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Mindy Jensen: We are so excited to have Virginia Trench back on the podcast for a behind-the-scenes look at how she and Scott think about goals, spending, and investing. We’ll dive into their current portfolio, how they balance real estate and stocks, how their priorities have evolved, and what financial independence looks like for their family today.
Scott Trench: Yeah, just as a heads up, I know some people have asked because of your great episode, Mindy, with Carl on The Money Guy Show to hear about what I’m doing with our money. And so we’re presenting the financial plan for the Trench household in our goal setting process today. But I do want to disclaim upfront that, you know, our position is very privileged. I got very lucky and had a lottery ticket joining BiggerPockets as an early employee and watching that explode, and even to be able to be the CEO at age 27, and having that ride for 7 years, that’s something a lot of people don’t get in their entire careers. And I had it as a very fortunate opportunity very early on. So I’m by no means saying that this is a realistic or attainable or repeatable path. I’m not denying the privilege and luck that I’ve had in my journey. I’m just saying, here’s what the hand that we’ve been dealt looks like and how we’re playing it and trying to do that to the best of our ability, with some real wins and some big mistakes that we’ll learn from today.
Virginia Trench: Hello, hello, hello.
Mindy Jensen: Hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my definitely Scott’s better half co-host, Virginia Trench. Ooh, I mean my goal-oriented co-host, Scott Trench.
Virginia Trench: I don’t know, Mindy, I think you’re the one with the hair goals today.
Scott Trench: So today I’m very excited that Virginia, my wonderful, beautiful, perfect wife, is joining us on the BiggerPockets Money Podcast.
Virginia Trench: You’re really overselling it, I think.
Scott Trench: We’re going to be talking about our goal-setting process, our financial plan, and what we do kind of operationally week to week. Because yes, I’ve imposed an operational cadence on the household finances that I think Virginia really likes, actually.
Virginia Trench: Yes. Having imposed several household systems myself.
Mindy Jensen: Wow, Scott, you imposed a financial cadence. Nobody listening to this show is shocked.
Virginia Trench: Okay. Try not to swoon. I know that sounds so romantic. Really is the glue that holds us together.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, oh, oh, that’s not even the most romantic thing he’s ever done. Did you or did you not have an in-depth conversation? You had a conversation on your honeymoon about your finances.
Virginia Trench: To be fair, we were looking at a very romantic view while that conversation was happening. So, context.
Mindy Jensen: I spent my honeymoon in different ways.
Scott Trench: This was 30 minutes of day 2 or 3. That’s all.
Mindy Jensen: But you know what? I want to make a point. Carl and I got married 100 years ago. We did not talk about money at all, even though it is rather forefront in our minds now. And we’ve definitely made up for it by talking about money all day, every day, since then. But before we got married, and definitely on our honeymoon, we did not talk about finances. And I love that you guys did. You talked about money before you got married. You talked about money literally on your honeymoon. And now you continue to have these money dates. And your goal-setting worksheet, Scott, that I’m sure you have seen, Virginia, that blew my mind. Scott has always been, I don’t know if you know this, but he’s kind of cerebral.
Virginia Trench: He’s a Virgo. Yeah, it shows.
Mindy Jensen: He’s made this goal-setting document. And what was your check-in, Scott? You did like this daily check-in every day for like 47 years or something that I was, when I first saw that, I’m like, ugh, why would you do that? And now I’m like, oh, see where you were at 35 and where Scott is now at 35? Those are different places. So I really admire your consistency and your focus on these goals. I don’t know that I have set many goals in my life, and we’re working on it. This is a, you know, it’s a process. But can you talk to us about your goal-setting cadence? Because goals and setting goals really informs how you think about your portfolio instead of this kind of throw-spaghetti-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach that so many of us have. What does goal-setting look like for your family now?
Scott Trench: I think that there’s no right answer to this. The answer that I have is goal setting starts with a reasonably clear, reasonably concise description in the present tense of the future state you want to attain. So this in practice is like a one-page vision, right? You can call it, but you know, if you don’t like that term, you think it’s too woo-woo, it’s goals. We use the term vision, and it literally is a written-out vision. And we’ve literally posted this on the biggerpocketsmoney.com website in the resource section in this goal-setting artifact that we have here. And it’s, our home is bustling with our 2 kids and our perfect, very handsome boy, our cat Fred. We have an energetic, healthy day-to-day lifestyle with lots of laughter. So we write it all in the present tense, what we want to achieve. And then we have a description of what our weekday looks like, what our weekends look like, how our kids are doing, our community, friends and neighbors and family and holiday events and those kinds of things. We have our fitness goals in there, and then we have one paragraph on our financial situation. And that’s it.
Virginia Trench: That—
Scott Trench: This all fits on a single page, this vision, if you will. And, as you made fun of me for it, we started that process with, I brought a draft of it to our honeymoon that we began to change, and we iterate on it every quarter as a little ritual.
Virginia Trench: So, yeah, I think it’s fair to say that you were more prepared for that conversation than you were for our actual wedding. But I say getting back to the vision and the goal setting, backing up to even step zero of this process and what’s changed, really made this meaningful for us and actionable for us is having a set weekly time to sit down and not redo the whole vision, but check in on the most immediate things that are important to us. And for us, the best way to do that is without our 2 little ones, because they are adorable. And I’m sure that we’ll try to indoctrinate them into this process at some point, but they are, you know, 17 months and 3, so a little young still to do this with us. So we go out to breakfast and we sit down once a week for about an hour to go through this in a more day-to-day, what are we working on now to make this all possible?
Scott Trench: The cadence there is we talk about wins and gratitudes, rose, bud, thorn, something great that happens, something great that you’re looking forward to.
Virginia Trench: So corny. I think I picked that up at like a youth group camp.
Scott Trench: It’s great. It’s great. It really is so cool.
Virginia Trench: And I still use it to this day.
Scott Trench: Yeah, we each have 3 goals that we’re working on at any given time in a quarter, and we just talk about red, yellow, green on those. We do a household equity check because I can be very spurt-heavy with a clear skew towards not contributing enough around very basic household maintenance items there. So I try to do a better job there. What’s this expression?
