moved out of your house and started renting it so you would be lendable. If you are going to pursue financial independence, you are going to have to do things that other people aren’t willing to do. Dave Ramsey says it best and most succinctly, I can’t even say that word. He says, live like no one else now. So you can live like no one else later, and Dion is living like no one else now because now is his later.

Dion:
And so people don’t feel depressed by the story we’ve talked about the beginning. The ending is I retired in 2022 with 16 rental properties. I purchased a duplex since then. It made about $204,000 in profit in 2022 to retire on. I spend about 50. So I have four times the amount of money coming in that I need. And so the fun thing in retirement is figuring out how to spend that and for anybody saying that it’s really hard to start. Now, I want you to understand that what’s about to be said is my opinion, not BiggerPockets and not Mindy. So if you get angry, come at me in the comments. My name is Dion. 2024 is the golden age of buying real estate, and I know that’s going to upset a lot of people. I’m going to go back through the last decade as succinctly as possible.

Dion:
Thank you for the 64 cent word there. I started saving around 2010 after getting laid off from law enforcement in 2010. Everybody was saying, it’s a double dip recession, don’t buy real estate. It’s going to crash again, right? 2011 was the bottom. So I started saving. Then in 2013, I go to buy that first duplex and everybody was screaming at the top of their lungs, prices are starting to pass where they were in 2008. It has to crash. It’s unsustainable. Don’t buy. So I bought a duplex in 2015 when I bought the next one, everybody in the world was screaming silver tsunami because this was the first year baby boomers were hitting possible retirement age. It’s going to be a flood of inventory prices were going to drop, don’t buy. In 2018 when I bought another duplex and made a huge mistake and paid off a house, I lost a million dollars doing that.

Dion:
Everyone was saying interest rates are above 6% and you know that prices haven’t come down. Nobody can buy a house if interest rates are above 6% and prices haven’t adjusted, don’t buy. So I bought another one in 2020. Everybody was screaming, there’s a pandemic, there’s an eviction moratorium there. Nobody has to pay rent and you can’t evict them. People can go on forbearance. The market has to crash. So I bought a fourplex and a triplex 2022 and 2021 when forbearance was ending and everybody said, this is going to flood the market. Don’t buy estate. I bought a duplex every single year when everybody was saying It’s impossible to do, I did it in 2024. Here’s what they’re going to be saying in 2028. Here’s two and a half reasons why this is the golden age of real estate. First remote work is a game changer.

Dion:
When I grew up, I think I knew one person who had a remote job in 2010. I probably knew five right now if you take out truck drivers because I ran a CDL school, and it’s hard to do that remotely, but half the people I know work a remote job. The census did a study. 56% of people are required to work in their office for their companies, which sounds like a big number until you realize that means 44% of employees aren’t required to work in the office. So what’s happened is pick the major metropolis near you. For me it was Seattle and Tacoma remote workers, not the ones who can work completely remote and geo arbitrage and live in Thailand and make a lot of money for living there. But the ones who have to go to the office once or twice a week, this is a little significant amount of people who can now take their Seattle or Tacoma rent money of $4,000 a month for a little apartment, move out to the suburbs and pay $2,500 a month for my house.

Dion:
Rent’s pushed up, but prices haven’t because they can’t buy. The remote workers don’t want to buy because they might get called back to the office next year. So rents are pushing up. For me it was I pushed out to Mason County and Kitsap County and found a ton of deals, found my most recent duplex that I’m actually house hacking now by using that method. The second reason why this is the golden age of real estate is November 18th, 2023. The regulation changed on conventional lending to be able to get a duplex, triplex or fourplex with a 5% down conventional loan. In the past for a triplex or a fourplex, you had to use FHA to get that low of a down payment. In 2028, people are going to say, can you remember 2024 when you can buy a small multi house for 5% down? How insane was that? Every one of those years that I bought that, somebody said you couldn’t. We look back now and think, I’m so glad I did. And people say, you can only retire because you did in five to 10 years. People are only going to be saying that you can retire the person starting this journey today because you took action in 2024.

