315: From 400 Credit Score to Making $17,000/Month in Passive Income

Andrew Brazell: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of the Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.

Mindy Jensen: Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, show number 315, where we interview Andrew and Haley and talk about their journey from his financial messes to their real estate successes.

Andrew Brazell: When we saw the potential though, we realized like we are not compromising again. We’re just loving future us. We’re living in— and it was an upgrade for us because, I mean, we’re coming from Denver where, you know, square footage here is not cheap. So we moved into the mother-in-law suite and it was an upgrade. So, you know, that’s how we looked at it. Yeah, we could be in the big 2-bedroom house and have a nice guest room and all that other stuff, or we can live in the small mother-in-law suite and just pay to have our friends stay at a hotel whenever they come visit. That was the options that we had. And I don’t regret it at all. I love that little place.

Mindy Jensen: Hello, hello, hello! My name is Mindy Jensen, and joining me today is my hard-hitting co-host Scott Trench.

Scott Trench: That’s a rocking good intro, Mindy.

Mindy Jensen: Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, to introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter where or when you’re starting.

Scott Trench: That’s right. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big-time investments in assets like real estate, start your own business, or simply get out of a hole where your credit score is 412, we’ll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way so you can launch yourself towards those dreams.

Mindy Jensen: Scott, you just mentioned a magic number of 412, which, spoiler alert, is the lowest that our guest Andrew’s credit score was at, at one time in his life, which is— I feel super judgmental, but that is really, really low. But why was it low? Because he didn’t know what he was doing with his finances. He was never taught about financial literacy. He was never taught about how to do his thing. What I want to make sure that we celebrate is the fact that he took charge of his financial situation. He recognized it was a problem. He saw that somebody else was having success and reached out to that person and said, hey, how are you doing it so that I can do it too? And that takes a lot of guts. I mean, you could very easily be like, well, I guess I just have credit card debt for the rest of my life. I guess I just have a 400 credit score for the rest of my life. And he didn’t stay there. He wanted better, so he sought out the information to do better and then took action in order to get better. And I think that’s really important to note.

Scott Trench: Yeah, I mean, Andrew is a longtime friend of mine. We played rugby together and I worked with him through his financial difficulties. What is it now, 5, 6, 7 years ago at this point? And it’s just been amazing to see what he’s been able to do, how he’s been able to get current on all his debts, build a financial success story, and now owns a number of rental properties that are cash flowing tremendously well. So it’s been a phenomenal privilege to watch his journey and start learning from him on this. And I couldn’t be more thrilled to invite him on the show today.

Mindy Jensen: He has a great story. And he’s joined by his wife, Haley, who didn’t have the struggles that he had, but joined him on his real estate journey. And I really like where they are in their real estate investment space. They’re making money in this market. They’re continuing to buy in this market. They’re not letting the market define what they’re doing. They have decided what they want to go after and they’re still buying properties. They’re still making it work. So, you know, people who say, oh, well, the market’s changed so I can’t make money anymore. Well, sorry, Andrew and Haley are doing it, so you could do it too if you wanted to, but you have to do the work. I think it’s a fun story today.

Scott Trench: Awesome. Let’s get to it.

Mindy Jensen: Andrew was your typical 20-something. He didn’t know anything about finances, so he just spent his money without any thought. He racked up tens of thousands of dollars in debts, many of which were delinquent. In 2017, he made a hard pivot and changed his financial situation dramatically. Now he’s in a great financial position, owns 6 rental units across 2 properties, which would not have been possible if he had not taken notice of some young kid buying beer for the rugby team so many years ago. Haley, on the other hand, is perfect in every way. Andrew and Haley, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast.

Haley Ferguson: Hey, hey guys, how’s it going? Thank you so much for having us.

Scott Trench: Thanks for coming on. We’re excited to have you.

Mindy Jensen: I’m super excited to talk to you guys. And since Haley is perfect, Haley, I’m sorry, we’re going to have to push you to the side and focus on Andrew. Andrew, tell me all your faults.

Andrew Brazell: Oh man.

Mindy Jensen: All right.

Haley Ferguson: True confessions.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, where do we start? I guess—

Mindy Jensen: Let’s start in high school.

Andrew Brazell: High school. Okay. My dad was a fighter pilot instructor in the military, and that had kind of set up my family’s expectation of once my dad gets out of the military, we will have the opportunity to go— he’ll go to a major airline, we’ll have a bit of a nicer lifestyle. And so we moved to Colorado. We experienced 9/11 shortly after, and my dad basically lost everything. He lost his high-paying salary, his pension, his security, his seniority, all this other stuff. And from then on, financially, my family struggled. My dad had to refinance the house a number of times to pull out equity to pay off credit card debt. And then also he went back to the military part-time and started working weekends and days off as a reservist out in Colorado Springs. I just didn’t have a ton of great financial education growing up, so I joined the military myself in order to pay for school. I wasn’t aware of all these amazing scholarship opportunities for lower-income people, and I thought I had to work or have somebody pay for college, so I decided to do the work route. I joined the military, went off to Air Force basic training, and was in the process of becoming trained to be a loadmaster in the Air Force out of Colorado Springs when President Obama scaled back military funding, and I wasn’t essential personnel. So my job basically got cut during the sequestration. But I had kept up my end of the deal, so I had full benefits and went off to college. And this is kind of where things took a turn south. Instead of using my GI Bill, I decided—

Scott Trench: What year is this where you went off to college?

Andrew Brazell: This was 2010. I had already done about 3 semesters before I joined the military. My dad did have enough to help me go through the first 3 semesters, and that gave me enough college credits to get a really good job in the Air Force at his unit, which he set up. He was amazing doing that. So I had a little bit of experience, but in 2010, I cut ties with the Air Force officially and went up to Colorado State up in Fort Collins. And my thought process was, you know, I’m not going to use the full GI Bill benefits and waste them on a state school, which doesn’t really cost that much. I’ll save that for medical school because that was my plan at the time. I’ll use the GI Bill to the maximum potential and use it for medical school. So what ended up happening was I pulled out all the subsidized and some unsubsidized loans as I could, and then I was working part-time, and then my last little bit of financial runway, I guess, was provided by a credit card. I ran the credit card up. Pre-med studies were a lot harder than I thought. I couldn’t end up working as much as I wanted to, so I maxed the credit card out and then couldn’t make the payments. Had to eat, so Chase Bank took a hit for a while. I had maxed it out and then they closed the account, sent it to collections, all that stuff. Graduated, and like many graduates at the time, had a difficult time finding a job. So I moved back in with my parents for a little while. I was working, waiting tables, doing all that stuff. Finally got a job at a local hospital doing oropharyngeal cancer research.

Scott Trench: And can you give us a couple of your timestamps on some of these too? You graduated what year? How long did you wait tables? When did you start this new job?

Andrew Brazell: Yep, I graduated in 2013, left Fort Collins and came back to Denver, and then I worked at a blood bank for about 6 months doing blood draws for plasma donations. I waited tables for a couple months, and then at the tail end of 2014 is when I got a job over at Porter Hospital in Denver, doing some cancer research, which is what I wanted to do. That was kind of my dream of doing medical school and all that stuff and getting into oncology. So I was in the environment I wanted to be, but definitely not making the money that I would have hoped for. So I was living paycheck to paycheck. I finally moved out of my parents’ house to a rat-infested apartment down in Denver and had a roommate who was a good friend of mine, but he was on hard times at the same time as I was, so I was not in a good place. But the one good thing about it was it was very close to the rugby pitch, and I could walk there. So my outlet was going and practicing rugby, and it was a new sport for me, and I absolutely fell in love and met some of my— to this day, some of my best friends. So it was definitely a trend upwards, starting there. So, well, we got it.

Scott Trench: We gotta pitch the club. What was the club called?

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, Queen City. Yeah, yeah.

Scott Trench: Go Rams.

Andrew Brazell: Yep. It was Queen City Rams. So I was a Colorado State Ram and then I came to Denver and I was still a Ram. So it was great.

Scott Trench: So what’s your position? This is 2014 we’re in. How would you summarize your position at that point in time?

Andrew Brazell: Oh, I mean, I was living paycheck to paycheck. I had no savings. The money that I had, I spent on either food, and what little I had left, I tried to spend on fun just to stay sane. I had no dating prospects whatsoever. My car was a piece of junk. It was pretty abysmal there for a little while.

Scott Trench: What was your income at that point in time?

Andrew Brazell: I think I was making around $32,000 a year, which if I had the financial literacy, I could have done good things with that. I just didn’t know what I was doing. So I made the money, I spent the money. That’s how it worked.

Scott Trench: And how much total debt did you have and what was your credit?

Andrew Brazell: My credit at the time was in the low 400s, so I think the lowest I ever got was a 412, if that’s even possible. Yeah, I look at it now, I’m just astounded that it ever got that bad, but having that card go to collections and not having done anything with it, I didn’t know I could call and settle and try to close the account. That knowledge came a little bit later. So my financial savings, I mean, were non-existent. I couldn’t qualify for any new credit cards to rebuild my credit at the time until I settled with this defaulted account. Yeah, it was pretty bad.

Scott Trench: And how much total debt do you estimate you had?

Andrew Brazell: So with student loans and that credit card debt, I was in the mid to upper 40s. I think 47 was the highest it ever got.

Scott Trench: So what happens next?