Virginia Trench: I’m shocked at how I’m like watching the gears turning in your head as you try to spin this to a positive, possible light. What Scott’s really saying is that he can be a bit of a blundering presence in our house. Like, there’s evidence— just, you can’t see this because it’s outside the camera vision, but there’s, like, dirty bowls from lunch deliveries, like, scattered all around the room, socks, like, all kinds of stuff. So, you know, as I’m sure is common in many partnerships and many marriages, there’s a division of responsibilities. One person can’t do everything. Scott manages most of our finances, though all of our financial decisions we make together. I am more of a dictator than a democratic operator when it comes to our household. Just like checking in on spending on a weekly basis benefits me and helps me, you know, make sure that we’re meeting our financial goals. Managing a household is also a lot of work, and we all have our blind spots.
Mindy Jensen: I think this is really important. You guys want to stay married. I want to stay married to my husband. People who are listening who are married want to stay married. And this household equity check is brilliant and needs to be added to the goal setting document, Scott. But that’s really, really smart, because it doesn’t start off as, I resent my partner. It starts off as, ugh. And then it gets a little bit more, ugh. And then it gets a lot of, I resent my partner. So the household equity check is an excellent addition to the goal setting worksheet because we are talking about money. And you know what’s really expensive? Divorce.
Virginia Trench: Wow. I was like, and you know what’s really expensive? I was like, what is she gonna say next? Like, I don’t know, ordering takeout because no one’s cooking, hiring cleaners cuz no one’s cleaning. Oh, we’re fully escalating it to like a divorce proceeding. Yes, that would be more expensive.
Scott Trench: I think this helps because, if I go months and there’s no format for this, then that will just build up. And this gives us a place where when there’s a problem, we just talk about it in our little weekly meeting. And I think an hour is overstating the time commitment of this meeting. We sometimes will occasionally go an hour on this meeting.
Virginia Trench: Oh, will we?
Scott Trench: But it’s almost always 15 to 25 minutes at most that we—
Virginia Trench: Sorry, we spend an hour. There’s a good amount of chat.
Scott Trench: And yeah, we just hang out, and this is—and then it’s this, but yeah.
Virginia Trench: Yes. And I would say, to your point, Mindy, another format we use because we just, we love our formats and we love our cadences, is we do a stop, start, continue feedback system for each other. I think I picked this one up at a work conference a million years ago. A continue would be something you appreciate your partner doing. So I would say, Scott, I love that you brought me a nice coffee in the morning. That was such a lovely surprise. Please continue doing that. And a stop—stop would be something one partner didn’t appreciate. So stop with the dish adjacency. That’s our current battle. It’s like leaving things near the dishwasher. It’s like a sense of presence here. This is where my plate is supposed to go. And then start is what to replace the annoying behavior with. Well, that’s how we avoid annoying each other.
Mindy Jensen: Okay. I’ve got one because my kids are older. They still do the dish adjacency, which is right in the sink. And sometimes I do, but also I’m the one who loads the dishwasher, so I’m allowed. Start having your older daughter help load the dishwasher. Don’t give her any sort of guidance except like, this is where the silverware goes. If she can’t reach the top yet, have her put everything in the bottom, and then after she leaves and can’t see you, rearrange it to wherever it goes. Because then she gets in the habit of dishes go in the dishwasher, hopefully, but probably not, you will miss this whole dish adjacency with her when the baby is old enough and she’s walking, right?
Scott Trench: She’s totally—
Mindy Jensen: She can walk.
Virginia Trench: She just chooses not to. Okay.
Mindy Jensen: So when she’s more solid, she can help too with plastic, not with anything you wanna keep unbroken, but teaching them from the very beginning. Then Scott is quitting his dish adjacency because he’s teaching the babies to help.
Virginia Trench: And they do love to help.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, they love to help, but that goes away.
Virginia Trench: I don’t know.
Scott Trench: The older one really likes her blankets flat every night, is very clear about wanting to turn off the light and close the door. These are qualities that she got from her mother, not her father, in terms of the attention to these small details that are so important. So the next step is start, stop, continue, as we discussed. Then we do a kid sync and we check in on how they’re doing, whether we’re gonna sign them up for soccer or, you know, start this or cancel that, whatever’s going on there. And then finally from there, we get to the finance check-in, where what I like to do is go over the big picture. I had built a fairly complicated position. I spent a lot of last year simplifying many things, and that’s resulted in a lot of logins and then having to move money here and sign this paperwork and all that kind of stuff. And now really that goes into just a check-in of all of the transactions that have occurred in our Monarch account in the last 7 days or since the last meeting. We usually do this every week, but sometimes we’ll skip a week and how it compares to the percent on the previous month. And then we’ll just kind of go through and make sure that all the expenses are accounted for and we know what we’re doing. And that process has resulted in significant improvement, you know, reduction in household spending, to a pretty good degree over the last 6 months to a year. There’s just some waste from the time when we weren’t doing this and didn’t have these processes in place.
Mindy Jensen: First of all, we’ve spent a lot of time on goals, but I think this is so important to continue to discuss, is that you’ve got this goal, you want your family to look like this, which you have outlined in your goal setting worksheet, which can be found at biggerpocketsmoney.com/goals. And then you have taken that a step further and had a money date of sorts, which comes every single week, which I think is awesome. Having no kids around is key. If you have children, you should not be having a money date with them around, because your money date is going to be distracted and you’re not going to be able to hit all of these things. And like you said, it’s a 15-minute-ish conversation. What I am really curious about is, how you reduced your spending and how much did you say you reduced it by?
Scott Trench: A couple thousand a month, I would say, you know, but it was—it’s just like, oh, you know, these things all added up here. We had these things piling up, and a lot of this is leftover from, you know, my time as CEO, when the opportunity cost of going through and cleaning up every dollar of spending was very large at that point in time running a large company, and that we didn’t have as much time together to spend or build these cadences during the week, for example. That was more of the issue. And I think it was like just household shopping, just making sure like, hey, do we—we’re going to put a little bit of a pause on like, are we going to buy this thing? Or are we going to make sure that we’re, you know, if we’re going to go out to dinner, maybe we can go get the gift cards at Costco on our shopping. And, you know, that’s $30 off.
Virginia Trench: It helped us identify the Costco slush fund that was ballooning our spending. And so we were like, okay, after noticing this pattern for a couple months in a row, we are making a list. Maybe Scott goes to Costco and not me, because I cannot be relied upon to resist Costco impulse purchases. And what else? You still need to join my Spotify Duo.
Scott Trench: Oh yeah, we’re paying for 2 Spotifys right now. That’s my miss.
Virginia Trench: And what else? Like, it helped us catch subscriptions we don’t use anymore, consolidated our entertainment subscriptions, cut back on our Amazon spending. All kinds of stuff. It’s just these things we’ve learned pile up if we don’t check in, and it’s painful to look at a huge stack of a month’s worth of spending. And it’s a lot less painful to do that on a weekly basis.