Dave:
Wow, okay. You said two and a half reasons. What’s the half reason?

Dion:
The other half reason is if you’re paying attention to fair market rents, this is a bit of a math thing. So this is why I try not to talk too much math because the Marine in me says, I don’t know math, but the housing authority bases their data on setting fair market rents on the last seven years. They don’t consider the most recent two. So those previous five years set rents. So if you go to the HUD website and check fair market rents in your area, look at how much rents went up from 2023 to 2024. It was a massive jump. One of my tenants went from 2200 a month to 3000 a month. That’s a significant increase. So what’s happening now in 2024 is that massive jump that happened after 2020 because there was a rent freeze for a year 2021 and 2022 are starting to be factored into section eight.

Dion:
And the way section eight impacts rents is every October they have to come out with what they’re going to pay for rents next year. So in October, we have next year’s data. That doesn’t mean that when my rents went up from 2200 to 3000 in January that all of the rents did because most leases end in the summer. So as we cycled through this summer, you’re going to see a lot of rents jump up mid 2024 because of that increase in 2028, people are going to say, if you were aware of this and in the middle of 2024, you were anticipating what section eight rents were doing to the area average rent in your area, you could find deals that would cashflow at the end of summer. That didn’t make sense at the beginning of summer. So it’s two and a half reasons because that’s projecting forward based on known data.

Dave:
Okay, you just blew my mind. And that’s specific to section eight? Correct.

Dion:
So that’s the thing is section eight impacts all rents because why would a landlord rent to somebody who’s not section eight when the government will pay you guaranteed amount of that increase. So two things. Impact rents area average that aren’t the rentals, right? Supply and demand is always a factor, but basic allowance for housing around a military installation or a college is impacted by what the military will pay for basic allowance for housing. In 2023, we saw a 12% increase. In 2024, it was only a 3%, but it was 3% on top of the 12%. So BAH is impacting area average rents and then housing authorities, what they’ll pay for rents, impacts, rents, but about six months behind because, and this is something I do backwards, most people say they want their leases to end in the summer because it’s really hard to find a tenant in winter because nobody wants to move all but one of my leases ends in January and February. That helps me have very limited tenant turnover because nobody wants to move in the winter. So I do that backwards, but most landlords want their stuff in the summer, so that’s when section eight starts to roll over midsummer. And again, why would a landlord rent to non section eight for less than what the state would pay?

Dave:
Exactly. Okay. Now don’t think, I didn’t catch this, but you said you paid off a house and lost a million dollars. Tell me about that.

Dion:
So not a hypothetical. It’s actually my story. In 2018, you were only allowed to have four mortgages in your name, and I had just found bigger pockets and was educating myself on things like DSCR lending, asset based seller financing, all these other options that I didn’t know was there. So I had four mortgages at that point and decided to pay off my smallest amount, li at largest interest rate, and I paid off my single family house. I owed about $121,000 just after that. I purchased a fourplex where my out OFP pocket was $109,000. That fourplex since 2020, has appreciated over a million dollars. Had I purchased another fourplex, which I had the funds to do, had the deal, instead of paying off a house, I would’ve had a million dollars in appreciation two or three times the cashflow of the paid off property. So I look at that paying off that house, it’s not a mistake and I don’t regret it at the time, based on the information I had, best decision part of the SWAN account, sleep well at night. But mathematically I can say considering all of the options, I lost out on a million dollars.

