How to FIRE Without Investing in Real Estate
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Real estate is not the only path to wealth. In fact, for some people, it's not even the best one. Today, we're breaking down the ways to build wealth that don't require you to become a landlord, manage properties, or tie up hundreds of thousands of dollars in down payments. So if you've ever felt like real estate investing wasn't for you, or if you're looking for ways to diversify beyond real estate, stick around. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear roadmap to building serious wealth. ♪

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPocketsMoney podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my Building Wealth with Multiple Income Streams co-host, Scott Trench. Mindy, it's just so great to do this podcast with you. You have all of the properties of a great co-host. Yes.

Bigger Pockets has 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 or whether you like real estate investing or not. Today, we're going to be talking about other ways to get rich. By other ways, I mean ways outside of real estate investing, which it goes without saying Mindy and I are huge fans of.

We know that we talk about real estate as a tool for wealth creation a lot, but there are plenty of other ways to build wealth that may be appealing to folks in different life situations or at different stages in their financial journey. We're going to talk about five of them today, and I'm excited to get started. So you want to kick it off, Mindy? I do, Scott. I think a good place to start is with the four pillars of building wealth that we consistently talk about over the history of this show. It may be a good time for a refresher for some of our newer audience.

I think you have a really great overview on that. So I'm going to throw it back to you and have you list those out. Yeah. And these are going to be groundbreaking guys. No, obviously these are the very basic building blocks of building wealth, but we have to start in a foundation and voice and state the obvious, I think to progress here. And those four building blocks are going to be, you can spend less, you can earn more, you can invest, or you can create.

Outside of those, you know, unless you win the lottery or marry rich and become wife-fy, which seems like an increasingly popular strategy these days, those are the building blocks, right? We have those options and almost everyone will need to go pretty heavily into one or more of those options, ideally all of them at once, in order to accelerate that journey to financial independence. Let's start off with the first one, Scott, spending less.

I don't know many people or really any people who couldn't look at their budget and cut something out, something that isn't going to really affect their life, something that kind of crept in, even just all...

altering how much you're spending on that item. The first thing that comes to mind for me is your phone plan. I know people who spend $100 a month on their phone plan. Mine costs $15. That's a huge difference for literally zero difference in service.

So something like that, looking at how you're spending, where your money's going and looking for ways to either reduce or remove it altogether. The gym membership that you never use or the gym membership that you kind of like, but not really, or maybe you have multiple gym memberships, little things like that can have a big impact

immediately. And then what happens with a lot of people that I know is it starts to become a game. How can I save money on this? How can I reduce the cost of that? How can I just eliminate stuff that I really don't care about that much? Spending less is a great first step and it can be a fairly easy first step. I do want to caution people who are new to this, don't do it all at once because it

everything is going to be removed from your life and it'll feel like you're in a period of deprivation. So start with something small. Start with something like your phone bill. If you're one of those $100 a month phone bill people, go ahead and check out Mint Mobile, which has been a past sponsor of this show. Republic Wireless, my husband had an account with them for a long time. Really great options for reducing your phone bill by a significant amount. I mean, that's 85%, right? Yeah.

$100 down to $15 is 85% savings, Scott? Absolutely. Don't look for 85% savings in everything. But another great place to start is your insurance. If you have not had your insurance re-quoted in the last couple of years, take a minute, call

Several of the big names call somebody local and see what they can give you with regards to monthly payments or annual payments on your homeowner's insurance, your car insurance, even an umbrella policy. There's lots of ways to save money just through that, too. I take a different approach to thinking about spending than you do, which I think is awesome. I think you're just basically coming out and saying, here are the most obvious places where there's just waste everywhere.

in the system that I see a lot of people I come across. I'm a little bit more of extremist here. And I think that the goal of FIRE, early retirement, is worthy of an even more aggressive approach to reducing spend. And reducing spend is so important because it impacts the journey in two ways. One is the obvious one, right? So you make 100 grand and you spend 90, you save 10 grand a year. And if you could spend 50 and cut it that drastically, you'd save $50,000 a year, right? Just in the obvious.

But what's lurking beneath that very obvious point is the broader implications on how long it will take you to actually get to a state of financial independence, right? And this is not new research that I've done or anything like this. It's an old post from Mr. Money Mustache called The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement. And if you assume a base case, about 7% annualized returns on investment dollars, if you save 10% of your income in that first example, it's going to take you 51 years to

to retire using traditional retirement math. If you save 50% of your income, it's going to take you 17 years to retire. So it has the dual approach, that savings rate of increasing the amount of cash you accumulate on an annual basis, but it also permanently decreases the amount of money you need to generate in order to sustain early retirement. So with that in mind, the way I like to approach spending is from an analyst perspective of let's categorize every dollar that we spend and put it into buckets, right? And let's attack the biggest ones first.