Andrew Brazell: So at a rugby social for the start of the new season, I hear this player who I’d watched play. I was kind of the second string, it being a new sport for me, but really admired him and some of the other guys in the backfield toast the team and say, hey, this is celebrating me closing on my second property. And I’m looking at him and going, I’m like, this guy is definitely younger than me. How is it possible that he owns property, like, at all, let alone has closed on a second property in Denver? Like, I literally had a rat crawl across my bed last night. I kicked against the wall. Like, how is this? How is there so much disparity? I mean, he plays rugby. He can’t be that much smarter than me. It’s like, yeah. And that’s when I pulled this guy aside and I was like, hey man, you gotta help me. I don’t know what I’m doing. You clearly have some knowledge that I don’t. Point me in the right direction. And that was Scott Trench. So yeah, I’ve known you as Trench basically our entire friendship. But professionally, I should say, CEO of BiggerPockets. I just happened to bump into you there at a dive bar.

Scott Trench: I have very few personal friends refer to me as Scott. So it’s always Trench with my personal friends. But yeah, that was awesome. I remember meeting with you after that and talking through some of those things. So do you want to walk us through some of the situation, like how things maybe changed or what that was like, thinking through that and how things progressed from there?

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, I remember you came into my apartment, sat down, and said, all right, let’s see the damage. What’s going on? Pull it up. And I didn’t even know where to find that stuff because it had been delinquent for so long. I didn’t know the logins. So I remember sitting there for like an hour trying to just get into the actual results and the statements and stuff. But when we finally found it, you said, all right, what you need to do is carve out some time and you’re going to make some really long phone calls. And I got a little discouraged. I was like, I don’t want to do this. But you framed it in a way that made a lot of sense to me and motivated me to do it. And that was like, think of it as, this phone call could save you thousands of dollars. So even if it takes 10 hours—

Scott Trench: This was because there were a lot of debts in your position that, if I remember correctly, were old debts that were long-time delinquent, had likely been sold from the original creditor to other loan, collections agencies and such. And so they already discounted that debt. And so the reason you do that is you call the debt and you say, hey, can I pay off a fraction of this somehow?

Andrew Brazell: Yep.

Scott Trench: Would you be willing to take a percentage of it?

Haley Ferguson: Yep.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, so you had explained it as, you can get rid of this debt for pennies on the dollar possibly. So you’re not gonna know until you make that call. It could take 10 hours, but I specifically remember you saying, if it saves you $1,000 and it takes 10 hours, you just got paid $100 an hour. And that really set off a light bulb in my head. I was like, oh, that totally makes sense.

Haley Ferguson: He says that to this day when we have to make phone calls.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Haley Ferguson: So that’s like a household phrase now.

Andrew Brazell: That’s logic that I use to this day. And I’ve passed it on to other friends, like, do your due diligence, do your comps. If you’re looking at property, don’t overpay $10,000 if it’s going to take 2 hours for you to realize, like, hey, that’s not where the market is right now. And so that’s wisdom that I’ve been able to pass on. But that’s really where it clicked. And I was like, okay, I can dig myself out of this hole. It’s going to take some elbow grease, but it’s not impossible. And so we went through all of my accounts and set a plan. But you set a hard deadline for me and you said, I also want you to do some homework. And you gave me your copy of The Richest Man in Babylon. You said, you need to finish this before we speak again. And that really lit a fire under me and said, okay, not all information is free. I’m gonna have to put some work in. I’m gonna have to make these calls. I’m gonna have to do a little bit of homework. And I devoured that book. I think— I mean, it’s not a huge book, but I think I finished it in 2 or 3 days and just total mind—

Scott Trench: Mind—

Andrew Brazell: What’s the word I’m looking for? Mindset. I actually know what you’re looking for. Total mindset shift. And I realized, oh, I don’t have to be the one putting in all the work if I put my money to work for me. I assign a job to every dollar that I make. I pay myself first, and then I pay the rent or whatever. And that just completely— it blew my mind. And one of the biggest things I learned from that book wasn’t even what I gleaned from the book itself, but it was just like, wow, knowledge and education is power. You don’t know what you don’t know until you meet people sometimes. But then after that, I just started devouring all these financial literacy books and financial planning and investments and all this other stuff. And that kind of transitioned me into, I guess, the next stage of my financial journey. So I can go into that now.

Scott Trench: Well, let me ask you a couple quick questions here. Were you able to get any of those loans reduced? And do you have any kind of anecdotes about those calls?

Andrew Brazell: Yeah. So the one I remember was that Chase card, and it went over. $3,000 was my limit, but somehow I got it up to like $3,300 or something. And I think I ended up settling for, I think it was just under $2,000. So it was like $1,920, $1,950 or something. And to be honest, had I known that a closed account and a charge-off, how it was handled by the credit bureaus, I’m not sure I would advise people doing that again because that literally just fell off my credit report last month. So a charge-off somehow stayed on my credit history for 7 years, and it was because it was 2015 when I finally paid it off. And knowing that, I think I would— I’m not sure, it probably was too late to go to Chase and pay the full amount and not have it hurt me anymore. And I still would have had the delinquent payments and all that other stuff, but yeah, that one stung for a long time. But after I paid it off, I saw— I want to say it was like a 150 or 200-point bump the next month after it registered with the credit bureaus and all that stuff. My score went up big time. Then I was able to actually—

Scott Trench: You’re saying because it was a credit card debt and I negotiated it down, that credit— that negotiating it down resulted in a charge-off, which hit my credit score and stuck with me, but I didn’t have to pay it.

Andrew Brazell: Yes. I mean, I did have to pay the $1,900 or whatever, but once it was paid off, the way it was reported was kind of finicky. It was reported as something different than just paying off the original debt, and that was weighed heavier, I guess, in the way they score it than just being delinquent on an account, if that makes sense.

Scott Trench: Okay, so within 6 months of our conversation and you reading The Richest Man in Babylon, what are some milestones, or what are some things that maybe changed? You said your credit score bumped up. Were you able to pay off this debt?

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, so my credit score bumped up, and after I finished the book, you came and sat down with me and helped me come up with a rough budget, a ballpark budget. And you said the next thing you need to do is you need to save up an emergency fund. You can’t have a blown tire wreck your finances. You can’t just be waiting for a disaster to wipe you out. So I saved up, I think $1,000 was my first emergency fund. And for me at the time, that was like 3 months’ rent at the time where I was living. So that was plenty of runway for me. And that saved me. I remember I got into an accident, and I had to pay for some repairs on my vehicle, and I was able to do that without tapping into credit and paying interest and possibly defaulting again. So that’s kind of what set me up. And then after I had the emergency fund, I started— I had read a few books on investing, and I wish I had read some different ones before trying to invest myself and getting into the stock market and all that stuff. But I actually had enough funds to where I could start making some future money decisions instead of just living in the moment.

Scott Trench: Awesome. So you built up the emergency fund, and then you began investing, or did you begin paying off debt? What did you decide to do from there?

Andrew Brazell: So I got current on my student loan debt, and I was basically paying the minimum. I had very low interest rates on those. And my strategy at the time was, I want to get into a better financial position, and then I can pass up on, you know, good returns in the market and pay off the student loan. So I still have student loan debt, especially since it’s been in forbearance forever at this point now with COVID. But if I can make 8 to 9% in the market, before this month started, it doesn’t make sense to pay off a student loan that’s at 3%. So I paid the minimum, and that had gotten me current. And then the rest of my money was going towards saving and investing.

Scott Trench: At the beginning of 2014, you were negative. You’re spending more than you’re bringing in for the most part, or treading water with that. By the end of 2014, how much of a monthly surplus do you think you’re generating, if you had to guess?

Andrew Brazell: Yep. So this was mid-2015, so it’s a little later than that, but I was coming out ahead like maybe $150, $200 a paycheck. So, I mean, it didn’t seem that substantial, but I reined in— I got a little smarter with happy hours. And, you know, for me, a big expense is food and socializing. So it always has been. To this day it still is, but that is where my biggest expenditures were. And so reining that in, I said, you’ve got X amount of dollars to spend. I think it was $30 a week I got to spend on fun, and that was movies and extraneous meals and stuff like that. So I really had to plan. And once I had that emergency fund up, I had just finished a book on negotiating. And so I was able to negotiate a new position at a different hospital that almost doubled my salary. So having understood how lifestyle creep works and all that stuff, that really just catapulted my savings and all that stuff, because I basically continued living on what I was living on, and all the extra income just went straight to savings and paying off debts.

Mindy Jensen: Did you feel like you were giving up things? Did you feel like you were being punished, or that you weren’t able to enjoy your life while you were going through this period? Because a lot of people feel, when you talk about this financial independence movement, or, oh, you have to pay down your debts, oh, now I have to give up everything and live like a pauper and everything’s going to be horrible.

Andrew Brazell: No, I was more intentional. Like, I would make plans, you know, to go see a movie with friends later in the week, and that would be the carrot that I’d dangle in front of me and say, like, okay, don’t go throwing on extra beers tonight at dinner because we’re saving it for the movie with our friends. And so having that as a goal in the future, I basically fell in love with future me. I was just like, future me is more important. Let’s set it up for future me to enjoy. And that worked. Yeah.

Scott Trench: That’s a really great framework. I’m falling in love with future me, and I’m going to make sure that they’re taken care of.

Andrew Brazell: That was before I met Haley. I’m sure future you—

Scott Trench: I fell in love with Haley. Well, great. So you get this new job, you double your income. What’s next? What are some other milestones on this journey?

