**Guest:** What do you do when you realize your dream home has become your financial nightmare? Today’s guests thought they had it all figured out, but when they crunched the numbers, they discovered that they were actually broke. That wake-up call sparked a complete financial transformation that took them from lifestyle creep victim to financially independent in just ten years. Today, we’re breaking down exactly how they did it, the brutal honesty, the tough decisions and the strategies that changed everything. Let’s jump into their story.
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my passionate about financial education cohost, Scott Trench.
**Scott:** Thanks, Mindy, great to be here. I’m looking forward to getting schooled on how to achieve early financial independence. Yeah, that was close enough. By, uh, Mr. Dave Fleischer here. We have a goal of creating one million millionaires. You’re in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting. We are so excited to be joined by Dave Fleischer on today’s episode, host of The Financially Independent Teachers. We’re gonna talk to him about his own lead up to achieving FI and how if you’re a teacher or a median income earner, there are options out there for you as well. Welcome, Dave.
**Dave:** Hey, thank you guys so much for having me on the show.
**Mindy:** Dave, what are you teaching in and what grade are you in?
**Dave:** I am teaching a mixture of ninth grade through tenth graders and it’s a state-required in North Carolina Economics and Personal Finance class. You don’t know if you’ve ever heard of IB, International Baccalaureate. I also teach IB Theory of Knowledge as well. And I think next year I’m teaching AP Microeconomics. So, I’ve been teaching 19 years, all at the same high school. Started right out of college and it’s been a lot of fun to see the movement of personal finance kind of shifting throughout the country. I believe over 25 states now require for graduation a personal finance course and I feel lucky every day to be somebody who gets to teach it. I don’t even feel like I work.
**Scott:** And that’s an important point because I think a lot of people still complain about, “Oh, I didn’t learn personal finance in school. What are they teaching kids these days?” Well, they’re changing it. And this is like a big, this is a big deal. I mean, more than half the students in the United States have at least one personal finance class before they graduate high school. Is that correct, Dave?
**Dave:** I’d probably say yes, definitely in North Carolina, every graduate is gonna take that class and it’s not just a partial thing, it’s a 90-day semester, the same as you would take calculus or anything else.
**Scott:** The meme goes, “Um, I’m sure glad that I took geometry in high school because it’s coming in handy this parallelogram season.” Um, but that’s starting to change here. And so great stuff. Thank you for the work you’re doing on that front at the forefront of this.
**Dave:** It’s fun.
**Mindy:** I am just excited that more and more states are requiring personal financial education as a requirement for graduating high school. My oldest daughter is the first graduating class in Colorado that needed to take that course. And hers was, I think it was a half a credit, uh, but it’s, it’s better than, you know, what I was getting, which is, this is how you fill out a check. Okay, well, that doesn’t teach me anything about spending and saving and, you know, balancing the budget and all of that. So I’m excited that this is moving forward. And hopefully soon all 50 states will require this.
**Scott:** Spoiler alert here for people listening. You’re pretty good with money and have built a substantial private net worth, you and your wife, uh, while teaching, um, for, for, how long have you been teaching?
**Dave:** 19 years.
**Scott:** I think that that goes a long way in teaching economics and personal finance and gives you a credibility beyond the, the power position you have of as a teacher versus against in, in the context of the classroom. Is that, is that right? Do you think that that’s a, that’s, that’s a particularly helpful to you and, and a important part of helping these lessons register with, with kids?
**Dave:** I teach at a neighborhood school. Do you want them to know everything about you? But at the end of the day, I always try to lead with my kids. I have nothing to brag about. My wife never went to college. I was a 2.5 student in high school. The only reason why I went to college is because I was a six foot six left-handed pitcher. Um, other than that, I wasn’t really academically minded. So if we can do it, you can do it. And I try to tell the kids all the time, I’ll show you our net worth not because I think we’re special, but because I want you to know that you can do it too. But it is a weird spot because now like you’ll see people and parents will come up to you and, “Hey, you’re that millionaire teacher guy at Jacksonville High School.” Like, how do I open a Roth IRA? So it’s a lot of fun and I’ll even do a parent night where I have the parents come in and we’ll show them how they can open up a custodial Roth IRA for their kid who’s working and talk about, uh, the Jerry Born CLEP college test and things like that, how their students can, uh, try to graduate debt-free. So it’s, it’s a little movement catching on and it’s a lot of fun to be a part of.
**Scott:** Well, as a 6’6″ left-handed pitcher, I can tell that, you know, you made millions of dollars from your NIL, um, deal in college. But aside from that, could you give us the story of, of your, your journey with money?
**Dave:** Oh gosh. Uh, I have two amazing parents that, you know, they’ve been married over 40 years now. But they were, my dad worked for General Motors. He worked in a factory up in Northeast Ohio. Don’t know how much you guys follow, uh, the politics and economics of Lordstown was a huge factory up in Northeast Ohio that it was gonna stay open, it was gonna close. Well, it ended up closing. And unfortunately, that was kind of my life growing up. My mom stayed at home, my dad worked for General Motors and kind of a subsidiary of that over time. But I felt like every couple of years we were wondering is Dad gonna get laid off. Um, is Dad gonna have to get a new job? I grew up in, I would say probably more of a lower middle-class family. Great benefits back in the 80s and the 90s, uh, but my mom stayed at home and she chose to do that. So I would say, as much as I love my parents, we had more of kind of a poverty mindset or a lack mindset. Uh, the same house that I was brought home from the hospital to is the same house that I graduated high school from. We never moved one time. And, you know, our idea of vacation was riding in a car, a station wagon, like Christmas Vacation or something like that and going to Gettysburg or Mount Vernon. Maybe it’s why I’m a history teacher. Uh, and then I met my wife, her parents were the complete opposite. Everything was driving around in the, in the big neighborhoods, gated communities and dreaming and, “Oh, we could buy that.” And, “Look at that boat in that driveway,” and real estate and entrepreneurship. So we kind of blended both of those worlds together when we met at 25 years old. But it was definitely um, some pain points along the way when you had two completely different mindsets.
