Mindy Jensen: Dave Siemens is a professional musician, lifeguard, side hustler, and now a millionaire at age 49. His financial journey started about 7 years ago with a net worth of $150,000, mostly in home equity. Today, we’re talking about Dave’s money journey from struggling to make ends meet to discovering financial independence and finding creative ways to turn his time and skills into increased income.
Scott Trench: Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast.
Mindy Jensen: My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my hustler co-host, Scott Trench.
Scott Trench: Thanks, Mindy. Let’s dive in and rock and roll. Dave, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast.
Dave Siemens: It is an honor and just a privilege to be here with you guys.
Scott Trench: Your career and story is just remarkable with a large number of side hustles, really cool ones in particular. And I don’t believe you’ve ever earned more than about $100,000 a year from your main source of income at any point during this journey. And I think it’s evolved in many convoluted, complicated ways while producing a lot of fun along the way. Is that the right way to summarize this before we get into the nuts and bolts?
Dave Siemens: I think that’s a fair way of saying it.
Scott Trench: Let’s start from the beginning and can we hear where your money story begins?
Dave Siemens: You know, I always wanted to be a rock star and I just remember reading an article, you know, back in the ’90s about if you do what you love, you never have to work a day in your life. And I’ve really followed that. I thought, you know, I’d rather live in a studio apartment and have an eviction notice than not know I didn’t try. And as I got into my 40s with a wife and kids, I started thinking, I love this. I’m happy to work really hard all the time, but I don’t know how this is going to work in my 50s, 60s, and 70s. And so, I started transitioning into a role as a full-time teacher. And after a few months, I just felt an urgency that I needed to figure this money thing out. And so, at that point, I started just aggressively trying to self-educate. I just thought if I could just pay my house off as quickly as possible, that would give us so much breathing room. And that’s how I stumbled across BiggerPockets in early 2019.
Scott Trench: It sounds like that pivot point in 2019 is really important. We need to dive in there. But before we get to that, can we hear a little bit about what led up to that moment? What were you doing before that? And what kind of wealth position had you built leading up to this aha moment that it’s time to get more serious about money?
Dave Siemens: I’d been working as a full-time musician. I went to the University of North Texas and got my degree in music performance. And then I just started around 2000 just performing in the Dallas area and just always happy to live paycheck to paycheck.
Scott Trench: Check.
Dave Siemens: You know, along the way I’ve met my wife, got married, had 5 kids. I started working as a lifeguard, you know, and that was kind of nice, you know, during the day it was a little more stable. I started getting fancy things like paid time off and flexibility in my schedule that seemed to complement, you know, my work as a musician.
Scott Trench: Tell us about your work as a musician. What kind of music do you play?
Dave Siemens: I have a lot of tribute bands. I’ve got a Guns N’ Roses tribute band, an Aerosmith tribute band, a KISS tribute band. I also play a lot as a solo artist. I teach lessons. I also do singing telegrams.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, wow.
Scott Trench: I want to call out that Guns N’ Roses— I haven’t looked, I haven’t gone through the whole stack, but Guns N’ Roses, at least you have like 3 million followers for this tribute band. And it sounds like you’ve been all over the world, right? I was looking at your website. 26,000 people attended one of your largest performances for Guns N’ Roses. Is that right? This is a serious, awesome band that we’re talking about here.
Dave Siemens: Yeah, people tend to just go crazy for Guns N’ Roses, and I think we do it really well. We try to replicate the authentic looks and sounds of the original band. You know, people are willing to bring us all around Canada, Mexico, Dominican Republic, all kinds of places. And, you know, we get to fly out and get treated like rock stars for the weekend. You know?
Mindy Jensen: What sort of money does that pay?
Dave Siemens: I mean, typically for me as a musician, you know, doing that sort of thing, I’ll make $500 to $700 a night.
Mindy Jensen: Okay. So that’s not small potatoes, but that’s still a lot of travel to do that.
Dave Siemens: And I will say that that’s after expenses.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, okay. Well, that’s good.
Scott Trench: You kind of implied you got serious here in 2019 about the next chapter of wealth building. What did your position look like at the time when you made that transition? What had you accumulated to that point?
Dave Siemens: If I had to be honest, I think early 2019, our net worth was probably around $150,000. Almost all of that was home equity. We bought our house as a foreclosure in 2004. And then my wife had a little bit in her teacher retirement. I had a little bit in my retirement with the city. I had put some money into a variable annuity when I was in my 20s. If you have a good exit strategy, please let me know.
Mindy Jensen: I don’t think there is one. Did you continue putting money in there or was that a one and done?
Dave Siemens: No, no, yeah, it was a one and done for sure.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah. Okay.
Dave Siemens: But yeah, that was it. It was almost exclusively home equity and then my wife’s teacher retirement and a little bit in my retirement with the city.
Scott Trench: It sounds like in 2019 your wife was still teaching at that point.
Dave Siemens: At that point she was homeschooling our kids.
Scott Trench: Okay. What was your job set at that point in time? Was that, was this the lifeguard or were you transitioning to being a teacher or what was that looking like for you?
Dave Siemens: Coming into 2019, I think I was probably making $20,000 or $30,000 as a musician and then maybe another $10,000 to $15,000 as a lifeguard. My wife was at home, you know, making a little bit just teaching a couple extra students.
Scott Trench: What triggered the epiphany to begin kind of the next chapter of your wealth-building journey?
Dave Siemens: I just felt an urgency from just working so hard as a teacher, you know, that I thought, this is not going to work in my 50s or 60s. And I thought, I got to figure this out now. And I’m willing to do whatever it takes.
Mindy Jensen: What changes did you make to your financial situation or your spending when once you started in on all of this?
