BiggerPockets Money Podcast

Losing $150K, Starting Over, and STILL Retiring Early | Life After FIRE

BiggerPockets Money Podcast
BiggerPockets Money Podcast
Losing $150K, Starting Over, and STILL Retiring Early | Life After FIRE
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Show Notes

Think you’ve blown your chances of achieving FIRE? You haven’t! Just ask Nik Johnson, who spent years growing his nest egg, only to have it completely wiped out with one bad financial decision. Despite losing everything, he managed to rebuild it from ground zero and still retire early!

Welcome to another episode of “Life After FIRE”! Nik and his wife had done everything right. They practiced frugality, saved aggressively, and invested at every opportunity. But everything was turned on its head when Nik decided to empty his retirement accounts and open a car dealership. Within just one year, Nik’s company had gone belly up, and as a result, all the money he had worked so hard to save was gone. It seemed that he had missed his one shot at early retirement, but rather than giving up on that dream, he started over. If he could do it once, he could do it again!

So, Nik found a W2 job, picked up a second job to fast-track his savings, and started throwing all his money at retirement accounts and real estate investments, and now, he and his wife are recently retired! Stick around as Nik shows you how to avoid the middle-class trap, what life looks like after FIRE, and the importance of community once you retire!

In This Episode We Cover

How Nik built, lost, and rebuilt his investments and still achieved FIRE

Supercharging your investments by creating extra income streams

How not to find seed money for a risky entrepreneurial venture

The savvy financial moves Nik made to avoid the middle-class trap

What the average “day in the life” of an early retiree looks like

Why you need a strong community around you once you retire

And So Much More!

Links from the Show

Mindy on BiggerPockets

Scott on BiggerPockets

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Email Mindy: Mindy@biggerpockets.com

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“Like” BiggerPockets Money on Facebook

BiggerPockets Money YouTube Channel

Everyday Money Heroes Podcast

Join a ChooseFI Group

Grab the Book, “Set for Life”

Sign Up for the BiggerPockets Money Newsletter

Find an Investor-Friendly Agent in Your Area

Buying at the Peak, Surviving a Crash, and STILL Being Able to Quit at 38

Connect with Carl

(00:00) Intro

(01:22) Growing His “Empire”

(08:58) Losing $150K!

(12:05) Rebuilding His Wealth

(16:48) Life After FIRE

(24:20) Nik’s Investment Portfolio

(28:34) Connect with Nik!

Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-618

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Transcript

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📄 Full Episode Transcript

Today we are talking with Nick Johnson, a man who built an empire, lost it all, and then built it back again.

Hello, hello, hello my dear listeners. As you may or may not know, my husband Carl and I have a new YouTube series on the Bigger Pockets Money YouTube channel called Life After Fire. And as a very special bonus, we’re going to be airing episodes here on the podcast on Wednesdays. Without further ado, let’s get into it.

Hi there, my name is Mindy Jensen. And I’m Carl Jensen. And this is the Mindy. And Carl. On Life After Fire, where we talk about what happens after you reach financial independence. Why do we call the show Life After Fire, LAF, laugh? Laugh. Cuz we’re laughing. No, because we’re talking about and talking to people who are living their best life after reaching financial independence. All right, we are so excited to get into the show. Nick, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. I am extremely excited to be here and thank you all for the time. Yeah, I’m super excited to have Nick on. I so the back story to this show is, I met Nick at FinCon, which is a conference for creators, and he started telling me this story of how he built up his financial situation and then he made a move that did not go well, lost it all, and then built it back up again. He said, if I can get it once, I can get it twice. And I thought that was so cool. No, no victim attitude, no pity party, just, okay, I did this, I can do it again. So that’s what we are going to be talking about today.

Nick, let’s jump into how you had built it up the first time.