The biggest ones, no surprise, are going to be housing, transportation, and food. I know a lot of people listening to this will say, what about childcare? Childcare is a big expense, but it's only a big expense for a small portion of the population, a small percentage of the time. So it does not show up in the aggregate American household spending statistics. But obviously, if you have children that are in full-time daycare, for example, that will be a major expense on par or above some of those other categories. But if you're

The biggest thing that's going to impact how soon you're going to be able to retire is where you live. If you're maxed out on your house and you buy as much home as you possibly can qualify for or rent as much home as you can possibly qualify for, you're going to find it very hard to save a lot of money and retire early. Alongside that, if you're not shopping your insurance or controlling the controllables inside your housing, that's going to similarly delay your early retirement. After that, the next single biggest decision is what you drive and how you finance it.

Paid off economy car that's pretty cheap, maybe a used one, is going to be a dramatically different choice in terms of accelerating financial independence compared to a brand new luxury electric vehicle, for example. Those decisions are of such an important magnitude that they'll probably determine the amount of time it takes you to retire by decades. It'll probably shorten the time to retire by decades if, for example, you can meaningfully cut back on your housing or transportation costs.

And then from there, the third one is food. I found food very difficult to control personally. I'm not I'm not very good at that. But because I had my housing and my transportation expenses under control during that decade long grind to financial independence, the food budget didn't matter quite as much. These are great points. Having these giant expenses cut down and even being able to cut those giant expenses down is kind of like a second tier challenge.

fi journey that I think you should be pursuing. But also when you're just getting started, these little savings start to add up. And then I think that kind of opens your mind to the second tier that you're talking about. We said the four pillars are going to be spending less,

earning more, investing, or creating assets, right? And before we get going, I think it's important to acknowledge to people listening that most people, I would say the majority of Americans who are likely to be listening to a podcast like BiggerPocketsMoney are going to be optimized on the income front.

They're not going to be in a position to realistically create extremely valuable assets, right? Very few people have the capacity to become entrepreneurs. And it's incredibly hard to become an entrepreneur while you work a nine to five.

and are giving your 100% best efforts. It's hard enough to be an entrepreneur when you work sunup to sundown for yourself. You're gonna start a business at five o'clock in the evening when you're exhausted, giving up time with your family or at six o'clock in the morning till 8.30 before you drive into work. It's just not reasonable for most people to do that, right? From a create perspective.

And so we have to start with the assumption, I think, that most people listening to this are in this kind of middle class scenario to a large degree where they're earning as much as they possibly can, at least from a base salary perspective, with a reasonable effort, with a full-time plus effort.

that they're saving as much as they think they can in that context, and that they're investing, you know, there isn't a bigger pockets money. They know to invest in index funds and put that money into a 401k. So how do we take that situation and say, here are the alternatives outside of buying rental property that can actually free you early in life?

How's that for the challenge that we give ourselves for this podcast? That sounds great. Let's talk about the investment piece next. I'll frame the challenge to you, Mindy, on this. So I'm listening to this and I'm like, okay, I understand that if I want to achieve financial independence, I'm going to have to make some different decisions

on the spending front i'm gonna have to clean up the obvious opportunities to save money like by switching out of my expensive phone plan something cheaper that mindy stated and i'm also going to want to take a top-down approach to my analyzing my spending by looking at the biggest buckets and saying do i really need to live here and drive that because those will make a major decades impact on your journey to financial independence so that's your choice you figure out how you want to how you want to deal with those whether whether that's something you're willing to change or not

Now we're going to talk about investing. Let's talk about an obvious truth here. Investing in index funds, old fashioned vanilla at this point in the financial independence community, VTSAX and VTI and VOO is not going to move you towards financial independence quickly.

it's going to give you an average return. That's the whole point. It's an average return. The index tracks the average of the stock market. It's the whole point of index fund investing. That's one answer here is invest in the index funds. But if you want to get rich faster without real estate as an investment vehicle, what should people do? One of the ways to spend less is to listen to podcasts like this one for free. In the spirit of keeping this podcast free, we'll take a quick break.