Dave Siemens: Honestly, the biggest, most important change that I made was listening to you guys talk about having a money date with your spouse.
Mindy Jensen: Yes, yes, yes.
Dave Siemens: And so one of my big resolutions on January 1st, 2020, was that I set a goal to just budget like a beast. So I talked to my wife. I was like, I’d like for us to sit down and do a monthly budget. And we started talking about that. And she had taken a class at our church called Money Wise. And so she was, you know, she had seen me consuming all of this content and she didn’t quite understand it, but she was willing to listen. And so we sat down and we started looking at, you know, every month, the last Sunday of every month, we sit and we look at our income and our expenses and our net worth. And honestly, my wife and I being on the same page and having that money date and making a spending plan has been the number one, by far, most important thing. Thank you, guys.
Scott Trench: The first step is just keeping score, right? And just looking at the numbers because there’s like an infinite number of actions you can take to move your wealth forward. The ones that matter become very obvious and the ones that don’t matter become very obvious as soon as you just basically keep score and have the numbers in front of you. So I think that’s awesome that you guys started doing that. What did that result in in terms of changes to your spending or your income?
Dave Siemens: It was amazing that we started using cash envelopes for certain categories. It flipped the script on our money conversations because up to that point, it seemed like anytime we talked about money, it was a fight. I would just work harder and then I would see that my wife had spent money and I didn’t feel comfortable, you know, talking to her about it because it seemed like, you know, it would become a fight. But once we sat down and made a spending plan and we allocated money for her to spend, she felt liberated because she had money that was, you know, set aside for her to spend on whatever she wanted. And I felt liberated because I always knew that it was going to be limited to a certain amount. And we would make, you know, cash envelopes for our restaurant spending and entertainment budgets. And so, we could still go to restaurants. But instead of the kids coming to me and asking, can we go out to dinner? Like, I would always say yes. I would just say, let’s look at the envelope and see how much cash is in there. And so it got our kids on board too that, you know, they’d see like, we can go to Chili’s once or we can go to Little Caesars 5 times, you know, and it brought them on. I never had to say no. I could always point to the budget and show how much was in there. And it got them thinking about, you know, where can we get value?
Mindy Jensen: So it’s not a couple money date, it’s like a whole family money date. Once you start talking about finances with your spouse, I don’t love that it would start a fight all the time, but I love that you figured out a way to have a conversation so it’s not ending up as a fight. Money is the number one thing that couples fight about. And now you don’t fight about money anymore. I’m assuming, I’m reading into your comments. I’m sure there’s discussions. We have discussions all the time at our house too, but I love that you sat down and had this money date with your wife. We have a how to have a money date with your partner document on our website. It’s biggerpocketsmoney.com/moneydate. It’s super easy to remember. Go to our website, go to our resources page. It’s on there. It’s one of the resources. It’s just a guideline to help you get started talking about money, especially if you’re in the position that Dave was in with this, you know, oh, everything’s a fight. I don’t want to bring it up because I don’t want to fight with my wife. Well, this is how you don’t fight. You come to the money date without this, like, you spent too much money. That attitude is going to give you a fight 100% of the time, guaranteed. What sort of spending changes did you see in terms of, like, real dollars, once you had this money date with your wife?
Dave Siemens: Initially, when we started looking at it in late 2019, early 2020, looking at those things critically, at that time we had 5 in our household and we were spending about $300 a week on groceries and $500 a month on restaurants. And we were able to cut it back to $100 a month on restaurants and $200 a week on groceries. And it just made us be a lot more intentional immediately. You know, it saved us $400 on restaurants and $400 on grocery spending. And that’s— we just immediately had an extra $800 every month, which is huge.
Mindy Jensen: I want to know how you only spent $200 a week on groceries.
Scott Trench: Yeah, that’s pretty impressive.
Dave Siemens: I couldn’t do this without my wife. She has been so amazing at meal planning and meal prepping. I mean, even now, my son’s just moved out last week, and so now we’re finally empty nesters. There’s 2 of us and we’ve increased the budget to $1,000 a month on groceries. But now that my sons are out, we’ve cut it back to $500 and that’s saved us $6,000 a year on grocery spending, which is crazy. My wife is a saint as far as meal planning and meal prep and all of that.
Scott Trench: It starts with this increase of, let’s call it, $800 a month in savings because of just the food. There’s that one category there. What else is happening around that time? What happens to income? What do you invest in?
Dave Siemens: I just have to take a moment and just say, far beyond the financial component has been the relational component. The fact that we have this money date and we sit and look every month as we see our net worth grow, my wife feels more secure. As my wife feels more secure, she’s more loving and more supportive. As she’s more loving and supportive, I’m willing to work harder and self-educate more. And so there’s the obvious financial component, but the relational component has been exponentially greater than the financial component is imaginable. I’m sorry, I know that didn’t answer your question. I apologize, but I just had to get that in there.
Mindy Jensen: I love that answer though. I love that this is just, everything is different now and that’s great. What I’m hearing you say is you have a better life because you listen to Scott and Mindy.
Dave Siemens: Absolutely.
Scott Trench: So we talked to Dr. Matthew Killingsworth from University of Pennsylvania. He’s a world-renowned expert on happiness and components of the happiness journey involve all that having a goal, having great relationships, making that kind of regular progress against it. And so, I think money is one of those things in life that is great to form a goal around, maybe not go to an extreme or crazy length, but to build a relationship and make steady progress against. It’s like fitness or there’s many worthwhile goals. Maybe that’s what was happening for you to some degree is because there was this shared goal, now there’s a shared cadence, there’s productive conversations, and that seeps out into, it sounds like, many other areas of your relationship and marriage and maybe your other family dynamics. Is that— am I getting close or am I overshooting?