All right, act one, right? So what happened is is that I originally was a computer programmer. So I was an application developer. And so whenever I hear Carl say hello world, it makes me giggle a little bit on the inside because if you’re in that world, you understand the back story to hello world. I did that. Um, my wife was a college professor. Um, she taught psychology. That’s how we started off. So everything was good. We were being responsible. Uh, you know, living below our means. We were um contributing to the 401Ks, so we were doing that. Had started a Roth. So we were like, we understood the basics, the fundamentals, you know, trying to, you know, live below our means and invest the difference. But what happened is is that one day I realized where I was at. I was like, I just didn’t really feel like the life that we wanted, we would achieve through just the traditional kind of 9 to 5 that we were doing by W2 means. So I thought about, you know, what could we do to expedite that or even do a complete pivot as far as when it comes to what we’re doing in our careers. And so we decided to open up our own business. I was just to say, what kind of business was this? A little more context here. We live in Jacksonville, Florida. And in Jacksonville, Florida, it is spread out. I mean, it is large. Um, for those of you who not may not know, as far as when it comes to like land mass, Jacksonville, Florida is the biggest content as far as in the contiguous US. 840 square miles. It is huge, right? And so there was two, two businesses that we thought about. We thought about either doing real estate, um, or we thought about opening a car dealership, okay? And being that we were in Jacksonville, and everything is so spread out and kind of giving a a kind of time check on this, this was 2003. So it really wasn’t things like, you know, your Uber, your lift, your ride shares and things like that. So we’re saying, you know what? Uh we know people who would if a had to choose between having their own place and having their own car, they would choose having their own car. And so we decided to go in and start a car dealership. And so kind of some of the challenges that go on with a car dealership, it’s pretty interesting, especially when you’re a kind of small mom and pop kind of uh dealership because that’s what we were. We weren’t one of the big names like a Lincoln or a Toyota or anything like that. We were mom and pop. And so what happened is is that you literally have to wear all the hats. It was a challenge to do that. And first of all, it was just coming up with the initial capital to do that. And so we were like, okay, SBA loans, this, this, and I can’t kind of again for context, I’m 27, 28 years old. So I know a little bit, but I don’t know everything. Uh, so I’m like, hey, I know we got some money. We got these retirement accounts. Let’s just go ahead and empty those out. We can use those. We’ll make the money back. And so that was kind of the seed money that we decided to use to start this car dealership. So that is how we decided to get in there. Some of the things that kind of the challenges that we had was, as I said before, when you’re a smaller dealership, you have to do everything yourself. When you have your own dealership, you have to, first of all, it’s sales, correct? Most people sell, go to look for cars on the weekends and right after work. And so that particular part, you have to be there at the dealership to do that. But then you have to get cars, right? And so you have to go and get them. And so typically you have to go get them from auctions. And the cars that you get at auctions are typically the cars that, you know, the car that like you barely got on the lot to like trade in because like it was smoking and it would run hot and all this other stuff. So those vehicles are the cars that typically you get at the auctions. I mean, sometimes you get cars that are off lease and stuff like that. So typically they are in a horrible condition. Um, so you go there and you you you get those cars and if you’re fortunate enough, you might have a team that can go and fix these cars for you. But if not, you got to be able to wrench it yourself. And so you got to get cars, you got to sell cars. You also have to deal with financing. There’s a lot of paperwork that goes on because it’s facilitated by uh the state. Then also it’s the unfront stuff, like you have to repo cars. I mean, so it’s a lot of stuff that you have to do and and literally when you’re a like a mom and pop operation, I mean, I was doing days, it would be nothing for me to do a 16-hour day, five, six days a week just in doing that. Nick, you seem like too nice of a guy to do this business. I can’t picture me walking in there and you’re like, hey, what can I do to get you into this car today? You know, Carl, um part of the issues that I had is that I found out I was a little too honest for the business. I mean, literally, uh I was way I I’m extremely compassionate. And so when people would come to me and they’d say, hey, you know what, I’m going through a challenge or whatever. I’d be like, hey, you know what? You know, I’m I’m big on accountability. So if someone would come to me they say, hey, you know what? You know, I’m having this issue or that issue. I’m like, okay, I was like, you know, can you make me whole next time? Or someone will say, hey, you know, I had a mechanical issue with the car and I had to get it fixed so I could make it to work. So I was very considerate to the plight that people had. But ultimately, it kind of made some challenges because the same kind of understanding that I had, like the finance companies didn’t have that same level of understanding for me. And so I realized that I think when it came to personality type, I think opportunity was good, but a couple things. First of all, I think I just don’t think my personality fit for the business. Um, second thing was that when it came to work life balance, there was very little, um, because I worked so much there. Um, and then also there were some costly mistakes that were made because I didn’t know the business. I didn’t know anybody who was in the uh car business. So the