Mindy: Today we are going to break down some of the most common portfolio mistakes people make on the path to financial independence. Of course, this is always for entertainment purposes only and isn’t investing advice.
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my has never made a mistake in his portfolio co-host, Scott Trench.
Scott: Thanks, Mindy. I’m going to decline to respond to that, uh, introduction there. We all make mistakes in our portfolio, myself included. But Mindy and I have observed a few newer portfolio mistakes over the last few years that we hope will be helpful to you as you think about constructing your portfolio and think about how you’re finishing out your fire journey.
Mindy: Okay, Scott, the first mistake that we see, especially with a lot of our Finance Friday guests is hoarding cash without a goal for that cash, without any reason to have that cash on hand. We have spoken with people like Farnoosh Torabi, who is a content creator in the financial independence space, who is also self-employed. And for her, I believe she said she holds 18 months of spending in liquid or cash accounts because that’s what makes her comfortable. She’s thought about it, she has a reason and she’s doing it on purpose. We talk to a lot of people, I’ll go through their financial statement. I’m like, why do you have $250,000 in cash? Oh, I’m gonna I’m going to do something with that. I’m thinking about buying a house in a few years. Well, $250,000 is a lot of money to just be sitting around without an actual purpose. So don’t hoard cash unless you have a reason for it. You should absolutely have an emergency fund which should be in cash. You should absolutely have enough cash that you’re comfortable, but you should also have a reason for why that number makes you comfortable.
Scott: I think that the mistake is in lacking a coherent philosophy or coherent, you know, investment approach that interweaves all of these things. And so you can have a lot of cash. right? Warren Buffett has a tremendous amount of cash, right? There’s a reason behind that. There’s an investment, there’s an investment decision being made there. But I think that, you know, hoarding cash with a impending sense of doom or just because um without actually having a coherent intellectual defense of that is the mistake people are making in their portfolio, not necessarily how much cash you have. There’s there’s all sorts of reasons to have cash at any given point in time. So that’s the mistake, but yes, I think we see people hoarding way too much cash without ability to deploy it because they’re just waiting for something to some sign from from the the ether to to about when they’re gonna deploy it.
Mindy: Now, in the beginning of your F journey, once you have your emergency fund, having a lot of cash sitting around without a purpose is not really going to benefit you. But towards the end of your fi journey, as you’re moving towards your drawdown strategy, having a specific amount of cash like uh, Emma Vonزي was on the show a few months ago talking about having two years of spending in cash as sort of a buffer for any sequence of returns risks. Having that much cash towards the end is a more thoughtful approach to your drawdown strategy. Again, this is something you need to come up with. This is not financial advice, but in the beginning of your your investment journey, maybe having a ton of cash outside of your emergency fund isn’t the best choice for you. Again, sit down and think about why you want to have your money where it is and make sure that it’s according to your investment plan. All right, Scott, what’s a second mistake?
Scott: Uh second mistake is staying in accumulation mode perpetually throughout the entire financial independence journey. I think this is a real risk to the fire community. I’ve been banging on this drum for a while now. a and the market keeps going up. So, you know, a good a good result is different from a good bet in a lot of cases here. But I think that there’s there’s a effectively no research that supports a 4% withdrawal rate in 100% equities. So if that’s your plan, something’s wrong there. Now, it may not be a mistake if you’re just going to stay in equities and just let your portfolio soar so far past the safe withdrawal rates that you can spend something much lower than a 4% withdrawal rate based on the portfolio size. That’s fine if you want to stay in all equities, but it is not defensible with any research that we are aware of to stay 100% in equities and withdraw at the 4% rule. So if that’s your plan, you need to begin rebalancing your portfolio. I think a lot of people consider themselves FI but are entirely or almost overwhelmingly in broad-based market cap weighted index funds without any bond exposure, any insurance whatsoever against drawdown risk.