Dave Siemens: I think that’s fair. Yeah, it’s just the camaraderie and rapport of working on our budget and our— I don’t even want to call it a budget. I always felt like a budget was rear-facing. I’d try to set a budget and then make mistakes and then eventually just give up. But making a spending plan, being intentional about where and how we want to spend our money as a couple and coming to that conversation together and as a family just was critically important. And, you know, along the way, my wife first discovered minimalism, and then I kind of, you know, stumbled upon Gabe Bolt. I know you’ve had him as a guest, and Jacob Fisker with Early Retirement Extreme. And I don’t know, I feel like Joshua Becker is just one of the most overlooked in the financial independence community. He’s got a book called The More of Less, and that really, really gave legs to me on how to pursue minimalism in a satisfying, fulfilling way. You know, just doing my own car repairs, you know, living and appreciating what I have. It goes hand in hand with what you guys say about, you know, experimenting, you know, looking at those things that bring you value and then, you know, removing those things and bringing them back and seeing what you like and what you don’t like.
Scott Trench: One thing I want to call out here is no one could reasonably call me a minimalist in my life today, but at one point that was very true of my life. And I think that that’s a component in the story of many people on the financial independence journey at some point, regardless whether it becomes a lifelong passion or pursuit or, you know, I think that many people go through at least a part of the journey that’s like that. And I think it’s extremely powerful as a component of financial independence. It’s wonderful whether that’s something that sticks around for life or whether it’s something that is there for a few years. But what it does, what minimalism does that’s so powerful is it empowers you to do everything, right? You now know you can fix your car. You now know you can fix the toilet. You can fix any of your appliances. And once you know how to do all of that, if in the future you ever decide, you know what, we’re not going to be this minimalist, we’re going to relax a little bit here, that’s now a choice rather than a helpless state that many people have. That’s why so many people, I think, really relate to that with some portion of the journey there. Have you found that to be your experience with minimalism at all?
Dave Siemens: Absolutely. When I first started, it seemed like a delayed gratification. You know, as you talk about in Set for Life, I love the metric of your hourly wage versus whatever the thing is. I changed the catalytic converter on my car. I got a quote and it was going to be $3,300. Well, I bought it and I think I spent $600 on the parts and then I paid a friend $200 to help me. And I got to spend the afternoon hanging out with him and it saved us over $2,000. And I did the work myself and it built this skill set and a satisfaction. Changing oil with my kids on their cars. We get to sit in the garage or the driveway and change oil and spend time together. And that’s a component that you just don’t get when you go to the Jiffy Lube.
Scott Trench: So we’re not going to get like a headline coming up, former BiggerPockets Money Podcast guest arrested for illegally emissions-free catalytic converter self-installation, right?
Dave Siemens: Nope.
Scott Trench: That’s what’s great about this is, yes, you get like these outrageous quotes every once in a while from contractors or from other folks to do work in your life. And you can be like, you know what? No, of course I’m not going to pay you that outrageous sum for this particular job. I know how to do it myself. I know what it’s worth. That’s empowering for life. And even no matter what your income is, no matter where you go, at some point, those items become prohibitively expensive to hire out regardless of where you are on your financial journey. And so it’s just so empowering to have that mentality across life. So tell us what happened to this $1,000 a month. Where did you start directing that extra $1,000 back here in 2019, early 2020?
Dave Siemens: We started, you know, pouring that into a Roth IRA. Like, I set these huge goals. I remember listening to BiggerPockets and one of the pieces of wisdom that stuck with me was the phrase, never say I can’t, always ask how do I? And so I set goals in 2020. I said, I want us to max out our Roth IRAs and budget like a beast and pay off our house. And that just seemed like an impossible goal. But I thought, you know what? I don’t want to say I can’t. I’m going to figure out how do I? And so we started directing that extra $1,000 into our Roth IRAs early 2020. I just stuck with the plan, listened to you guys, and JL Collins, that when the market’s down, everything’s on sale. So during COVID we just kept dumping money into the Roth IRA.
Mindy Jensen: I love that. What were you investing in?
Dave Siemens: Index funds. So I kind of, you know, split it between—we have it with Fidelity, and then it was just their S&P 500, you know, FNILX and FSKAX, and then a couple mutual funds, FOCPX and FBGRX, their blue chip and their NASDAQ mutual funds. So, you know, kind of splitting the difference between, okay, let me see how these high-performing mutual funds do over time versus, you know, these S&P 500 index funds. And it’s, of course, paid tremendously over the last several years.
Mindy Jensen: Are you still in all of those funds?
Dave Siemens: I am, but pretty much just the S&P, you know.
Scott Trench: So this was a big goal. You know, $1,000 a month goes a long way to maxing out certainly one Roth, maybe two. And you also wanted to pay off your house. How much was left on the house?
Dave Siemens: That’s a good question. Let me see. I’ve got our—I’ve got our budgets here.
Mindy Jensen: I love that it’s in a spiral notebook. That is how I first started budgeting and tracking my expenses, because we could not figure out what the hole was in our spending. We’re like, why are we spending so much money? Why don’t we start tracking it? So every time I would come home—from, this was when I was a stay-at-home mom—I would come home from whatever errands I was running, I would walk in the door, there was a spiral notebook right there. It was the first thing I would see, and I’d write down all the things I just spent money on. And all of a sudden we’re like, oh, we know where that hole went.
Dave Siemens: Yeah, no, I love hearing that from you guys. So this is—we started including our house in our spending plan with, like, our home equity in, it looks like, June 2020. And at that point we owed $38,536.
Mindy Jensen: Nice. What did you pay for that house?
