Scott: Mindy and I are so grateful for the following sponsors who make Bigger Pockets money possible.
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Mindy: Today’s guest is taking the slowfi approach, prioritizing stability, flexibility and actually enjoying life along the way. Instead of extreme saving which sometimes leads to burnout, she’s building wealth at a steady pace that lets her live well now. If you’ve ever felt like traditional fire is too intense or unrealistic, this episode will show you a more balanced way to get there.
Mindy: Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my didn’t take the slowfi approach co-host Scott Tch.
Scott: Thanks Mindy, great to be here. I’m going to fast follow that wonderful intro by greeting Alyssa. So Alyssa, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. We are so excited to hear your slow five journey today.
Guest: Hello, it’s crazy to see you guys in person. I only ever listen to the podcast, so like seeing your faces is throwing me off a little bit, but it’s exciting.
Scott: Well, thank you so much for listening and for coming on today. We’re we’re super excited to chat with you. So could you start off and maybe tell us where you were financially or what your situation was when you discovered financial independence?
Guest: Yeah, of course. When I discovered the idea of Fi, I was working as a project manager. Um so I was in my second career with my MBA. I had a really good title and a six figure job and a remote schedule. I had pretty much everything I could have wanted in a career. I had a side hustle. Um, I’m a nurse by trade. That’s my original career. So I was still working part-time as a nurse and I was doing a four-hour commute about every other week down to headquarters to work for a couple days and then I’d return the four hours home. and so on these car rides, I had just a ton of time to listen to podcasts and somehow came across financial independence and just like drove head first and started looking up all the topics going down the rabbit hole, listening to every podcast I could get my hands on, making some changes in the way I was prioritizing my investments and my savings and pretty quickly realized that I was already at Coastfy just by pure happen stance, I guess, good role models from my parents when I was younger telling me to invest heavily at the beginning of my career.
Scott: What did that look like? It sounds like we need to go back a little bit and understand your career in terms of how you got here because you said you started as a nurse and then basically had your career evolved to a high-paying project management role.
Guest: Yeah, so I originally got my nursing degree not knowing for sure what I wanted to do when I grew up, just knowing that this was a career that was steady and would, you know, give me a lot of opportunities and I happened to be good at it. So did that for quite a while, was not loving every day going into the hospital. I knew it wasn’t something I wanted to do for 40 years just seeing other nurses who were having like the physical issues of this high demand job. And so I pretty quickly within two years of becoming a nurse, started going back for my MBA. My original thought was that I would do something in management or healthcare administration, but I went MBA versus MHA, knowing that I would have a little more flexibility in what industry I could work in, got my MBA in the summer of 2020. So I got insanely lucky on that timing and just as like the pandemic was picking up, my unit turned into the covid ICU overflow and like it was just a wild time and that’s when I was able to take a job outside of healthcare.
Mindy: What industry are you working in?
Guest: So the position I took was with um my dad’s company. He’s been there for like almost 20 years now. and it’s in agriculture actually production and sales. And so I took on a job that was originally just helping with lots of different projects and eventually turned into a CRM onboarding role. It got very tech heavy, so I actually only stayed there for a few years, about the time I figured out I was coast by. I was like, this isn’t, you know, my forever career either. So.
Scott: Where was home and where was work?
Guest: So, I’m originally from Missouri. so I was living in Columbia, Missouri, university city, work was down in a tiny town called Parma Missouri, which is like less than a thousand people live there.
Scott: And you said that you were really happy with your situation at this point. And I found like this is not universal, but it seems like many people discover financial independence because they’re unhappy with their situation and want to move away from it. How did you discover financial independence and why did it resonate with you despite having what sounds like a pretty good setup?
Guest: I think it was just that I had the dream house. I had an amazing relationship. I had the job that I couldn’t have had any better. I was making six figures. I had a good title. Um my schedule was flexible and it was remote on paper, I had everything. So like I should have been over the moon, happy, content, but I just didn’t feel free, I guess, which is something that’s very important to me having autonomy and time freedom, flexibility. So for whatever reason, I just, I knew something was missing and that working this nine to five job, which when it’s remote, you’re not just clocking out at 5 o’clock. Your computer’s always there. It’s an international company, so at all times of the day, I could get a phone call or email, so I just couldn’t ever turn it off and I knew that wasn’t something I wanted to do for my entire career.
Mindy: You said that you discovered you were coast fy already. What does that number look like?