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And we're back. Let's talk more about investing. Scott, what worked for us was investing in up and coming companies that we did a lot of research on and picking stocks. And that's not something that I really want to recommend to anybody who isn't willing to do the same amount of work that we were doing. My husband is

is in tech or was in tech. Now he's retired and he reads tech news every single day because he has 30 years of history of reading tech news every single day. It's not that big of a deal for him to read a little bit more about tech.

what's up and coming in tech right now. That's a huge amount of time spent on doing this research, which is why I caution people against individual stocks. I think a lot of people would also argue that even with that effort, there's a lot of luck involved there. There's an enormous amount of luck involved in there. And I'm glad you brought that up because so many people are like, oh, you did this when tech stocks were young. There's still tech stocks that are making tons of money right now.

Yes, we did this when tech stocks were younger and we are continuing to keep an eye on the tech stocks. That's where the big growth is. Growth stocks are called growth stocks for a reason. One thing that we've done that isn't

stock market related, is doing private investment loans, private money lending to people who are investing in real estate. That is another aspect of real estate investing. We do investments to people that we know as opposed to the deal itself.

We'd still look at the deal. We run those numbers and all of that, but we're investing more for the person. So Scott, if you needed a loan, I would absolutely give you a loan because you would pay it back. I, of course, would run the numbers on the deal, but if you needed a loan, you're the kind of person who will pay them back. So that's an opportunity for people who know people in real estate, but don't want to get involved themselves. But again, you need to know how to run those numbers.

Scott, what would you suggest outside of vanilla index fund investing? I want to really caveat this with some important context here. Folks always want to hear, hey, I have a median income. You know, I'm maxed out at my job. I work 40 hours a week. I'm not going to start a business. I'm not going to invest in real estate. I'm not going to change my lifestyle. How do I fire? And the answer then is let a large amount of time pass.

Just invest in index funds and let a large amount of time pass. You won't fire fast. It won't come within 10 years if that's the situation. Something's got to change. It's got to be a drastic combination of cutting back on expenses, an increase in income, or an aggressive, highly risky, different investment approach. My approach to investing was I went all in on real estate and house tax, of course, but I also went all in on bigger pockets as a private business.

So is there an opportunity to combine that income generation by buying or joining a small business or doing some sort of professional work that comes with at least the potential for upside, right? Of course, I got super lucky joining BiggerPockets as an early employee in there and having the opportunity to invest.

But I certainly, I had that option. It was a possible outcome for my career when I joined in a way that it would not have been possible if I had stayed at Dish Network, for example, and continued my career there. You know, the next option there is, can you invest in the business that you work in through an employee stock purchase plan? Can you get equity or options in a small company? Can you buy a small business?

And begin making that more of your profession in there. Or is there something unique to your circumstance that you can invest in, right? The best investments, the ones that produce incredible ROI are things like a bicycle, right? If you can change your commute from a car driving commute to a three mile bicycle commute, for example, that's going to have an ROI that's going to absolutely trounce an index fund.

When I was 23, I bought a bunch of pots and pans. And for me, cooking was not a skill that I had developed, but developing that skill and doing that saved me a tremendous amount of money over eating out for that year or two. Then I got bad about it again as the years went on, but that's an incredible ROI. Those types of things are immense ROI. Those are available to many people, but a lot of people have different skill sets.

For example, I used to work with a guy who was really skilled at evaluating used bicycles on Craigslist. He could find, oh, that frame is worth two grand. I just got to put some new stuff on it. He would get an incredible ROI out of that. We talked to somebody here on BiggerPocketsMoney a while back who was able to train horses. Remember that person? Yes. They would buy a horse, train it up, and then sell it basically to somebody who wanted to ride it in a competition.

in competition. That was an incredible ROI for them. So do you have something like that, that you can generate an immense ROI on that is not available to the rest of the population where you can get that incredible return with much less risk? It's kind of blending this concept of business, lifestyle, and investing. But that's what I'd recommend if you're not going to do real estate outside of stocks is look for that because you won't get there quickly.

If the other situations can't change and you're just focusing on the investing vehicle, unless you do something like that, I think. I think that's a really great point, Scott. Vanilla index fund investing is a great solid base for your wealth building journey. But you just said, is there something unique to your circumstance? I would say yes. Everybody listening to this podcast specifically has something, some unfair advantage over somebody else that they can exploit.

And I don't know what it is because I don't know every single person that's listening. But look into your skills, look into your circumstances, look into your life and see where you can pull levers to take advantage of your unfair advantage. Like what is your lux?

Scott, your luck was walking into Josh's office. I love that story. Walking into Josh's office and forcefully introducing yourself. I'm such a big fan. And I can, knowing Josh, I can see him being like, who is this nut job in my office? Right?