Mindy: Yes, I think people should really start considering rebalancing their portfolio the closer they get to FI, like within three to five years of reaching financial independence. you’re not selling equities to buy bonds, you’re just changing where you’re putting your money. Instead of buying more equities, now you’re starting to buy bonds instead. again, this goes back to the investment plan that you have. if you are retiring based on the 4% rule, that portfolio was a 60/40 portfolio. so make sure you’re actually playing by the rules of the game that you’re playing. Okay, Scott. Third mistake, not optimizing for taxes to a point. This is where a flat fee financial advisor can be hugely helpful. I know that Carl and I have made some tax mistakes just because we never got any sort of advice from somebody who really, really knows about taxes. But we have some investments in taxable accounts that shouldn’t be in taxable accounts. We have investments that are in pre-tax accounts that would be a better choice for us to have in a taxable account. So when you are starting to invest, right at the very beginning, this isn’t such a concern. But as you get a larger amount of wealth, you need to be putting the types of investments in the right types of of accounts.
Scott: I think this is such a nuanced mistake because there’s like the the technical tax code today and how do I optimize to keep my tax bill low today. And there’s the long-term tax planning strategy. And this is where I think you’d, you know, I make some CFPs very uncomfortable because I think for the fire community, if you have, you know, a million dollars in your pre-tax 401K and you’re in your forties or fifties, that is very likely to swell to a pretty large number by the time, you know, you you you hit 65 or, you know, begin getting into RMD territory. It’s not a normal American or median American problem. It’s a fire community or a uh, you know, financial independence podcast listener problem that they’re going to have. And so, you know, at that point, you have to make some decisions. you you may be in a higher tax bracket in retirement in that particular situation marginally. They maybe get into this whole discussion about effective versus marginal taxes, right? Effective is what for all the income you earned, what is the average across all of that that you pay? And marginal is what’s the taxes on the last dollar that you pay. And marginal is really where the decision is made for to contribute to a 401k versus a Roth. So anyways, you have to have a a strategy about how you think your tax situation is going to evolve across your life. And you have to be right, not just conservative or aggressive, but right because the stakes are pretty high here. And then when you actually begin to decumulate in early retirement, that matters because going into the next cliff is a serious opportunity cost if you don’t need to do it. And today, here in 2026, the primary tax planning challenge for early retirees is staying under the Magi cliff, the modified adjusted gross income cliff that allows you to qualify for Affordable Care Act subsidies. As preposterous as that sounds, as a, you know, a multi-millionaire early retiree staying below a federal poverty line cliff to qualify for health care subsidies, that is actually one of the fundamental constraints today in the fire community. And you want to be careful about how you’re thinking about this, right? You want to make sure you’re not over extracting ordinary income from your portfolio early in your fire journey. And you want to make sure you’re realizing gains up to but with a nice healthy margin of safety below that uh that magi cliff. So anyways, I’m getting very complex here, but it is complex. I don’t know how to communicate it more simply than that. This is a hard, hard problem to solve and you gotta really, you know, roll up your sleeves and be a pretty sophisticated DIYer to do it. You absolutely can. But you may also want to this may be the place to hire a a flat fee financial planner.
Mindy: Yeah. How thick is that tax code now? Isn’t it like 18 feet thick or something like that? You can’t possibly know all of this. Having somebody who is an expert in tax planning, look at your statements, look at your situation and look at your goals and say, this is what you should do, can be invaluable. The money you spend on a flat fee advisor could be grossly outweighed by the money you save by making the changes now while you’re still in accumulation mode, while you’re still in the lower tax brackets. If you’re interested in working with a flat fee financial advisor, Bigger Pockets Money has partnered with domain money to learn more about them, go to biggerpocketsmoney.com/cfp.
Scott: Again, the word optimize is so loaded because what are you optimizing for? You know, a a lot of CFPs and CPAs will optimize you for today’s low tax bill. That’s great. I disagree with that for a big portion of the financial independence community right now because you’re probably going to be wealthier than the average American when you hit traditional retirement age if historical returns are any help whatsoever over the next 20, 30 years. And that means different tax planning strategy for the long term, in my view.