Andrew Brazell: So at that point, you and I were talking about just lowering the cost of living, and you had talked to me about your house hack over here in Denver and all this other stuff. So I was cognizant of that, and I wanted to do something similar at my next living situation. So I found a friend of mine, an old hockey buddy who wanted to live downtown Denver, worked for Deloitte, made very good money, but traveled for work so often. He told me, it’s like, it doesn’t really make sense for me to have an apartment all to myself. I’m basically just spending money to have it sit there empty half the year. And so I told him, I was like, hey, let’s join forces. I’m looking to upgrade my lifestyle a little bit. That apartment that you met me in actually got condemned because of the rats. I’m not kidding. So I was looking to kind of upgrade my lifestyle a little bit, and we found a great apartment really close to Coors Field and everything. And I told him, I was like, I’m happy to split the rent with you, but let’s do something to where cost of living is even lower for us. When you’re out of town, let me Airbnb your room. I’ll manage it. I’ll be here, and we’ll split the profits. I’ll manage it. You know, basically, you’ll pay less. And he basically lived out of a suitcase anyway, so cleaning his room wasn’t super difficult. But I did everything, and that was my intro into house hacking. And that’s what we did. And there were a few months where, especially during peak season, we both lived for free, because that one room in downtown Denver across the street from the baseball stadium was prime real estate at the time. In 2015, Airbnb was getting up off the ground, and there weren’t a ton of units in Denver at the time. So that was really where I noticed the potential of Airbnb. And then I met Haley shortly after. So the first night I met Haley, I had guests in my apartment. I was planning on being out of town for that weekend. And so I had the entire apartment rented out, both rooms, and met Haley and decided, hey, I’m actually going to stay in town, this girl’s awesome. And we wanted to go down to the swimming pool, it’s an amenity at the unit, but I didn’t have my bathing suit. So I had Haley go over and be like, hey, tell them your boyfriend forgot his suit. And I was like, we’ll see how this goes over. And she did it. She went over, knocked on the door. The guest came to the door, and she’s like, my boyfriend forgot his bathing suit. She went in and got it. And yeah, that was the first night we met. So yeah, I forget that.

Scott Trench: It’s kind of fun.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, that’s awesome. I flew to Denver to check it out, and this will come in later in my story, but I flew to Denver to check it out to see if I wanted to live here. And 2 hours later, I was sitting at a table at the Nickel downtown in Denver with my friend who was going to host me, and her apartment next-door neighbor was this guy. So that was pretty cool. Decided on Denver pretty quickly. Let’s just say that. It’s pretty fun.

Scott Trench: But that’s a wonderful meet— what is that?

Haley Ferguson: Meet cute, right?

Mindy Jensen: Meet cute.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was interesting for sure. So, came straight from the airport to the restaurant and we met, and the rest is history. So, yep, very pretty quickly. Denver gripped her, I’ll say.

Mindy Jensen: Yeah.

Haley Ferguson: Well, you did too. Yeah.

Scott Trench: We’re in 2015. You’ve got— you’re doing this really ingenious house hacking solution that I think is awesome. You’ve got your new job. I presume you’re saving quite a bit, and you’re just— you’re generally being very methodical about what you do spend on, or intentional about what you spend on. What is your savings rate at this point? And what’s happening to your overall wealth position, your credit score, these other types of things?

Andrew Brazell: So around this time, I had devoted most of my extra income to investing. I had a decent run with Redfin when they went public. I had a great run with Tesla there a couple of times. But I was really seeing some great gains with my personal investing. And looking back on it now, I realize I was getting lucky, because I don’t know why, to be quite honest. There were just a few of those where I got really excited, put all my extra money into it, and it worked, or I broke even. So I wasn’t too heartbroken about that. But I was also putting more of it towards student loans at the time, because yes, market gains will come and go, but I’ll still have these student loans looming over me. So I wanted to just be out from underneath those. So I’d say at that point I was saving about 20 to 25% of my monthly income and putting it towards investment or towards paying off debt.

Scott Trench: And so what is that? Is that like a $2,000 a month kind of thing, or $1,000, $2,000 a month?

Andrew Brazell: So at that time, no, it would have probably been about $700, $800. Yeah, I still wasn’t making that much.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah.

Scott Trench: Okay, but the snowball is turning. We’ve gone from $150 to $700 at this point, and it’s starting to pick up.

Andrew Brazell: Yep, it’s rolling now. Yep. And about—

Scott Trench: wonderful lady. Life’s getting better throughout this period, is that right?

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, it’s taken time and it’s taken conscious decisions, but I don’t regret any of them. I’m starting to devour more books. Around this time is when you sent me Set for Life when it was still in the editing phase, and that book was so heavy. I mean, it took me forever to get through. I think by the time I finished it, you’d already published it, so I wasn’t able to help at all. But there were so many concepts in there that just blew my mind. I couldn’t get through it very quickly. But you had mentioned just setting your investments on autopay, which is something Ramit Sethi— I loved I Will Teach You to Be Rich for that point. He just gives you a play-by-play of, do it this way, you’ll never see it, it’ll never hurt, type thing. And that’s kind of where my next steps were at that point. And this is— we’re in the middle of 2017, tail end of 2017 at this point. So it’s been a couple years at this point. But there were bumps in the road where I made a stupid purchase of a toy or something I felt like I deserved, and I can’t even tell you what that is at this point. That’s how important it was to me. So, yeah.

Mindy Jensen: Okay, I want to make a comment. You said that Scott really set you on this path, but we’re overlooking the fact that it’s so impressive that you actually did the work. I have had these conversations with people in similar situations that you are. Hey, this is the stuff you have to do. And then I never hear from them again. And there are so many people who want to be in your current position, but they don’t want to do the work necessary to get into your position. So we need to celebrate the fact that you actually took this information and did something with it, and that is the hardest part. Scott had the knowledge, great for him. You did the work, and it sucks to do this work, and you did it anyway, and that is the thing that we need to celebrate. So hooray for Andrew for doing it right and doing the work and taking the time to do it, because it takes a while. I mean, it’s not like you picked up the phone and you’re like, hey Chase, I want to pay this off, and they’re like, great, now you’re amazing. I mean, you had to do this a bunch, and you had to slog through this. Where did we start? 2013, 2014, and now we’re in 2017. I mean, this was not just an instant, wow, I had a 420 credit score and now it’s 800, 5 minutes later. It’s like 4 years later, or 3 years later, you have a good financial position. When did you buy your first property?

Andrew Brazell: We didn’t buy our first property until October of 2020. So like 7 years later.

Mindy Jensen: I just jumped way ahead.

Scott Trench: Okay.

Mindy Jensen: Still.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Scott Trench: But I mean, this is— I mean, you had a terrible financial position, right? And you articulated that. There’s a rat crawling across your bed in the middle of the night.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah.

Scott Trench: And you’re willing to come in and confront the reality of the situation head on, say, here’s what I’m up against, here’s what I need to do, and begin attacking it piece by piece, one call at a time, $100 at a time, and grind. And then it starts to snowball, and the grind takes a few years to get going. And then the magic that begins to happen when you commit to that— you know, it takes— it’s much harder month to month than you think it will be. And then you look back and you’re like, wow, I made a lot more progress in the last 2 years than I thought I could have possibly done. And that’s the— yeah, go ahead.

Andrew Brazell: I was gonna say, there’s a little story I’d like to tell just to kind of emphasize that. And in those people’s defense, Mindy, and the people you talk to who just say, oh, it’s too much work, I feel like most of those— I was one of those people. I feel like most of those people, they don’t have a good example to look at. I saw Scott and I was like, this guy’s done it. I don’t have an excuse. I can’t say that some pie in the sky, like, oh, that only happens to 1 in a million people. There’s this regular Joe, if you will, that I play rugby with, who has done this. And I can’t attribute it to him being a trust fund baby or all this other stuff.

Scott Trench: He worked, and that’s nice of you to say, but I will say that also you did have— a lot of people would have had that excuse in your situation. I didn’t have student loans, right? I had a higher paying job coming out of college than what you had with that, right? So there were advantages I had that you didn’t have, and you chose, no, I’m gonna ignore that, and I’m gonna go after and begin attacking what I can control and what I can influence there.

Mindy Jensen: Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Trench: I definitely want to give you lots of credit with that.

Andrew Brazell: Well, thanks.

Scott Trench: You are an example for other folks that have all of those headwinds that have piled against them to begin overcoming.

Mindy Jensen: There are people who see Scott buying the beer and saying, oh, trust fund baby, not even looking at how he could have done this. They just automatically make an excuse for him because there’s no way he could have done this by himself. Clearly, he had help. I’m going to make my own narrative for him so I don’t have to dive further. You asked him how he did it, and maybe his answer was going to be, oh, I’m a trust fund baby, and you’re like, okay, fine, this isn’t what’s for me then, I’ll just move on. But you had the initiative to even ask the question. That’s— let me celebrate you, Andrew.

Haley Ferguson: Take it.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, fair enough.

Scott Trench: Well, let’s jump back ahead to 2017, where we were, the snowball is turning. What are the next kind of milestones there? And how do we get to Florida and that first property?