Scott Trench: Well, and now that we’ve just cleaned it up and eliminated, you know, much of the waste, the transaction count is much smaller too. So it makes it go faster. So that’s been the most, I would say, like impactful part of this, is just going through it and looking at the spend and saying, here’s where it was last month. Here’s where it is by category. And as part of that, I can look through and say, okay, here’s a category here. You know, heating is kind of creeping up, or heating and cool—electricity is heating up. Electricity is cooling off, heating up. I don’t know which word I’m supposed to use here. That was an unintentional pun, but I’m going to roll with it. But I’m going to change the thermostat and the automatic settings there. And that saved us like $50 a month. So I just like to attack little pieces of it every month, not for like hours and hours, but like for like, hey, I’ll look at the expenses and then I’ll make a little to-do, a couple to-dos for the next week and plug them in. And so that’s the cadence. That’s how we like to operate our household. And it’s not like we run it, you know, like this business 40 hours a week. We spend an hour and have a couple of to-dos as part of that.
Mindy Jensen: Scott, you mentioned Monarch as a way that you keep track of your financial situation. I also use Monarch. I really, really love the holistic snapshot, but also their recurring merchants tab, because that’s how you find those unused subscriptions. I go in there every once in a while and I’m like, “Wait, why do I have two of this?” Well, because Carl and I both signed up for it at the same time. Or why do I have two of this? I don’t—it’s two separate, or it’s biweekly charges. Or you know, Claire has one thing and Daphne has another, and they’re really not the same thing. So, but being able to take a few minutes to go in there and see everything—they categorize stuff as recurring that sometimes isn’t recurring. It’s easy to mark that as not recurring, and it never shows up there again. But Monarch has definitely changed my understanding of my holistic financial picture, because everything’s right there. I don’t have to log into 47 different accounts and remember 47 different passwords and pick up my Google Authenticator to make sure I’ve got two-factor authentication on this. It’s just such a hassle to log into everything. And I could just go to Monarch, log in once, and then there is everything. Once you set it up, everything is just right there.
Virginia Trench: We like to see things in one place as much as possible, and that’s what led us to consolidating a lot of our accounts. And the quickest way to get the most difficult version of Scott’s personality is to put him in a difficult customer service login—send the code, remember the password, send it to this email address. He requires somewhat of a nervous system reset, calming down period after that, which is—should we segue to how we have deployed everything since we realized in one weekly check-in, like, oh, we actually need to move this money here into this account to make sure it’s actually doing what we wanted to do, and that kind of stuff?
Scott Trench: Yeah, let’s go into the financial plan then. So we have a net worth in the Chubby FIRE to Fat FIRE range. I know some people will be disappointed, but we’re not going to share the specific numbers here. We’re going to give you a very clear shape and try to be as transparent as possible within that constraint. But you can kind of break this out as there’s a paid-off house, and then a Chubby to Fat FIRE financial portfolio. And that portfolio is going to be broken out about 45% real estate—rental real estate here in the Denver area—about 45% liquid portfolio, which would include the stock portfolio, about 5% cash, and about 5% side bets sleeve. So that’s the target allocation. Right now it’s like 46% stocks, 44% real estate, 6% cash, and like 2 or 3% in the side bets, depending on how conservatively I want to estimate the value of those. And this does not include very important components of our potential wealth, which include valuing the books that I’ve published, or that Virginia has published, ownership interest in private companies, including BiggerPockets, and some other assets that are there. It also does not include our two cars. It does not include our donor-advised fund that we set up in a high-income year. And then it does not include the 529 plans for our two girls that are, if not fully funded for college and, you know, front-loaded in a significant way that could cover all or much of college education, depending on where they go when they turn 18. That’s the summary in a nutshell. Any response or questions there, Mindy, before we move on?
Mindy Jensen: I think it’s fair to not include your cars. Like, anything you don’t want to include, then great, don’t include it. This is your financial situation, and you have an understanding of what is going on in there. But I think cars are a depreciating asset essentially, although my car did go up by $4,000 since I bought it. Wow. But all the other stuff that you don’t want to include, great, don’t include it. You said side bets. What does side bets mean to you?
Scott Trench: We have positions in debt funds. We have a position in a commercial office building that I recently placed, and we have positions in various other syndications, including multifamily syndications, that I mark very conservatively and assume zero. They may be worth something there. So, but that’s the majority of the side bets there. In the future, I intend to, or hope to, advise various companies using my skill set as a trained CEO and operator over at BiggerPockets. And so I would hope to make similar side bets in those types of businesses that I would participate in or advise over time. So that’ll be where a good chunk of the future side bet sleeve probably grows.
Mindy Jensen: And would that be like a consulting gig?
Scott Trench: Yeah, like you can think of a consulting gig, or even like a board seat. That’s something I’m interested in exploring in the future. Yep.
Mindy Jensen: So real estate’s a big chunk of your portfolio. Are you actively looking for more real estate, or are you kind of status quo?
Scott Trench: We’re status quo on the rental real estate. So last year we made a big purchase that we talked about with the quadplex that we purchased, and then we also bought another duplex. The quadplex was in great shape, and the duplex was a little bit of a project. So the tenant moved out, and so we’re now in the middle of that rehab right now. We’re basically finished with that, and so we’re going to be putting it on the market and looking for a tenant soon.
Mindy Jensen: Putting it on the market, meaning opening it up for rental, not selling it.
Scott Trench: Yes, right.
Mindy Jensen: Okay. How many rental properties do you own, and what percentage of them are paid off?
Scott Trench: We have 19 rental units, and 13 of those are in a partnership. They’re owned with a friend and they’re levered. And that portfolio is kind of one part of the real estate portfolio that’s done very well for us. We also have these two properties that are completely paid off as part of that.
Mindy Jensen: Hmm, completely paid off. How’d you buy those, Scott?
Virginia Trench: We had this amazing consultant we engaged. Couldn’t have done it without her.
Scott Trench: I want to—
Virginia Trench: It’s Mindy.