Speaker 1: When spring hits, some people suddenly just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized. Whether or not that hits you, Monarch will do your financial spring cleaning for you. One dashboard gets your entire financial life organized. No more clutter, no more mess, no more scattered logins, just accounts, investments, property, and more, all in one place. One of my favorite parts is the Sankey diagram. Every month, I open it up and literally watch the flow of money. It shows exactly where every dollar is going from income to all of my spending categories. It makes it so much easier to spot what’s working and what needs tweaking. Get your first year of Monarch for half off, just $50 with the promo code Pockets. Use the code Pockets at monarch.com to get your first year half off at just 50 bucks. That’s 50% off your first year at monarch.com with the code POCKETS.
Speaker 2: You may have seen some of the headlines about trouble in private credit. Many of those funds are floating rate corporate lenders with multi-year loans and exits tied to M&A activity. Pine Financial Group’s Fund 6 is a different animal. It’s short duration bridge and hard money real estate loans, senior secured with personal guarantees. Pine has charged borrowers 10 to 14% consistently since 2008. That funds an 8% monthly preferred return to investors plus an 80-20 profit split above the hurdle paid each January, targeting a 9 to 10% annual distribution. Real estate debt can be a way to diversify against stocks, bonds, and real estate equity. But they’ve originated over a billion dollars since 2008 with 75% repeat borrowers and they offer a nine-month initial lockup and then 90-day redemptions. You can learn more at biggerpocketsmoney.com/pine. This is a paid advertisement. I, Scott Trench, am an investor in one of Pine’s funds. Investing involves risk, including the loss of principle. See offering documents at biggerpocketsmoney.com/pine.
Speaker 1: I’m skeptical of a lot of financial products, but life insurance isn’t one of them, at least not term life. For the vast majority of you listening, term life is simply the right answer, and the smartest way to buy it isn’t one big policy, it’s a ladder. Your need for coverage isn’t flat, it declines over time. You’ve got a 30-year mortgage, a couple of young kids, maybe a spouse, mid-career. In 15 years, the mortgage is going to be smaller and the kids are almost launched. So instead of buying one giant 30-year policy you’ll overpay for, you stack a few, say a 10-year, a 20-year, and a 30-year layer. So your total coverage steps down as your actual obligations step down. You only pay for what you actually need when you need it. Ethos is a platform that helps you find life insurance 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds and apply in minutes. There’s no medical exam, you just answer a few health questions online. You can get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies are as low as 30 a month. That makes building a ladder genuinely fast. Get your free quote at ethos.com/bpmoney. That’s ethos.com/bpmoney. Application times may vary and rates may vary.
Mindy: Okay, Scott, what’s the fourth mistake?
Scott: Is ignoring estate planning. So this is a this is a check the box item that I think needs to be checked for for many families. And you just have to update it and do the work. Beneficiary designations, a dead box, where, you know, your loved ones can access all of your accounts in those areas. I think that one thing that’s overblown and maybe somebody who’s very sophisticated estate planner can challenge me is thinking about things like irrevocable trusts and gifting to get under the estate tax exclusion for all but a small portion of the fire community or the financial independence community. This will not be an issue, at least not yet, not today because those estate tax gift exclusions are so large, like $15 million per person. So I I think that unless you’re really starting to get into that number or think you’re going to blow past it in your lifetime, that’s not something I am worrying about personally right now, but may, you know, if things go ridiculously well over the next, you know, 20, 30 years and I begin to have that problem, maybe then that’s the time to to start thinking about that. But a basic estate plan with revocable trusts and clear designations about what’s going to happen in the event of your passing, those matter greatly.
Mindy: Yeah, you already have an estate plan, even if you don’t. It’s the intestacy laws of your state, and they are not what you want your money to do. So you need to speak with an estate planning attorney. If you visit legaltpodkast.com/seeresources, S E E Resources, there is a list of elder law and estate planning attorneys in all 50 states that my friend Jenny Rosell has put together. She hosts the Legal T podcast talking about the different issues that can come up during estate planning. Carl and I, I am kind of embarrassed to say, Carl and I just did our first estate plan this year. It’s 2026. We were very remiss in not doing this ahead of time. I’m so thankful that something didn’t happen to one of us because that would have been a whole mess to kind of unwind legally if one of us would have died with no will. So now we’re all taken care of. We’re actually going to have a conversation with our estate planning attorney to talk about all the things that could have gone wrong and talk about all the things that we did in our estate plan. It is so important. And even if you’re at the very beginning of your journey, you need to have something in place. Something written down and signed and this is your estate plan. And as you go, you can always make changes to it. But if you have nothing, you die, it’s called dying in testate, and you are subject to the intestacy laws of your state and they’re not fun.