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, so at this point, the journey kind of takes a pause. I originally had joined the Air Force and wanted to get my college degree and all that stuff, so I could kind of follow in my dad’s footsteps of being an aviator in the military. And when I was basically pushed out of the Air Force, I thought that dream kind of died. But I went into a Navy recruiter just kind of wanting to know what the chances are of me doing the military part-time like my dad did, so I could have an additional stream of income. And as I’m walking out, I had a Marine Corps recruiter just kind of call at me and was like, why are you talking to them? You know they don’t do anything cool. And we just struck up a conversation, and unbeknownst to me, I was still eligible to be a pilot, and I didn’t know that. So there were a lot of hoops I had to jump through. And I guess, kind of to your previous point, Mindy and Scott, about these things take time—I called my dad and I asked him, I was like, should I do this? I’ll be old by the time I get done, and everyone I’ll be going through training with will be younger than me. And he’s like, well, what’s gonna happen in 4 years anyway? You’ll be 4 years older regardless. So just do it if you want to do it, type thing. It’s like, you’ll get there whether you want to or not. You might as well come out ahead, type of thing. And so that was kind of my mentality. But I started pursuing a pilot slot through the Marine Corps, and I eventually got it. So in 2017, I was notified that I had gotten a slot, pending I could pass their physical fitness standards. And so after about a year and a half of training—the run was what killed me—I qualified for it and then went off to training in 2018, very shortly after meeting Haley. My whole financial progress and journey and all that stuff was kind of put on hold for a little while, because I didn’t make it through training the first time. I made it to the very last week, and then got hurt and had to get sent home. And they said, you can try again if you want to, or you can just quit. I went back to my job at the hospital while I was waiting for another slot to open up so I could attempt it again. And I had that job for 6 months—that’s all it was protected for through the USERRA laws and all that stuff; they have to give you your job back for a minimum of 6 months. But after that 6 months, I was unemployed. And so I ended up Airbnb-ing my current apartment, and I would stay with friends or my parents or something like that whenever people would come in. And that was my sole income.

Scott Trench: Or me.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, or Haley.

Mindy Jensen: Sorry, Mom and Dad.

Andrew Brazell: Sorry, Mom and Dad, I would stay with. But yeah, basically I realized the earning potential of Airbnb once again, and then I did an arbitrage. I found—I guess it wasn’t officially an arbitrage, because the landlord didn’t know it was solely being used for an Airbnb. But I was like, well, I’ll just find a property with out-of-state owners; they’ll probably never check in on it. It’ll be fine. There’s nothing in the lease that says I can’t do it. And so I had another downtown apartment that I had set up strictly for Airbnb, and managing those 2—doing the cleanings, doing the messaging, all that other stuff, maintaining those—was my full-time job until I got another chance to go back. And so in January 2020, I went back to Virginia to try Officer Candidate School a second time. And my first awareness of COVID was when they told us that our graduation was canceled because of COVID. So I graduated 10 weeks later, which was right in the middle of March, and that’s when everything hit the fan with COVID. So my family wasn’t able to travel out to my graduation, but Haley—come hell or high water—she made it. And that was kind of my first indicator, like, hey, I got to hold on to this one.

Haley Ferguson: That was your first indicator?

Andrew Brazell: That was the final indicator, I should say. So.

Haley Ferguson: That was a week after Denver Public Schools closed.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah. And that was hard, because those 10 weeks are grueling.

Scott Trench: Oh, yeah.

Haley Ferguson: Especially the first time around. And we couldn’t talk to each other.

Andrew Brazell: You’re radio silent. So—

Haley Ferguson: A number of weeks for that. And so that was also—I mean, now I guess I can speak as a military spouse, but as someone who has a loved one in the military—that was pretty bitter. There are times when you can’t be there for their graduations, or celebrating is a big part of it. So after 2 10-week experiences not being able to actually be there for our first kind of hurrah for your military career—that was—

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: But it was a hard time for the entire world. So it was, shortly after that, I went to the basic school, which is a requirement for Marine Corps officers. Every Marine Corps officer becomes an infantry platoon commander. So you learn infantry tactics and how to lead a platoon and all this other stuff. And that school’s 6 months long, and that was in the same area—yeah, it was in Quantico, Virginia. And at this time I bumped into one of my superiors, Dozer, Captain Dirth. He is a pilot, and he was the liaison for all the pilot contracts who were there at the basic school. And he mentioned, you’re gonna get down to Pensacola, be sure to grab property immediately—you gotta start your financial journey and all this other stuff. And I kind of picked up that he had done this. And talking to him, he said, oh yeah, I do this kind of part-time. I have 14 properties in the area. And I’m going, okay, whoa, we gotta talk, type of thing. And he basically turned me on to just—you buy a property with the VA loan, you live in it while you can, and then you rent it out once you PCS, permanent change of station, when you get orders to another duty station. And so I talked to him extensively, asked him how he did it. He had a whole bunch of JVs that he had done. He had some short-term rentals, he had some long-term—most of them are long-term. But I told him, I’m getting ready to go down to Pensacola, can you give me any advice? And he said, yeah, buy as big as you can and get it as an investment. And so we were looking for—

Haley Ferguson: He said buy as many units as one property.

Mindy Jensen: Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: When he said big, he meant as many units. So the VA loan allows you to get up to a quad, up to 4 units. And it’s all dependent on the local area and what cost of living is and all that stuff. So we—I think we qualified for $493,000, is what I qualified for, max. And so we set that as our search. We found a realtor who was highly recommended down here—worked, shout-out to Michelle over there. And she did a number of virtual walkthroughs with us via FaceTime while I’m sitting there in full camo gear with a 90-pound ruck, coming back from a 12-hour hike and all this stuff. And I’m trying to stay awake while she’s doing a walkthrough of a property. And there was one property specifically—it was the first one that I saw on Redfin, actually.

Haley Ferguson: It was the first MLS email she sent us.

Andrew Brazell: Yep.

Haley Ferguson: Had a quad right near downtown.

Andrew Brazell: Yep.

Haley Ferguson: And Andrew was like, oh my gosh, this is a great property. And I was like, no, no, wait, we have to analyze many, many properties.

Andrew Brazell: We have to look at 30 or 40.

Haley Ferguson: That’s what Brandon Turner said. We have to go through many of them, build that analysis muscle, and then we’ll be good. This can’t be it.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Haley Ferguson: It was it.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, that was the one.

Scott Trench: So.

Haley Ferguson: And since then, we keep an eye on the property and on the market. We have not found the same deal since then.

Andrew Brazell: I mean, now that we’re into expansion mode, we’ll never find a deal like that one. I pray we will, but it will be unlikely. So they were originally asking—the way the house was set up, it was a 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom that they added an office and a laundry room onto in like the ’50s or ’60s. And then in the ’90s, they added onto the back of that—they added a law office. There’s law offices everywhere in Florida, if you didn’t know that. But they—

Haley Ferguson: It’s a 1920s home.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, built in 1920. Very small—what, 1,100 square feet, maybe? I don’t even know officially. In sections, it’s hard to—

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, because they added on twice.

Andrew Brazell: They added on twice. They closed in the porch and made it a—they call it a Florida room. But they have done basically all the work that a lot of people are doing now, in adding ADUs—walling off certain sections, adding kitchens, all this stuff. And so we saw the photos, and we’re like, this has a lot of potential. As well as the carriage house.

Haley Ferguson: Yep. The law office could also be like a mother-in-law suite.

Andrew Brazell: It had its own kitchen and bathroom. And then they had a carriage house out back, a separate building that was converted in the ’60s to an upstairs and downstairs, one-bedroom apartment each. So it was billed as a triplex, but if you consider the mother-in-law suite, it really was a quad. So we bought it as a triplex, but—

Haley Ferguson: Well, I should say, we bought it as a triplex, but once you close the door, you have 4 units.

Andrew Brazell: You have 4 units.

Haley Ferguson: And it was a 2-sided security door, and we soundproofed it.

Andrew Brazell: Yep. So they were asking $489,000 for it, which was just under what we qualified for. And that was, at the time, overpriced. I spoke to my mentor, and he’s like, yeah, that’s a little steep.

Haley Ferguson: And the comps didn’t—

Andrew Brazell: The comps didn’t support it.

Haley Ferguson: And also, it had been on the market at that point—like, we caught it when it was on the market about 20, 30 days, 20 days or so. We made an offer, I think, at about 30 days. Yeah, our first offer.

Andrew Brazell: We made our first—I talked to my mentor and he said, make an offer. Like, the worst they can say is no, and they will most likely counter. So we undercut the you-know-what out of it.

Haley Ferguson: We made a very low offer.

Andrew Brazell: We offered them $400,000, and they came back and just flat-out said no. Didn’t counter, nothing. And we’re like, okay, they seem to be pretty set on their $489,000. And, you know, with all the closing costs and all this other stuff, I’m not sure—you know, even with a VA loan, there’s extra expenses. So I’m not sure we can do this. I don’t want to have to liquidate my stocks in order to pay for this. Which now, in hindsight, that’s a no-brainer. But I’m glad it worked out that way, because about a week and a half later—I mean, first, me being the analysis-paralysis guru, was like, great, no problem, we’ll walk away.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, no, we’ll find something else.

Andrew Brazell: So, and we did—we looked, we sent our realtor, poor thing, she went through probably 6 or 7 more houses before they came back. But she’s talking to their agent the whole time, saying, hey, this is overpriced, you gotta come down a little bit, and all this other stuff. So we didn’t know that until later.

Haley Ferguson: But she was amazing.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, she was incredible.

Haley Ferguson: She really advocated for us.

Andrew Brazell: Michelle Bear with American Valor Realty is a rock star. But she came back and said, hey, they actually countered—this is a week, week and a half later, 10 days later—they came back and they countered, and they said, we’ll sell it to you for $440,000. And we were like, whoa, okay, we just saved—what did we just save?

Haley Ferguson: We just moved the dial so much.

Andrew Brazell: So much, just by making a bold offer. And we talked about it, and came back and said, well, we’ll do you one better—we’ll do $450,000 if you cover all the closing costs.

Haley Ferguson: We had no money at that time.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, we did not. I did not want to—I mean—

Haley Ferguson: We needed any liquid cash we had. Yes.

Andrew Brazell: So they agreed, they accepted, and our agent wrote it in that they would pay closing costs, or up to—what was it, 3.2% of the purchase price?

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, she wrote the initial contract, and closing costs were 3.2% of the price of the house, or the sale price of the house—which turned out to be more than we needed for closing costs. But that was the initial contract, where she expected the realtor to come back.