Scott Trench: Yes, I know, I know. Yes, I know it was Mindy. Mindy helped us buy the properties. Yes. But going back to the broader question that implies, we had the ability to generate a tremendous amount of wealth because I joined a startup as an early employee and became CEO at 27 years old, and literally spent seven years in the CEO seat. Not a lot of people have had seven years of CEO experience by the time they’re in their mid-30s, and it’s just a luck outcome there. I mean, a lot of people who have similar capability sets just never get an opportunity like that. So that’s a lot of winning lottery ticket. I am not trying to say that this situation is repeatable or attainable for other people. There’s a luck component to it. We’ve tried to play the hand the best that we were able to, but we are also very grateful and fortunate for the opportunities that we’ve had. And we’re not saying this is like the repeatable journey for a lot of folks.
Mindy Jensen: Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. You prepared a lot and then took advantage of an opportunity. So I don’t want to just say, oh, it was a whim that it happened. It kind of was, but also you put a lot of work into making that whim happen. But what I was really meaning is, about a year and a half ago, you were rather vocal about making a switch from the stock market to the real estate market because you believed that the market was overvalued. Has your portfolio shifted much since then?
Scott Trench: I’m actually kind of actively betting against you, Mindy, with the way that we have our portfolio set up, because I do not trust the mega-cap tech valuations. I invested in the S&P 500 for 10, 12 years and put almost all of our stock portfolio in there, and it was highly concentrated in that. That performed really well. And around early 2025, I decided I really don’t like that. I know that’s not something I’m comfortable with. I was looking more crudely at CAPE ratios and other valuation metrics rather than the mega-cap complex as a specific threat to what I thought was my long-term financial future. But yes, I made that reallocation. I’m at least very early in that reallocation. Denver real estate has gone nowhere, arguably down, although we’ve seen rents come—really not that impacted in our portfolio—but we know that they’re down in the market from a market-wide perspective. So I’m at least early, and within the next year or two that will shift to wrong, clearly, if things continue in this direction. So we’ll see how that goes. Oh, here’s our cat Fred here making an appearance.
Virginia Trench: He doesn’t approve of you betting against Mindy.
Scott Trench: So what I’ve also done is, over the course of 2025, I continued to buy real estate, and I began moving into factor tilts and other allocation sleeves. So small-cap value was something that we talked about with Frank Vasquez actually last year. We had Ben Felix talk about that. And so I shifted a lot of our public equity positions into those towards the end of last year and into the beginning of this year. And as of the last month or two, I’ve made one last pretty big switcheroo. And so our equity portfolio is now largely in an equal-cap index fund, which people who are smart investors will note likely has had higher historical volatility than a market-cap-weighted fund. But my feeling is, I do not want to have 40% of my wealth in this mega-cap complex of nine major technology companies that comprise literally 40% of the S&P right now, as of today’s recording. And I would rather have an equal weight—I want to own one slice of each of those. Now, there’s also really good pushback about whether an equal-cap index fund is the right way to express that. There are different adjustment factors that certain other funds can have, but I’ve chosen a fund called RSP for now—the plurality. It’s not quite half of my stock portfolio, about 36%. I continue to hold 16% in VTI, and then the remaining portion of the portfolio is actually in factor tilts for U.S. small-cap value, international small-cap value, emerging small-cap value, and international value, which includes large cap. I’m actually doing that with a lot of Avantis funds. So if you’re following that, that adds up to about 100% of the portfolio. I also have a small sleeve of individual random stocks that I purchased in my stock-picking days years ago, and I’ve held on. They’re not very meaningful, probably around 1 to 2% of my position. I have not had a winner like Google, or Tesla, or SpaceX, like you have, Mindy. That’s the stock portfolio there, and that’s actually done really well, that portfolio. I probably got very lucky in just the timing of learning about small-cap value and putting my positions in there at the end of last year. But that has been a rocket ship for us.
Mindy Jensen: I think most people investing in the stock market, when they go up, they’re getting lucky. They have a fortunate series of events that are happening that are raising their stock market valuation. Again, what is that? Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. You can’t take advantage of the opportunity if you don’t have any sort of preparation behind you. I mean, I could just throw money in any stock, but some of them go down, some of them go down to zero. So I’m curious what individual stocks you hold, Scott.
Scott Trench: Before I get to that—because I actually have to go look, I haven’t really checked in a while. They’re such small positions, and I haven’t made any active moves in there for a long time. So I actually have to go and look at them. I wasn’t prepared for that question, but let me just ground the thesis one more time here, which is, I don’t like being concentrated in mega-cap tech. And so I have attempted with this portfolio to buy everything else in the equity market, maintaining a 70/30, like the market-cap-weighting allocation, to U.S. and international. And then I’ve bought into this concept of the factor premiums in value and size, thanks to the great guests we’ve had, like Ben Felix. That is not saying other people should do that, but I like this for us because it puts 5% of our stock portfolio into the mega-cap tech complex on a holistically weighted basis, instead of 40%. And I don’t like having 40% of the equity portfolio betting on a very small handful of companies. I like this better. I’ve been reluctant to do this episode because I’m not really loving the secondary bet I’m making, right? There’s two decisions here. One is stay away from mega-cap tech. I can defend that and feel really good about that. People can disagree, but I feel like I have a really good intellectual grounding in that. Then it’s build this portfolio, which is a secondary bet that is also making decisions that are different from that, right? And I have learned that from that mistake last year in buying rental properties, right? It’s one thing to move away from large-cap tech. It’s another to buy that rental property in Denver. I can be right about mega-cap tech in five years, maybe, and I can still lose depending on how the rental property performs. So that’s what I’m trying to work through intellectually with the position here. But I feel pretty good about this portfolio and how we’ve constructed it. And Virginia, I think, likes the reasoning as well. Carl wouldn’t.
Mindy Jensen: Well, you know what? Are you married to him?
Virginia Trench: No.
Mindy Jensen: So it doesn’t matter what Carl thinks. It matters what your partner thinks.
Virginia Trench: I imagine that Scott explained this to me many times to follow it. But yes.
Scott Trench: We have a diversified portfolio in index funds that make a decision about moving away from mega-cap tech. That’s what this is. It’s not individual stock picking. You asked about the individual stocks though. I did at one time pick individual stocks, and I have a small handful of them.