Dave:
Okay, I can see how that is working. I can hear people saying, oh, well he didn’t have a million dollars in his hand. No, but he could have. So I agree with you, you lost a million dollars, but you said something very important. You said, and I typed this out as you were saying it, you said at the time, based on the information I had, I made this decision. It is completely the seller’s fault for not listing that until after you had paid off your house. But I also am not a fan of paying off those old mortgages, the 3% mortgages, the 2% mortgages. I have one right now. I’m not paying an extra dime towards that because instead of putting money into that account, I put it into the stock market where it grows more than the 3% return that I’m getting by paying off my mortgage. So I completely understand why you wouldn’t in hindsight not want to do this. It is what it is. What is it, $200,000 a year coming in and you only spend 50. So this would’ve just been more problems. You saved yourself some problems.

Dion:
When I retired, it was 204,000 in profit and I spent about 50 because of the binder strategy and thank you inflation. It’s closer to two 50 a year coming in and I still don’t spend more than 50.

Dave:
Do you want my address to send me a check for 200,000 every year?

Dion:
You would think of something better to do with it than I do. All I do is blow it on scuba diving in other countries.

Dave:
I can’t spend the money that I have. I’m not going to take yours. We’ll just take your money and throw it into more real estate. Are you currently buying more real estate or are you sitting pretty?

Dion:
So my goal is not to acquire more real estate actively to grow the portfolio, but the money piles up. This is the problem. I’m trying to get everybody watching this video to have so that I will acquire more rentals. Again, I’m not trying to create generational wealth, but it’s the best use of capital. And this is, lemme see if I can articulate this. Warren Buffet often talks about diversifying Kevin O’Leary. Mr Wonderful says no more than 20% in one asset class, no more than 5% in any asset. I’m 100% in real estate and because I’m one, I don’t know if I owned a stock or had a penny in a retirement account, I’d probably still be working. So since I’m in one asset class, I diversify in two very specific ways and doing that, adding properties as I go that meet these criteria, one is that it’s at least 10 miles away from my other properties, pulling tenants from different sources close to several economic drivers like a port, a base, a college, a hospital, Boeing or Amazon.

Dion:
And the second criteria is that I have three different types of tenants. I want about one third military, one third section, eight, one third working or retired. So my portfolio is ready for a pandemic stock market crash or prolonged government shutdown. Adding properties as the money piles up for me is still the best use of capital because I have mastered one asset class. When you reach probably 10 or $20 million in net worth, maybe diversifying to protect your wealth makes sense for those people that say those things. But as you’re growing your wealth focusing with its stocks, focus on stocks. If it’s growing a business, focus on the business. Joss Singh from Minority Mindset, it gets a better return growing his business than he does buying his rentals. He buys rentals, but he doesn’t focus on it. For me, since I’ve mastered real estate and rentals and actually have my tenants ask me to increase the rent with the binder strategy, it’s the best use of my money other than the hardest thing in retirement has been learning how to spend money and I’m slowly, I’ve come out with these things called reverse budgets.

Dave:
Oh, okay, you are throwing so much stuff at me. This is going to be a nine hour conversation. Reverse budgets, since you just talked about that, I’ve got notes for these other things. What is a reverse budget?

Dion:
A reverse budget is if you had to be frugal in financial freedom, I wouldn’t have done it. I would’ve stayed at work until I was in my seventies or eighties, but since I don’t want to be frugal, but it took a decade of living, frugally took that dedication and learning the systems of how to make as much as you can, spend less than you make and save and invest. The difference you develop these habits over that decade to reach financial freedom that are really hard to break. So I actually have a reverse budget. So if I don’t spend this much, I failed for the month, I must spend $2,000 a month eating out at different restaurants. Now, whether it’s me or with friends, it doesn’t matter. That’s a reverse budget. I have an asset for every expense, right? I’ve got the healthcare duplex, I’ve got the travel duplex, I’ve got the vehicle duplex, and I’ve got the vodka fourplex, but with my vehicle duplex, it profits a little over $2,000 a month. I want to make sure that the next vehicle that I get costs, at least now, this is registration, insurance, upkeep and everything, at least a minimum of what that property profits to where, yeah, I drove a 15 and a 17-year-old Jeep and Jeep Cherokee for that decade to reach financial freedom. But going forward, I’m always going to have the goofiest silliest vehicle I feel like having because I have an asset paying for it. So reverse budgets is making sure I don’t live too frugally because that was not the point of financial freedom. Okay,

Dave:
That is interesting. I like these different properties that fund your lifestyle and your spending. And question, what sort of reserve fund do you have for either each individual property or just collectively for all of them?