**Mindy:** Did you talk about money with your wife before you got married?
**Dave:** Oh gosh. Uh, this is good comedy right here. So my wife’s a real estate agent, never went to college. School wasn’t her thing. She said she wanted to come and socialize for a couple of hours and then go to work and make money. So her parents are awesome as well. Two great sets of parents, but just different paradigms for sure. When I met her, uh, this is back in 2008, she had a 2007 Hummer, uh, H3 Hummer that was like a $50,000 vehicle in 2007. She was maybe making $75,000 a year as a real estate agent. And, uh, we had just met and had been dating for a couple of months and she said, “Well, I said, ‘What are you doing today?'” She said, “Well, I’m going to test drive an Escalade.” I was like, “Why would you test ride an Escalade? You have a brand new Hummer.” She goes, “Well, I feel bad because this one guy bought three houses off me in the last couple of years and he works at the the car dealership.” I’m like, “So you’re gonna go buy an $80,000 vehicle because you feel bad?” And I said, you know, “If you test drive that vehicle,” I said, “We’re done.” Like, I said, “I, I can’t,” I mean, we had built a relationship a little bit along the way. And she said, “Well, I’m gonna let you know that if you continue to rent, you know, we’re also done.” So she goes, “I won’t buy the vehicle and you need to buy a house.” So our, our relationship was built on being very blunt, uh, and we have a lot of fun back and forth. We like to kind of jazz each other a little bit, but she didn’t end up buying the vehicle and she ended up, my real estate agent, who I started dating, ended up convincing me to buy a townhouse at 25.
**Scott:** That’s a new one for us. The cat, the, the, the journey begins with, uh, a Hummer and a Cadillac Escalade, uh, on there.
**Dave:** Yeah.
**Scott:** What, remind us, are you still in the same location um, where this, this journey began, um, around 25?
**Dave:** Absolutely. Yeah. I moved from Northeast Ohio to Jacksonville, North Carolina. If you’ve ever heard of Camp Lejeune, home to the Marine Corps here. Um, she’s born and raised local here and then I’m a transplant that’s been here almost 20 years. So same spot.
**Scott:** And what brought you to that, um, to this town?
**Dave:** Uh, one of my college teammates was a baseball player and he had a friend that knew a friend that said there are a bunch of teaching jobs near the beach in North Carolina. And that kind of beats, uh, the snow in Cleveland, Ohio. So I said, “Hey, let me go ahead and do that.” And I did it. That was kind of the first risk I took. And again, like I said, I grew up in a family of non-risk takers. You don’t invest in real estate. The stock market, you’re gonna lose all your money. And I remember my dad always saying, “Hey, just save your pennies, but you know, our family can’t afford that type of thing.” So growing up, I had never been on a plane, I had never been to Disney, I’d never been to Florida. Again, a lot of our trips as a child were just day driving trips with maybe three or four hours and I met my wife who had been on cruises in other countries and, wow, my whole mindset was blown and, and now I think we’ve really blended those two worlds together nicely where we have balance.
**Mindy:** We have to take a quick break, but while we’re away, please hop on over to our YouTube channel and subscribe to BiggerPockets Money at youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney. We’ll be right back.
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**Scott:** All right, welcome back to the show.
**Mindy:** Balance is interesting and you coming from one mindset and your wife coming from another mindset is very different. Uh, how did you strike that balance? You were, you were very blunt in the beginning. Don’t buy that Escalade and I will, I will buy a house and then you stayed together. But I hear from a lot of people who have very different money ideas and money backgrounds, uh, that there’s a lot of money fights. Would you say that there were a lot of money fights or, you know, heated discussions in the beginning or were you guys both on the same page at making it work?
**Dave:** Yeah, just to be clear, I think when we met at 25, we had both been in long-term relationships that, you know, we were kind of at the point of, we’re not gonna date just to date. We want to, you know, marry the right person. So the first week that I met her, she said, “I’m never leaving this town. I know you’re from a different state. So if you ever plan on leaving, like I’m not your girl.” So we were very upfront and blunt with each other right out of the gate. But I would say we didn’t really have money fights because we weren’t married. We dated from 25 to 28. We dated for three years, but the one thing that brought us together was Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. Our church had hosted FPU and my brother-in-law who works at the church said, “Hey, I really think that you guys could benefit from this program.” And we went through it together. And I would say at 25 years old, my financial education was probably like a D minus and her financial education might have been an F plus. She knew how to make money, but my wife carried a continual balance of $20,000 on a credit card. So we, we are a crazy funny couple, like we got to the point after three months of dating, she had $20,000 of credit card debt and I actually took her credit card from her because she told me to and I would go to Bank of America and pay that off for her as we went along because she could not trust herself. And she still doesn’t have a credit card at this date at 42.
**Scott:** The Financial Peace University is often cited as a as a turning point for many on their, their journeys with money. What made you decide to sign up for that class and how did it change things?