Mindy Jensen: Well, while you look that up, I want to share with our listeners who may not be on our newsletter list, which you can join when you go to biggerpocketsmoney.com/newsletter—Scott wrote a really great article on our blog called “Mega Cap Tech: Individually, Each Giant Makes Sense. Collectively, They Don’t. Is It an AI Bubble?” And this can be found at biggerpocketsmoney.com/aibubble. And in this article you reference a really awesome calculator that you created at biggerpocketsmoney.com/megacap, where, once you read Scott’s article, you can see what he’s talking about and start sliding around all of these different ideas that you have about these ten stocks that are the FAANGs and the big, big, big tech stocks, and see what you think might happen. Next Friday, Scott and my husband Carl are going to have a conversation about their differences of opinion on this mega-cap valuation, because in some regards, Carl’s like, yeah, that makes sense, Scott. In some other regards, Carl doesn’t agree. So I think that’s a really great conversation that we’re all about to have, and you should tune in if you are interested in this mega-cap stock valuation, because somebody has to win and somebody has to not win. And this mega-cap calculator that Scott created brings up some pretty interesting theses.
Scott Trench: My belief is basically not that the mega-cap tech complex companies are bad companies, or that they’re going to go bankrupt or anything like that. It’s just that I believe they’re valued at a level that requires fairly preposterous assumptions as a group. Anyone could win—Google could win, Tesla could win, SpaceX could win. But when you try to combine them all as one company, because there are a lot of interrelations, it’s just fairly preposterous that they could all win, or that any one could win enough to make up for the losses that will inevitably happen in other companies. So we’ll talk about that, and the circularity, and all that kind of stuff. I’m not alone in this. I’m not even particularly original in this framing. There’s plenty of people who have this opinion, and plenty of people who have counter opinions. And so we’ll discuss it, and that’s where I’m at. But hopefully you can see our portfolio is relatively conservative. We have a significant cash position that’s at least a year—well into, maybe approaching, the 18-month to two-year mark in terms of our household spending. We’ve got a portfolio that’s diversified across all these different funds. It’s not concentrated in any individual stock. My largest individual stock holding is Crocs, actually. Crocs and Franklin Covey. I don’t know why I bought Crocs and Franklin Covey at one point, but—
Virginia Trench: Red Robin?
Scott Trench: Red Robin I have owned for years, and I have one share. It is worth $8.06.
Virginia Trench: Oh, down five today.
Scott Trench: I’m down 5 cents today, and I’m up 33 cents on my holding, but that’s been a rough ride.
Virginia Trench: Yeah, Scott is very passionate—well, he’s a niche, passionate grill master. You’ve mastered the brisket, and your buffalo wings are very good.
Scott Trench: Yeah, so I bought a Traeger, and then I bought the equivalent amount of Traeger stock there. That has gone very poorly for me, that particular investment. So there’s just a few things like that. They’re very small position parts of the portfolio though, because I can’t resist, and I enjoy turning my brain on for these analytics. But I’ve made a few thousand bucks across these individual stock positions over like 10 years, so it’s not really that interesting.
Mindy Jensen: I think that if somebody is interested in following a stock, buy a couple of shares, buy $100, buy $1,000 in a stock that you really want to follow. Daphne, my 16-year-old, has recently started following Nvidia. I don’t know why—she just got it in her head that this was a great stock to follow. Of all the stocks that we talk about, this is the one. We don’t even own Nvidia, except whatever’s in the index funds.
Scott Trench: We own a lot of Nvidia.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, okay, so we own a lot, but none individually. And she’s like, I want to buy Nvidia, it is going up and I want to buy it. And I was like, well, okay, what do they do? And she’s like, I don’t know, but it keeps going up. I’m like, well—so this kind of goes against all of my advice for people who want to invest in individual stocks. If you want to invest, you should do some research in it. At the bare minimum, you should know what they do. Frankly, I have a vague idea of what they do, but it’s also—I don’t own it, so I don’t need to know what they do. She is also getting a Roth IRA now that she has her very first job at Taco Bell, and we will be matching her contributions dollar for dollar into her Roth IRA. So she will be able to buy this Nvidia stock.
Virginia Trench: That sounds like a supreme approach to parenting and investing.
Mindy Jensen: I was talking to Carl and I said, oh, we should put it in her trust account. Oh wait, we can’t. So reminder, we did an episode a couple of weeks ago with Jeremy Schneider from Personal Finance Club on the pros and cons of a trust account. If you have a child who is under the age of 18, you have the opportunity to get up to $5,000 per year into their trust account, their 529 account. And if they’re born between January 1st, 2025 and December 31st, 2028, you have the opportunity to get an additional $1,000 into their account from the government. They’ll just give it to you. All the rest of the $5,000 you have to put in. But I think that’s a great opportunity for people who are looking to help their kids get a leg up. So go check out that episode that we did with Jeremy. Very informative about all the different ins and outs of these accounts.
Scott Trench: Yep. And we’ve set up trust accounts, which I actually have not added to the Monarch portfolio yet because they’re very small, but I’ll put those in and consider them like the 529 or DAF inside of this. So that’s a good little to-do. That’s like one of the to-dos I would have from a financial plan discussion is just, okay, gotta add those to the account. Just a couple of points I want to talk about with the portfolio here. So we have the stock portfolio with the real estate. That’s the vast majority of our position, plus our cash and some of these side bets here. Over the last several months, our spending has been about 3.25% to 3.5% of the financial value of that portfolio. And that’s kind of right where I feel much more comfortable. I get very uncomfortable when that number bumps past 4%. I know that there’s plenty of research and people who debate and don’t like the conservatism, but that’s how I feel. And that’s one of the reasons why I really like this meeting is I definitely need to do a better job of contributing around the house more consistently and those types of things. And I also like being able to say, okay, our spending is here. And I don’t like it because we host this podcast. I don’t want to be beyond these reasonably conservative rules of thumb with my own spending. So there’s a little bit of circularity to that, that I think is important to try to live our life the way that we talk about on the podcast here. And I get uncomfortable when we drift. And so that’s been one of the valuable things for this is we are living within this framework.
Mindy Jensen: How are you tracking this? Do you have an idea, like my net worth is $100,000, therefore 3.5% of that is $3,500. So as long as I’m not spending more than $3,500, I’m good.
Scott Trench: Yeah, exactly. It’s just, here’s the number we want to stay under from a spending perspective each month and averaging that.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, I think that’s really great. Because you have reached financial independence, you don’t really need to budget, but you do need to have an idea of where your money is going so that it doesn’t just fly out of your pockets. It’s so easy to be like, oh, it’s only $1, it’s only $20, it’s only $100. And then all of a sudden that adds up real quick and you’re like, ooh, I thought I was spending $60,000 a year and look, I spent $150,000 last year, and I didn’t plan on it.