Guest: So for me, that would have been just my 401k contributions and in 2021, I was somewhere around 110,000 and I would have been 27 years old. So I figured out with all the compounding and where I already was that for traditional retirement, I was already pretty much set. So that’s when I made a big transition from 401k contributions to after tax accounts.
Mindy: You stayed at the job?
Guest: I did stay at the job for a while. Yep. And I kept getting my match, but I started investing in index funds. So primarily Vanguard. And I kind of try to do everything all at once. I bought a rental property. I was like, I’m gonna be, you know, a flipper and a landlord and that went terribly. I kind of expected it would. I just tried a bunch of things.
Scott: At 27. I’m probably in a, you know, a fairly similar position to what you’re talking about and I am just grinding it out towards financial independence. I’m obviously working at bigger pockets and doing everything I can there, but I have like two properties that I’m, you know, fixing up on the side, still trying a bunch of side bets, you know, all over the place. You decide you want to go with slow fi while pursuing the same approach, which is probably much smarter. What was the catalyst for saying, you know what, I’m gonna, I’m gonna enjoy things right now and I’m not gonna finish the grind out to true, you know, durable early financial independence.
Guest: So I think it started with that attempt to do everything all at once. I was working the full-time job. I was doing the rental property on the side. I flipped it myself. I was landlording myself. I didn’t have property management and I was also working part-time still as a nurse. So I was doing two jobs and the landlording thing and just quickly realized, you know, I could get there pretty quickly going this route, but I didn’t have time to do the things I wanted to do, which is travel. I thought for sure there’s a career out there that I’m better suited for and I just don’t have time to go look for it. and just spending time with family and focusing on my health and fitness are really important things to me and two jobs, real estate, it was not happening.
Mindy: What sort of income were you bringing in with these two jobs and real estate?
Guest: I want to say I was somewhere around the 110 to 120 range in a year. My real estate was probably negative.
Mindy: Do you still own that rental property?
Guest: No, I was able to finally get out of it. After my first camp fi event, I got some good advice from some other real estate investors and they were like clearly this is not for you Bale, take the loss. and that’s what I ended up doing.
Mindy: And do you own any rental properties now?
Guest: I do not. We’re down to a single family residence.
Mindy: Okay. So, I just want to say yes, this is bigger pockets money, but real estate is not for everybody. And just because you hear people saying, oh, I, I got into real estate and I grew my wealth. Yeah, you probably did, but not everybody has to be in real estate if they don’t want to be in real estate. And making 110,000 a year because you’re working two jobs and doing real estate and flipping and and and and that’s the recipe for burnout, I believe. So, what did you change besides getting rid of your rental property?
Guest: So, my biggest change was walking away from full-time employment. I want to say I stayed another year after I found financial independence and started making those big changes, funding my brokerage account having a little bit of a buffer, I guess there. And I originally thought that I was taking a temporary break from full-time employment.
Scott: Can you remind us, was it an intentional, I’m going to stop maxing my 401K specifically so that I have the funds available after tax to produce some kind of option. Was that the the rationale for this? And there was a year-long slog to build that up or was something else going on?
Guest: Yeah, that was essentially the case. My main reasoning being that I realized I was coastfire with traditional retirement accounts and by listening to these podcasts, I had heard all these people say, you know, I wish I had diversified. I wish I had more options when I was younger and I was in my mid twenties and I have all this time until I need that money for my retirement accounts, but if I did want to do something entrepreneurial, buy real estate, do any of these things that give me more options. I did know that I needed the after tax funds essentially.
Scott: I love the mentality, right? This is obviously like we share the same philosophy, especially in your twenties, amassing liquidity and the purpose of amassing that liquidity is you know you’re gonna lose long term to something like the 401K or the Roth because you’re undergoing that tax advantage. So you need to get something out of that. And what that something is, it can be investment returns because you’re investing in real estate that you control and driving better returns, it could be an entrepreneurial approach that can drastically increase your your wealth. It could be a job that pays less today but offers higher upside or better opportunities long term. It can be all these different things, it could be travel that is, you know what, like I’m gonna get rich either way by the time I have a traditional retirement age and I’m gonna travel and enjoy my life. You get something when you do not max out the 401K as long as you don’t blow it essentially in there. And in your case, you put it into a rental property or maybe one or two sounds like and that didn’t go so well. And so I’m wondering like, like someone who’s listening to this, who’s a skeptic of this is gonna be saying, well, you know, we’ve got a perfect example here in you Alyssa of somebody who didn’t invest in the 401K and instead put that into rentals and lost here. I’m wondering if across the collection of the series of actions that you took with these funds outside of your 401K, if you’ve had some winners or had that optionality delivered to you in some form.