**Dave:** I guess the fact that her brother had done it and we had heard good things and we were definitely not on the same sheet of music. I was uh, making maybe 35,000 a year as a young teacher then. She was making probably 75,000 as a real estate agent. But she was over $60,000 in debt and I had a paid-off truck and I had $5,000 in the bank. And that’s what really spawned me to create Financially Independent Teachers because I’ve lived this life. I had a girlfriend that made double or more than double what I made, but I still had more money than she did even though I was a teacher and she was out there making better money. So, uh, I think just, you know, we had some money discussions, no fights because we weren’t engaged or anything like that. But I think we just both wanted to learn and after we took that class, just knowing the basics of insurance and a three-to-six-month emergency fund, all the things we never got taught in school that thankfully we get to teach now, I felt like that was a really good, I don’t think I realized it at the time, but it was almost like graduating from elementary school with personal finance until I found the FIRE movement.
**Scott:** It’s tough because of the the lower income um, and and the the ceiling on income in many cases for, for folks in that profession to get ahead quickly. But you also see a lot of really good habits and disciplines with teachers and a teacher, for example, does not need to drive a $50,000 car to impress colleagues. That, that they’re real or not, there’s a perception in legal and I assume broker um, circles that showing off the trappings of a high income lifestyle and high consumption with great suits, great clothing, and great vehicles, um, can translate to business or the, the, the there’s at least a perception of that. Was that, you think that was at all in play in those first few years?
**Dave:** I would say so, you know, right now I’m driving a 2008 Ford Expedition with 209,000 miles on it and, uh, we’ve had teachers on campus. I had another guy that I worked with, he drove a a 1989 S10 pickup truck. And I guess the color you would call it is maybe rust, I don’t know what the actual color was. Um, but most of the students didn’t know it, but he also taught, uh, back when we had civics and economics, he had a a $600,000 beach house in Myrtle Beach that was paid for in cash. Uh, he also had a Corvette in his garage that he never drove to school. But he had driven that truck for about 25 years. But that enabled him to invest and have those other opportunities. So again, yeah, teachers, most of us in especially states without a union, we’re not out here making $100,000 a year, although on our podcast, we’ve interviewed a bunch of teachers from New York and California that are making 120, 130, 140. But I would say the average teacher we come across is somewhere between 60 and $80,000 per year, uh, but they can definitely make it happen. That was one of the things that I put down is one of the benefits of being a teacher is you don’t have the pressure, the social pressure to impress people. You know, all your students think you’re broke anyway. And a lot of teachers kind of have the mindset that they’ve taken a vow of poverty to be in education. Oh, hey, well, it’ll pay the bills and one day I’ll get a pension, but I know I can’t really make any money doing this. So you can kind of have that stealth wealth just based on the perception.
**Mindy:** When you went through Financial Peace University with your wife, was there any sort of aha moment? Did you look at each other and say, “Oh, now we’re both on the same page with money,” or did you take a little bit of your, uh, frugality and her living life to the fullest spending and kind of meld them?
**Dave:** Yeah, I remember uh, we were doing some of the classes at her parents’ house, there was some of the DVDs and we were watching and I remember her mom saying, “If you guys could just combine your two mindsets, you guys could be like a power couple or a super couple.” She is, she has vision, she’s a visionary, she’s the hardest worker I know. Uh, that’s the great thing about sales, right? Is you can make as much as you can, there’s no cap on it. Whereas a teacher, I know I’ll never make $100,000 year in North Carolina, but I was good at saving money, I was good at defense. She was really good at offense. When you relate it to sports, I I tell my kids all the time, you know, defense wins championships and the first thing you need to do is build an emergency fund and you need to, you know, have different savings buckets, you know, whether you’re saving for a car or saving for college. But my wife was really good at the offense and selling houses and buying real estate. She bought her first house at 19. So when I was 25 and we met and I was renting, her mindset was like, “What the heck dude, I bought a house six years ago. What are you waiting for?” And her parents were involved in real estate, her dad was a real estate agent as well. So her whole mindset was you buy a house and it’s four walls. Uh, she’s not very emotional about a home. We could talk about our journey of how I think one move can change your life because we’ve lived in like nine houses since we’ve been married for 13, 14 years.
**Scott:** Well well, let’s, let’s go back chronologically here. So you take Financial Peace University, what happens next? What are, what’s a, what’s the evolution of your money story from there, maybe leading up to when you discover FIRE?
**Dave:** So I would say the two big things we learned about that class that kind of changed everything for us. I’ll share two of them and there was a lot of great takeaways. Compound interest blows our mind. That’s one thing for sure. Compound interest blows our mind that I cannot believe that no one ever told me that when I was 18, all I had to do was invest $100 a month into a Roth IRA and at 65, I’m a millionaire based on historical returns. That blew both of our minds. And she was like, “What an idiot. What am I doing? I can’t believe I just spent, you know, another $800 on a dress for a wedding.” Uh, and then it changed our mindset. We got married. So she bought her first house at 19, a little townhouse, a little two-two townhouse. She convinced me, I don’t know if she threatened to break up with me or not, if she would have really done it, but she threatened like, “Hey, you, you need to buy it. Why are you wasting your money?” I know that’s one of the big conversations in the FIRE world. Should you rent, should you buy? Well, we’re in a low cost of living area. She bought her first house for 74,000. I bought my townhouse in 2009 for 113,000. So she had a townhouse, she convinced me to to buy a townhouse and I did. And I did this thing called house hacking that I had never heard of at the time. I had to do it. I think when I bought my first house, it was 40% of my take-home pay. And I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know if I can make it.” But I had a buddy that was also from Ohio and he taught and coached with me at the school. I said, “Hey man, I’ll let you stay for $500 a month.” He couldn’t find a place to rent for under 700. So it was a win for him, it was a win for me. We were both single young teachers in our mid-20s. And that ended up paying for my master’s degree. He lived for with me for two years. My master’s cost 12 grand and that ended up getting me a 10% raise for the rest of my career. So the house hacking paid off. Sure enough, then again, I go ahead and after three years of dating, I propose and once we get married, my wife moves in with me. We didn’t live together before marriage. And we decided, “Hey, let’s rent your townhouse out instead of sell it.” So I don’t know if we ever really had a plan, we were kind of more accidental landlords. So, we then rented her place out. It rented beautifully. There were no issues, people paid on time. We didn’t have any of the horror stories that, you know, we hear about sometimes. And after a year in my little townhouse, we found out we’re gonna have our first child who said, “Let’s have a little more room than the little 900 square foot townhouse.” He said, “Well, hey, the other one rented perfectly. Why don’t we just do that with my townhouse?” And then we built a little 1600 square foot house together. So I went from being early 25 to owning no houses, to 25 buying my first townhouse, getting married at 28 and at 29, we now own three houses together. One that we lived in our primary home and then we had two that were each our previous primary homes and we now had three properties just like that.