Scott: Yeah, no one likes the word in testacies. That’s for sure. And I will say that this is not a very fun exercise. You’re going to spend several 100 or several thousand dollars depending on how big your portfolio is, how complex your situation is. You got to go through every account and name a beneficiary. You need to separate out property that’s, you know, yours, your spouses, marital property, those types of things. You need to decide what you’re going to do in the event that you pass, what happens with your kids, what happens if your kids if you pass and the person that you just has needed to watch over your kids passes as well and down that line. These are hard conversations. This is not a fun exercise. We did this when our firstborn child was born and we’re very glad we did. And I will also say you have to revisit this every once in a while. So, Mindy, I’ve had this in place since, you know, shortly after the birth of my oldest daughter. But I have, I things have drifted in the last year or two and I I have to update some of those things and I haven’t got around to it. So it’s, you know, important to keep things up to date and, you know, revisit this periodically.
Mindy: Yeah, and Scott, you are way ahead of the curve or you were way ahead of me. Uh, my oldest daughter is 19 and a half and I just did it this year. So don’t be like me, be like Scott.
Scott: I do think that there’s a case to be made that you do not need to hire an expensive estate planning attorney and do all of this work necessarily, depending on your portfolio size, the complexity of your situation and whether you have are married and have children. There’s levels of this that are appropriate. So this is not a spend several thousand dollars on a first-class estate planning authority until it’s time to do that for your in your situation. There are plenty of cheaper ways to do that online that you can get this done passibly in the early stages of your wealth building journey.
Mindy: Yes, definitely. I had to spend several thousand dollars and it was money well spent. He asked me a lot of really great questions and I had to think about a lot of things before we were able to put everything down on paper.
Scott: Also, I think I think there’s this is a evolution thing over time because again, you have to make decisions that are philosophical and your lawyer should not be giving you that philosophy. Maybe they give you a little bit, but I think like there’s decisions like, for example, I might make a different decision about how and when my daughters get access to the estate if I were to pass away when they’re three and one right now, right? Then I’m I might make a different decision when they’re 18 depending on how things go. So there will be things that I’ll be revisited over time and I’m not I’m not ready to say I’ve committed to a lifelong approach for how to distribute funds to my, my daughters who I I’m just starting to get to know what their personalities will be like and how they’ll handle things as they grow up.
Mindy: Yep, it’s absolutely more of a fluid document than you think it is, but it does need to be written down. All right, Scott, what is mistake number five?
Scott: The fifth mistake is is not having a clear withdrawal strategy. So how are you going to uh actually access these funds, right? The starts complex and gets harder depending on how things go, right? So if you are a very simple index fund investor and you have some money in your 401K, some money in your Roth IRA, some money in your after tax brokerage account and some money in your HSA, which is kind of like a text bookish fire accumulation portfolio, you know, end result, then how you withdraw matters, right? From those portfolios for the tax reasons we talked about. And there’s an order of operations. I think again, we go back to the tax planning to and through early retirement from Sean Mullaney and Cody Garrett. But it may look something like this. I’m going to use up the $32,200 standard deduction for a couple married filing jointly. And I’m going to use up the entirety of the long-term capital gains tax bracket, which can be up to like $98,000 plus for a couple married filing jointly. And then from there, I’m going to say how close am I am I pushing to the Affordable Care Act Magi cliff, which is 80% of the the federal poverty line. I’m only going to stop maybe before I get to the full 0% long-term capital gains tax bracket to make sure I don’t go over that cliff or maybe I’m going to push through that and actually go to the next layer and begin doing Roth conversions. This is a challenging exercise, right? It it’s part and parcel to our tax optimization strategy. And you’ve got to have a strategy to deal with this if you want to make the most of your situation. That’s the beginning of the complexity. It gets more complex if you have rental real estate or a pension or some other some form of income or, you know, alternative investments that are going to produce unpredictable or even forecastable tax impacts. So that’s all really important to determining how much and when you’re going to withdraw your money from your portfolio.