Scott Trench: Yep. So you got it. That’s kind of one of the key goals for the meeting, is make sure that we’re tracking that way across the average for the year. We’re really conservative in all this stuff, right? Because again, we have—well, even with our portfolio, right? I mean, a paid off, very lightly leveraged rental portfolio, the stock position here, the large cash position, some of the side bets, and then not even factoring in some of the equity in the businesses, you know, other businesses and those things. So that’s probably a criticism of our portfolio. And the other thing I don’t love about our portfolio is the rental real estate concentration in Denver here. I didn’t really have that framework a year or two ago around it, but I think it’s less bad to own real estate here in Denver than it would be to have them across the country. But it is a real risk that makes it harder to model the portfolio because of the geographic concentration. Forget Denver-specific promise or lack of promise, I actually am a big fan of Denver and like the area over 20, 30 years, but any geographic concentration with that part of the portfolio just changes the dials a little bit on the risk profile, the risk-reward profile for the whole portfolio. So there are some things I like. I feel great about our portfolio and the way that we’ve set it up, but I don’t love all of it. And there’s some risks that I’m reasonably open about.
Virginia Trench: Trade-offs. Yeah.
Scott Trench: With the real estate, I don’t think this is appreciated very much by a lot of people, but one of the thoughts I have around the way we structured our real estate portfolio is we bought these things at like a 6 to 7 cap, between 6 and 7 cap. And so if you just zoom out at long-term average, we should generate something around that in terms of annual cash flow from the properties, and we should get something close to historical appreciation. If you stack 3.5% appreciation with a 6.5% cap, you get a 10% return, which is still a little too crude, a little too simplistic, but you’re there. And so I should generate that from these properties for the foreseeable future, but I also have the option to refinance them at any time. I routinely go through and try to make sure I have financing available for the primary residence and the rental properties as an option. I don’t know if I’ll ever exercise it, but it’s there. And I think that that’s a very valuable part of the portfolio here that maybe is underrated by some folks with the paid-off rentals—that option is worth something. And I’m not paying very dearly for it. In the meantime, I’m just collecting cash flow. So I think that’s something to consider. And I’m not sure exactly how that will play out in the future, but I think that one day that may be something we’re very grateful to have. In a deep recession, maybe it’s harder to get financing, but I should be able to get something, if not nothing, from that portfolio. So that’s an idea.
Mindy Jensen: Where would you buy real estate if you weren’t buying in Denver?
Scott Trench: I would probably move into the REIT space, or maybe pick a market or two and buy a handful of single-family rentals—enough to make a difference in my portfolio, but not so much that it would create another set of, you know, major geographic risk. But that’s the question I struggle with, is do I buy in Denver, do I buy out of state? And at the end of the day, you can see where I put my money—it’s here in Denver. I just think that even if another market really does well for the next 10, 15, 20 years, I may actually get a better return in Denver because I can be involved in major decisions and go and handle it.
Mindy Jensen: One of the suggestions I would make when I was the community manager at BiggerPockets and people were asking, oh, it’s too expensive where I live, where should I invest, was where do you know people? Or what other markets do you know? Like, Scott, I know you grew up in Maryland, you know that state, you know that area—you may not want to invest there. But that’s a great place to start looking. Oh, maybe there is a great market in Maryland. I actually am incredibly unfamiliar with the rental market in Maryland. But I grew up in Illinois. I still know people who live in Illinois. I could look around in the different, like, Chicagoland area cities and say, oh, this actually kind of makes sense, and I used to live there, so I can check it out. So is there any place that you know, like, oh, didn’t you go to school someplace that isn’t Maryland?
Scott Trench: I have thought about this a lot, but I’m like, I don’t want to get on a plane and go deal with problems in any of those areas. And so if I’m going to own real estate, I’m going to own it in the area where I can—if, let’s say, things go terribly over the next several years, the market tanks and my equity position begins to dwindle, we have some sort of historical disaster or whatever—well, I can manage these properties. We could move into one if we needed to. We’ve lived in several of them for many years. So that’s a real risk mitigant, I feel, for our situation that I wouldn’t get if we had a bunch of properties back east.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, and that’s valid. That’s something that you have thought of. But this show isn’t just for you, it’s also for our listeners. So if our listeners are thinking, oh, it’s too expensive where I live—where else do you know, could you rent out a space? My friend Jake used to live in Ohio. His dad is still there. He owns rental properties in Ohio. And when there’s an issue, his dad helps him out. So having somebody local who can help you out in an area is priceless, because property managers are great, but knowing somebody who can help you—let me go through a couple of other key concepts from our plan here.
Scott Trench: So we’ve talked about the buckets of our wealth. We’ve talked about why we’ve made decisions and the optionality we think it provides and how it provides a really, really great quality of life, I think, here. And we’re very lucky. We have to talk about cash. So the cash is a small amount in checking, significant amount in the money market. And I also consider the small bond position that we have as part of the cash position. So just for anyone wondering there, if we own bonds—we do own bonds, very small amount—I kind of bucket it into the cash position. I also think that the real estate is more bond-like for us and gives us that differentiation from the stock market, the lower correlation. So we get a little bit of that kind of risk parity benefit to some degree by having that real estate holdings there. On tax strategy, I’m very aggressive. So Mindy, just to draw a comparison to you—you have a lot of your wealth in the 401k, pre-tax, in SpaceX. I don’t know if you’ve actually been able to liquidate SpaceX or not, or if that’s coming up. We have gone the complete opposite route. We have very little wealth in the pre-tax bucket, a much larger Roth position here, and much of our wealth is at basis, effectively, because I’ve been aggressively resetting that basis. And one of the reasons why I reset that basis is because I believe I’ll have business interests, Virginia will have a writing career and those types of things, and we will not really be in a very low income tax bracket like some people in the FIRE community who choose to stop working entirely. I’m skeptical that that day will ever come—that we’ll really be in relatively low tax brackets. And so I like harvesting at the 15% capital gains bracket if I can. And so much of our wealth—we have very little capital gain in the portfolio other than the real movement from some of that small-cap value stuff in the last year. And I may reset that at the end of the year. So I think that now is a great time to pay taxes. And I’ve been happy to do that because I think I’ll pay much, much less taxes in the event that things go well for our financial position in the future, or if the tax code changes with future administrations. I do not think that will be friendly to somebody who has not harvested gains in a situation like ours. So that’s the governing theory of that. This year we’ll continue that by moving into the Roth position there. There have been a few years where I’ve deferred, though, especially when we’re in a particularly high income tax bracket.