**Mindy:** Did you run the numbers on these rental, former primaries, now con contemplating them to be rentals? Did you run the numbers before you made them rentals to see if it made more sense to just sell it? Or did you, like did she just know that they would rent really well because she’s in the industry?
**Dave:** Yeah, her, I think her mortgage was 600 a month, uh, with PITI and we were getting around 750 a month in rent. And at this time, by the way, we don’t know anything about the FIRE movement. Uh, I don’t know anything about the 1% rule, I don’t know any of this stuff. She just knew, hey, mine makes 150 more, uh, than our payment is. So it’s fine. And with mine, it was a little different situation because I bought in ’09 and we’re in a military town. And with VA loans and BAH, with Marines getting paid to live off base, we were kind of in our own little bubble. So 2008 didn’t hit us until the end of 2009. We were like 12 to 14 months behind. And I bought mine for 113, but 18 months later, they were selling for 70,000. So at that point, I couldn’t sell my place and I literally just rented my place, um, just to cover what the monthly payment was. And, you know, we couldn’t have sold it and we didn’t have the cash to get out of that. So I I just kind of took the approach of I’m not gonna freak out, let’s just be patient. And my wife said, “Hey, the market goes up and down. Uh, if we just hang onto this thing, we’re gonna let our renters pay it down and then eventually, sure enough, about 10 years later, that paid off and we sold it, did a 1031 tax exchange, pocketed that money, uh, and then bought a different rental property with it down the road.” So it was definitely worth it.
**Scott:** So so we are exiting, you know, we’re exiting our 20s with three properties, married and and we have a kid. What, what happens next? What’s the next milestone building up to the discovery of financial independence?
**Dave:** The next milestone is we have another kid 15 months later. Um, so we have two kids in 15 months or so. So life is getting really busy at that point. And it was really interesting. Once we had my second child, if you’re a high school teacher, it’s kind of an unwritten rule that you’re not just a teacher. Like you’re a part of a community, you’re involved in all these kids’ lives, coaching, going to prom, doing all these different things. I was a head varsity baseball coach for almost 10 years and I was working probably 70, 80 hours a week between that and my regular teaching job. And I could just tell that, you know, when making $1,500 a season to coach a sport and my wife is getting babies ready to go to daycare and she’s making dinner and she’s doing laundry and she’s the breadwinner, uh, at that point, I could kind of tell without her saying like, maybe I need to step back and support my family. And at that point at around, uh, I guess 31, 32, I decided to to quote unquote, retire from coaching and just still be a teacher. But I love being outside, I love cutting grass, so I started my own lawn care business. Um, nothing crazy because I get out of school every my contractual hours teaching is 6:30 in the morning, which is really early. Uh, kids come at 7:00 and then we get out at 2:40. Uh, the kids are out at 2:10, but we have to stay till 2:40. So I figured, “Well, I can just get a zero-turn lawn mower, you know, hop on that mower and by 5, 5:30 I could have cut three or four yards and make way more money probably in one month than I made an entire year of coaching.” And that’s when I found FIRE. Um, I got sick of listening to my classic rock music, same songs over and over again, and I discovered this little purple icon on my phone that said podcast. Like, “What the heck is a podcast?” Um, I’m not the best at technology, so I clicked on it. And then I think I typed in personal finance and then ChooseFI showed up. And I found ChooseFI and then I was hooked. Uh, I found ChooseFI, then I found, “Wow, Dave Ramsey has a radio show and people call in and tell him all the dumb things they’re doing and then he gets to yell at them.” And some of those dumb things we’ve done, I need somebody to yell at me too. So just being on a lawn mower, not only did that produce another $1,500 a month in income, but it was limited time away from the family. Uh, just plugging in from listening to music to trying to grow myself as a person and make our family better. Man, you guys and ChooseFI and the Money Guy show, those podcasts, I don’t have a degree in finance, it’s political science, but I feel like I’ve gotten a master’s degree for free just from listening to people like you and the guests you have on your show.
**Scott:** So so we go down this rabbit hole. This that, uh, uh, in at 31, 32. And and I assume you’re listening to these while you’re mowing lawns.
**Dave:** Yes.
**Scott:** And so you’re bringing in another, what, let’s call it $1,500 bucks a month or $18 grand a year. What’s the portfolio look like during this period? What are you investing in? What are you, what are you, uh, did you bought more rental properties by this point?