Mindy: And I can hear people saying, oh, I don’t need that because I’m at the beginning of my journey. No, you need that at the beginning of your journey so that you know where to put your funds. If you’re planning on retiring at age 40, putting all of your money in your 401k is going to sign you up for either 10% penalties or 72Ts and the 72T has to be taken until you turn 59 and a half or for five years, which ever is longer. So you’re signing yourself up for 19 years of 72T withdrawals from your 401k or you can think about it differently and start putting some in your after tax brokerage or some in your Roth IRA or you decide that yes, I am going to have 19 years worth of 72T withdrawals, but at least you’re doing it on purpose. So start thinking about your withdrawal strategy as soon as you start investing.
Scott: This is going to be a loaded word to call it a mistake. but a I I would even say like a base case for a fire accumulation journey is max out the 401k and HSA for most of your working career, right? and then you retire early. the the problem with that is that that that really leaves you with one option, which is finish this play and then stop working. And you may find and we find here at Bigger Pockets Money that life doesn’t bend quite perfectly to this fictional pure fire journey. Many people on the road to fire find that they get married after, you know, 5, 10 years into their journey and their spouse continues to work. Well, now you have income of some sort and that money in the 401k is very unattractive to withdraw at that point in time, right? that’s a good problem on there, but that may not actually solve your needs. So I think that the right approach, the the one that we would I would I would bias you towards is to balance this this accumulation to have some in the 401k, some in the after tax brokerage account, some in the Roth and some in the HSA. And I think that if you can get to the end state and have your portfolio balanced about a third third third then pre-tax, post-tax and Roth deciding which which third is going to be the biggest based on reasonable sets of circumstances, you’re in a high tax bracket while you’re working, maybe make the big third year 401k, that’s great year pre-tax 401k. That’s really an ideal circumstance because you want this complexity, this optionality, I think in early retirement to have multiple places to draw from. You don’t want it all in one bucket that really limits your options. I think the pursuit of fire and then actually achieving financial independence is all about options.
Mindy: Absolutely. Options is the whole reason we’re pursuing financial independence in the first place. All right, Scott, the sixth mistake is not having an investor policy statement. We have an upcoming episode with Bob Haynes where he talks about how to create an investor policy statement. This will come out in a couple of weeks. It’s an excellent episode. But the investor policy statement is the the document that you fill out, that you write down that covers all of your goals, your hopes and dreams for the life that you want to live. It gives different constraints that you’re thinking about. It includes your investment philosophy plan. It’s a great document that you can have available for when you’re unsure of the markets, when you’re unsure of your financial situation, when you’re unsure of what to do next, you simply consult your investor policy statement. Oh, this is what I said I was gonna do. I’ll do this. It is a clear cut way that you are personally going to start investing, continue investing and continue throughout your entire financial career.
Scott: Yep. And I I would say very few people seem to have this in practice. It may be folded into a document called a financial plan, but I think that yes, not writing down a true financial plan that you come back to and update and and iterate on over time is is encompassing this mistake and I think that that’s really important. If you’re going to retire early, you can spend a few hours or a week or so, really intellectually defending a robust financial plan or you can pay somebody to do that for you. But I think that’s really important.
Mindy: Yeah, the investor policy statement, investor philosophy statement is so important that I included it as day five of the 31 day challenge that we did back in January. And if you’d like to get an elevated handle on your financial situation, you could still sign up for the 31 day challenge at biggerpocketsmoney.com/31days. It starts on day one, no matter when you sign up. It will help you avoid some of the mistakes that we have listed here.