original model for open a car dealership going back many, many years ago was that you would buy a car and the hope was that you bought a car where if you got someone to make a down payment, it almost covered the entire cost of the vehicle. So at that particular point, if they never came back again, you were pretty much whole. But as time went on, it was getting harder and harder to find vehicles that someone could come down and make a down payment that would basically cover the initial price of that car. And so you always found yourself being in more and more of a deficit because people couldn’t make those larger down payments. So it was kind of challenging there. So if you didn’t have a lot of car dealership experience, uh why did you choose car dealership to open as a business to open? Because I literally as I sit down, I kind of looked at everything that I felt like um, was almost a necessity where I was as far as I I feel like having a car was a necessity. Um, number two, I went through, um I did do like uh, there was actually some courses that I took prior to doing it and I kind of went through some of the courses. I’m like, okay, I feel like I understand this pretty good. Um, and so at that particular point, I feel so I I had a reasonable amount of understanding of the business to get into it. So I went ahead and did that. I there were some other things I looked at that I feel as though that the margins were a little bit too thin. Like I didn’t want to do something like opening um a car wash and some of that other stuff like that. So I was like, you know, I was like, I want something where that had residual income and really the car dealership is where it really um interested me about the residual income along with that’s why I contemplated real estate also. That’s funny that you say you didn’t want to open a car wash. Carl and I drive past a car wash near us and every bay is filled with people behind it waiting to get in. It’s like the spray at yourself, stick your credit card in there. I’m like, maybe we should open up a car wash. Yes, those are good. I would take one of those. Um like the kind of manual, hey, pull up like me with the bucket and the sponge. No. I can’t do that. But yeah, with the bays, absolutely. Those are a good model. 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Welcome back to the show. So, how long did you own this dealership? My wife and I, we had this dealership for right at a year. Oh. So, I got into it, um, and we were feverishly going at it. And uh, me being uh, financially minded, I did keep up with the books. And I kind of noticed how uh things started to uh go in the wrong direction. And so uh things kept going and things kept going and around a year, uh we had literally gotten to the point where we were almost at zero. And I went to my, yeah, yeah, Carl, we were almost at zero. And I remember um I was getting ready to pen a check to the uh mortgage company. I was like, well, I was like, well, I know I got this month. And I wrote it, and I sent it, and I went back to my wife and I told my wife, I was like, baby, I was like, um I don’t know if this is going to continue to work out. My wife being the person that she is, uh, she’s like, okay, well she’s like, what are we going to do next? And I literally I told her I was like, hey, I was like um, like I told you, Carl, like we got it once, we can get it twice. But the thing is that now we have experience and knowledge based on what we did. And so we know what things don’t work. And even if you don’t know everything that will work, you’re ahead when you know what won’t work. And so we just literally went and say, okay, well what we want to do? Um I did realize that, you know, the type of business was important, who you went into business with because um you want to make sure that the team that you have around you has the same drive that you have. So a lot of things that we learned kind of in that experience that we could um use moving forward. And um from that particular day I said, okay, let’s get it. And so, and this is the the this is the truth. I remember we stopped. We had vehicles that were out and I literally I just told the people I was like, hey. And literally I told them to keep them. I was like, I was so over it. I was like, keep them. And I mean, and me and my wife actually went back and we like ran the numbers at one point and figured out like just how much we felt like we ate during that business and we ate about probably $150,000 in that business. But I was like back in 2003, 2004. I mean, we did it, but we had to like keep moving forward. So we just had to, you know, keep marching. So that’s what we did. And so just to be clear, you lost about $150,000 on the business, but you also lost money because you weren’t working your W2, and was your wife working at the time or was did she quit as well? Yeah, fortunately my my wife, um my my wife a flex in between doing the dealership and she was a um adjunct professor. So she was still, you know, do some teaching um online and uh in afternoons sometime. but I was doing the the dealership full-time. So I wasn’t getting W2. Um I also I lost from the money that we pulled out the market cuz we cashed out on our 401K, so the opportunity growth in that money was gone. Um and everything else that we had. So, yeah, I don’t want to do it. I’m pulling up a calculator right now. Oh, man. It was 2004. So pretty much the entire year 2004. Okay, 2004 for $150,000. I’m gonna I’m gonna go for it. I won’t say the number if you don’t want to hear it. It’s all right. You can do it and I won’t go on suicide watch. It’s okay. Okay, it’s taking a long time to think about it. So I it must be a pretty big number. With all the zeros, I’m sure. Remember, you would have lost a lot in 2008. Yeah, I would have. That’s the one thing that and that’s when I think about the real estate piece. I was like, even if I would have did real estate, I probably would have lost my shirt then too cuz when the market crashed in 08. So I’m like, like either way I probably would have got served. Depending on how you structured that business. But okay. So, so okay, you shutter the dealership, what’s your next step?