Dave Siemens: We bought it in 2004. The market value, the ARV in 2004, was like $125,000, and we got it for $100,000.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so you had $38,000 left in 2020. When did you pay off your house?
Dave Siemens: First week of December 2020.
Mindy Jensen: Wow. Did you also max out your Roth IRA that year? And your wife’s Roth IRA?
Scott Trench: Both.
Dave Siemens: Wow.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so that is—I’m going to actually look this up—$6,000. Okay, so that’s $12,000 plus $38,000. Where did this money come from?
Dave Siemens: So some of it, my job as a lifeguard, I got furloughed from the city. And the day that they called it, my boss came in and said, well, I need to send you home, you need to go apply for unemployment. And so they were doing the extra $600 a week for unemployment. And then at the same time, in January 2020, I had been listening to you guys. And one of the things was, if you want to learn real estate, one of the things you should do is get a job working in the real estate market. And so my wife got a job doing property management in January 2020. And so she had started working and I was getting unemployment during the pandemic. And then I was doing gigs, like online. So I would play online and have, like, my Venmo code and my Cash App code. And I was doing some singing telegrams during the pandemic, you know, so I would do them socially distanced, of course. And I would teach my guitar students virtually, you know, and then I also started doing these TCPA lawsuits. And so, you know, I think my first big paycheck from one of those was in 2020.
Scott Trench: That was one of the things that caught my eye. You are an active contributor in our BiggerPockets Money Facebook group, and we were asking about side hustles, and you were like—I forget how it was phrased, but something to the effect of, every time someone spam calls me, I make $500 or something to that effect. This is where the TCPA component comes in. So can you tell us about this particular side hustle, because I think a lot of people would love to turn those spam calls into some extra income?
Dave Siemens: So as I started listening to you guys and investigating side hustles, because as I felt more secure in my marriage, I was like, all right—I started feeling that every dollar I made wasn’t just going into this empty pit. Every dollar I was making could actually go towards paying off our house. You know, we were working as a team, and it was like, how can I make more doing side hustles? And so, as I started talking to people, as you talk about in Set for Life, like, put yourself in a position to become lucky—I started asking people about things, and someone at my church mentioned she had seen a news story about this guy with these telemarketing calls. And as a musician, I feel like I always have to answer the phone because it could be a gig. And it’s really annoying, you know—I don’t want to buy your solar panels, I already have them, I don’t want to get your extended warranty on my car, you know, all these things. And I watched the news story, you know, the guy was—of course, he makes it look a lot easier than it is because he’s been doing it for 20 years. But, you know, it was like, hey, here’s—in a week I made $10,000, you know, from these phone calls. And, you know, he sells his book on the website, and I read the book, and I just dedicated myself to, you know, this. I started, you know, doing the Tim Ferriss 80/20 analysis. You know, it was like, once I got back to work at the lifeguard job, I thought I can pick up extra hours working at the pool. And at that time, I was probably making $12 or $13 an hour, you know, or if I can settle a lawsuit here for, let’s say, if I got three phone calls, that could potentially be $4,500 in violations. Even if I settle that for $1,500, which is a third of the statutory damages, that’s a lot of hours working at the pool. And so the 80/20 analysis on that with Parkinson’s Law and Pareto’s Law is, you know, it’s worth my time to work on this lawsuit because it’s going to be a very big payoff.
Scott Trench: So you’re kind of like Batman. You’re not the hero we need, you’re the hero we deserve. No, one of those—you’re not the hero we deserve, you’re the hero we need in stopping these spam callers in the first place. So it’s a real—like, there’s a real service to society for going after these guys and making it expensive to call people that they shouldn’t be calling.
Mindy Jensen: So what is the gist of this lawsuit? Because I also get quite a few of these phone calls.
Dave Siemens: So the gist is, if you’re a telemarketer, by federal law, you have to check the National Do Not Call List every 30 days. And the law has made it very difficult for them to make a living, you know, spam calling people. And a lot of people are on the National Do Not Call List. So rather than being legally compliant, what they like to do is they download software to spoof numbers, and then they rotate their fake numbers, and then they just have auto dialers that just make thousands of calls a day. They like to have a lot of them—not all of them, but a lot of them like to have foreign call centers where they might have people working for, you know, $2 or $3 an hour answering phones, generating leads. And then once they generate enough leads, they turn that over to someone that’s stateside, you know, to kind of call back and actually, you know, cash in on the lead.
Scott Trench: So how does one go after these guys?
Dave Siemens: Not to get too much into the weeds, and the way that I do it here—Section 227 of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, you know, says that if you receive these calls, they can be a $500 violation, and if you can prove willful intent, it triples to $1,500. So if you’ve got two phone calls with a fake phone number, that’s $3,000 in statutory damages. I record all the calls with my old iPhone 5, and I file them under Texas state law. And I typically do it in small claims. So let’s say, for example, if I get multiple calls about my car’s extended warranty, I’ll typically just answer the phone and I’ll let them go through their spiel. And I’m just polite on the phone, and I take notes about what company they say they’re calling from. And they usually have a similar call script. And then let’s say it’s the third or fourth call about a car warranty—then what I do is I might even have my spreadsheet there, and I’ll check my spreadsheet and it’s like, oh yeah, this is the fourth call I’ve gotten from these guys. And then I just buy the warranty, you know, and I put it on my credit card. And then once I receive the warranty in the mail, it has all of their legitimate legal information. And then I call back after I get that, and I cancel it, and I get a refund back on my credit card. And then, using a form letter that was put together by an attorney, I send my demand letter and, you know, depending on how willing they are to settle, they might call or they might ignore me. And if they ignore me, which is what happens most of the time, I file with the small claims here in Plano, Texas.