Guest: Right. So I would say when I bought the rental property, I knew that I was buying a really expensive lesson. It was either gonna be my first property in a portfolio or it was gonna be my last one and it ended up being my last one. I figured this out within 18 months. So I think, you know, in my twenties, what’s the harm, worst case scenario is I go back to, you know, fully funding my 401k and I miss one year trying this vet, right? And again, for me, the things I got in return were time, the flexibility to be able to go do some job shadowing and volunteering and taking trips with family. That’s all the things I got when I stepped away from full-time employment. I wasn’t focusing on investments. I really thought I was just taking a little hiatus in my career and I was gonna find like this next big thing for me and that was five years ago and I have not been a full-time employee ever since and somehow at the end of every month, I’ve managed to pay my expenses and still have extra to invest.
Mindy: Okay. I think you are a very successful real estate investor because you discovered in a very short time frame without losing a boat load of money, which we didn’t even cover yet. when we will and to discover that this is not for you. Imagine if the first one went, okay, and you’re like, well, everybody else is making money even though I don’t like it, I’ll do it again. And I’ll do it again. And then you’ve got 15 rentals and you’re like, oh, I’m losing money all the time. I hate this. Now I gotta get rid of 15 rentals. Like you figured it out, you moved on. How much money do you think you put into this rental and how much did you sell it for?
Guest: The numbers on this, I think I’ve tried to like block out of my memory.
Mindy: I have several properties like that.
Guest: So, I bought this property for maybe 125,000, which is about average for a starter home in the area that I was at that time. It was in a bad part of town and it needed a lot of work. but I saw some potential. It had four bedrooms, it had a completely unfinished basement. It was not far from where I had my first home and I had never had any issues with, you know, crime or anything. So I was like, you know, people keep telling me this is not the best neighborhood, but you know, I lived less than a mile away and I never had an issue. Immediately upon taking ownership of the house, somebody broke in, broke out some windows, stole some things and this happened three different times. So that was my, my very first experience. I got the whole place flipped and rented within six weeks and another break in happened and that tenant was like, nope, not doing this. So I lost that tenant within a month. Just all in all, I think I probably lost somewhere in the 10 to 20 range, which I think for 18 months of a lesson that real estate is not for me, landlording is not for me. I’m okay with that lesson. It didn’t put me in a financial hardship situation, but I was stressed for those 18 months.
Mindy: And now you know, now you know that this particular investment vehicle is not the right choice for you and you never have to do it again because I could give you 150 people who have done great. Good for them. That wasn’t your experience. now you know that you want to focus on something else. You don’t have this stress. That right there is the best thing about not owning rental properties is absolutely no stress about your rental property. You seem to be doing okay. You don’t work full-time and you’re happy with that. When you say you left full-time employment, does that mean that you went back to nursing?
Guest: Yes. So, since then, I have always done at least part-time nursing, which it’s a hard career to walk away from because it is so flexible. Like right now I work a minimum of one shift a week. so 12 hours. I can work as many shifts as I want. And then I always try to have like a fun hobby job on the side and that has allowed me to do some like really interesting things.
Mindy: Ooh, what’s your fun hobby job?
Guest: Right now, I recently quit my fun hobby job. So I’m looking for my next one. but I was working at a fitness center, before that I worked at a mushroom farm, before that I was working at a brewery. I was doing beer tending and um social media marketing for them. and I’ve worked at a wellness spa. So I’ve done quite a few different things and my current side hustle is refinishing, refurbishing old furniture, which again, is just a hobby. I make probably, I don’t know, $1000 a month at it.
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Mindy: What are your annual expenses or your monthly expenses?
Guest: Monthly expenses last time we did a quarterly audit was about $9,000. So our annual about 108.
Mindy: And how much are you making as a nurse?
Guest: As a nurse, I make somewhere between 30 and 40,000.
Mindy: Okay. And you said we, so I’m assuming there is a partner in there somewhere.
Guest: Yes, I am married. My wife’s name is Natalie and she earns majority of our income these days.
Mindy: So Natalie brings in enough to cover the rest of the expenses and you still have money left over to save for retirement. Is Nat do you combine finances?