Speaker 1: When the change in season hits, some people suddenly just want to declutter the garage, clean out the closets, and get everything all organized. And that’s great. If that’s you, or if it’s not you, either way, let Monarch do the financial spring cleaning this year for you. One dashboard gets your entire financial life organized, no more clutter, no more mess, no more scattered logins, just accounts, investments, property, and more, all in one place. Another feature I love about Monarch is the weekly AI recap. It catches spending spikes before they become problems and flags big net worth shifts or upcoming expenses. It’s like having a quick personal check-in every week so nothing sneaks up on me. Get your first year of Monarch for half off, just 50 bucks with the promo code Pockets. Use the code Pockets at monarch.com to get your first year half off at just $50. That’s 50% off your first year at monarch.com with the code pockets, P O C K E T S.
Speaker 2: Pine Financial Group’s Fund 6 is a real estate debt fund, but not like the private credit funds making headlines for liquidity problems. Those funds hold long-term corporate loans where exits depend on M&A or private equity events. Fund 6 originates short duration bridge and hard money real estate loans, senior secured with personal guarantees. And because Pine has charged borrowers between 10 and 14% consistently since 2008, regardless where the federal funds rate sits, the fund pays investors an 8% preferred return monthly with a target net annual distribution of 9 to 10% after the profits but they originated over a billion dollars since 2008 with 75% of those loans going to repeat borrowers. They have a nine-month lockup period and then redemptions are available with a 90 days notice. Learn more at biggerpocketsmoney.com/pine. This is a paid advertisement. I, Scott Trench, am an investor in Pine’s funds and investing involves risk, including the loss of principle. See the offering documents at biggerpocketsmoney.com/pine.
Speaker 1: If you’ve been putting off life insurance, I get it. The old process was miserable. Phone calls with an agent, a nurse coming to your house for a blood draw, then waiting weeks to find out what you’d pay for. That friction is exactly why so many people who should have coverage don’t. Here’s what I believe, most BP Money listeners need term life and the right move is to build a ladder. A few term policies of different lengths stacked together, so your coverage steps down as your mortgage shrinks and your kids get closer to being financially independent or you get closer to hitting your financial independence number. The thing that makes that practical now is Ethos, a platform that helps you find life insurance all 100% online, same day coverage, no medical exam, you just answer a few health questions online. Up to $3 million in coverage some policies as low as 30 a month. So building a two or three layer ladder that used to take a month of appointments is something you can knock out before your coffee gets cold. Get your free quote at ethos.com/bpmoney. That is ethos.com/bpmoney. Application times may vary and rates may vary.
Mindy: So, Scott, have you made any of these mistakes in your portfolio?
Scott: I am lucky to have minimized many of these mistakes in my personal life. I have made bets, I’m going to call it this way. I have made bets with my portfolio that remain open, uh, in particular, um, one that that many listeners of this show may know with my sale of stocks last year to purchase rental properties. So that bet is losing relatively speaking, at least if we consider the the massive opportunity cost of the the market going up what 20% since February of 2025 when I, when I sold my position versus a maybe 8-ish, 10% total return from the rentals depending on what what the appreciation looks like. I haven’t marked them to market yet. That is a bet that is currently losing. We’ll see how things end up over time what, in terms of how I categorize that as a mistake or not. But I separate that from uh, you know, the actual mechanical mistakes that we’ve listed here. I don’t know. I don’t I don’t know which ones are mistakes yet or which ones are bets.
Mindy: I think that calling it a bet and calling it a mistake, you made a decision based on information that you had at the time. You gathered information, you did some a bunch of research, you looked at the Cape Schiller Index and in your opinion, the market was priced too high. So you made a choice based on research, not on a whim and you decided I am going to pull my money out of the stock market and I’m going to put it into real estate. You didn’t pull it out of the stock market to wait until the stock market had a lower caser price index number. You just pulled it out of the stock market and put it into a different investment. Do you like the investment that you put it into?
Scott: Yeah, let me let me phrase this way. I made a bet last year. I don’t consider that a mistake yet. We’ll find out. Maybe maybe one day if the market pulls wildly away from that portfolio and I lose millions of dollars over the course of my life, then I will absolutely categorize that as a mistake. No hands down. But a better definition of of a mistake in my financial past is when I invested in a Phoenix multi-family syndication at the peak. And the reason that was a mistake, I classified that as a mistake versus my rental recent rental property bet is because the pipeline for supply in Phoenix in retrospect was so obvious. It was so obvious they’re building so many multi-family apartment buildings. And if I’d done just a bit of basic due diligence on that at a macro level, I would have known to avoid that, that situation at a very expensive price ratio. So I was missing intellectual defense of that move at the time that I, I believe I’ve since developed. We’ll find out over the next couple of years.