Scott Trench: That sounds very believable to me. There’s a bunch of calls, I go through this activity set, and then they do nothing—they ignore, completely ignore me. Do you have—how do you actually then collect?
Dave Siemens: That’s an excellent question. So typically, you know, I find their legal information, get them served, and I’ve been learning more and more the last couple years how to enforce judgments. And small claims here in Texas goes up to $20,000. Usually, depending on the company—and if I’ve got them for $5,000, it’s normally not worth their time to hire an attorney. So most often, you know, they call me about a week or two before we go to trial and, you know, want to talk numbers and come up with a settlement. And, you know, once again, if it’s $6,000 in statutory damages, and I can get them to write a check for $4,000, it’s worth it for me, you know, because I don’t have to worry about collecting. Other ways that you can collect is through—if they own property, I can file liens against it. There’s a lot of different ways. But, you know, as I’ve learned over the years, I’m learning the legal system.
Scott Trench: How much have you collected or generated in this activity set?
Dave Siemens: I sat down and looked at it, and over the last seven years, I believe I’ve collected about $80,000.
Mindy Jensen: $80,000?
Scott Trench: Yeah.
Mindy Jensen: Because somebody called you. Yeah, I love it.
Scott Trench: Because he keeps a spreadsheet and entertains all these calls and has gone through and listened to what they have to say. This is not, like, no work to do this. There’s a real process that you’ve installed here with a real failure rate, and $80,000 is a nice bonus. But that goes back to the story that we’ve been talking about here, which is your wealth-building journey seems to have been built on a variety of these side hustles and various, various gigs or work that you have. It sounds like the last eight years have involved lifeguarding, music gigs, this—it sounds like there’s teaching involved, there’s lessons that you gave for guitar. Your wife is in real estate and property management. So it seems like there’s, like, a large collection of side hustles or side bets going on at any given time, and this is one of those.
Dave Siemens: Yeah, correct.
Mindy Jensen: How much time do you think you’ve spent to generate that $80,000?
Dave Siemens: I’m not sure. It’s gotten to be, over the years, there’s—there’s definitely that learning curve, that S-curve. You know, in the beginning, the first year I did it, I didn’t collect anything. Honestly, it was a learning curve. You know, I would send demand letters and I would collect data. And even the first two trials that I went to, I lost, because I just didn’t have good evidence and I didn’t know the law well enough. I was in the right, but I just didn’t know how to present the evidence and present the law. And that was okay. That was, you know, that’s how you learn is from making mistakes. And, you know, small claims is a good place to do that.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, small stakes too. So $80,000 is a great salary for a year. Would you estimate you’ve spent 2,000 hours doing this, or less, or more?
Dave Siemens: I’m not sure.
Scott Trench: Okay.
Dave Siemens: You know, the first couple years, you know, I just learned how to kind of do the detective work, like how to gather evidence, how to keep records, how to make the spreadsheet, how to take the screenshots and record the calls. Like I said, the first two trials I went to, I didn’t have the calls recorded. And in Texas, that’s permissible—you know, I don’t have to tell them when they call that I’m recording it. And it’s a one-party state, so I can present that, you know, unless they request it—you know, I don’t have to give them that evidence. And there’s a legal way for them to do that. So I can present that in court, and it’s completely legal, and it helps, you know, show that they’re the ones making the calls, and I never signed up for any of that stuff. Just over the years, as I’ve learned the skills, just like any other skill, initially I didn’t get much return for it as I was learning the skills, and then I started to get a big, big return. And then, as I’ve gotten better at it, it’s taken less effort, you know? So typically now, I like—if I can find someone that has several violations, I’ve got a trial this week. I actually have them for more than $20,000, but I just put it at $20,000, because that’s the cap for small claims here in Texas.
Mindy Jensen: And with small claims, you don’t have to hire an attorney. You can represent yourself.
Dave Siemens: Correct.
Mindy Jensen: I mean, I guess you can represent yourself anytime, but have you ever hired an attorney to help you?
Dave Siemens: I have a couple cases that attorneys have handled, and attorneys that handle these cases typically take 50% minus legal fees. And so it’s a tough spot. So, you know, I’ve got a couple cases that they’ve handled, but it’s really inspired me to say, you know what, I can do this myself. In fact, the last one that I had an attorney, I had to teach him all the laws and present all the evidence. And, um, you know, it’s—I’ve gotten to where it’s like, you know what, it’s easier for me to do it myself, you know, kind of coming back to that DIY mentality.
Scott Trench: What if many people in the financial independence community achieve financial independence, and then whenever their early retirement is interrupted by a spam phone call, they go, great, I’m going to make my $500 to $1,500. That would end this spam world pretty quick, or at least greatly reduce it. But let’s go back to the meaningful factors in your story here. So 2019, early 2020, we have an epiphany to begin building wealth. 2020 is a whirlwind of activity where you’re starting this pursuit—it’s actually zero in 2020 for you. Your wife goes into property management. You have furloughed, $600 a week unemployment from the COVID situation that’s going on. You have gig work and online work happening. You are investing in your Roth and you pay off your house. Give us the overview of what transpired over the next few years and what were the big levers. Like, was income coming in from some form of active work? What was the meat of your financial journey over the last seven years since then?
Dave Siemens: Well, Scott, I’ll quote you and say, get to a 50% savings rate as fast as possible. And the big three, like housing, transportation, and food—we wanted to get to that 50% savings rate as often as possible. You know, once we built an emergency fund, we didn’t have to keep building an emergency fund. So all that money we could save, invest, and give. And once we got to where we were comfortably at a 50% savings rate, like, we learned how to live the way that we liked. And with my wife’s support, you know, I was able to work on making more, you know. So, and then that financial confidence that comes with a strong financial situation, you know, eight years ago, if I got a call about a gig, I might feel an urgency to take the gig. It’s like, this is the amount that I’d like to get paid, but I need the money so I could ask for less. But, you know, having a strong financial position, it’s like, well, maybe I’d like to stay at home with my wife and kids, so I’m going to ask for more money. You know, a position of financial strength has put us to where we could get more.