Guest: Yeah, we completely combine finances. So when we got married, I had a sizable net worth and she came with a sizable student loan amount. So we’ve been kind of working up from there. So her job pays for student loans, it pays for our mortgage and it gets us both health insurance. So that kind of takes some of the pressure off in that regard as well.
Mindy: How much are you putting away every month or every year?
Guest: I was just doing so I said we do quarterly um audits and this last quarter we put away 23,500. So annually that comes out to like 94,000. I think that’s around a 45% savings rate for us. So I’m pretty happy with that considering I work less than 20 hours a week.
Scott: And so what what does like a non-work day during the week look like for you with this lifestyle?
Guest: This is like my favorite question that you guys ask. What are you doing on a Tuesday? For me, it’s usually a bike ride or run. Uh we train for adventure races. So there’s always something to be training for. Yesterday, we went for a run. I got to have lunch with my wife before she went to work. I got to go on a bike ride. I got to garden, just like work on some furniture that I’m fixing up. Just a really chill day, no emails, no calls, nothing.
Scott: By the way, sorry for a quick tangent here. I need to shout out Stacy from years ago. This is probably six or seven years ago. She has a uh mushroom farm out in Pennsylvania, fourth generation mushroom farmer. And uh Mindy hates mushrooms and so when she came out to visit, she somewhere she came out to Denver. I I I’m reaching back for years, but she brought a huge box of mushrooms and and it really I I I enjoyed it and and and you know, that grossed the heck out of Mindy. So, I think, I think I think that’s like literally Mindy’s nightmare is to have a side job of working at a mushroom farm.
Mindy: I wouldn’t do it.
Scott: So Mindy, what what do mushrooms grow in again?
Mindy: Mushrooms grow in poop. Everything that was in the poop is now in the mushroom. So I don’t eat poop. therefore I don’t eat mushrooms. and I know there’s gonna be mushroom farmers calling me telling me that that’s not how it goes and you know, good for your mushrooms. I’m glad somebody loves them. It’s not me.
Scott: So let’s go back a second here to money. You said at 27 or so, you had 110 grand in your 401K and this was the bulk of your financial net worth. We had another 10, 15 or so that we invested in real estate that kind of resulted in uh that much being lost essentially over several painful years. What does the portfolio look like today for you that supports this lifestyle?
Guest: Yeah. So today it looks like I want to say I have around 190 in my individual retirement account, which again, I’m going to call Coast and based on projections, I’m pretty sure that’s gonna be in the 2 million range at 65. Um so I’m completely okay with that our brokerage account is sitting somewhere near 330. We have some home equity, which I don’t really count home equity or I don’t count it as um a liability either. I just kind of leave it out of our numbers. And then we have the student loan debt that we’re paying off and then my wife has her retirement accounts as well.
Scott: Where does that student loan debt sit? Where did it start and where are you at now?
Guest: It started around 165 and I want to say we’re down to 130.
Scott: We have to kind of address that we we have a little bit of coast fi here and we’ve got a little bit of wife fi here as part of this the story here. So what what is it? What are the expenses that you cover as part of this? Because it sounds like um your wife’s covering the mortgage payment and some of the housing costs here. So how do you split that in the in the arrangement arrangement that you guys have?
Guest: So we don’t really do any splitting of any kind. It all goes into a joint account. We pay everything out of the joint account and yeah, we just look at it as our couple’s money. And yeah, we don’t think of anything separate except for her retirement account and my retirement account. That’s just kind of like our backup if something were to happen in the relationship, we always have that to fall back on. So yeah, we don’t really split anything specifically.
Scott: And so you said you’re accumulating this 23 24,000 a quarter. So little shy of 100 grand a year. Where does that go? and what is the kind of wealth building plan that you have here in, in your household?
Guest: Yeah. So it kind of is a split between loan pay down and investing in index funds. It really depends on the month. Um so sometimes we’ll look at the market and be like, all right, it’s lower and we’ll put a little bit more towards that. Sometimes the loans are in forebearance. We’ve had a lot of that over the last couple of years. So when it’s not accumulating interest, we just kind of put that on the back burner. And then it just kind of depends on what’s going on. We’ve also invested a lot in our home just to make it, you know, what we want it to be. So mostly simple index funds and then loan pay down is what our portfolio looks like.
Mindy: So I have a question back to the sharing of finances. Carl and I share our finances. We have always shared our finances. We got married, we went on our honeymoon and then we came back and combined everything. Are your parents still married?
Guest: No.