Mindy: I will say your bet on the stock market in January of last year was something that you chose to do based on your feelings and your research and your understanding of the market. I don’t categorize that as a mistake. I categorize that as you chose to move in money from this investment to this investment. Will the market outperform this investment? Maybe, maybe not. But did you know the market was going to go up 22% in February? I bet you didn’t.
Scott: Another bet that people will be able to make fun of me for that could certainly be a mistake, is I’m actually going to participate in an office investment purchase here in the Denver metro area in the next little bit as an LP with a a small with about 1% of my portfolio. So a small um side side position bet there because I explored this thesis of, hey, I think office buildings are really cheap and I think that there’s a really good chance that they fill back up to, you know, over the next 5 to 10 years to a more stable occupancy level. So that’s a bet I’m making. I’m certainly uncertain about the prospects of those of office building filling back up, but I think that there’s a good risk-adjusted opportunity with this. So that’s another one that that could be a mistake in the portfolio. We’ll find out but maybe these one-off bets will be mistakes.
Mindy: Yeah, but you’re using 1% of your portfolio. That’s the kind of money you can use to make these bets. You could put that into Bitcoin if you wanted to, Scott, you’re probably not gonna. But that’s, you don’t put 50% of your portfolio into something that you are guessing about or I think maybe this will happen. That’s not what you do with 50% of your portfolio, 1% in an office building. Let’s see what happens.
Scott: You and Carl have made a large number of bets on specific companies, both private and public over the years. Have you had any losers in that run?
Mindy: We invested in a Las Vegas casino a long time ago that eventually was torn down. So, yeah, that was a big loser. It was a nominal loser because we had a nominal amount of net worth, but we’ve had some pretty good successes because we do tons of research and do tons of of reading. and by we, I mean Carl, he reads tech news like you breathe.
Scott: How about this? would it be fair to say that you guys have made a mistake in not doing your estate planning earlier, much earlier, 5, 10, 15 years ago?
Mindy: Oh yeah. 20 years. You got a good outcome, no or at least no harm done by not having that done, but would that be something you’d consider a mistake?
Mindy: That’s a huge mistake. 20 years ago, I was pregnant with my first daughter and I didn’t have a state plan until January of this year.
Scott: How about term life policies?
Mindy: We never had life insurance other than whatever came like $1000 policy that came with our jobs. That could have been a mistake. When I had the first baby, I quit my job and stayed home with my daughter. My husband was making a really nice salary. He was making way more than we were spending. So we didn’t need my salary and I was able to stay home with my girls. I chose to stay home with my girls. And if something would have happened to him, I would have had to go and get a job. And at that time, if I was working instead of staying home, all my salary would do would pay for childcare. So in hindsight, not having life insurance when I wasn’t working and he was the only breadwinner was a big mistake.
Scott: I don’t think anybody is going to go through their financial journey not making mistakes. And I think that the definition of mistake can vary from person to person. A bad definition of mistake is not doing the optimal thing in hindsight, right? Nobody has Gray Sports Almanac and knows which businesses are going to boom over the next 5 to 10 years, except for Carl Jenson, wonderful boost to the the the Jensen family fire journey there is picking one huge tech winner after another for 15 years in a row. I can’t do that. I don’t do that. I’m my my luck has gone the other way there, or luck, my my skill has gone the other way on those bets.
Mindy: Well, how much time do you spend reading tech news?
Scott: I don’t bet bet on tech stocks. I bet on multi-family properties was my expression of that bet and I got my clock cleaned.
Mindy: Well, if you spent three or four hours a day reading tech news, maybe you could make good tech decisions too, Scott.
Scott: That I spend three or four hours a day reading real estate news and running a real estate platform. I guess I guess I made reasonably good bets in the Denver market across my my rental property portfolio there. That seems to have gone very well for me and I was scared enough to not put all my chips on the table in the run-up in the 2021, 2020 22 period, just bought consistently like always.