Dion:
I’m a crayon eater. I’ve got my crayons ready to eat. It has to be simple, so it’s not per property and my reserves scaled with the size of my portfolio. When I had seven units or less, I kept $10,000 as a reserve thinking I can handle an eviction, a garage door, a water heater. When I got above seven units, I thought Murphy’s fourth corollary could kick in. That’s if any sequence of events can go wrong, they probably will and in the worst possible order. So 10,000 was no longer enough. I raised it to 30,000 and that was pretty much where it stayed while I worked, when I stopped having that drug that kills our dreams, the paycheck I raised my reserves to 50,000, that’s not per property. That’s 50,000 total. Any amount above the 10 30 or 50 needed to be put to work to help me get to financial freedom.

Dion:
So I still maintain a $50,000 reserve. That’s scorched earth emergency, never touched everything above that is cashflow for my lifestyle and going to the next investment. And so as your cashflow grows, your investment strategies can change. I’m the lazy investor. For 10 years I bought rent ready or already occupied. I’ve never done a rehab. I’ve never done a burr, a flip, a wholesaler or anything to reach financial freedom and retire. Once I retired and had my time freedom, I did my first bur, which I call my last burr. I don’t like it. It created about $300,000 in cash in a year and I don’t want to do it again. It’s not worth it. I could have spent the winter in Thailand scuba diving and no, I was here managing a burr, so that’s not why I retired. So that’s how I do my reserves kindergarten simple. I picked an amount, I stayed there and it scaled with the size of my portfolio and grew when my job went away.

Dave:
And remind me how many units you have total.

Dion:
So in 2022 when I retired, I had 16 and I’ve purchased one duplex since then because I’m on the slow path. The problem was the cash piles up, so I did a burr that was self-funded. I just purchased at cash, funded the repairs, and so I’m not even sure it’s going to be a complete bur because I might not pull any money out at the end. I might just leave it in there and enjoy the cashflow.

Dave:
You could do that when you have 200,000 more than you need every year, you can make different decisions. How much time does your real estate take up either weekly or monthly?

Dion:
It’s a great question. It has two short answers. When you’re growing your portfolio all of the time, it is not passive Real estate investing is not passive. Real estate ownership is close to passive 18 rental units. Now a house act one of them takes about two hours a month to completely self-manage. It would take me about two hours a month to manage a property manager. So I’ll do that myself. And I use things like Hem Lane. So if I’m in another country and I have a tenant turnover, I can step up the process for that one month and have a leasing agent go out. I have handyman in place now. I do this, I invest locally. I’m in Washington State. Everything is between Tacoma and Olympia. I’m now in Port Orchard, so I’m a little bit further out. But since I invested where I live, I did it myself.

Dion:
If I was going to invest at a distance, I would’ve started with property management. Like my friend millennial Mike, he’s a law enforcement officer near Seattle, but he invest in Gary, Indiana, five years investing. He’s got 27 properties, but he does it with property management. He’s smart though. He still house hacking a duplex in the high cost of living area. I self-manage because I put the systems in place and those systems are what gives me the freedom. The idea that it’s probably been about seven years now that I’ve had to go to a property, like I’ll go and record a video or one of my tenants is a nephew. I’ll go and I get to see my nephew, but I don’t have to go to my properties. It’s kind of like when people say I want to buy a rental property. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a property and then made an offer. I’ve always gone to look at a property once I’m under contract. Everything I’ve needed to know, I can find out online.

Dave:
Dion, what would be your piece of advice to anybody who is just discovering financial independence, maybe has debt bad or worse and is thinking, well, I’d like to try that, but I’m not sure that I could ever get there.