Mindy: Oh, okay. That’s, that’s, uh, fascinating because I think our parents are both still married and that’s what I thought like was kind of a, a precursor for, oh yeah, we’re just gonna combine finances. First of all, I think it’s great that you combine finances. Um I’m gonna probably make people angry when I say this. I think that’s that’s one of the keys to a strong marriage is to it’s not your money, it’s not my money, it’s our money because it’s not you against Natalie. It’s the two of you against the world. and when that’s your mindset in your marriage, it’s a stronger foundation. You’re not keeping score with, well, I put in 30, so now you gotta put in 30. Well, I don’t have 30, you know, I think that’s fantastic and I just wanted to point that out. Yay for combining finances because it it just makes everything so much easier. There were lots of times when Carl made, made many years that he made way more than I did, and now I make more than he does, ’cause I’ve worked and he doesn’t. That’s a key right there. And you are wife fi, that’s a term that Carl created, but also what if your wife wants to retire? You’ve got this 165,000 in student loans and you only work part-time. What if she wanted to work part-time? Like have you had this conversation yet?
Guest: Yeah, we definitely have had this conversation. It usually boils down to we need to tackle these loans first. And then, you know, once that’s paid off, we don’t need as much as we have currently been investing. you know, honestly, we don’t need half as much as we earn if we didn’t have the loans and we didn’t continue to invest. So I don’t see any problem with that. I see a problem with health insurance. I see a problem with the loans, but other than that, we’ve had the conversation and like I said, my job is so flexible. I could pick up as much as I want. I could get two jobs. I usually have two jobs. I’ve got my MBA. like just the possibilities are pretty endless, I feel like.
Scott: Let’s go through this real quick. The student loans you’re going to accumulate 94,000 I think you said somewhere in that ballpark this year. Is that pretax accumulation primarily like the 401K, the retirement accounts, that sort of that’s primarily going into?
Guest: That would be maxing hers out. So 20, is that 23, something like that. But everything else is after.
Scott: And so what, what is the rate on these student loans?
Guest: We have been paying off the highest interest ones first. Um so I think the average now is about 62 to 65.
Scott: And is that what you’re doing? Is that where all the additional cash is going is straight to these student loans or is it being invested?
Guest: It’s about 50 50. So we’ll at the end of the month, I like to take our bank account and put it in like a false sense of scarcity. So whatever we have that’s over our comfortable limit that we like to keep in our checking account, half of it goes to our Vanguard account and half of it goes to student loan paydown.
Mindy: What is your timeline for paying off the student loans?
Guest: We don’t really have a specific timeline. You know, this year we’ve paid off at least 15,000. So I mean, at 6.2%, 6.5%, we’re not aggressively going after it. And it’s been in forbearance for, I want to say like a year now. So again, like that’s not been our top priority. I like to kind of mix it up and do a little bit towards investing and then some towards debt paydown.
Mindy: And and how about the mortgage that you have on the house? What’s the what’s the rate on that guy?
Guest: It is 5.99.
Mindy: This is in that squishy area, Scott, where you’re like, do I pay it off? Do I not pay it off? I’m going to give you a bit of homework to just look at all of your numbers and okay, if we aggressively paid down the student loans and the mortgage, what would our obligation be just to keep food on the table and how many hours do you have to work? Does she have the option of going part-time?
Guest: Yeah, she definitely does. She’s a veterinarian, which is also a high demand job. Yeah, so she could work part-time at hospitals, just pick up when they need it.
Mindy: Yeah. So I can see a vision of your life where your student loans are gone, your mortgage payment is gone. and now instead of spending $9,000 a month, you’re spending three or four. So maybe out of four weeks, you work five or six shifts and she works five or six shifts and then you’ve got all this time to travel. and maybe you could front load and work like a whole week and then have three weeks off. and she could do the same thing and then still have the same amount of money but not have the same amount of monthly obligations. So if that sounds even remotely interesting to you, just like jump in your numbers and see how long that would take because if you could just bang it out in like two years, three years and then have all this freedom, did you say you’re 37 now?
Guest: I’m 32.
Mindy: 32? Oh, I thought you said 10 years.
Guest: I’ve been a nurse for 10 years.
Mindy: Oh, okay, sorry. Okay. So at like 30, imagine this, you’re 35 years old and all you get to do is travel all the time.
Guest: I kind of already do that.
Scott: Yeah, it sounds like she’s already got that. Yeah.