Andrew Brazell: And yeah, we also had $5,000 of repairs written in, which, I mean, any real estate agent would go like, yeah, you’re joking, give me a break. But we expected some pushback, and they just accepted.

Scott Trench: So, did you move into this property?

Haley Ferguson: This is a house hack. Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: Yep. So they accepted. And long story short, we ended up walking away with cash in hand at closing. So, like I said, probably won’t be able to do that one again. But we moved into the mother-in-law suite. The upstairs and downstairs apartments had existing leases that we inherited, that were like maybe 60% of the market rate. So we knew we had room to increase the rents there.

Haley Ferguson: But something safe to move into.

Andrew Brazell: But something, yeah, something to move into. And our goal was to work on the main house, the 2/1, and make it livable for long-term tenants. Our goal was to get military people in there, because there’s students coming in and out of Pensacola—you know, it’s probably, there’s probably 1,000 students a year go through there, and they’re only there temporarily before they go from pilot training to other assignments. Yeah, our initial goal was long-term tenants.

Haley Ferguson: So we kind of fell into STR.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, we knew Airbnb was a potential, though, just from previous experience. And so we put the 2 bedrooms there up on Airbnb, and it just—

Haley Ferguson: Well, we were, yeah, we were initially looking at—we talked to a bunch of his pilot school training friends and said, hey, you guys interested in living on our property? We imagined, you know, them all studying together, all of us kind of being nearby could be kind of fun. And everybody was just kind of finding other places farther away from downtown, for a little cheaper. And so we started to get a little nervous.

Scott Trench: That’s true.

Haley Ferguson: We also looked at the main house, which again, its core is 1920, and then added onto. And the couple before were kind of retirement.

Andrew Brazell: So the original plan was to put long-term tenants in there. In the process of us repairing one of the bedrooms, we had put it up on Airbnb, and the Airbnb just took off. We did not realize what a huge market the Panhandle is for short-term rentals until we put that first unit up. Then when the next lease expired, we didn’t even think about putting a long-term tenant in there—we just went out, furnished it, opened it up as our second Airbnb. And then we wanted a little bit of insurance, just in case, for whatever reason, this was just a quick blip of business for Airbnb and in case it crashed. We kept one of the long-term tenants and renewed her, increased her rent—not nearly enough. She was very happy to keep the lease at that rate, but pretty much regretted it almost instantly when we started seeing the second unit’s income.

Haley Ferguson: So the second unit was making about—

Scott Trench: Yeah.

Haley Ferguson: $2,000 a month on Airbnb.

Scott Trench: What was the total income from the property, after you—or from the rent, from the short-term rents and the long-term rent, once you completed this?

Haley Ferguson: Long-term rental was $700 a month last year. So quick math, what would that be?

Andrew Brazell: $700 a month would be—what would that—

Scott Trench: $700 a month from the one with the long-term rental. What are we getting per month from the second unit?

Andrew Brazell: So for Airbnb, I mean, it’s seasonal. So we were doing between, I want to say, $1,500 to $3,000 per month just with one Airbnb, which was covering the mortgage.

Scott Trench: So that’s double to quadruple.

Andrew Brazell: Yes.

Scott Trench: Double to quintuple.

Haley Ferguson: Yes.

Scott Trench: The revenue of the long-term rental.

Mindy Jensen: Yes.

Scott Trench: And what was the main house getting?

Andrew Brazell: The main house was getting about the same. So I’d say the median is a little higher—$2,000 to $4,500. I’d say $2,000 to $4,500.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, we had some really good months in the summer.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, I mean, obviously.

Scott Trench: So on the low end, you’re getting $4,200 a month, and on the high end, you’re getting $6,000, $7,000, $8,000.

Andrew Brazell: Yes, correct. Yeah.

Scott Trench: So this is phenomenal. And what’s your mortgage payment on this property?

Andrew Brazell: Our mortgage payment at the time was $2,820.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, $2,800.

Scott Trench: This is a killer house hack.

Andrew Brazell: Yes. Yeah, it did.

Haley Ferguson: We were living for free.

Andrew Brazell: Yes, I get a housing allowance from the Marine Corps, and my housing allowance was half of what the mortgage was. So I was willing to eat it if everything went to hell, and I would be paying out of pocket to live, which is what everyone does. So, worst-case scenario, we saw this as a win—like, I’m at least buying equity, or the Marine Corps is buying me equity. But I mean, we have yet to pay to live in Pensacola. So yeah, we’ve never paid a mortgage, not a dime.

Mindy Jensen: I have a couple of things I want to highlight really quick. First of all, the VA loan is not for investment properties. You have to live there. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used for a fourplex. I mean, the VA is not going to approve a loan that doesn’t qualify for it—they’re not going to approve a property that doesn’t qualify for the loan. But I just wanted to clarify that you can’t use a VA loan for a strictly investment property. So you’ve done a VA house hack, a VA hack where you’re using this—no money down, like truly no money down. You walked away from closing with a check in your pocket. You had a property that was miscategorized on the MLS. There was a mistake. It’s a fourplex, but they listed it as a threeplex, and you changed it to make it into a fourplex. Or actually, you lived in the one unit and you were still collecting rent from three other units. I have a little acronym called the MLS is not dead yet, and if you go by the initials, it’s Mindy.

Haley Ferguson: That’s great.

Mindy Jensen: You knew it was a great deal because you could do math. I think that all investors have an opportunity to get that one rockstar deal, and not everybody takes advantage of it. This is, again, an opportunity to celebrate you guys because you could have been like, “Oh, it’s the first property, I don’t know.” And yeah, most of the time your first property isn’t going to—like the first property you look at isn’t going to be the best thing ever. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. So know what a good deal is and keep an eye on the market right now because things are changing. And maybe there will be another really great deal coming up on the market. I love what you said.

Scott Trench: I just want to agree with everything Mindy said and say this was a perfect house hack. With this, it was—I don’t think it was listed incorrectly. It was a triplex and there’s a mother-in-law suite. So you just moved into the mother-in-law suite, which is perfect for you guys from that, and in the context of a house hack. And that allows you to Airbnb out the other units with that. Your only quote-unquote mistake is that you could have done all three units from a short-term rental perspective with this. You also were willing to do work on the property. I remember you telling me about this property a year and a half ago. I guess it was almost two years now.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah.

Scott Trench: And like, yeah, it just seems like all that—like, that’s all the stars aligning with that. The VA loan, 0% down, this triplex, quadplex, whatever you want to call it. And then being willing to—obviously there’s a lifestyle sacrifice. You could have qualified for a $400,000, $440,000 house that was all to yourself with that. So there’s a big sacrifice you’re making in order to exchange for that income.

Andrew Brazell: Absolutely. When we saw the potential though, we realized like we are not compromising—again, we’re just loving future us, you know. We’re living in—and it was an upgrade for us because, I mean, we’re coming from Denver where, you know, square footage here is not cheap. So we moved into the mother-in-law suite and it was an upgrade. So, you know, we still—that’s how we looked at it. Yeah, we could be in the big two-bedroom house and have a nice guest room and all that other stuff, or we can, you know, live in the small mother-in-law suite and just pay to have our friends stay at a hotel whenever they come visit. You know, like, that was the options that we had, and I don’t regret it at all. I love that little place. A lot of good memories.

Scott Trench: So what happens next? Now that you have this place, how does that affect your cash position, your investing? What do you do? How do we get to the present here?

Andrew Brazell: So this entire time, you know, we haven’t touched our stock. I mean, we’ve been continuing to maximize our IRA contributions every year, you know, all this other stuff. We have our retirement funds, and we continue to contribute to that. But we realized Airbnb has some serious potential in this town. Let’s—let’s try to—let’s try to just lean into that. What’s the word I’m looking for? Scale. Thank you.

Scott Trench: Scale.

Andrew Brazell: Let’s try to scale with Airbnb. And so I started looking for another property. And we wanted to get as many units as possible. We looked at a number of duplexes in the area, but by this time—this is late 2021—and the market is just insane. And properties are selling within literally minutes, people have offers on properties. There were two properties specifically that I told my agent, I was like, I want to make an offer, draft it up. And she calls me back and she said they just accepted an offer. And I’m not kidding, it shows on the MLS listed 49 minutes ago. And you’re just going, this is insane. So we looked at a couple of properties in this specific area in Pensacola that we were wanting to move to because we had just hit our year mark in the home with the VA loan. So we are allowed to get out free and clear at this point.

Haley Ferguson: We also crunched the numbers and realized that it was costing us to stay, that we could make more money if we moved to the apartment, the big old apartment complex downtown. We would cash flow $1,000 a month if we moved out.

Andrew Brazell: If we started paying rent.

Mindy Jensen: Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, we would’ve made money. So we said, why pay rent? Let’s just—

Scott Trench: Because the spread between your Airbnb and the mother-in-law and your rent would’ve been so large.

Andrew Brazell: Yes.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: Yep. So whenever we traveled—I mean, we’re doing it now—whenever we travel, we list our home as an Airbnb to kind of subsidize the cost of traveling. And every time we traveled, we would make more money because, you know, we furnished our home in the way we want to live. And so it was, you know, I had this—

Haley Ferguson: Cool, stylish life.

Andrew Brazell: I had the smart lights and I had, you know, my splurge of a big-screen TV for watching hockey, you know, and all this other stuff. So whenever it rented out on Airbnb, it was getting more than the house. And so we realized, like, if we can make this standard, then we’re losing money by staying here. And so we decided, like, hey, we’ll start looking for a property. If we don’t find one, then we’ll move downtown to a very cute downtown area in Pensacola. But we were pretty certain we’d be able to find a house. And if we could find one with a mother-in-law suite or an ADU or something like that, then we could—

Haley Ferguson: Get out ahead.