Scott Trench: It sounds like the power dynamic flipped in your situation for your gig work, at least. What happened with the lifeguarding or the day work that you were doing?
Dave Siemens: Yeah, the other side of that too is it’s been so awesome to just study tax-advantaged accounts, right? So my city job, we have a state pension. You know, I can put 7% into that and the city does a two-to-one match. So every dollar I put in, the city puts in $2. And then we also have a 457. And so all of that money goes in, you know, pre-tax. And as I learned from listening to your show, you know, there’s no retirement age. So whenever I want to early retire from that job, I have full access to that money. You know, with a strong financial position, we can take high-deductible insurance. And because I’m a gig worker for the most part—my city job is not full-time, so I don’t get benefits—we have marketplace insurance, and we can take high-deductible insurance because our emergency fund will easily cover that high deductible. And so our health insurance is very low. We have high deductibles and, you know, stuff on our homeowner’s insurance, high deductibles on our auto insurance, and then just all the—all the tax-advantaged stuff. And even, you know, we’ll use the saver’s credit, you know. So I try to put as much as I can into tax-advantaged accounts to bring our taxable income as close to zero as possible, and then put the rest in, like, Roth or taxable accounts and, you know, get the saver’s credit and take full advantage of that.
Mindy Jensen: What is the saver’s credit?
Dave Siemens: So depending on your income, they will give you up to a 50% credit on your tax return, up to $2,000 for a married couple. And so, you know, let’s say, depending on where you sit there, if you put $6,000—and Roth contributions count—so let’s say if I put a bunch into my 457 and it lowers our taxable income to where, you know, let’s say we have a $10,000 taxable income at 10%, you know, so that’s going to be we owe $1,000 for income tax, but our contributions put us in a position that we get a 50% credit up to $2,000. So we get a $2,000 credit and that would just cover our entire tax bill.
Scott Trench: I actually wasn’t aware of this, and that’s kind of embarrassing, because I think a lot of the BiggerPockets Money listeners are just fairly high income, so they don’t qualify for this credit here. And that’s what makes your journey so remarkable — the low expenses that you maintained this entire way through, so that you generated substantial wealth. I want to hit that headline number in a second here. Over the last 8 years, from this $150,000 starting position, through this body of activity, and then it sounds like just general applied financial knowledge. And I imagine that knowledge didn’t come in one big chunk. It was hours and hours of consuming content and going and researching and finding every possible advantage and stacking them up bit by bit. And that really compounded nicely for you. Am I again guessing reasonably close here for this?
Dave Siemens: That’s absolutely right. I know you talk about the 4 levers.
Scott Trench: Yep. Spend less, earn more, invest, or create.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, he does it all.
Scott Trench: Yeah, you’ve done all of them. So what was the headline here? Never earning more than $100,000 a year, from $150,000 in net worth in 2019, early 2020 — where are we at today?
Dave Siemens: Yeah, we hit $1 million in net worth back in April.
Scott Trench: Yes.
Mindy Jensen: Hooray! That’s awesome. The double comma club.
Dave Siemens: Yeah. That was a huge milestone for us, you know, and that was just unreal.
Scott Trench: How old are you right now?
Dave Siemens: 49.
Scott Trench: 49. Okay. So you started your 40s not doing bad necessarily with any of this, but not feeling like you were on the right track. And by the time you turn 50, you’re well past $1 million in net worth, assuming that there’s no market crash or anything like that. But you just absolutely crushed it here. Do you think your journey is repeatable? Do you think that your situation was particularly unusually suited to building this wealth, or do you think that this is something a lot of people who are maybe starting their 40s or even 50s can repeat?
Dave Siemens: I think there’s components of our journey that have just been a blessing and luck — you know, just being at the right place at the right time, putting myself in a position to become lucky. Once again, I can’t say it enough — my wife being on the same page with me has been critical for us to just be accountable and encourage one another. And her skills as a homemaker have just been absolutely fantastic. But it’s repeatable. Just taking the tax advantage and the side hustles and doing those things and just cutting expenses. But really, for us too, digging into that minimalism and not feeling deprived — looking at those things as, when I make salsa at home, it’s better than when I buy it at the store. When we make laundry detergent at home, it’s better than what we buy at the store. We build our own furniture — my wife and I build it together. It costs pennies on the dollar of something that we would buy, and it’s become like a fun activity for us to do together. And I think it’s repeatable. I think a lot of people just don’t challenge those limiting beliefs. And it’s been so satisfying.
Mindy Jensen: The story that I’m hearing is absolutely repeatable to somebody who’s willing to do the work. This was not just, “I am going to sit back and let all this money come to me.” This was, “I am going to go out and find ways to earn income.” I got annoyed by these spam calls. I get annoyed by spam calls too. Do I do anything about it? No. So guess how much money I’ve collected over the last 8 years? A whopping zero. But you saw a story online. There’s a lot of people who saw that same news story and did nothing. You took action, and you are $80,000 richer because of it. I would actually say you’re more than $80,000 richer, because you took that money and probably invested at least some of it, which has grown. So you’re more than $80,000 richer because you took action when most people don’t. They sit on the couch, they watch the video, and they’re like, “Huh, that’d be cool,” and then they never do anything. So yes, your story is 100% repeatable if somebody is going to do the work.
Scott Trench: The next question I have is, what is retirement going to look like for you, and when are you expecting to retire?