Guest: Yeah, like next month I’m going to Colorado twice. We’re doing these adventure races twice in March. We got a family vacation in June, like we almost always take an international trip, go somewhere to do like a hiking trip every month. We really kind of already have a semi-retired life.
Mindy: Then just keep on keeping on. This is awesome. So you chose a career that had steady employment because you didn’t know what you wanted to do with your life. and I totally understand that. I think it’s really unfair that we ask 17 and 18 year old kids. Okay, now pick a career that you’re gonna do forever. How many people listening are actually working in the career that they studied? I mean, Alyssa is and Scott sort of is and I’m not at all. I think there’s a lot of people who are like, well, yeah, it sounded great when I was 18, but then I grew up. So you made a smart decision. You got into nursing. You can always get a job in nursing. Nursing is fairly AI proof, right?
Guest: I would say so.
Mindy: The same with veterinarian. The issue with veterinary school, as highlighted here is that it’s really, really expensive and you take out student loans similar to people doctors, but you don’t necessarily make that kind of income as well, although she’s making, sounds like she’s making a pretty good income.
Guest: Yeah, the specialty she’s in um is emergency medicine. So it’s a higher starting salary and then she also gets quarterly commission pay.
Mindy: One of the things I think that I’m like struggling with in this conversation is it’s so freaking easy for you guys. Right? Like what you just described here, like finances is something that well, you know, 250 million plus Americans, 300 million Americans struggle with on a daily basis and obsess over and it’s just a complete non-issue for the two of you in the way that you’ve set up your life, it sounds like your wife likes her job uh and is content with what’s going on there and I’ve ever want to, she can, you can grind it out for two years and pay off your loans. You’ve front loaded your retirement savings. so, you know, if they, if the next 30 years go anything close to historical averages, you’ll be set for a comfortable retirement number there. And then you just kind of do whatever you want picking up a shift every once in a while because the lines of work you chose are compatible with that type of work and it’s very interchangeable. You can basically slot in in any city in the country or any, any small town in the country really and either pick up nursing shifts or pick up veterinarian ships. Why is it so easy for you guys and so hard for everybody else? Like we spend our whole life, our whole career 10 years interviewing 750 people on this podcast and you know, like maybe three or four times I’ve come across a story like this where it’s just like, well, there’s no challenge here. It’s easy, life is good. We’re rolling, right? One of them was um what was his name, Mindy? the kid who who basically went to that tech program, got the Salesforce job, house hacked once and he’s like done at 27.
Mindy: Oh, was that Javier?
Scott: Javier, yeah, I think Javier, yeah, but like that was another one that like these they, these stick out over time, these, these stories about that, but is that is that how you feel about it? Like, is it remarkably easy for you guys? And it seems like, why is everyone, why is it so challenging for everyone else?
Guest: No, I don’t think that, um so I started working when I was 16 through high school, I had up to three jobs at a time. I was able to get some pretty significant scholarships for college and get help from my parents for the rest. I was working all through college. I was able to buy a starter home right out of school. I house hacked unintentionally as a nurse. I was working with all these travel nurses, they needed a place to stay. We’re working the same shifts, we’re sleeping at the same time. I’d like I’d never even knew they were in my house. and you know, I was making almost my entire mortgage off of those. And then just I got great advice from my dad and my stepmom mostly. they have both been financial planners in their careers. And one of the best pieces of of advice that my dad gave me was as soon as I go from working as a nurse aid to working as a nurse and my income quadruples automatically start putting 25 to 30% away. and I did that because I wasn’t going to notice it. I had only ever been making like $10 an hour. So as soon as I started making more than that, I immediately started front loading my retirement. I bought that starter home. I was house hacking. I got lucky on multiple real estate deals. I’ve owned several houses and they’ve all appreciated in kind of an insane way. So, I think just in a lot of ways I looked out, I got good advice, timing has been on my side. I started aggressively investing around the time that the markets have just gone crazy. So I don’t know that it was easy so much as lucky and I did all the work in the first 10 years not knowing what I was working towards and now here I am at 32 and I have been working part-time since 27.
Scott: But I think that’s true though because like every single real estate investor who started in between 2013 and 2019 got way luckier than you did on that journey, right? Like, so I also think we should call out that you basically are a double income household with no kids. And that that just makes the game so much easier, I think for a lot of folks as well, right? Kids come in and change the equation because then there’s a stability component like we want a house with a mortgage in a nice area, it’s gonna probably stretch us a little bit. And there’s child care for this first five years which really slows things down for a lot of folks or just a stay at home parent which reduces income. So I think, I think that’s a component of it as well that we’re seeing in here that makes it less like the financial freedom aspect, the ability to kind of do what you want with the most of your day and easily cover those baseline expenses even with loans and a mortgage, it seems like that’s that’s playing into this as well.