Andrew Brazell: Get out ahead. And so we put offers on a couple, none of them got accepted. And a friend of mine—this goes into who you know and networking and all that stuff—I told my friend what my plan was, and driving through the neighborhood, he saw the realtor hammering the sign out in front and was like, “Call them right now.” And within—I mean, I don’t even—I think by the time we made an offer, it had been on the MLS for less than an hour. So they actually didn’t go with our offer though. Originally they were asking—

Haley Ferguson: Someone else beat us out.

Andrew Brazell: They were asking $360,000 for this house, and the reason we went with it was they converted the garage into the master bedroom, put a bathroom in it, and it had an external door where you could walk straight from the driveway. It didn’t have to go through the main front door. And we saw it and we’re like, okay, there’s one door from the garage into the house. We’ll just wall that off and that’ll be another Airbnb. It’s just like a suite, you know, it doesn’t have a kitchen or anything like that, but it’s like a hotel room. And so that’s what we called it. We called it the Suite. And originally we offered $360,000, which was their asking price, but we asked for $10,000 to go towards closing costs. So really we underbid them, which was bold, but we thought that getting in there as fast as we could, you know, maybe they would just take it.

Scott Trench: And they didn’t.

Andrew Brazell: They went with somebody else. And so we were in Colorado actually—for Christmas? No, that was for Thanksgiving. Yeah, we were in Colorado for Thanksgiving, and our realtor called us back and said the people that they went with went with another property and lost their earnest money and all this other stuff. But they were willing to do that because they wanted this other property, and now they want to go with you. And so we ended up getting it after all. So this is now twice where we have bought property and had the seller give us money towards closing, which, I mean, is ideal. And I don’t know if we’ll be able to do it again, you know, three times in a row.

Scott Trench: So walk us through this property. Where’d you live? How much income were you able to produce? And what was the mortgage payment on it?

Andrew Brazell: So the mortgage on this one is $2,300. Yes.

Haley Ferguson: This property is my property. Yes, unofficially.

Andrew Brazell: And this Airbnb is—yeah, it’s her baby and she’s crushing it. We went with a conventional loan. We were thinking of doing an FHA, but they offer conventional at 5% if it’s your primary home. So we’re thinking, okay, 1.5% extra is not a ton, but it gets us out from under lifetime PMI. So at some point we’ll get to the 20% down if we decide to pay that extra, but that’s going to save us—the PMI, I think, is $187 or something a month right now. And so once we get past 20%, which I looked at, it’ll be in the next 3 or 4 years at the rate we’re paying, then we’ll get out from under that lifetime of PMI. And we saw kind of the writing on the wall, like rates are changing. We most likely won’t be able to refi into a better rate to get out from under the PMI. So we just went ahead and did the conventional at 5% down. Did finally have to liquidate some of my stock holdings, but it was absolutely worth it. So yeah, we furnished it and—

Haley Ferguson: And it was turnkey. Yep. And we furnished it. We put it on Airbnb two weeks after we closed. We didn’t have our place set up just yet, but that Airbnb was flawless. The first full month we made $4,700 on a one-bedroom, one-bath hotel-suite-style thing.

Andrew Brazell: She has the number—

Haley Ferguson: I knocked all of our units out of the water.

Andrew Brazell: She has the number one Airbnb for two people in Pensacola right now.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, I’m top of the algorithm at this point. So, you know, you did say “perfect,” I’ll just throw that in there. So that has been my baby and was super fun to see that.

Mindy Jensen: I do believe I said “perfect in every way.”

Haley Ferguson: Yeah.

Scott Trench: Except for that other, that third unit.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Scott Trench: At the old place. Yeah.

Mindy Jensen: We blame Andrew for that one.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Scott Trench: Yeah. Yeah.

Haley Ferguson: No, that was actually probably a security thing of mine. So I’ll take that one.

Mindy Jensen: Well, you know, let’s look back at that. That was—they had just opened up Airbnb again after closing all of Airbnbs and returning all the money to the tenants or the renters or whatever.

Haley Ferguson: Guests.

Mindy Jensen: Yeah, so to the guests. Yeah, Airbnb closed it. You didn’t have the option to close it, and Airbnb gave all of the refunds to the guests. You didn’t have that option. So to keep one unit as a long-term rental for the security a year and a half ago is not a bad choice.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, that’s fair. Yeah, with all the waves of COVID we didn’t know what was going to happen. Yeah.

Scott Trench: So we’re now—so you have the suite and you have the main house. Is that—is there just one unit or are there multiple more units? I’m sorry if I missed that on this property.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, so the property is a single-family home with the suite as an Airbnb. So that was our 5th Airbnb. We have the 4 on the quad and now the one on the new property. And we live in the house and we have a guest room. Finally.

Scott Trench: And this is your current situation, is you own these two properties with these six units, the ones that include the one you live in?

Haley Ferguson: Yes.

Andrew Brazell: And shortly after that, we set up the deal for our next closing, which is in July. I had just listened to the podcast with Pace Morby, about doing sub-2 and seller financing and all that stuff. And driving—actually, we were driving to look at a property that we got turned down on. I was going to show my neighbor and drove past a for-sale-by-owner sign and just pulled into the driveway and called the number. And the owner was actually there in the garage, and she walked out to me and talked to me. And I just, you know, she told me what she wanted for it, which was so expensive, so far out of my price range. But I had literally just listened to this podcast about, you know, just talk to the seller, see if they’re willing to accept terms or anything like that. And I just pitched it. And she said, “Oh, absolutely not.” And I was like, “Oh, well, you know, we tried.” And about three weeks later, she called me and she’s like, “Are you the one who was talking to me about seller financing?” And I was like, “Yeah, I am.” And she goes—

Haley Ferguson: There’s a trend here.

Andrew Brazell: I think, yeah, I think we’re back. Yep, she came back and was like, “I think we might be able to set something up. We talked to some lawyer friends of ours, and I think this could be beneficial for everybody.” And so we went and sat down with them. They were asking—this is a duplex in the same neighborhood, which is—it’s like the Wash Park of Pensacola, basically. They’re all—

Haley Ferguson: Very sought-after neighborhood.

Scott Trench: Very nice neighborhood. Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: What’s that?

Scott Trench: Nice neighborhood.

Andrew Brazell: For folks that don’t know, it’s coming up. It used to be a rough neighborhood, and now it’s—people take a lot of pride in their homes. They’re all—they’re no copies of—

Haley Ferguson: Time.

Andrew Brazell: Oh, sorry. Yeah, we’re short on time. Okay, nice neighborhood. Yes, but they were asking—it’s a duplex on the main street through there with all these cute breweries and restaurants and all this other stuff, and they were asking $750,000 for this duplex, which I looked up, you know, going through the county assessor, and they paid about $340,000 for it a year and a half before. So they went through and they’re both—

Haley Ferguson: We have to caveat that it’s a 3/2 on each side.

Andrew Brazell: On each side, yes. So they’re large.

Haley Ferguson: So it’s a 3/2 condo on each side.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah. But they’re both general contractors, so they gutted this house, completely redid it. And I walked through it and it is—I mean, they spared no expense. It looks very, very good. Still though, our realtor ran comps for us and she said it’s about $60,000 overpriced. So even with that, we looked at the potential. We paid for a survey and a report on Pensacola Airbnbs through AirDNA or one of those. I can’t remember.

Haley Ferguson: Mashvisor.

Andrew Brazell: Mashvisor, one of those, just to see what our competition was like. And the number one Airbnb in Pensacola is one property with two homes. And I went through all the reviews and everyone was saying, “It’s so nice to be able to come here with my family. My brother had his own house with his kids. I had my house with my kids.” And every single review is like that.

Haley Ferguson: And there—

Andrew Brazell: This property is not anywhere close to as nice a location as this one. So we went in there and we’re like, we can do some damage with this. So even at their asking price of $750,000, which we agreed to, we are looking to come out ahead considerably. And a house about 4 houses down from them sold—same building, same style of duplex, not identical—but it sold for $350 a square foot. So at that rate, the house is already worth over a million. So we haven’t even closed, we have it under contract, we’re closing on it in July.

Scott Trench: So let’s sum up your position right now. You have 5 Airbnb units currently with 2 more on the way, or 1 more if you’re going to rent this out as 1 big Airbnb with 2 units on it. What is your current Airbnb income that you project on average for a month? Or what’s the range that you expect from the current Airbnb income across all of your units?

Haley Ferguson: Last month we made $17,000. Last year we made $75,000 on 1.5 units.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, 1.5, 2 units.

Haley Ferguson: We slowly brought them up. We’re projecting in this coming year, and it might be conservative, to make $150,000 just on the first property, I think. Yeah, the first property. Yeah, and then we’re house hacking the one we live in. And at the rate we’re going, we can cash flow on that property about $20,000. So that’s $170,000.

Andrew Brazell: Our primary home. And then this duplex that we have, we did seller financing with $60,000 down total in three chunks. So $20,000 at closing, $20,000 six months later, and $20,000 at a year.

Haley Ferguson: We locked in a great interest rate.

Andrew Brazell: We locked them in. We have them under contract for 3%. With—it’s a 2.5-year balloon. So, you know, that’s a big chunk of change that’s coming due here soon. But we have no worries about it whatsoever.

Haley Ferguson: We have the option to sell at 2.5 years if everything goes bust. Yes.

Scott Trench: What do you expect the income for that property to generate?