Mindy Jensen: Do you want to retire?
Scott Trench: That probably should be included in the question set.
Mindy Jensen: I mean, look at his life, Scott. What does he want to get rid of?
Dave Siemens: That’s really hard to say. You know, I love The 4-Hour Workweek, when Tim Ferriss talks about how no one wants to have $1 million — they want the lifestyle that $1 million pays for. And I feel like we’ve found ways to live a very fulfilling life. My wife is actually in the other room watching my granddaughter right now, and it’s just amazing to have the freedom to say, “I can go spend time with my granddaughter.” This seat for my bicycle that I can put her on and take her for bike rides — that is so fulfilling to me. I can go around with my band and play my favorite songs, and it helps pay the bills. I can go to the pool and hang out with my coworkers and talk about finances, and read my Bible, and do all the stuff I would be doing at home for free. And most of the people who go to my pool pay to be there — I get paid to be there. So retirement, I just think it’s kind of more doing what we want to do. We’re happy with our house. We’re happy with our lifestyle. And it’s just taking more time to spend — maybe more travel and giving more, and spending time with our kids and our grandkids, and just trying to share this kind of information with our friends and family.
Mindy Jensen: I love this. I love your mentality. I love your happiness, because there’s a lot of people who look at this financial independence weirdo thing and think, “Oh, I would be miserable. I have to give up everything.” And you have a really great life. It sounds like you really enjoy the life that you’re living now. Yes, you could choose to retire, but you also really enjoy doing all of the things you’re doing. Why would you retire?
Scott Trench: You’re kind of doing, professionally, the same things you were doing 8 or 9 years ago, but the power dynamic has totally flipped in your life, where you’re in complete control of the situation. So it really hasn’t resulted in — you’re still doing a similar job. You’re still doing the band. You’re still suing scammy phone callers. It’s just now the option set has exploded, and you decided, “You know what? I really like what I’m doing here,” and you can now open up and see what’s next. That’s what financial independence, I think, is all about. It doesn’t necessarily need to lead to a huge external change in life. It’s just a power dynamic, and happiness, security, relationships — it sounds like it’s all improved.
Dave Siemens: Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, we definitely spend luxuriously on the things that we get value out of. Like, I always only drink really good coffee. You can laugh at this, but the socks that I wear are $15 a pair, but they’re really nice socks. My son got me on really nice soap — it’s like $7 a bar for soap, but I get value out of that.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a really good point.
Dave Siemens: And I don’t get value out of having a car payment, or an expensive car, or a bigger house. My wife does — like, if we go on a trip for our anniversary, if I rent a sports car for the week, she likes that. But it’s easy to rent a sports car for the week if I ride my bicycle to work. And I like riding my bike to work. It helps wake me up, and it gets me some fresh air and a little exercise. And it’s amazing.
Scott Trench: Fantastic. Well, congratulations on a wonderful outcome here, and a fantastic story. Thanks for sharing your journey with us. It’s just so impressive to hear what you’ve achieved here, never having earned over $100,000 in active income in a year, right? Is that the right statement?
Dave Siemens: I think the last couple years it’s probably been a little over $100,000 — maybe in that $100,000 to $110,000, $115,000 range the last year or two.
Scott Trench: And that’s the aggregation of these multiple things you guys are doing that has stacked up to that. And it’s just still remarkably impressive. Congratulations on what you built and the wonderful, fulfilling life that you seem to have here. And thank you so much for listening and sharing your story here with BiggerPockets Money. We really appreciate it. It just makes our day to hear about this kind of outcome.
Dave Siemens: Thank you guys so much for sharing the information, and just challenging my limiting beliefs, and putting out the resources, and making it seem approachable, and aggregating all that information for people like me to access it and be inspired.
Mindy Jensen: And I’m just so happy that you took action. Thank you for hearing it and then putting it into practice. I love that.
Scott Trench: Dave, where can people find more about you? And specifically, where can people find out where you’re going to be playing your next shows?
Dave Siemens: You can go to my website, davesguitarmusic.com, and you can also find me on Facebook with my bands — Guns N’ Roses, and Walk This Way, and Texas Kiss Destroyer, something like that.
Mindy Jensen: I don’t know.
Dave Siemens: But you can find me on Facebook, you know, just under my name.
Scott Trench: Well, thank you very much. We’ll check those out. Ever coming through Denver?
Dave Siemens: We actually took a trip up through there a couple months ago, and I thought about you guys. We took a family trip and went and did some hiking. It was a lot of fun. Did the Manitou Incline.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, how did you like that?
Dave Siemens: That was a lot of fun. That was a lot of fun.
Scott Trench: I gave up because there was no parking the day I went there. So I still have — I’ve lived here forever, I tried to go there once, and there was no parking, so I went and did some other hike. I have to go back and try it sometime. I’ve heard great things.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah. Scott, when you go, take Carl with you, because I don’t want to do it. I love reading the reviews on the Manitou Incline, because people are like, “Wow, this was a lot of stairs.” What did you think it was? It’s like 2,700 steps or something. It’s like at altitude, straight up. So yeah, not my idea of a good time, but I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Dave Siemens: You know, and it was one of those things that it didn’t cost anything to do.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, they give out passes. You have to have a permit to do it, especially on the weekends, but you can get a permit, I think, either 1 or 3 months in advance, and it’s free. You just have to — they don’t want 9,000 people on there, so they only give out a certain amount every day. It is a very interesting, fun — in air quotes — thing to do if you are in the Colorado Springs area. All right, Dave, this was so much fun. I’m so thankful that we had you on the show today. I loved hearing your story, and I really, really appreciate your time with us. Thank you so much, and we will talk to you soon.