Dion:
Understanding that it’s going to take a decade is the first step, right? If people think it’s Michael’s, Uber from one rental at a time has over 180 rental units, and if he said, well, to reach financial freedom, you need to have 180 of these rental units, nobody would start. So he’s smart enough to say, get to four. If you can get four properties, your entire life will be changed. Your generation will have millions to inherit by the time you get there. If you pay these off anywhere close to around your retirement age, your retirement will be completely different. Once you get to four, now you can decide, okay, I don’t like this. Stocks is my way. And I didn’t start investing until I was 40, so I only had a short runway of 10 years. There’s people like Joe Kuhn on YouTube, KUHN. He retired at 54 using stocks and the buckets method, completely different method than me.

Dion:
He made more money than I did, and he invested for over 30 years to retire at 54. So if you have a longer timeline for compound interest to do its thing and you make more, there’s other methods that might be better for you. For me, it had to be done in a short period of time. And since I have to live somewhere, I was willing to house hack. And I think the biggest mistake that people make about house hacking, we can talk about in this video, if we end up having time for it, is one of the things that helped me retire. If I didn’t house sack, I’d probably still be working. That reducing or eliminating my biggest expense added $1,200 a month to me being able to save when I was only making 17 or $18 an hour, that’s huge. And so that’s what got me started.

Dion:
And so if somebody’s going to start today, I think it’s really important that you pick an asset class that excites you. If it’s entrepreneurial and you want to start a business, or if it’s stocks, if it’s crypto, if it’s real estate, we’re more likely to stick to a plan. We’re emotionally invested in, I don’t want to say this, that it’s so bad you don’t start the first five years suck. It’s slow. Take me as an example. I start saving, two years later I buy a duplex and then two years later I buy another duplex. In the first four years, I did two things. How boring is that when you reach 10 years of doing really boring? Lemme tell you, boring is sexy because boring gave me freedom and I can now using the math of time, I never have to work again. I can choose to, but because of finding BiggerPockets and educating myself and improving the way that I invest, whether it was stocks or crypto or real estate, choosing that asset class life is completely different than if I was stuck in the rat race with another two decades to work.

Dave:
I like what you said right there. I could choose to work if I want to. I think some people hear about financial independence, retire early, and they’re like, Ooh, I don’t want to retire early. I like my job great. Get financially independent anyway, because you might not always like your job. Maybe your boss leaves and you get the worst boss on the planet. I’m sure that’s never happened to anybody in the whole history of the world, but it’s happened to me a bunch of times. It’s happened to a lot of people I know, and just being able to choose to walk away is huge. You don’t have to. I still work. I’m financially independent and I’m totally fine still working. I love what I do. But if you get to a point where you are financially independent, now you have all this freedom to choose how you want to spend your day instead of having to spend your day at jobs that you may or may not love. And I mean, even if you love your job, there’s still times that you’re like, Ooh, it’s really nice outside. I want to go swimming or snowboarding, or whatever it is that you like to do. And when you have a job that you are tethered to your desk, nine to five, that’s not going to happen. Dion, this has been so much fun. I could literally talk to you for a hundred more hours. So we will of course have you back, but where can people find you?

Dion:
You can find me on YouTube, Dion Talk, financial Freedom, or if you go to dion talk.com, there’s actually a free binder course there I don’t charge because it helps the tenants and the landlords. And that’s just dion talk.com. And in that, I give away my spreadsheet that was made by me and my CPA for managing my rentals, and I give away my seller finance letter that I submit with my offers when I’m pursuing a seller finance purchase

Dave:
As a real estate agent, I’m going to go grab that seller finance letter. You never know when somebody wants to write that up. I love that. Alright, Dion, thank you so much for your time today. It is always so much fun talking to you. If you liked this video, please click the thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to this channel for more inspiring fire stories, just like Dion’s. This is Mindy Jensen signing off.