Andrew Brazell: We’re expecting between $450 and $600 a night. So that’ll be about—it’ll do the same as the quad. We’re expecting about $1,500 to $2,000 a month through that.

Scott Trench: All right, last question here. What’s next after this? What’s in the future for the next couple of years for you guys?

Andrew Brazell: Well, we’re actually looking at a property here in Denver tomorrow. We want a place to come stay at. We are here quite often. So my sister is moving out of her apartment and her landlord called me and said, “Hey, seems like you might be the type of person who’d want to buy this, so let’s have some drinks and discuss it.” But I would love to just help other people in the way that you helped me, in just helping educate and just basically showing people—not to be arrogant, but through the example that, um, what we’ve been able to do—showing other people in the military specifically, like, what the potential is regarding real estate and investments and stuff. I’ve had a number of friends who’ve taken me up on the offer of opening their own Airbnbs, and they’re doing quite well right now as well. So for those who are willing to listen, I mean, they’ve seen some benefit.

Scott Trench: All right, Haley, let’s hear a quick background about your journey with money here. Could you walk us through how things started for you, maybe starting in high school, college, and up until the point you met Andrew?

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, absolutely. I grew up in a very money-conscious family, mainly surrounding debt. My parents have always touted that they just have not ever had debt. We didn’t grow up super wealthy. We always had enough, but we were aware that we made certain financial choices to stay within certain margins. I loved growing up that they emphasized spending less than you earn, staying within your means, which was kind of a principle that I lived by for quite a while until I expanded my financial literacy. Went to college, did an undergrad in psychology, graduated in 2012. Up to that point, I had kind of had jobs here and there, but mostly for fun money. Then after that, I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do post-college. My parents had always dreamt of just paying for my college for me because their parents were able to do that for them. Instead, we were just in a spot where that wasn’t totally feasible, so they shouldered half of the debt. I shouldered the other half. I graduated with about $24,000 of unsubsidized student loans at that point. I moved home, and my parents— I didn’t have a direction I wanted to go. I considered graduate school. Didn’t quite have the answer, and so I took my mom’s advice and just moved home and started working at a hospital, paying off that debt and living for free. I would throw a thousand dollars each paycheck at twelve dollars something an hour towards my debt, and I managed to pay off the $24,000 in two years. And along that journey, I did the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University bit, and I credit a lot of just doing that debt snowball and paying that off so quickly to that program and my parents’ diligence about debt. And I remember my mom saying, whatever direction you go, at least you can start here and you don’t have something you’re dragging behind you and bringing along. And I thank them for that. I did decide to go on and do a counseling master’s degree after that, and having just paid off debt, I was not interested in getting into more debt, and so I stayed at home for the next four years, worked full-time. I mean, it was often 60, 70-hour weeks. On top of that, you have to do internships and practicums, so it was a hard-fought four years there. This is getting into now end of 2017 where I was wrapping up my degree, and I graduated with my master’s in counseling with about $8,000 of debt where I could have just kind of sloughed it off, and those were subsidized student loans. So I graduated with $9,000 of subsidized student loans that had been accruing interest pretty quickly. So I could have graduated with $40,000. So I appreciate that at-home time to kind of get through that. But it was at that time, right after I graduated, that I decided I wanted to leave the Midwest and the cold and check out Denver. And Andrew and I met early in 2018, and I was very interested in the house hacking. He was doing Airbnb around that time, on and off, kind of shutting it down, heading into the Marine Corps. And it’s just been really cool since then to allow him to be the acceleration where I’m the brake. I’ve learned from him with risks. I think he’s learned from me on planning and being more proactive about things and strategic, and I think we make a great team on this.

Andrew Brazell: I’d be inclined to agree.

Haley Ferguson: We’re working it out. It’s interesting in our relationship. I think one thing when you’re doing something with a spouse as well, if I can extrapolate, is we’ve had to figure out when we’re in husband and wife mode and when we’re in business mode. And to balance that all out, we have to call it out in moments of like, hey, this is not business time, this is our time. And we love it so much, but we’ve noticed ourselves on date nights and stuff like that starting to talk about the business. And as much as that’s good, we really had to start balancing out how much we put into our relationship and keep nourishing that, because it can creep up on you because it’s fun, but there’s some distinction there that’s really helpful. But it’s been a wild ride and totally loved it. Yeah, totally loved it.

Andrew Brazell: Been a good time.

Scott Trench: Well, that’s awesome. And so, are you both working full-time right now, or is the business taking up a lot of that time, or what does that kind of look like for you guys?

Andrew Brazell: Recently, we finally got a chance to go on our honeymoon, and when we did that, we had to basically establish a team because we were going to be unreachable for eight days. So we set up a team and took a breath for the first time in 18, 20 months-ish and realized, oh my gosh.

Haley Ferguson: We should have been doing this way earlier.

Andrew Brazell: We should have been doing this way earlier. So in the last month, our focus has been we need to set up a team, because all the time we’re spending on managing is time that we could be spending on expanding. And so we have realized that a small expense of 15%, maybe even 20%, is a small expense when it comes at the cost of us being able to spend more time with each other, us being able to think of bigger picture goals, that type of stuff. So that is our current focus, is just kind of handing off management. And instead of managing units and Airbnbs, we’re going to start managing people, which, I mean, that’s what I’m paid to do by the military. So I’m hoping it’ll be an easy port over into our little side hustle.

Haley Ferguson: So, and yes, to answer your question, sounds like a great honeymoon. Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: Oh, it was phenomenal.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: Yes.

Haley Ferguson: We went to the Galápagos.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Haley Ferguson: And did a dive trip. Represent. So.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, it was incredible. But that’s what it took for us to kind of step back. And I wish we would have done it sooner.

Haley Ferguson: I work a mental health agency job and just started a private practice, small, and then did this on the side. And we haven’t even mentioned that we own a Tesla only by putting it on Turo.

Scott Trench: Oh yeah.

Haley Ferguson: And so that’s another side hustle. So we were getting warning signs before the honeymoon to slow down, to get higher help, but it’s a total mind shift to go. I mean, I’m seeing us move kind of— when you move up socioeconomically, it is an adjustment because we are in the mindset still of thinking we have to do everything ourselves. We have to work super hard. We have to be hands-in, and bringing other people on is the next level of doing that. So it’s an adjustment.

Scott Trench: It’s a function of profit and cash flow too. You have so much profit and cash flow that you can begin thinking in those terms. And guess what? Because you can do it all yourself, if there is a problem in the market or something like that, you can always go back to doing it yourself and continue to slog those things through.

Andrew Brazell: Exactly, yeah.

Scott Trench: So you’ve got a large number of exit options with these properties, with the first two properties in particular, where you could just long-term rent them and they’ll still probably produce a reasonable cash flow.

Haley Ferguson: Exactly.

Scott Trench: That’s one, or sell them with that. This next property, you’re taking a big risk with the 2.5-year balloon. But this is after you’ve built your systems and have those things in place. So I’m optimistic. I think it’ll be great.

Mindy Jensen: Going back to the doing everything yourself, if you know how to do it, then you can hire somebody who will do it well. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s really easy to hire somebody who also doesn’t know what they’re doing. But when you already know how to do it, you interview somebody and you’re like, oh, you’re full of garbage, you don’t know what you’re doing, I’m not going to hire you. But if you don’t know how to do it, then it’s easy to fall for a really, really slick talker.

Haley Ferguson: Absolutely.

Andrew Brazell: And we’re still learning. I mean, we’re unfortunately about to fire our first person. So they’re not doing this. Yeah, it’s not enjoyable, but it’s unfortunately business.

Haley Ferguson: So you have to have the right people on the bus.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Haley Ferguson: And doing it from the ground up really helps you know what you need. I think the lesson is to just not get caught in the scarcity of like, I have to do everything, because who knows if this is going to keep working. Really, we have a year of data on Airbnb and what we’ve been able to do, but there are still parts of us that are like, if everything goes down, you have to fall back on those plans of, yeah, there are long-term rentals. Overall, our properties have appreciated already.

Andrew Brazell: Significantly.

Haley Ferguson: Wildly.

Scott Trench: What do you guys think is a good cash position for someone doing this type of work, the type of investing you’re doing?

Andrew Brazell: We agreed early on that our comfort level is six months of runway with no income whatsoever. So that was initially what we wanted to save up, and it got to the point where we were actually losing opportunity by having that much. And so we’ve scaled it back. We have about three months of runway for each property to pay the mortgage, no questions asked. And we’re very confident that we could find a monetary solution to whatever ailments we may encounter had we needed to tap into that. So 90 days is, I think, more than enough for us to kind of fix whatever goes wrong. So it’s a little risky, I guess, but something cataclysmic would have to happen for both of those to go bust at the same time. So that’s where we’re comfortable.

Scott Trench: Should we go ahead and do the Famous Four here?

Andrew Brazell: Let’s do it.

Haley Ferguson: Absolutely.

Mindy Jensen: Famous Four, Haley, what is your favorite finance book?

Haley Ferguson: I would have to say I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. I know that’s an intro book into the field of investment, but his straightforward instructions along with the relationship he’s noticed between psychology and finance just really spoke to me, especially being in the mental health field.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, love that one. That’s definitely like my number two, but my first one would have to be The Richest Man in Babylon, just because it started this whole journey. So that one’s super easy to digest, it’s super short, and if you’re a former contact sport player like me and have a little bit of head trauma, it’s really easy to understand.

Mindy Jensen: That one’s also my favorite.

Andrew Brazell: Oh, awesome.

Haley Ferguson: Yeah, the fables are awesome.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah.

Scott Trench: What was your biggest money mistake?

Mindy Jensen: Do you know? Do you know?