Guest: Yeah. So we are in the process of starting a family. We’ve been working on that for the last six months or so. We’ve hit some setbacks, but we’re getting there. So we know that that expense is coming. We also know that with both of our schedules being very flexible, we each work 12 hour shifts, so we never work more than three or four in a week. We can work it out to where there’s always somebody home. We wouldn’t have to pay for child care if we didn’t, you know, want to. We’ve thought about that. We know that expense is coming, but I think there are going to be some ways that we can mitigate it a little bit.
Scott: That’s awesome. And it changes some things here. How does it make you feel going into that process being Coast-Fi? Like does that does that take off a ton of pressure going into that situation for you guys?
Guest: Yeah, I mean, it definitely does. Just knowing that like we are going to be able to be home a lot. The way we’re having to go about starting a family is very time intensive, lots of appointments and I’ve never had an issue being there for those. Neither of us have getting off work for those things. And yeah, just knowing that if we needed to change our allocation from paying into our brokerage account or maxing out the 401k and focus more on childcare or those types of expenses, we have that buffer in our current, I guess income and even if we were to cut down on hours, we’d still have a pretty good ratio, I guess.
Scott: This is really interesting because we I, I got a question yesterday from a listener, they have a child and they’re think about starting, you know, getting having other child and they’re own like, like not quite coast by, they want to hit that goal, they want to buy a house at the same time and it’s like you can’t do all of that. But the way your situation is set up, you don’t have to worry about any of that. It’s just all gonna be there. The only challenge I think you’re gonna have is I don’t think your 12-hour adventure race days, I think those are coming to an end here. So pretty, pretty soon if as your family starts to grow on this front. So that, that that’s not gonna fly in the Chunch household these days. So,
Guest: yeah, we might have to cut back to.
Scott: That’s when Grandma, grandma and grandpa come in.
Guest: That’s true. We are within an hour of grandparents, so.
Scott: Okay, maybe maybe that doesn’t even change for you guys.
Mindy: Well, I see that you both chose careers that are flexible, always in demand and even, you know, you didn’t think of this at the time, but they’re AI proof. Anybody who’s listening who’s like, oh, I wonder how she did it or or how can I do it too. Pick a flexible career that pays well that’s always in demand that’s AI proof. Nursing, veterinary school.
Guest: just about anything in healthcare.
Mindy: Yeah, anything in healthcare, which is more schooling, but like nursing is not, that’s a four-year degree, right? Or is that the master’s?
Guest: Yeah, I got a four-year degree. You can do a two-year degree. Eventually they expect you to get your four year, but typically your job will pay for that.
Mindy: oh, so you could go and get a two year degree and then get a job. You’re not making as much as the four-year degree and then your company will pay for you to get the rest of those four-year degrees. So you’re coming out of school without a lot of debt. You’re doing like I could never be a nurse ’cause I can’t handle the side of blood, but like there’s a lot of things that that prevent me from being a nurse. But if that’s not you, then go look at a nursing. Is there a shortage of nurses right now?
Guest: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Mindy: And there’s a shortage. So you’ve got job security on top of job security, on top of job security. I mean, I think that you weren’t lucky at all. I think you were very smart.
Guest: Yeah, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I went to school. My family was like, you know, you seem like you would have the personality for a nurse in healthcare is something my mom always did. And so, yeah, I kind of always had that in the back of my mind and nothing else really like popped out as like, this is what you should do. So it was like, all right, I’ll start pre-nursing and change if I figure it out and I never figured it out. So here I am.
Mindy: Well, I think you have an awesome story. I think it’s super repeatable. Anybody who is listening to this, if you’ve got high school, college kids in your life, listen to this episode and see how easy Alyssa’s life has been that she’s been able to set up a really great life for herself and she has the freedom. I mean, do you feel free? You said when you were working, you had a remote schedule making six figures, You had a great title. You had a four-hour commute. It’s four hour work week, not a four-hour commute to work week.
Guest: yes.
Mindy: but other than the four-hour commute, you had a really sweet gig and you said you didn’t feel free. Do you feel free now?
Guest: Absolutely. I mean, I live by the philosophy that I schedule work around my life, not the other way around, which is what most people have to do.