Mindy: Yeah, and that’s great. You have done well. Celebrate what you have done well.
Scott: Well, I think we’re both very fortunate and we we both have minimized the number of mistakes, I think in our our financial journeys where we can kind of reflect on them. but there is no mistake-free journey. and I think the last mistake we’ll leave with is trying to never make any mistakes. Uh I think there you got to at some point action and and moving towards a long-term goal even imperfectly is better than being paralyzed by fear of making an error in some capacity. So an estate plan that is reasonably well documented is better than no estate plan. An investment policy statement that’s not optimal in in a draft format is better than no investor policy statement, right? an an attempt at a withdrawal strategy that is well researched but imperfect and maybe puts you over the Magi cliff in year one is not a disaster you can’t recover from, it’s better than not having a plan there. And so there’s no journey that’s going to be mistake free, but I think that by attempting a good faith effort in each of these categories over time, you’ll minimize them and have a pretty good outcome.
Mindy: Scott, I think we have started with some mistakes that people might not be thinking about. Of course, not getting started in early enough, not taking your 401K match, blah, blah, blah. There’s lots of mistakes we could list here, but these are six mistakes that I think people don’t always think about. So if you are watching this episode and you have a mistake that we didn’t say, please leave a comment below on our YouTube channel or you can email Mindy at biggerpocketsmoney.com or Scott at biggerpocketsmoney.com and let us know what you think is a mistake that people aren’t really thinking about so that we can help our audience avoid those mistakes too. All right, Scott, we have an excellent episode coming up on Tuesday. Ben Felix is coming back to join us to chat again about his thoughts on the fire community.
Scott: I tried to pick a fight with Ben about the fire community and uh, like usual, we can’t get anywhere because we agree on almost all the fundamentals there. Just slightly different tweaks on the world view about how we approach an optimal life.
Mindy: It’s always awesome talking to Ben. If you, our dear listeners want more financial independence information, visit us on our website, biggerpocketsmoney.com. Sign up for our newsletter. We also have a bunch of free resources and calculators and templates to help you on your journey to financial independence. that’s biggerpocketsmoney.com. all right, Scott, should we get out of here?
Scott: Let’s do it.
Mindy: That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is my almost mistake-free co-host, Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying later skater.
Speaker 1: When I evaluate debt funds, I look for things like first position loans, personal guarantees, deep experience by the fund operator, low fund leverage, fast liquidity and consistent returns. These are some of the reasons why I’m excited to partner with Pine Financial Group. Their fund 6 offers investors exposure to real estate credit, largely for construction and rehab with loans originated by an experienced originator with over $1 billion in origination volume. They offer investors an 8% preferred return paid monthly and a 70/30 LP GP split of everything over 10% paid annually. The lockup period is nine months with liquidity available within 90 days after that nine month commitment. The fund is open to accredited investors only. The fund’s minimum investment is typically $100,000, but Pine Financial is able to reduce that minimum for bigger pockets money listeners to a minimum of $25,000. Full disclosure, I am personally invested in this fund through my self-directed IRA, Pine Financial is sponsoring this message and our podcast. go to biggerpocketsmoney.com/pine P I N E. Please note that returns are not guaranteed and may vary based on fund performance.
Speaker 2: There’s a reason most big wealth management firms don’t like talking about flat fee planning. It’s because it puts the power and the profit back in your pocket. I’ve been working with David Jackson at domain money because I wanted a fiduciary who didn’t care about selling me products or making asset under management fees that grew as my portfolio grew. I wanted a partner who would look at my whole financial picture with all of its complexity and give me a personalized step-by-step road map to reach my goals faster. If you want a plan that’s built for your benefit, not your advisor’s, you need to check out biggerpocketsmoney.com/cfp. This is a promotion for domain money, a registered investment advisor with the SEC. Bigger Pockets money may receive compensation if you choose to work with domain money as a client. I Scott Trench am a current client of domain money and receive non-cash compensation related to this promotional activity. This is not personalized investment device. For the full disclosures, visit biggerpocketsmoney.com/cfp.
