Every so often someone posts something in our Facebook group that makes me stop scrolling. A while back, Nate Forbes shared that he and his wife had paid off most of their rental properties, and the income from those rentals now covered their family’s living expenses. He has four kids. His wife stays home and homeschools them. He has never earned six figures, and for a big chunk of his career he earned a lot less than that.
I asked him to come on the BiggerPockets Money podcast, and Scott and I spent an hour picking apart how he did it. The short version is that he did nothing flashy. The long version is below, and I think it’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of how financial independence on a low income actually works in real life.
He Started Out Owing Nothing
Nate’s money story starts with his parents. His dad worked for a nonprofit, his mom stayed home, and money was always tight. Nate says they never felt poor, though, and his parents were never stingy. They gave generously and were deeply involved in their community. Larry Burkett was always on the radio, and good money habits were just part of the house.
When college came around, his parents told him they’d help where they could but didn’t want him borrowing. So he worked. He was a janitor, then worked at a restaurant, then picked up whatever jobs he could find through school. Between his savings and his parents’ help, he graduated with zero student loans.
His degree is in theology. He didn’t want to be a pastor, he just found the subject interesting. I have a degree in fashion design and I host a money podcast, so I’m in no position to judge.
He left college with about $2,000 and no car, because his Volkswagen bus had recently caught fire on a road trip. (He has a photo of it burning in the background, and I would like that photo framed.) His first job was a camp internship that paid around $5,000 for the year. Room and board were included, so it worked. He was in charge of hiring the summer staff and eventually realized they made more per hour than he did.
Scott made a point here I want to repeat. Graduating without debt gave Nate the freedom to take a job he loved that paid almost nothing. With a $600/month student loan payment, that camp job would have been off the table.
“Let’s Focus on the Poorer Part”
One of the staffers Nate hired that summer later became his wife. Before they got married, he brought up the wedding vows. He told her the jobs he liked tended to pay very little, so they should plan around the “for poorer” part. She was all in.
They bounced around for a while. They moved to Pennsylvania with no jobs and no place to live, and spent a month house sitting for a stranger they found on Craigslist. (Nate isn’t sure he’d recommend that. Neither am I.) He did carpentry, she worked at a doctor’s office, and after about a year they headed back to Oregon, where Nate took a nonprofit job running a day camp for about $25,000 a year.
Around 2007 they went to a Dave Ramsey seminar, and Nate saw the famous chart comparing two savers. One starts investing young and stops after a few years. The other starts later and keeps contributing for decades. The early saver ends up with more. Nate figured his career would probably stay low paid, so he wanted to front-load retirement savings while his wife was still working. If their income dropped later, they’d already be in good shape.
How Cheap Can You Live? Pretty Cheap
To make the savings work, they lived in a shared house where several people rented rooms and split meals. Their rent was about $300 a month, and groceries ran $40 to $50. They saved all of his wife’s income and some of Nate’s, took the employer match, and maxed out their Roth IRAs.
They also saved for a down payment, and when the housing market crashed, homes that had been out of reach came back down to earth. In 2011 they bought their first house.
Then the kids started coming. Nate and his wife both grew up with a stay-at-home parent and wanted the same for their family, even knowing it would slow down their savings. His wife left her job when their first was born, and when we talked she was homeschooling all four.
The frugality kept going. Nate’s favorite example is the Goodwill outlet, the one where you pay by the pound. They bought nearly all their clothes there, and Nate kept an eye out for vintage pieces. He’d sell those to a vintage resale shop, and that money frequently covered their whole shopping trip. (I love the Goodwill outlet. It’s a little chaotic, but it’s my kind of chaos.)
Their vacations were camping trips, house sitting gigs, or visits to family. They never paid more than $4,000 for a car. When Nate needed a commuter vehicle, he went to fueleconomy.gov, looked up the most efficient used cars, and bought a 1992 Honda Civic hatchback that got close to 50 miles per gallon. They’ve since upgraded to a used Toyota Avalon, which for this family is the height of luxury.
What struck me most about their story was how much they enjoyed their journey. Nate called frugality a game, and he said kids actually made life simpler. A trip to the park costs nothing, and the kids think it’s the best thing ever.
A Better Job, Same Lifestyle
By 2011, Nate’s nonprofit job had turned into a 50 to 60 hour a week grind. His boss was let go and the work landed on him, right as baby number two was on the way. At about the same time, his father-in-law offered him a job on a one-year trial basis. When we talked, he’d been there about 10 years.
The new job roughly doubled his pay, and this is where a lot of people slip. Nate and his wife sent the extra money to savings and kept their expenses about where they’d been. Eventually they moved closer to work, sold the first house for a nice profit, and bought a foreclosure that they fixed up. Nate described it as the worst house in the best neighborhood.
Along the way they found Mr. Money Mustache and Mad Fientist, opened an HSA, put money in index funds, and kept going. Around 2014 or 2015, Nate ran the numbers and realized they’d hit Coast FI.
If you haven’t heard the term, Coast FI means you have enough in your retirement accounts that, even if you never contributed another dollar, growth alone would carry you to a comfortable retirement at a traditional age. You still need a job to pay today’s bills, but you’re done saving for retirement. Nate got there in about seven years, on a modest income, with a single earner for most of it.