Mindy: I love that so much. That is awesome. That’s got to be a quote.
Guest: So I never have to say no to a trip. I never have to say no to any kind of event. I never have to say no to a race or something for my health, something for my family. I just schedule my work around it.
Mindy: Okay. Alyssa, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I think it is a fantastic story and you might not have gotten here on purpose. You started off as a nurse, just because you didn’t know what it is you wanted to do, but you have created such an awesome life for yourself. I am so happy for you guys and I wish you the best of luck with the babies too.
Guest: Thank you. It was great talking to you guys.
Scott: Great talking to you. I’m just stumped. I’m just I’m so used to having like a problem or a challenge to attack here or whatever. and you have no problems and no like you’ve no like you’ve just figured it out. like it’s exactly what you want already. And there and the numbers are not huge, but it’s still like it’s still a solved problem and that’s like that’s like a new I have to like grapple with that mentally because it’s just challenging the frameworks that I’ve built for my my the whole time we’ve been doing this podcast for 10 years. So thank you for that. it’s awesome and congratulations.
Guest: Thanks. I apologize for giving you this challenge.
Scott: Like I don’t know, I don’t know how to do with it. So uh but thank it’s, it’s very impressive what you what you guys are doing and I’m just like, why why why do I make it so hard? Why why is it so hard in some of the other other other situations. So I gotta think about it.
Guest: I’d be happy to answer follow up questions.
Mindy: All right, Alyssa, thank you again for your time today and we’ll talk to you again soon.
Guest: All right, see ya.
Mindy: All right, Scott, that was Alyssa and Alyssa’s fantastic life. What did you think about her story?
Scott: I can’t I’m just like frustrated that we do this podcast every day for 10 years and she just makes it look so easy. when you really internalize these concepts and figure it out. you know, the things that she has going for her, you know, in her situation specifically to her, she didn’t create like a huge amount of student loan debt for herself. She went into a career field that has very steady demand. It has shift work, which you know, I think is there’s some drawbacks to, but also the there’s tremendous flexibility that goes along with that. She can work a weekend day or during the week or, you know, overnight, like whatever, whatever that looks like, she can flex up and flex down in that career field and that seems like it’s likely to sustain for a very long period of time in her profession. Her, her spouse has the same thing going on in terms of the flexibility and then they frontloaded their retirement savings and that’s the compounding, you know, that we’ve all learned about the compound math of this. And so when you take those together and you apply the sophistication that she has with finance, the comfort she has with compound interest and the basic budgeting and and and cash flow, they’re still able to accumulate and have all of this freedom and flexibility right now. So in the same situation, my mind was and and would have been going into, okay, how do I accumulate more, more, more, more, more and finish the play to true financial independence? I think there’s a big case to be made for what she’s doing as a more sophisticated overall approach to personal finance.
Mindy: Well, and it solves the problem of getting social interaction, having a job. How many people have we talked to in regular life, not even on this show who are like, oh yeah, I could be retired, but I don’t know what to do afterwards. So I’m going to keep working or I was retired and then I went back to work because I had this big hole in my life. She works one shift a week. She gets her job done and then she’s got a bunch of free time and then she does it again the next week. Same with her wife. That’s fantastic. That that that solves a lot of problems. The identity issue that I think a lot of people don’t realize could be a really big issue for them. She doesn’t have that problem. I think that this is a such a great solution to all of these little things that are going on. Oh, the market’s down and it’s been down for a while and I’m a little nervous. Great, pick up another shift, pick up two more shifts. start working full time for a little while. Like you don’t have to be so worried when you’ve, like you said, this, this is shift work, which isn’t all that great for a lot of reasons, but it’s perfect for this reason.
Scott: By the time AI and robots, you know, make, make her job obsolete in nursing, the semi-retired podcast co-hosting professional will be long dead. So she’s in a very good and flexible spot there. So, you know, I I’m jealous of that.
Mindy: AI and robots are going to take her job any time soon. All right, Scott, we get out of here?
Scott: Let’s do it.
Mindy: Okay, my dear listeners, do you want more financial information? You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at Bigger Pockets Money. You can go to biggerpocketsmoney.com/newsletter to sign up for our once a week newsletter where we send you articles, additional information and we are starting to send out copies of the ultimate guide to Fi, which is our book every week. We release a new chapter. So if you’re not on our newsletter list, you should be go to biggerpocketsmoney.com/newsletter and sign up. All right, that wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying farewell Gazelle.
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