I often tell people, um the quickest 10 years you’ll ever see is from 20 to 30. At that point, I was at the back side of 30. And I was like, okay, I was like, um I got to ramp it up. So first thing I was like, I need to start getting some money coming in. Um the quickest way for me to get money coming in, at that point I had my um I had my bachelor’s in computer science. So I was like, I can go be a substitute teacher. They always need substitute teachers. So literally I went and I started being a substitute teacher. I knew it was like no lines, no waiting. So I went there and I started doing that as I was looking for uh employment back into the uh computer field. So I did that for, I probably did that for around six months, six, seven months until I was able to get um full-time employment via being a computer programmer again. Uh one thing I did, I always appreciated teachers, but I got an even better and greater appreciation for them once I subbed for a while. So, um, I did that. I did that, I got W2 employment again. And then when I got my W2 employment again, I was thinking about, okay, how can I generate more revenue? Because at this particular point, the coffers were empty. Um we were s- you know, we were sustaining, but I was like, okay, I was like, how can I go back, try to make ourselves whole and how can we get to the point where we can go ahead and start trying to um get to where we’re just not making it, but we’re actually able to start back investing and doing things like that. And so my wife was an adjunct professor, so what happened is that they had a program at the university where that um a spouse could get 50% off tuition. And so I was like, I was like, okay. I was interested in teaching and being an adjunct professor as well, but I didn’t have a graduate’s degree. But I was like, you know what, this would be a good opportunity for me to be able to be an adjunct professor as well if I can go get my graduate’s degree. And so I went and I used using the program that they had along with the tuition reimbursement that my employer had, it really allowed me to really get my graduate’s degree at no cost because the way they had it structured is that they they didn’t do a lot of um, it wasn’t a lot as far as reimbursement. I think it was like around 6 or $7,000 a year, but it was based on calendar year. So in my head I knew it’s like, okay, it’s about two years for me to get my graduate’s degree. If I start like in June of one year and have a roll over the calendar year to the next counter year, I can kind of get like two years in one year. So that’s literally what I did. And so I got my graduate’s degree. I think I may have paid like maybe three, $4,000 out of pocket for my graduate’s degree at that point. And when I got my graduate’s degree, um Carl, you probably know this. There aren’t a lot of people in the IT field that have graduate degrees in IT. Some don’t have any degree. Yeah, some don’t at all. So it was fertile ground for me to be able to get um a lot of teaching assignments. I mean, I had at one point, I had five universities that brought me on as an adjunct professor at that time. And I was literally cycling in and out different terms. You know, sometimes I was working my full-time W2 and I was doing like maybe adjunct, you know, being an adjunct for like maybe one or two universities a semester at the same time just trying to get that money up to make up for like, you know, kind of some of the time that we had lost. I’ll back up a second, Nick. Have you ever read that book Rich Dad Poor Dad? Oh, yes, sir. Yes, sir. It kind of annoyed me a little bit, cuz he makes, and and funny enough, I didn’t even realize you were a professor before I started to have this thought, but he kind of makes fun of his supposed dad who was a college professor because that guy was a loser. He’d never become financially independent. So you have to own a business, you have to do this thing. And uh I don’t like that attitude because you can become FI just fine by having a normal job. It might not be quite as sexy. It might not be quite as exciting. It might take you a little bit longer, but it’s certainly attainable. And you were the poor dad for for Richard Kiyosaki. Is that the guy’s name? Richard Kiyosaki? Robert Kiyosaki, I always mess that up. So, you could stick it Robert. Robert definitely can. And uh my my thing is that, you know, there wasn’t as many, it wasn’t like the gig economy like it is now. And so I was like, okay, I was like, how can I, you know, kind of sit there and it allowed me the opportunity cause all those most of the universities I taught at were remote online. So it allowed me the opportunity to kind of, you know, um work into the wee hours of the morning. And so literally I did this for um a series of years. Um I probably did this around maybe um between my W2 and adjunking, I probably did that for like around three, four years. Um and I had to stop because one of the things other than burnout, I know the cost of tuition for college, and if I ever, I said to myself, if I ever got to the point where I feel like I couldn’t give my students 100%, I will stop. And so it really got to the point where I was like, you know what, I was like, I’m getting