But then you had something you could offer him. Hey, if you ever need this, I can help you. And lo and behold, he needed it very soon after, remembered you, called you, and the rest is history. You said just a moment ago, do you have something like that? I would say that everybody listening to this absolutely does have something like that. It may not be apparent right now, but what are you passionate about? What do you love to do? What are you good at? And how...

How can you make money out of that particular circumstance? I think most of the people listening to this podcast maximize their income in the context of base salary. So this is what is the highest possible base salary that I can get from

within the constraints that I've set, right? I'm not willing to work 80 hours. I'm not willing to do these other things, but within the constraints, you know, I'm not willing to move out of this town or whatever, but within the constraints that they've set for themselves, that's the highest possible base salary that they can get for the most part. Okay. There's going to be exceptions out here. If you can job hop, you should, um, on there. If you think that that's going to improve your quality of life and increase your income, obviously do that. The issue I believe with that approach is

is that when you optimize for base salary and you spend almost all of that income, it's very hard to do something more entrepreneurial or something that could explode your income, like joining a startup, like BiggerPockets, like starting a small business, like going into some kind of opportunity that either offers commission potential and a sales role or some sort of revenue participation or invests

in getting a stock option in a business. If you're earning $100,000 a year, it's very hard to go and say, I want to spend, I want to actually earn 60 now, but I have an option that could be worth millions one day. That's a better risk adjusted bet for a lot of people, but you can't handle it if you spend $85,000 a year.

Again, that's where spending comes into this. The less you spend, the more these types of situations look like opportunities that can dramatically, meteorically increase your income or wealth over a long period of time, and the less they look like risks. And so I think that it comes back to that spending piece is if you can get your spending low on an annualized basis, since you need a low base salary to support yourself and you accumulate cash,

As those two things continue, as the years go by, the opportunities that will present themselves to you to dramatically increase your income or to have those chances to do that, whether it's entrepreneurial in a sales role at a startup or whatever, I think will expand geometrically. And you got to be looking for those. You don't have to necessarily know exactly what it is ahead of time, but you got to be looking for them and setting yourself up with that flexible financial position to be able to take advantage of them.

The flexible financial position, I think, is something that is so counterintuitive to what we're bombarded with in America, in the media these days. But having the flexible financial position, FFP,

Scott, is such a powerful tool in your FI tool chest. And also, I want to be really clear here. I'm not going to take this to some point of absurd extremism, right? Like if you're a doctor or a lawyer or an airline pilot making $250,000 plus a year, you do not need to be looking for an entrepreneurial side gig to accumulate the FI. All you got to do is spend like a middle or even upper middle class American and you're

you're going to save your way to financial independence, invest in an index funds, the old fashioned way, and probably less than 10 to 15 years on there. Now, if you want something way more than that, then, then my, my logic still applies of course with that. But I think that this situation is specifically for the middle class, like the meat, the median income earner to the average income earner in this country. If you're in that situation, then I think you need to apply this framework. If you want to get serious about financial independence, because it's just, you're just not going to hear a,

Wealth creation takes time.

time. It's not going to happen overnight. Like you said, Scott, it's not going to happen instantly if you have a median income. It's not going to happen quickly if you have a median income, but it will happen. And I think that's really important to note. There are so many news stories that you hear, oh, I won't be able to retire and I'm 72. I won't be able to retire and I'm 59. You're working towards retirement at any age, and now you're just stepping it back.

to get to a place of earlier retirement. And all of these different strategies that we're talking about, spending less, earning more, and investing are gonna get you to a place of retirement. All right, we're gonna take another quick break and then we'll be back with more.

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And we're back. We are going to hop into creation. All right, Scott, the final point is create. And this is where we start to think about businesses, either starting your own small business or buying a small business. What is your thought in this very leading question? What are your thoughts on small businesses? Going into business in a general sense is by far the best way to do it.

to build a large amount of wealth in a hurry. There is no alternative. There is no exception to that. You will meet people who get rich outside of doing that. Typically, they will earn a very high income or generate incredible investment returns like by buying Google stock back in the early 2000s like Mindy and Carl did in there.

But I built most of my wealth by joining a small business and watching my income rapidly grow and then redeploying that into real estate and stocks, right? It's bigger pockets, for example, that helped me really generate a large amount of income and wealth over the years. That's going to be true for a large number of people out there.