Nothing about this journey was ‘exciting.’ It was years of steady saving plus a couple of live-in flips. According to Nate, ” He said “it never felt like a slog. It just felt like my life.”
The Michigan BRRRRs
In 2017, Nate noticed that houses in Michigan, where he grew up, were cheap but rented for about the same as homes in Oregon. They refinanced their Oregon house, pulled out cash, and bought their first BRRRR property.
BRRRR stands for buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat. You buy a house that needs work, fix it up, rent it out, refinance based on the new higher value to pull your money back out, and do it again.
The first house cost $111,000. They put $18,000 into flooring, paint, toilets, vanities, and a lot of scrubbing. The refinance gave them $124,000, so about $5,000 of their own money stayed in the deal. When we talked, it rented for $2,100 a month and cash flowed around $700. That’s roughly $8,400 a year on a $5,000 investment.
The second was a duplex they bought for $67,500. It was a mess and took $40,000 to fix. The refinance returned $85,000, so about $22,000 stayed in the property. (Most BRRRRs leave some money in the deal. Having $22,000 tied up in a duplex instead of $107,500 is still a great result.)
They bought two more houses in 2019. The plan was to get to 10 rentals, then pay off five and keep mortgages on the other five.
What 2020 Did
When 2020 happened, it hit Nate’s family harder than most. Dams failed upstream of his parents’ town, and the flooding damaged both their house and the rental they owned next door. His mom broke her arm. His uncle died of cancer. His mom was diagnosed with cancer. His dad, who had been healthy, was diagnosed that summer and gone by fall.
Nate and his wife stopped buying. They had a pile of cash ready for the next BRRRR, and they used it to pay down debt instead. Earlier, they had pulled their Roth IRA contributions out to fund the real estate. (You can withdraw your Roth contributions anytime without tax or penalty. Earnings follow different rules.) Nate was also laid off for two weeks during the pandemic, which let him take a coronavirus-related distribution from a high-fee work plan. Under the rules at the time, he skipped the 10% penalty and could spread the taxes over three years.
By the time he posted in our Facebook group, every rental but one was paid off, and the rental income covered the family’s expenses. They expected to pay off the last one within 12 to 18 months.
“Life Isn’t All About Math”
I asked Nate the obvious question. I am firmly in the keep-your-cheap-mortgage camp. Why pay off cheap debt when you could invest the money instead?
His answer was great. He agrees the math says to keep the mortgages. But they were exhausted, and watching his dad go from healthy to gone in a few months made him think hard about his own family. He has life insurance, but it wouldn’t be enough for his wife to keep homeschooling if something happened to him. A paid-off portfolio would. He thinks of the free-and-clear rentals as a second life insurance policy.
I can’t argue with that. Personal finance is personal, and a plan that lets you sleep at night is worth a lot of interest.
They didn’t pay off their own home, by the way. The rentals had higher interest rates, so those went first. They also kept a combined emergency fund of about $30,000.
A Reality Check on BRRRR
Before you book a flight to Michigan, Scott and I want to be honest about what made Nate’s deals work.
He was investing in his hometown, where his family lived. He’d fly out for three or four weeks at a time and work 80 to 85 hours a week on the houses. His parents, his sister, his brother-in-law, and some friends all pitched in. That’s a lot of free, trusted labor, and you can’t buy it. If he’d hired everything out from Oregon, his numbers would look very different.
Nate is quick to say he’s grateful for it. He has memories of working on those houses next to his dad, and he wouldn’t trade that time for any amount of cash flow.
BRRRR also asks you to learn flipping and landlording at the same time. That’s a lot for a beginner. You can still do it, but go in with your eyes open, and know that finding a reliable contractor is its own adventure.
BRRRR works well for someone who has already spent years building savings, learning the math, and getting stable. Nate is proof. He was an overnight success in only about 13 short years.
Nate was doing this back when mortgage rates were super low – and so were housing prices. While you still can utilize this method, it’s a lot more difficult to do now, in 2026, and the amount you’re leaving in your property is a lot higher. It’s still a valid way to buy properties – if you can find one that works!
Nate’s Advice for Getting Started
His advice for beginners was refreshingly practical. Get out of debt. Then pull up your bank statements and see where your money goes. He recommends reading Your Money or Your Life and working through its exercises. Find your worst offender, figure out how to shrink it, and then move down the list.
They still do this every year. During our conversation, his example was cell phone service. By switching to Xfinity Mobile and keeping data turned off, they were paying $22 a month for four lines. Your options and prices will be different, so do the yearly check yourself.
His book picks were The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and Building Wealth One House at a Time.
And because we asked, his best party joke: What do you call a pencil with two erasers? Pointless.
Why Nate’s Story Matters
When people tell me financial independence on a low income can’t be done, I want to hand them Nate’s story. He has four kids, one income, a theology degree, and a career that mostly paid less than average. He reached Coast FI in about seven years and then built a rental portfolio that covers his family’s bills.
It reminds me of our conversation with Jordan Clint back in episode 63. He has five kids and a stay-at-home spouse, and he still invests in real estate. Big families can reach FI. They just have to spend on purpose and stop trying to keep up with the Joneses.
Nate said something at the end that stuck with me. When you strip away the expensive stuff, people see who you really are. That’s the community we’re building here. If you want to find your fellow frugal weirdos, come join us in the BiggerPockets Money Facebook group.
Leave a Reply