tired, I’m getting burned out, you know, um we’re getting to a point where um our finances are kind of beyond where we were, um before, you know, we had the situation with the dealership. So let’s kind of go ahead and pull back, let’s try to enjoy, you know, some of our time together and stop grinding so hard. What are you doing right now? What am I doing right here now? Well, my life after fi, we fied in um, we hit fi in 2022. So that’s when we hit. So as far as um I I I found out about the FIRE uh community in 2020. And um somehow or another I was, I don’t know exactly how I end up crossing it. Um I just remember um seeing a podcast, they talked about how you can invest in your HSA. I was like, you can invest in your HSA? I was like, I didn’t know that. And then like it sent me down like this this this this rabbit hole and I like benched on just about every episode of uh Choose FI. And then they talked about, you know, the local groups and like all this other stuff and I met a local group and I got connected with them. So that’s what happened in 2020. And I was talking with my wife and um I was like, babe, I was like, you know, I was like, you know all we’ve been doing? I was like, it’s a a’s a name for it. And I think we’re almost there. And I kind of explained her some of the stuff or whatever and my my wife has always been extremely supportive to me. And so she’s like, okay, well, let’s kind of go over the numbers, let’s talk about it. And I talked to her, I was like I was like, I think in a couple of years, you know, if everything kind of keeps going the right way, we’ll get there. So, in 2022, we hit, you know, our fi number. In 2023, my wife came to me, she said, hey, you know what? I think it’d be kind of cool if um, I know you want to stop working, but she like, I think I want to stop too. And so like, that’s fine. So in 2023, my wife completely stepped away from uh being a professor at the university. And in 2024, I stepped away from my my W2 job. Right now, as far as what life looks like for me, life is good. I I I can’t lie. You know, if someone would have told me um back when I was flipping the sign over at that dealership that some uh 19 years later I would have kind of, you know, the life where I can kind of do what I want to and go how I want to. I don’t know if I would have believe them. Um but at the same time, you know, there’s something to be said, you know, when it comes to consistency and just really um trusting the process. And um so now I’m able to sit here. Um we volunteer a lot um in our kids’ schools. Um we we we go to the gym like four or five times out the week now. You know, um we never thought we’d be we’d be gym rats, but we go to the gym a lot now. Um we have the ability now, we we meet up with a lot of people who are in our fi community. And we’re fortunate, um and literally this is how it looks. This past Tuesday, um it’s a it’s a group of us, you know, a FI group and we are like kind of like the lunch bunch and the happy hour crew. We don’t we don’t believe playing a full price for anything. And so we’re at um we’re at Top Golf because Top Golf is always 50% off on Tuesdays. And so we’re sitting there and we’re talking about how we’re going to leave from there and go get $3 tacos because you know, it’s Taco Tuesday. And uh we’re discussing about kind of like how we have like this ownership of our time and how grateful that we are that we have the community because we would be so alone if we didn’t have, you know, kind of the camaraderie that we get in the community. So we spend a lot of time in community uh doing that. Um and also right now we’re um just trying to evangelize uh financial independence. And so right now I have a um, I have a podcast that I do on a, well, I have a show, which is called Everyday Money Heroes where I go out and the goal of that is to provide information and inspiration to people of all ages to take control of their financial journey. And that’s really what it is. And so literally we talk about um, you know, kind of the fundamentals of fi, but also, you know, I try to spotlight people’s stories who are not, you know, who might be a college professor, who might, you know, be a a worker in a factory, but they’re just, you know, they stay disciplined, they’re um living below their means and they’re just investing in their difference and they’re getting ownership of time back. And that’s really what it’s all about. So I’m thankful that um I I have the fy community that I trust the process because I didn’t know anybody who did it, but at the same time, you know, anybody can achieve that and you can just have a a life well lived. People look at me and they just like, there’s no way. They’s like, you’re not 65, you can’t be retired. I’m like, well, I was like, you don’t have to be 65 to retire. I was like, you can have time ownership at any point, you know, if you really have the ability to um really stay disciplined. So, um hopefully I answer your question carl, but it really excites me because, um, I I know that I feel like if anybody can just understand just the um the concept that you can do it. I think they’ll be more empowered. We have to take one final ad break, and we’ll be back with more after this.