Mindy Jensen: I wrote an article at the end of June called “You Don’t Have to Sell What You Love, You Just Have to Sell It for a Second,” and it talks about capital gains harvesting. This is not something that Carl and I ever thought about, and now we sit on a good problem to have, but it’s still an issue where our cost basis for almost all of our after-tax stocks is close to zero. Definitely for the bulk of the after-tax stocks. So when we sell, we’re just paying all gains. But there are definitely years over the past 25 where we had space in our lower or even middle tax brackets that we could have filled up, that will be very different than our current tax bracket. So I want to encourage people who have never capital gains harvested to look into this option and look into this idea, because if you have after-tax stocks that have significantly appreciated—on the one hand, hooray, I’ve made money; on the other hand, the government is going to come calling. So if you have space in your tax portfolio, reset the basis periodically. I love that you’ve been doing that.
Scott Trench: I think there’s a world where we could have had a significantly larger pre-tax net worth, but that this approach that we’ve taken will ultimately generate a lot more post-tax net worth for us to enjoy in our life and maybe pass on to our girls one day. So that’s been my philosophy. That’s a real debatable point. And I think that there’s a certain aggressiveness, or maybe even arrogance, to that belief set that I bring to the tax strategy. But I certainly bias towards the belief that this is a relatively good time to pay taxes for someone in our position.
Mindy Jensen: I think it is right now. And I mean, you don’t have to just sell everything and pay it all at once. Look around the end of November, beginning of December, look at where your income is, what moves you’ve already made, and see if there’s any space at the top of whatever your current tax bracket is to take advantage of this.
Scott Trench: So, next up is estate planning. We have all of our estate plans set up—revocable trusts, all that kind of good stuff. I was worried in preparing for this episode that we were way behind on not updating that, but we had a great setup for that and it rolled through and carried through and has, you know, all the things that applied to our firstborn applied to our second child. And so it was really well structured, and there were just a few things to clean up—beneficiaries and that kind of stuff—on some of the complexity of the accounts that we had. That’s generally up to date, with maybe a few to-dos between now and the end of the year just to get that into good shape. One of the things that I think is interesting is the inheritance tax is way beyond our net worth. But I think that’s one of those things that could change at any point. And so that’s something I’ll be looking at—if some policy change in a future administration places taxes on inheritance at different levels, we would begin a serious conversation about setting up irrevocable trusts to some degree as part of that. But that’s not something we’re firing at at this point.
Mindy Jensen: Ooh, I want to plant a seed. I got an email from a listener talking about South Dakota legacy trusts.
Scott Trench: Yeah, we’re not doing anything like that.
Mindy Jensen: Well, not right now, but a South Dakota legacy trust, in a nutshell—definitely do more research—helps you provide for future generations, and you skip all of the 40% inheritance taxes when, like, you don’t leave it to your kids, and then when they pass, they have to pay 40% inheritance tax to their kids, and so on and so on. It kind of skips all of that. So it’s an irrevocable trust. I would definitely encourage you to read a lot about it, but it sounds like something I want to do some research on.
Scott Trench: Yeah, I think that that begins to apply when you get to your level of net worth and begin to think about, oh well, if I double that a few times, I’m going to be in this problem—maybe it’s time to start thinking about these advanced tax planning structures. That’s real big-league stuff. So we’ll see how that goes.
Mindy Jensen: Scott, you have 18 years between you and me. So what is the rule of 72 talking about in 18 years? You’re going to double 2 times, 2.5 times?
Scott Trench: I think it’s very possible that happens with our portfolio. But what I’m trying to communicate is we’re not there yet, but it’s in the back of the mind, if that ever happens, to begin thinking about that stuff, especially if that tax law changes. And everyone’s got an opinion on this stuff. I believe it’s smart to err on the side of they might raise the tax bracket. You may not be in a higher tax bracket later if you FIRE or stop working or stop maximizing active income in the near term for some point in time. I’m betting, clearly, and making high-stakes tax decisions here, that tax brackets will go up.
Mindy Jensen: I agree.
Scott Trench: So let me see here. Let’s, let’s summarize. We talked about where we are at. Chubby FatFI. We talked about the portfolio. The high-level goal, just to restate it here, is to maintain financial independence in our spending band and give ourselves the option to let the portfolio continue to grow. And if it does, then we may continue to increase our lifestyle or maybe do some other things or continue to donate to our charitable fund or our donor-advised fund. But we would like that option. We don’t want to rule it out and attempt to spend as much as possible right now. We have a comfortable life. We want to eliminate waste. We don’t want to deprive ourselves, but we want to stay within the bounds of financial independence. And then if it grows, let that continue to let our lifestyle spending grow. And that’s that. We’re giving up some maximum expected return in exchange for the floor on that, but we’re also staying reasonably aggressively invested with our stock portfolio to give us a higher ceiling on that. So kind of high floor, but with ceiling growth opportunity there. We talked about public equities, we talked about real estate, we talked about— we have some controls in place here. We talked about cash and liquidity, tax, estate plan. Oh, insurance. Last one to cover here, which is we have a small insurance policy that would pay off the debt on the levered portfolio. For me, we do not carry life insurance on Virginia. I have never filed a claim, right? I don’t know, maybe one claim in 10 years on rental property insurance. So what I do with the rental properties is, because I don’t like to file claims—it’s a pain in the rear, and then your premiums can go up for a long time. And usually the claims aren’t that large. So all of the premiums in our portfolio are at the highest possible deductible, like literally $20,000, $25,000, $30,000. And that keeps our insurance rates much, much lower. It’s a pretty big, pretty dramatic difference. We forego a lot of the wind and hail stuff because it’s almost the same as the deductible on these policies. And that’s paid off huge for us. We’ve had a few roof replacements and that kind of stuff over the years, but I think that the premium savings across the portfolio has drastically overwhelmed that. So that governs all of our insurance thoughts here: what is enough to protect against catastrophe, but we’re going to float any large deductibles or that kind of stuff. And that keeps our costs really low from an insurance perspective. And I shop that pretty aggressively every year or two.
Mindy Jensen: I have a similar stance on insurance, but also I would like to point out that you and I might be in a different financial position than somebody who is listening. One of the tips that I have heard from people who are suggesting increase your deductible is to have that much money—your deductible—in an account that isn’t in the stock market. This is your savings account, maybe a high-yield savings account that is specifically in case you need to file a claim. Let’s say we live in the Colorado area, we get a lot of hailstorms. Let’s say your deductible is $10,000 to do a new roof. I mean, I’ve got a couple of roofers that’ll do it for $12,000 or $15,000. So is it really even worth filing the claim when you’re going to pay that much anyway? But have that $10,000 in a bank account. So if you do have something like, God forbid, a fire, and it’s a significant expense to rebuild the house or remediate or whatever, you’ve got your deductible already. That’s not now a new burden for you to try and figure out if you are not already financially independent. Carl and I have the highest deductible that our lenders will allow.