Dave Siemens: I love it. Thank you guys so much. Scott, Mindy, appreciate you guys and all you do.
Mindy Jensen: All right, Scott, that was a fantastic story from Dave. What did you think of his side hustling and his just willingness to take action?
Scott Trench: Well, I think it comes down to what he said in the show, where his big 3 — his housing, transportation, and food expenses — were kept under really tight control for the majority of his wealth-building journey. And I think that it’s literally that simple and that hard for a huge percentage of people in a similar position. And I think one of the things we didn’t get to today — it’s tough to speculate on this a little bit — but one of the things we can get to is the decision to pay off the mortgage versus invest, to finish paying off that last $38,000. I imagine that was at a low interest rate, or could have been refinanced to a low interest rate at that point in time. But what paying off the mortgage did, I think, in his situation, is it made everything optional upside — that extra gig, negotiation, this component of flexibility over here in my day job. I just think that provided that optionality there, and that may, in his case, have overcome the opportunity cost of not investing that $38,000 at what ended up being a very high return. We’ll never know. It’s not as simple as “you could invest and get more wealth than paying off your mortgage,” I think, in a lot of real-world scenarios, and this may be one of those examples.
Mindy Jensen: I hear you saying that you are Team No Mortgage, Scott.
Scott Trench: I’m Team “It’s Not as Simple as It Seems,” right? I probably would not have paid off a 2.5%, 3%, or 4% mortgage. In many cases, I have made the equivalent decision to basically pay off a 6.5% mortgage. I think it just depends on the situation. And I think it’s interesting that once those costs are very low, optionality explodes, especially if that comes with this embrace of minimalism, or the “I’m going to be able to do it myself” mentality, which I think is the key to being able to have an outcome like Dave’s on an income like Dave’s household. It’s really just a remarkable story.
Mindy Jensen: It reminds me of another Dave — Dave Ramsey says, “Live like no one else now so you can live like no one else later.” And I really love that quote, because Dave was living like no one else. Nobody else is going to be doing musical gigs and also being a lifeguard and also doing all these other side hustles — the TCPA payouts that he’s getting from these spam phone calls. There’s a lot of people who have no interest in doing that, but then they’ll come up to Dave and say, “Wow, how’d you make $1 million? How did you grow your wealth to $1 million?” Well, this is how you do all of these little things, and they add up. I love his story.
Scott Trench: I have a question for you. I think that Dave’s clear sophistication and self-education, and the action he’s taken in a variety of things — like the tax-advantaged accounts and how he’s doing that, the saver’s credit, the opportunities that came with COVID, to make the best of the situation with COVID and his furlough — I think all of those stack really nicely with the complicated and varied income sources that Dave has as a musician, and lifeguard, and spam-call suer, or whatever, however we describe that activity set. Those things, I think, they really stack nicely with advanced personal finance knowledge accumulated over many thousands of hours of self-education, perhaps in a way that they don’t stack quite as nicely with somebody who is earning $80,000 a year at a W-2 job. Right? Like, there’s just not as much mechanically to do in one of those situations, other than control the budget and move through the tax-advantaged accounts, as there may have been in this situation. Do you think that’s fair?
Mindy Jensen: I think that’s really fair, because let’s take this person who’s making $80,000 a year. They’re probably working at least 40 hours a week. They don’t have time to answer that spam phone call and talk to the person who’s on the line and take the notes. And they could eventually amass $80,000 in lawsuit money, but they would also have to go to court, which means they would have to take time off work. And Dave has more of a gig lifestyle, where he can just not take a job on that day that he knows he has court. So he can go do that. He can go do the DoorDashing and the Uber Eats, and he can go do lifeguarding. They need lifeguards during the day. They need lifeguards on the weekends. If you’ve worked your 40-plus-hour job, A, you can’t lifeguard during the day — you have to lifeguard at night, and the pool may or may not be open for very much longer after you get off work. You’re not going to want to do anything on the weekends — you’re trying to recharge. I think it very much coincides with Dave’s more gig lifestyle.
Scott Trench: Everyone has their picture of what personal finance ought to look like, right? And it’s dominated by, “I’m a W-2 employee earning a middle-class income, and here’s the right set of actions.” And I think what’s been so interesting in the last few years here at BiggerPockets Money is hearing the different stories where that breaks, because there’s not really much controversial to disagree with for the traditional approach for an employee. I mean, it’s basically pick your Roth versus your 401(k). There’s an argument about which marginal tax bracket you make the switch to Roth versus 401(k), depending on where you’re at. It’s straightforward. There’s no arguing with what best practice largely looks like in that situation. And then it really opens up once you get into entrepreneurial side-hustle land, where you have 6 jobs stacked at once. It’s very interesting, very fun. I’m sure many people also would have no part in it, and it’s not really for them. And that’s great. That’s what makes personal finance personal.
Mindy Jensen: Yep. Scott, how many TCPA lawsuits have you filed?
Scott Trench: I have filed none. I’ve thought about 100.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, I’ve thought about it every time they call. I’m like, “No, I don’t want it.” I also have to answer my phone every time it rings, because I’m a real estate agent, and it might be somebody asking a question about a listing that I have, or some transaction that I’m in the middle of. I don’t have the luxury of just not answering some random call I don’t recognize.
Scott Trench: Well, should we get out of here, Mindy?
Mindy Jensen: I think that sounds great, Scott. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, but we are not done sharing information with you. We have a whole website filled with information — articles that Scott has written, articles that I have written, templates and forms and calculators, free resources for you. Everything on our website is free. BiggerPocketsMoney.com. We also have a Facebook group, facebook.com/groups/bpmoney, and we would love to have the conversation continue with you over there. Reach out anytime. All right. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen, saying good wishes, little fishies.