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Thanks for sticking with us. Just one quick comment, I’m so, you hit on this real strongly, so I’ll just mention it in passing. The the community part of it is so vitally important cuz uh like for us, we just it was kind of the exact same thing for us, our FI story. We had all this money and we just thought we were saving, but we had no idea what we were going to do with it. Then I discovered Mr. Money Mustache. I ran out to the kitchen, told Mindy about it. She’s like, yes, this sounds great. So, side note, very thankful to have a spouse who understands and embraces us too. What a gift we both have. That’s just incredible. Yes, what a gift you both have. Yes, yes. He who find the wife finds a good thing. Yes, but if we didn’t have this community to build on all that, I think we’d feel a little bit lost. It’s nice to be able to like here, we’re in Colorado, lots of hiking, lots of outdoorsy stuff, and we have a hiking group that goes out on Thursdays. We have a potluck that meets on Tuesdays, and many of the people in these groups are from the FI community. So, um, it what’s the point of having all this money if you can’t have fun with it? And I think at the core of building a a fun, fulfilling life is having good people. And I consider myself a pretty severe introvert. Most people scare me. So for that to come from me is is pretty big. I want to underscore what Carl is saying, having the uh community is so important. And, you know, Nick, what you said about the Choose FI local groups, Brad Barrett, that was the best thing you ever did besides, you know, the podcast and the main group and all the other things great that you have done. But the local groups are so fantastic. Carl and I travel and we’ll go to uh a an an area that has a local group and we’ll jump into the group and just say, hey, we’re going to have a mea up. You know, we’d love to meet local people here. But when you don’t have that community, when you are the only frugal weirdo in the neighborhood, you kind of start to feel like, oh, maybe this isn’t the right thing. Or you think I I know I want to do this, but I feel so out of place. And you, you know, you do retire, you start reaching out to your friends and they’re all like, what do you mean on Tuesday at noon? I got to work. And having this this FI community, what did you call them? Your your FI, your lunch bunch and your your happy hour heroes? Yes, it’s the it’s the lunch bunch, you know, we do happy, we’re happy hour heroes and lunch bunch, you know, that’s what we do. We we do not believe in paying full price on food down here in Jacksonville. So, you know, if if you got apps on your happy hour, me and you, um we will find you. We will find you. These local groups are everywhere. And if for some reason you live in a place that doesn’t have a local group yet, you can email Brad at choosefi.com and he will set one up for you. He just wants to have these continue to grow and continue to be supportive of the community. So please, please, please reach out to Brad if you don’t have a local group. But first, go to choosefy.com/local and see if there’s a local group near you because they probably is. There’s, what is there? like 586 or something like that. They’re everywhere. They’re all across the world. They’re not just in America too. But yeah, I think that’s that’s such an awesome part of your story is just having people to connect with that speak your same language. Um, so Nick, I want to know, we kind of jumped from 2004 a little bit and then all of a sudden 2022. What were you investing in to get yourself to financial independence? Both the type of investment and the type of account that you were putting the money into. Okay, that was a great segue, Mindy, because one thing I did want to do, I would be remiss if I did not give a shout out to Bigger Pockets. All right. So, and this is this is where it goes. So remember I I kind of had that that fork in a row where I go either car dealership or real estate, right? Um I did eventually put the car in reverse and go up the real estate lane. And so what ended up happening is that um, you know, the bubble happened, real estate went down. We did have our home. Um we had gotten to a point where we were getting ready to build um a new home. We had bought some land, we were going to build a new home, but we had our our our starter home or our first home. And we had lost so much equity, we’re like, we’re not going to sell it now. I was like, so we might as well keep so we decided to be accidental landlords. And