Scott Trench: Yeah, and we also have a high deductible health insurance plan, of course, that’s HSA compatible, and do max that immediately.
Mindy Jensen: Yep, you max the HSA.
Scott Trench: Yes.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, Virginia, now that you have reached financial independence, how does it feel?
Virginia Trench: I think Scott and I both—we both are ambitious people, and we have a tendency to think about the next thing, the next thing, the next thing endlessly. So we try to really enjoy—it’s a big undertaking to say just enjoy life. I think we’re too anxious. We’re anxious people. So it’s just a matter of being intentional with enjoying the freedom, the financial freedom that we have, and being grateful for what we can do and the flexibility that we have. Going for a walk in the middle of the day. The gratitudes are so important as part of our weekly check-in, and we do stuff that’s big and small in that. Just because we have that flexibility that Scott worked very hard for, and there was a good amount of luck, we had the ability to slow down and say, “I want to write down how grateful we are for how our youngest says the word shoes,” which is “ooze.” She puts on her ooze.
Scott Trench: This is a real threat to early retirement.
Virginia Trench: Yeah, the princess dress economy is absolutely out of control. For our oldest, she is obsessed with these princess nightgowns. They cost maybe $15 each, but we frankly run out of princesses, and now we’re moving on to Paw Patrol, Spider-Man. Short story long, answer to your question, it feels amazing, Mindy, and I get to pursue my creative career. We get to have wonderful family time. It helps that we actually like each other. And we’re going paddleboarding tomorrow. That’s gonna be fun.
Mindy Jensen: I was just gonna ask, what does Tuesday look like for you?
Scott Trench: Today’s Tuesday, but let’s use tomorrow as an example, because tomorrow we’re going to drop the kids off—it’s largely a workday tomorrow for us—at the local daycare. Then we’re going to do a quick daycare. We like to do our dates if we can during that period because we’re already paying for daycare. So we’ll do that. And so we’re going to go get breakfast and then do a paddleboarding session. And then I have various meetings. We’re actually going to record 2 podcasts tomorrow, it looks like.
Virginia Trench: I have work to do.
Scott Trench: Yeah, I’ve got a one-on-one with somebody. I’ve got a call with one or 2 team members.
Virginia Trench: Oh, we should talk about that.
Scott Trench: Yeah, then I’ll work out, and then I’ll go pick up the girls, and Virginia will go in and do her little thing tomorrow.
Virginia Trench: Yeah, we do that once a week too. We call it our quote-unquote “night off,” a break from parenting duties. So one of us does pickup through bedtime while the other might see a friend. In your case, you are somewhat addicted to pho. I’ll go get my nails done or something. Yeah.
Scott Trench: Yeah. And that’s like a good night—like, okay, I’m gonna hang out with my buddy. And with the football season coming up, I’ll probably take a lot of Mondays, for example, and go hang out with my buddies and go watch that. And then on Thursday, I will do my night off. What I’m going to do is I’m going to drive up to Breckenridge and I’ll do a little hike, and then I’ll go to a coffee shop and work for a little bit, and then I’ll come home and might be there in time for pickup or bedtime, or might be home a little bit later after that. But I think—
Virginia Trench: This is as spontaneous as we get. This is scheduled spontaneity, to the extent that’s possible with 2 young children.
Scott Trench: Yeah. So I’ll throw in work. I’ll probably do some Claude coding for something for BiggerPockets Money or write a blog post or something like that as part of that outing. And then next week I’ll do it with one of the girls. So I’ll take out Katie, and they love that.
Virginia Trench: Daddy-daughter skip days.
Scott Trench: Yeah, we’ll do a skip day and do that. That’s a real luxury that we get to have here, and it kind of weaves in all this stuff. So that would be the example for this week of how we would do that. And it is nice to be able to have that flexibility.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah. And as far as spontaneity goes with the 3-year-old and the 1-year-old, you gotta plan it or it’s never gonna happen. Same with dates, same with nights off. Obviously I survived, but we didn’t do this, and I wish we would have, because that would’ve given Carl an opportunity to bond with the girls even deeper, and me an opportunity to not have to answer “mommy, mommy, mommy” questions every 30 seconds from morning until night. And I think that’s really important that you’re doing that. I love that you’re doing that.
Scott Trench: That’s what that means to us right now. And—
Virginia Trench: And it’s not perfect. We definitely don’t implement this all perfectly all the time. And much of it came from lessons learned the hard way, but life is good.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, life is really good. I love that for you. Okay, Scott and Virginia, I really appreciate you sharing all of this information with us. Scott, everybody knows where they find you. Virginia, where can people find out more about you and your books?
Virginia Trench: Ooh, so I write psychological thrillers, and you can learn more at virginiatrench.com. And I have a new book coming out in the fall. It’s about a con man and women who will stop at nothing to take him down. Pretty much the antithesis of sound financial advice. It’s about a financial scammer, but it’s a thrilling read, and I’m excited for people to read it.
Mindy Jensen: I am excited to read it. Mr.—
Scott Trench: Disappear is the title. So November 10th, Mr. Disappear by Virginia Trench. So check that out. And yeah, that’s a great read. It’s like the guy’s kind of like the Tinder Swindler. That’s kind of how I think about it.
Mindy Jensen: I love that. I’m super excited for Mr. Disappear, and I really loved your first book, Our Secrets Were Safe.
Virginia Trench: Thanks, Mindy. That’s a fun one too.
Mindy Jensen: If you like psychological thrillers, head over to virginiatrench.com and check those out. They’re also available wherever books are sold, right?
Virginia Trench: Yep.
Mindy Jensen: Awesome. All right, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. Before we go, I want to let you know that we have tons of financial information on our website, biggerpocketsmoney.com. We have a blog, we have a newsletter. You can sign up for that at biggerpocketsmoney.com/newsletter. We have free resources and calculators and templates, all designed to help you on your journey to financial independence. So hop on over to biggerpocketsmoney.com and check us out. Now that wraps up the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. He is Scott Trench. She is Virginia Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying bye-bye, fruit fly.