One of the best ways to do that, there's a reason why these guys like Alex Hormozy and Cody Sanchez are super popular right now. It's real, these opportunities to build wealth in business. It's really hard. You're going to trade your 40-hour-a-week job for an 80-hour-a-week entrepreneurial endeavor, and you may lose it. You may lose. There's no guarantees in this. But that is where I would be looking if I was just getting started.

again right now, could I spend my 20s building a small business like that? I think that that would have been, you know, there's always a chance you fail in there, but that would have been one of the best risk-adjusted ways to really have a shot at early financial independence. And this is not the inaccessible challenge that I think a lot of people feel it is. You can get loans like you can on real estate using small business administration loans, for example, to do this. You got to go with your eyes wide open and know this is a real skill set. If you have a challenge given a

real feedback to people or putting together offer documents or firing people, for example, if that's something that you don't think you can ever do, don't do this in there, but that will be part of your life as a small business entrepreneur at some part, pardon

part in that journey, but it is by far the most powerful way to build wealth in America today. And I think most of the people who achieve high levels of fire will have some form of business component in there or be these elite exceptions like athletes, performers, doctors, lawyers, so on and so forth, high stakes programmers.

Scott, we talked with Tim Delaney back on episode 325, and his small business idea was purchasing a local liquor store. They agreed on the purchase price. The owners closed up one night. They did inventory all night, started operating it the next day, and instantly brought in salespeople.

savings and updated the company just by adding a POS system, like the barcode scanners, instead of typing in numbers that were stickered on top of the bottles. Yeah. He also spent five years of his life in a liquor store. He spent five years of his life in a liquor store. And that's a wonderful story around that. That's where the real piece comes in. That's a real opportunity. That's millions of dollars in wealth that you can build with opportunities like that.

And you're going to be spending your day in a liquor store for a large portion of that. They don't come without a cost. And some of it's monetary and a lot of it is time. It's such an exciting time to start a new business. There are lots of things that people need done and don't want to do themselves. Yeah, we're recording this on May 27th. And there's a Wall Street Journal article this weekend that discussed exactly this, right? And this is an open secret. People think all this wealth is built in tech, but

Many of America's millionaires are really in the owners of these boring businesses. I think the story about this gentleman was a guy who basically built the car mats for certain type of car into a several hundred million dollar annual revenue business on there. And it's just like that all day long. The millionaire next door details these types of folks in great detail 30 from 30 years ago.

in there. This is a major path to wealth, taking that shot and understanding that it's not going to be very glamorous. You're going to be doing all these things. And there's a high overlap, I believe, with the success of these types of businesses and the people who operate them and low personal spending. These are very frugal people. These are people that by and large, you'll talk to it. They're the ones answering the phone in the early days of their business. They're the ones doing all these things in there. It's not glamorous. It's out of a garage.

But that's what I'd be doing if I was starting over again today. I would be spending a lot of time looking at those opportunities. And by the way, I did do that, right? That was my whole like every 90 days. I have this dig, I start a new business every 90 days. If nine out of 10 businesses fail, by the end of two and a half years, you'll have one successful business. That's basically how we did at BiggerPockets for the last 10 years too, is we would just try new goals every quarter and to see what would help customers and what would make money for the company. And many of them worked and many of them were flops and no one looked at them or read or

reviewed what we were putting out in some of those areas. And that's, that's all it is. That's the, that's the path here. And you just do it, you know, cheaply scrappily and figure it out. Certain people are wired for that. If that's you go for it. If it's not you stay far away and try to maximize income the old fashioned way.

You could be a silent partner in one of these endeavors with a friend who is entrepreneurial, but may not have the cash to get started. Maybe Tim Delaney needed help buying that liquor store, but then has the ability to put the time into it to run it. That's another way to get into creating without actually having to do the work. Well, that's it, right? You can spend less, you can earn more, you can invest, or you can create. Creating is by far the fastest way to move towards wealth.

investing is not a very powerful tool unless you have a specific advantage that you're bringing to bear in the situation in the early days of your journey. Once you become a multimillionaire, of course, investing will likely be the most powerful tool you have in your wealth building journey. Earning more is a function of the skillset you develop and the amount of risk you take and the blend between business and business

high income or revenue generating sales jobs becomes murky once you get into the world, joining startups or entering into the sales or other commission type jobs in there. And then spending will always be a central part of the journey. The less you spend, the more you accumulate and the less your portfolio needs to generate on a perpetual basis to ensure financial independence. So those are your levers. That's what we talk about it. Real estate can really help a lot of those, but it is not necessary.

Plenty of ways to get rich without it. All right, Scott. I thought that was a good episode. Are you ready to get out of here? Let's do it. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPocketsMoney podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying bye-bye, butterfly.