**Dave:** At that point at like 31, 32, uh, between both of us, we have about $5,000 in the stock market. I just found out in my 30s what a Roth IRA was. Um, my wife wasn’t really investing. I had signed up at work for a thing called a 457B, which is deferred comp, which um, I remember a a friend of mine, his wife was a financial advisor, a fellow teacher, and I asked her, “Should I do the the state 401k or the 403b?” She goes, “I think you should do the 401k. I think that makes more sense.” But I kept going back to this 40 457 thing, excuse me, of if you separate service, you have access without a 10% penalty. That sounds really cool. So I opened a 457 and I did $100 a month for maybe three or four years, not much. So at this point, we still have the three houses. We’re investing maybe $100 a month in our early 30s, but I really at that point, I would say maybe I’m now a C minus with knowledge of personal finance. But uh, at this point, my wife being a real estate agent, you know, having access like Mindy does to that MLS and you can see deals that are coming on the market, there was a local military family that they were getting orders and they had to go, like they had to. Uh, and they had a house that was coming on the market for like, maybe $50,000 under what my wife thought it was worth. So we moved to that house and it was a a five-bedroom, 3,600 square foot house, which was way bigger than the 1,600 square foot house we had moved in, uh, after we found out we were having a kid. We lived there three years and then we moved up into this bigger home. And we sold the other house, we didn’t keep it as a rental, we needed that money for a a 20% down payment. It did have a little bit of equity in there and we lived there for a couple of years and we were starting to gain some traction. I think we finally got out of debt, we had an emergency fund. Uh, but then my wife had a listing and that’s one of the dangerous things sometimes when you don’t have self-discipline is you get a listing and it’s a beautiful house, right? And you’re walking through the house and then your wife comes home and says, “I have this listing, you know, I think maybe it should be our house.” And it was in a gated community in the most exclusive neighborhood in our town. Back then it was about 600,000. Uh, now it would probably be around 950, maybe a million. And we put in an offer on that house and that was the best thing we ever did was they said no. And we’re like, we were starting to climb that keeping up with the Joneses, even though I don’t think we’re trying to compare ourselves to anybody. But it had a pool and it had a three-car detached garage and it was brick. And then we went home that night, we kind of went back to the drawing board like, “Well, this house is fine.” And I said, “Hey, do you want to watch Netflix and just kind of relax a little bit and not go out?” And we watched a documentary from the minimalists on Netflix. Uh, and in that documentary, it talked about how 40% of a house isn’t even used by most Americans. We said, “We have a 3,600 square foot house with a a three-year-old and a two-year-old and we don’t even use half of this house. What are we doing? This is stupid. We’re gonna make an offer on a half a million dollar house.” And then we decided to sell it and we moved into a new duplex, uh, 900 square feet.
**Guest:** All right, this is our final ad break. We’ll be back with a little bit more after this.
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**Mindy:** Thanks for sticking with us.
**Scott:** Awesome, love it, the house hack on there. And, and I want to call out before we get into the numbers on this, there’s a couple of decisions that determine how fast you can get to financial independence, right? One is, you know, are you making the smart choice with the latte every morning or whatever, you know, your discretionary spending. But the, um, the the big three are gonna be housing, transportation, and food. So the Hummer wasn’t super helpful at the beginning of the journey here, uh, uh, toward financial freedom. But you made pretty good decisions on the housing front though with the house hack here. Um, uh, in there and, and I think a 3600, $600,000 house, I got to believe that the opportunity cost associated with that is like $60,000 a year, right? In terms of of wealth creation that could be be being made and, you know, 50, $60,000 a year that could be being made in the, in a stock market investment or other, you know, 8 to 10% yield, uh, yielding return on there. And so if you move into a half duplex, maybe the duplex is even smaller than that house, uh, in terms of total square footage, I mean, you’re just, it’s just going to mint money. It changes the directory directory by at least two decades. I’d imagine. Is that, is that right? Am I am I doing…?
**Dave:** Oh, for sure. It was 2017, Scott, 2017 we lived in a 3,600 square foot house, which believe it or not here in it was $238,000 is what we bought it for. Uh, you know, 3,600 square feet, five-bedroom. That same house now is probably $500,000, but we were driving through a neighborhood and we were kind of praying about it and we’re like, “This, this just doesn’t make sense.” And we felt like, we’re in our early 30s and we have less than $10,000 invested. We literally laid in bed at night and we read The Millionaire Next Door and our mindset was completely blown up from what we thought a millionaire looked like. We didn’t realize that a millionaire is driving a Ford, they’re driving a Chevy, they’re driving a Honda. They’re not driving Hummers, right? They’re not driving Escalades. Maybe some people are, but reading that book, uh, changed everything with that documentary. So we go from the 3,600 square foot house and we see a for sale by owner in a cul-de-sac. There are 32 units in this cul-de-sac. One street, a mile from where I work at the high school. And we ended up deciding, “Let’s buy it.” It was $78,000, but we had $78,000 equity from that 3,600 square foot house that we paid cash. We went from a mortgage and utilities of probably 2,200 a month to having no mortgage and having utilities of probably $2 P.M. a month. So it was about a $2,000 swing, or a $24,000 a year difference. And at that same moment, by the way, I think a lot of our friends either thought that my wife was doing really bad in real estate or we were like going bankrupt. Why would you leave the five-bedroom home in the, the community where all the accountants and the teachers and the nurses live and move to like a C minus neighborhood where the cops were getting called with a lot of rental properties, why would you do this? Um, our parents never told us not to do it, but I think they thought we were probably crazy. And we didn’t have many visitors while we lived there because we had a a one-car driveway and you could only fit one vehicle in it and a one-car garage, so nobody could even park to visit. But it was the best thing we ever did. A two-bedroom, 900 square foot, our kids shared a room, they bunked up. They were about five and four years old. And I think they had a 7 by 10 bedroom. That was the size of their bedroom and uh, we had a decent size, you know, master bedroom there. But that changed everything because we also made the decision Mindy at that point that we wanted to, after we found you guys and ChooseFI, we want to live off one income and invest the other. And instead of, it would have been much easier to just, hey, let’s invest Dave’s teacher income of like 55, 60,000 a year and let’s live a pretty good life off of Stephanie’s real estate income, which at that point had gotten up to maybe 150. But we did the reverse and I said, “How about we live off my teacher income and I’ll still do the the lawn care side hustle for 1,500 a month.” And then we’re going to invest every penny you make into your SEP IRA, my 457 at work, 401k. And then we’re also going to, uh, buy more real estate. Uh, and here we are now we have nine homes and, uh, two of those are paid for.