Haley Ferguson: I’m just running through it.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, I can’t decide. I would say early on we decided to do some long-term Airbnbs, and the tenants that we had at the time were a little rough on the house. And we looked at it and we’re like, who cares? They’re giving us a great rate, we have this secure, and all this other stuff. And looking back on it now, they ate up our entire busy season. They wrecked the house. We had to replace a furnace. We really regret letting these tenants stay in, and also allowing the claims window for Airbnb to expire before reading up on our protections and all this. Airbnb would have completely covered everything, but we ended up eating it just because I didn’t do my homework. And I got scared and thought a sure thing was going to be better than risking it early on. So for the sake of security, we just went with a sure thing that actually ended up hurting us. I would say that was one of our early mistakes.

Haley Ferguson: Me personally, when I started to save my money after paying off all of that student debt, and I was in a higher-paying job during my master’s degree, I was contributing pretty heavily to my 401(k) because I was really excited about actually investing. But I was also excited about keeping my money. And so I allocated my investments at that time to be very conservative. So for eight years, those sat in a 401(k) that was very conservative and did not earn the money that the compounding interest over time really could have done for me. And I missed out on that. But there were opportunities later to earn that back. So—

Andrew Brazell: She kept me from buying a timeshare once, which would have been the biggest financial mistake ever. Holy cow! Oh my God!

Haley Ferguson: I was like, man, you’re getting suckered right in.

Mindy Jensen: Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: I think it was the moment when the salesman said, “You can’t run the numbers. This has to be an emotional decision. This is an emotional purchase.” And I was like, wait a second.

Haley Ferguson: My mathematical, logical-minded husband. I was like, where are you?

Andrew Brazell: Where did you go?

Haley Ferguson: How am I on the other end of the spectrum?

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, I was like, it’ll be great, we can visit the mountains every year.

Haley Ferguson: Go, buddy.

Andrew Brazell: So that was a close one. But yeah, fortunately dodged that bullet.

Haley Ferguson: Good.

Mindy Jensen: Yikes. Timeshares should be illegal. I can’t imagine a situation where a timeshare is a good idea for anybody. And if you want to change my mind, you can email scott@biggerpockets.com. No, you can email mindy@biggerpockets.com, unless you’re with a timeshare company, in which case, no. What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out?

Scott Trench: Timeshares are a great way to help make the salesman financially free.

Mindy Jensen: Yes.

Andrew Brazell: No kidding.

Mindy Jensen: A timeshare is a great idea for the person selling them.

Haley Ferguson: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Mindy Jensen: Okay, Haley, what is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out?

Haley Ferguson: I would say, I mean, we’re speaking from just our experience. The thing that changed my mindset was, if you want to have large assets, have them in a way that they can make you money. You can have large assets, just have a plan for them. We have two properties, they make us money. We have a Tesla, which we wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise, and the only reason we have it is because renting it out on Turo for a number of days during the month—right now it’s like four days—pays the bills for it every month. My uncle came to our house and joked and said, everything you own is for rent, huh? And I was like, yeah, you just kind of hold things loosely. And so that’s just kind of where I see our mindset, how we’ve shifted, to making this money and using our assets well. Yeah.

Andrew Brazell: I would say don’t look at setbacks as roadblocks. Look at them as just bumps in the road. I mean, you’ll make an offer on a property and you won’t get selected. I can’t count how many offers we made that got turned down.

Haley Ferguson: Don’t be afraid of no.

Andrew Brazell: You have to be resilient. You have to be willing to make lemonade out of lemons. And even a roadblock will eventually be moved. Once the construction is done, you have to just be persistent and diligent at the same time. So, yeah, don’t be easily discouraged.

Scott Trench: I think it’s fantastic. And I think that when you look at your story, Andrew, in particular, where you came from a 412 credit score and all these other problems in your financial position, and now you’re so focused on building this real estate empire and driving cash flow, making these investments and making deals with that— it’s that you’ve done this incredible period of self-sacrifice, self-education. You’ve overcome all these hurdles you don’t even think about. Like, we asked you what your biggest money mistake was and you’re like, oh, I rented to some folks on Airbnb suboptimally. And we just spent the first 20, 30 minutes of this podcast talking about how you were living in a rat-infested hotel because you couldn’t afford anything else with all this. And so, it’s funny how those roadblocks kind of just take the back seat.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, absolutely.

Haley Ferguson: They fade away.

Scott Trench: Once you’ve really overcome them and gotten this grind going and gotten to a stronger position, you almost forget those—they recede to the background, it seems like, and you’re focused on the recent challenges you have today as a big-time real estate investor.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, I mean, to your point earlier, Mindy, this is not a short trip. This is a long road, and you have to be willing to be in it for the long haul. And I hope that people can see, through all of our examples here, the potential if you just decide to put in the work.

Scott Trench: What is your favorite joke to tell at parties?

Andrew Brazell: So mine is a bit tailored to me. I would have to say my favorite joke is, what is red and bad for your teeth?

Mindy Jensen: What?

Scott Trench: I don’t know, what?

Andrew Brazell: A brick.

Mindy Jensen: Yeah.

Scott Trench: So why is that one tailored to you, Andrew?

Andrew Brazell: So my name on the rugby team was Ruthless Toothless, and that’s because I lost some teeth playing hockey, and I can drop them out at will. So for those of you watching—

Haley Ferguson: Oh, it’s a great party trick.

Andrew Brazell: It’s a great party trick. I can photobomb anybody. It’s amazing.

Scott Trench: It’s pretty remarkable.

Andrew Brazell: And in Navy Medicine’s defense, they are fixing these in like a month. We just happened to film at the right time. So 10 years from now, it will be memorialized here. Yes, these will go onto the mantelpiece as a keepsake. So yeah.

Mindy Jensen: Oh, how charming.

Andrew Brazell: What’s your favorite joke?

Haley Ferguson: Oh gosh, I don’t think I have one. No?

Mindy Jensen: How are false teeth like stars? They come out at night.

Andrew Brazell: That one’s great. Oh, okay.

Haley Ferguson: All right.

Andrew Brazell: That one’s— that one’s—

Mindy Jensen: That could be Haley’s, tailored towards Andrew as well.

Haley Ferguson: There we go.

Andrew Brazell: That’s amazing. I laughed so hard I almost spit them out. Yeah, that’s great.

Haley Ferguson: I will say part of our guest book in the suite is to ask people for their favorite dad jokes when they sign in. So it’s name, where are you from, what do you like about the area, and your favorite joke. And none of them are coming to my mind right now, but jokes are so essential. I love them.

Andrew Brazell: Yeah, what was the most groundbreaking invention ever? You remember that one?

Haley Ferguson: The shovel. Oh, I got one.

Mindy Jensen: Yeah.

Scott Trench: Well, this has been awesome, guys. Thank you so much for coming on. It’s great to see you. Thanks for stopping through Denver and agreeing to share your stories here and your incredible real estate journey. We appreciate it. I think this has been a fantastic episode. I hope it helps a lot of people who may be struggling in the way that Andrew was at first, and some folks who are struggling to get into real estate in recent years with prices the way they are. You guys have been really creative, really consistent, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Andrew Brazell: Thank you so much, guys. We really appreciate it. A real honor to be here. Yeah, such a pleasure to meet you, Mindy. And yeah, we look forward to keeping you updated on progress.

Mindy Jensen: I look forward to those updates, and it was lovely to meet you too, guys. We will talk to you soon.

Haley Ferguson: Thanks, guys. Bye.

Mindy Jensen: Scott, that was an awesome story. That was a super fun little twist at the end with Andrew’s teeth. What did you think of the show?

Scott Trench: Like I said, Andrew, or Ruthless Toothless, as he self-identified at the end of the show—I wasn’t gonna out him—is a longtime friend of mine. And it’s just been so fun watching his journey from really a pretty tough financial situation to the success that he’s had. And it’s an overnight success story in seven short years to see what he’s been able to go from and to with this. And it’s really combined every part of his life—his housing, his car, his career. All of those things have been made with financial freedom in mind. And I think he’s got, you know, a lot to show for that now. Wonderful wife, a property portfolio, the career of his dreams. It’s just been fantastic to watch.

Mindy Jensen: Yep. And I think the core of all of that is he took action. It is so easy to leave the military—he was separated from the Air Force, not by choice. It would have been easy to say, “Oh, okay, I guess I’m not in the military anymore,” and just go about his life. He could have decided to say, “Oh well, I guess I just have debt. Whatever, that’s just how it is.” He could have, you know, even with Haley, he could have decided not to take action with her. You have to take action in order to make things happen. And he is kind of the embodiment of what can happen when you do take action, when you are intentional with your actions. That’s such a terrible word. But you know, when you are intentional, you can make things happen. You can change the course of your financial life, your whole life, but you have to do the work.

Haley Ferguson: Yep.

Scott Trench: And you have to take—you have to do the work, and the work always, or almost always, comes with a grind, a several years long grind to get from point A to point B or that next milestone. It’s not even a several years grind to get from start to finish. It’s a several years grind to get from start to the next point of optionality in this journey. And I think Andrew demonstrated that through the self-education that he has subscribed to, through finding mentors throughout the journey, which is kind of weird, but I guess I was one of those on that journey. And then he has his military advisor—or the person from the military who gave him some advice on rental properties in Florida—and he takes action based on that. And then the relentless self-education that is just enveloping in all of that.

Mindy Jensen: Yep. He’s just a success story. Like you said, overnight success in just seven short years. I love it. Okay, Scott, should we get out of here?

Scott Trench: Let’s do it.

Mindy Jensen: From episode 315 of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, he is Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen saying you can change your financial future and Andrew is proof. But you have to do the work.