so we didn’t know a whole lot about the business and I stumbled upon Bigger Pockets. And so I started going through there and uh once again binging on that and started, you know, hanging out in the forums and stuff like that. So back in 2016, we actually like kind of started our first rental then in 2016. So, um kind of using some of the the know-how and knowledge that we had from uh Bigger Pockets. Uh from that particular point, we acquired a couple more um rentals. We didn’t want a large portfolio. Um at this point, we have four rentals, um single family rentals. We do that. So um that’s part of our portfolio as far as we do that. Um then also, um we have um just retirement accounts, um taxable brokerage accounts. So basically that’s how we did it. We started off, we got to the point where we able to start maxing out those 401Ks. Um then we got to the point where we would max out the 401Ks, then we would max out the HSAs, we would max out, you know, the Roths, and we just kind of did that every year. Then we got to the point where we started maxing on those out, we start putting our money into um just kind of um VOO and uh VTI and all that other stuff and just continue to do that. And so that was it. So right now at this particular point, we’re probably about 50/50 when it comes to um a value when it comes to our um brokerage accounts, um retirement accounts, and uh equity in real estate. I love that story so much because what I’m hearing you say is you’re not in the middle-class trap, which is what Scott Trench and I call the uh scenario where you’ve done everything right. You’re you’re contributing to your retirement accounts, you are uh building up your home equity or paying down your mortgage, and then you get to retirement or early retirement age, you’re like, I’m a millionaire on paper. You can’t actually access those funds because they’re stuck in your home equity or they’re stuck in your retirement accounts and you can’t access them before age 59 and a half or, you know, in some cases 55. So, I love that you skipped that. I love that you’re not falling victim to this by contributing to after tax accounts as well. So, anybody watching who has not started contributing to their after tax accounts yet, now is the time to start doing that. Yes, it’s a balance between, oh, do I want the tax deduction versus do I want to be able to potentially retire early? So, take into consideration how old you are, take into consideration what age you want to retire, but you don’t want to find yourself in this middle class trap and saying, oh, now what? Yeah. Um just kind of picking back what you were saying, Mindy. I had heard individuals before me say, hey, you know what? Um I I went really hard on my uh retirement accounts, but I didn’t do a whole lot to kind of bridge the gap, you know, in between, even they started to do, you know, stuff like Roth conversions and all that other stuff. Like we still need some living funds someplace. And so that’s what really got me into, okay, you know, let’s get this stuff inside of um a brokerage account. Now, I I don’t like, you know, having to pay the taxes on the stuff that’s outside of the retirement accounts, but you know, it is what it is. And so it allows me the opportunity to pull off that stuff if I need to, um, as I’m kind of transitioning and and working in those other buckets. I love it. I love whoever said gave you that information, spot on. Very well done, sir. Could have been you all. I I I taken a lot of your your content, so it could it could have been you all. I’ll say credit for it, sure. Yeah, absolutely. Mr. 1500, you know, gave me that sage advice.

Nick, thank you so much for your time today. This was so much fun. Remind me again where people can find you online. Thank you all, uh as well, uh Carl and Mindy. Um folks who want to keep up with um what I’m doing in my life after FI. Um I can be found at Everyday Money Heroes on YouTube and all other platforms. Um I’m just excited to spread the good news um that, you know, life is um, life after fi is it is is what you would think it is and more. So absolutely. I look forward to seeing everybody there. And once again, thank you all for the opportunity to come here and share my story. All right. Thank you so much, Nick. And if you like this video, please click the thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to this channel for more videos just like Nick’s. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Life After Fire. And with that, Mindy and I say goodbye.

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