**Mindy:** That’s, there’s often a a turning point that you can pinpoint in your financial journey. This one thing changed the trajectory or this decision made this decision easier and then changed my financial trajectory. I love that so much. I hear people yelling at their radio right now. “Yeah, but you did this in 2017.” When was the last time you bought a rental property?
**Dave:** Two weeks ago.
**Mindy:** Two weeks ago. Okay. And did you buy it for $78,000?
**Dave:** Those same properties now we bought one for, I think it was 144 and then there’s a a handful of three-bedroom ones that are 1,200 square feet. We bought that for 170. Um, and we put 25% down. But again, we’ve never taken a penny of the rental income to inflate our lifestyle or anything like that. Um, we’ve always just put it back into a high yield savings account. And fortunately, we had enough money each time one has come available to put the 25% down. I’ve got one other spin on this stuff that I think Scott will like. During this whole process, I hope everybody’s following along. I apologize. I get excited sometimes. We bought the house that we’re in now, our single-family home, and it has a detached three-car garage that we converted the attic above that into a 450 square foot apartment that we rent to travel nurses via Furnished Finder and that pays for our actual mortgage every month. So we’ve never paid for a mortgage in the house that we live in. Um, that covers our mortgage every month. So that became another Airbnb. So that turned into three Airbnbs at that point and now we’re up to to five Airbnbs, nine total properties, four of them are um, long-term rentals and five are on the short-term or the medium-term rental game. We had no idea what this was gonna turn into, but 2017 again, like $215,000 net worth, 2021 it gets up to a million and as of like this week, obviously depending on the market, we’re at about like almost two million. We’re about $40,000 shy of two million net worth. and that all happened from 2017 to 2025 in eight years. And I’d always heard people say that if you really, if you really focus and you make hard decisions, in 10 years, you can get to FIRE. And I really think that in that 10 year stretch from probably, I guess it was like 33, 34 to 43 or 44, we could be FIRE if we want. Last month was our first, we hit a $15,000 a month in rental income last month. That was the most we ever brought in in a month. Now we do have mortgages of about 6,000 on those rental properties and we do have to pay an Airbnb cleaner. But I would say that our cash flow is probably about six to $7,000 a month on our rental properties right now.
**Scott:** I want to caveat something with this 10 year grind. I don’t think we’re gonna meet the person who starts that 10 year grind with a house that pushes them to their financial limits. I don’t think we’re gonna find the person who gets to grind it out. I think unless they hit it with an entrepreneurial venture, um, or have one of these super high tech, you know, high highpaying technology jobs out there, I I think that essentially everyone who gets there in that in that 10 year horizon will live well below their means with a specific regard to their housing selection and I don’t think you could have done it without moving out of that house.
**Dave:** No. No, even my wife has a high income now. I mean, she, when we met, again, she’s making 60 to 75,000 back in like ’08, which who knows with inflation, what that is now, maybe $100,000. Uh, and then she climbed to 150. But the key is we’ve always tried to basically live off my teacher income and again, we had less than 10,000 invested when this whole process started in 2017 and as of now, I think in the stock market, uh, we’re up to about $835,000. So our next big goal is to be stock market millionaires. We’re not there yet, but we really started to get concerned of, you know, just being in real estate, we want to have more balance in our portfolio of more of a 50/50 split. So, you know, that’s, that’s really our next big goal is to try to get to a million on that.
**Scott:** So, a million of the lines there. That means you’ve contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the stock market, um, over the last couple of years to build a position from basically nothing to 800 almost a million at this point because of the real estate decisions that you’ve made and keeping their lifestyle expenses flat with in the face of rising incomes.
**Dave:** For sure, you know, here I am teaching these high school kids and I’d say 90% of the high school kids that I teach have a way nicer vehicle than I have in the parking lot. I tell them that all the time. Like, they know my net worth, I’ll pull up, uh, I converted it over from Mint to Credit Karma. And we’ll say, hey, let’s take a look. What can you do? It’s like, guys, you know, keep in mind I’m driving a 2008 in the parking lot. You know, I’m not what I drive. You know, material things don’t define me, but the most important thing that defines us as a family is we want our, our ceiling that we get to to be our our children’s floor and we want them to start out. And now that we have these paid for houses, we say worst case if the, you know what hits the fan, my son and my daughter each have a paid for duplex that they could live in worst case and we know that they have a house that’s paid for the rest of their life, you know, if that’s something that they earn, if they’re good kids and they’re, you know, being good members of society.
**Scott:** I think that if you want to retire early as a teacher, I think you’ve got to go back to housing. I just don’t think we’re going to find the example of a teacher who was able to do it without housing, at least not with a family in there without that as a core component, just to get the ball rolling early on, uh, in there. Do you think that’s right?
**Dave:** Yeah, and I think having a partner on the same page if you are married, my wife is awesome and she really doesn’t care at all about the money stuff. Like I remember I was like, “Hey, you know, we’re up to $350,000 net worth.” She’s like, “Just talk to me when we hit a million. I don’t even want to hear anything else.” She goes, “We’re so far behind. 350, that’s nothing. Like, we should have had that years ago.” But, you know, I I always equate it to like an an aboveground swimming pool growing up when you’re a kid and you get out there and you and your buddies want to make a whirlpool and you get four or five kids walking around the aboveground swimming pool in the same direction like 30 times and then eventually you can kind of pick your feet up and it’ll just carry you around four or five times. But I feel like so many of us, someone created a whirlpool, but we’re the person walking in the other direction where the current’s going the other way and it feels like we’re gonna drown, it feels like we’re not gonna make it, it feels like we can’t even walk one lap around that pool. But when you have a spouse who’s on the same page, willing to make sacrifices. My wife, you know, God bless her, she’s probably one of the top three real estate agents in our county. She does really, really well, but she was driving a 10-year-old Ford Flex with 200,000 miles on it. And people would always say, “Why are you driving a Ford Flex? Why don’t you go get that escalate? Now you can afford it, you could pay cash for it.” She’s like, “No, I’d much rather buy another rental property than have a nice vehicle.”
**Scott:** I thought you were gonna say it was a 15-year-old Hummer.
**Dave:** Yeah, no, she, we, we encouraged her to get rid of that fairly quickly after I came in the picture.
**Scott:** Yeah. Um well one one other question here about the portfolio is you you’ve you sacrificed living in in the duplex. You now live in a house with a attached three-car garage with an ADU that is rented out to traveling nurses. So that’s got to feel like an upgrade, um, pretty substantially over the duplex. Is that correct?
**Dave:** Oh, for sure. I mean, we have a beautiful home, you know, it’s 2,700 square feet. Um, we did, you know, after the cancer thing, we did cash flow and put in a in ground swimming pool there. So I think since the cancer thing, like I was extremely frugal, I was a miser. It was all about, I told my wife, “In five years, we can do this and in five years, we can do that.” But when you get diagnosed with cancer, you don’t know if there’s gonna be five months from now. So I think along the way we’ve had to adjust and again, that keyword of balance, we were scorched earth, like probably saving 70% of our income. Uh, now we still save all the rental income or whatever, but I think we’ve definitely lightened up and we’ve gone on cruises and we got a boat and we put in an in-ground swimming pool. Now we use some of her income to actually enjoy life and take the kids on vacations and do things like that. Trying to be cognizant that you get these kids if you’re lucky 18 years and we want to do as many fun things. My kids at 10 and 12 have already experienced more in life than I had experienced by 30 years old when it comes to traveling out of the country and going to pro sporting events and having a pool in their backyard, going to Disney. But it took a lot of sacrifice to get there. Um, but like I said, it’s it’s totally been worth it. Can that one move, you know, does your house define you? Can you go backwards in lifestyle? Um, my wife had the great attitude of people would say, “Well, do you really want to leave the house that you brought your babies home from the hospital to? Like you have all those memories.” She goes, “I have plenty of videos and pictures. It’s four walls and a roof. As long as we have each other, I really don’t care where we live.” Uh, and I think her mindset was kind of the catalyst behind this of it wasn’t this emotional thing. It was a business transaction.
**Scott:** I think that’s really important to highlight here is you have to do scorched earth I think to reset the trajectory of a financial position. It’s a very common theme in the truly early or rapid financial independent stories. But you got to move out of it after a few years, right? Maybe one, two, three years at most in that to reset that balance and go back into it because the point is not to live like that forever and amass millions and millions and always be deferring. It sounds like you guys hit a great balance of it triggered by both Financial Peace University and the I and the discovery of the FIRE movement and the awake wake-up call that life is short and precious and you’ve got to be able to enjoy that with, um, the cancer diagnosis. And it sounds like you’re living a wonderful life now. And I was gonna, I was just kind of jumping to, because of the rental property portfolio and the snowball that you’ve got going and the pension that’s going to hit in how long?
**Dave:** It’ll be, I’ll be 43 this year. So I got about seven and a half years when my daughter graduates, her senior year, she’ll go to my high school that I teach at. Like my goal is to kind of, not that I would really want the attention, but I joke that I’ll walk across the stage when she graduates, we’ll graduate and we’ll be retired. So the critical piece is to get to 50 so I get that pension, get that free healthcare until 65. Could we be FIRE now? It probably be like kind of more of a lean FIRE. You know, we, it sounds kind of crazy, but my wife and I talk like 20,000, we don’t have a FIRE number other than like, we want $20,000 a month to really be able to give back, help other people, and enjoy life and travel and live a better life at 50 than we ever did at 25 and 30.
**Scott:** Yeah, I I think that’s gonna go really nicely for you on those next seven years. I think that portfolio has got a good shot at doubling, the existing portfolio, plus you shoveling a lot more cash and buying a lot more properties to keep it going plus the pension. It’s going to be fun to see, uh, uh, I think that’s going to be fun because you’re already starting, you’re already living it up with this. And I I think it’s going to be, uh, as you said, I I didn’t put all those pieces together until you were going through the advantages for teachers. But wow, that’s going to be a wonderful, um, early retirement at 50. That’s awesome.
**Mindy:** All right. Dave, this was a super fun episode. I really appreciate your time. I see, uh, the, I’m I’m listening to the Timbuktu 3 song, “The future’s so bright, I got to wear shades.” I see such a bright future for you, such a bright financial future. Um, when did you say you were gonna be a a stock market millionaire?
**Dave:** Who knows what the market, but I would love to by, you know, the end of 2026.
**Mindy:** Okay, great. I see that happening. I looked into my crystal ball. It’s, it’s going to happen.
**Dave:** Hey, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I’ll claim that.
**Mindy:** But I just, I love the message that you’re sharing and I thank you so much for sharing your money story with us. This was so much fun. Yes, you can become a millionaire, even if you are a teacher on a teacher’s salary, you just have to do the work. So, Dave, thank you so much for your time today. And where can people find you online?
**Dave:** Our website is financiallyindependentteachers.com and if you look up The Financially Independent Teachers Podcast, we’re on Apple, Spotify, all the different places. We’d love to have other people join us. We have lots of teachers, other middle income earners and, you know, we don’t just have millionaire teachers on our show, although we’ve had, I won’t, I don’t want to say hundreds, we’ve had 218 episodes, but we probably had 50 millionaire teachers share their story on our podcast on how a middle income earner can do it. And you guys can do it too.
**Mindy:** You absolutely can. All right, Dave, thank you so much for your time and we’ll talk to you soon.
**Dave:** Thank you guys very much. I appreciate the opportunity.
**Mindy:** All right, Scott, that was Dave, the Financially Independent Teacher. And that was such a great story. I loved his underlying message. Even if you are a middle-income earner, you can still reach financial independence. And I think that that’s just a message that doesn’t get shared enough. Financial independence is absolutely possible for anyone, no matter when or where you’re starting. Oh, wait, that sounds familiar.
**Scott:** I loved that story and I think that it’s like, it was just wonderful getting a glimpse into each of like the key milestone decisions along his journey, which, look, we covered the house hack. We’re gonna beat that dead, we’re gonna beat that until it’s a completely dead horse because it is just so important and I know it frustrates people who don’t want to house hack. That’s too bad. It is too powerful of a tool to ignore and it’s too much of a cheat code for folks. If you’re not gonna do it for at least one year of your life, you’re gonna really set your… That one year could could accelerate your timeline by 40 years to retirement. Um, so we’re obviously needed to hit on that one. But there were other really subtle important points that he brought up that I want to float back to the surface here, like the discussions, the blunt conversations he had with his spouse prior to getting married and early in their journey. Like the fact that he loved baseball coaching and he gave that up because it wasn’t reasonable at that point in his life with two young kids and with the goal of attempting to get ahead and build flexibility into the position. That’s an immense sacrifice you can imagine for someone like Dave who, who really, you know, played D1 baseball and, and went in there. And that’s, that’s, that’s something that I think wasn’t talked about or discussed enough that, um, in there and there’s other sacrifices, lifestyle sacrifices, there’s budgeting, there’s discipline, there’s the skill of becoming, um, a sophisticated real estate investor. But that’s a really big one that I think, um, you know, might make people a little uncomfortable, giving up a passion like that baseball to mow lawns to put your family in a better position that will pay off for the rest of his life. I bet it was a really hard one.
**Mindy:** Yeah, I’m sure it was, but also a really easy one. Look, this is going to make my family life better. And you don’t have kids, so you never, ever, ever spend time with them. You have kids to spend time with them. And he is working till, what did he say, 11 o’clock at night doing baseball coaching? I don’t have that same passion for baseball. But even if I did, I don’t want to be away from my family until 11 o’clock at night. Then he’s got to be back at school at 7 o’clock in the morning or 6:30 in the morning because the kids come at 7, which is strange to be as well. But he’s never seeing his kids when he’s a baseball coach. So you can have time to coach baseball down the road. You need to spend time with your kids. That’s the tradeoff that he made. And now instead of coming home at 11, he comes home at five. He can have dinner with his kids, he can help his wife put him to bed, and then they get to know him as a person.
**Scott:** Yeah, absolutely. And I’m using the baseball thing because that was clearly his passion. Everyone’s got, not, not everyone, but a lot of people have these different passions that consume a large amount of time and resources or or, you know, are just not compensated, um, in a meaningful way. And I think, but I think that was an underrated part of the discussion, something that we didn’t really harp on enough during the show. Um, it kind of showed that shows how all of these decisions blend together, right? It’s the sacrifice. Yes, we’re gonna sacrifice on the car front and the home front, and we’re gonna be disciplined with our spending. We’re also gonna be really consistent with how we spend our time and a lot of it. And that’s what alignment looks like and that’s the type of sacrifice that’s needed in a healthy relationship um, to move towards a really important goal like financial freedom. And the irony is you probably think in in an example like that, you know, put your own example in your mind as you’re thinking through whatever parallel is in your life. But if you think through an example like that, you’re helping these kids, shaping them, molding them. He’s now able to do that amplified across teachers all over the country because of the success he’s had in building his personal financial portfolio and helping all these kids with personal finance decisions and helping set them up for life now. And so there it all comes back in weird ways on those fronts. And I just think that that I want to call them out for a large number of great decisions that he’s made, not just the the house hacking one.
**Mindy:** And they’re not necessarily easy decisions to make, but they’re great financial decisions that he’s making looking down the road, not just thinking, “How can I have the best life right now? How can I have the best life for the future?” And I think Dave Ramsey said it the best, “Live like no one else now so you can live like no one else later.” And now he’s a millionaire teacher with an awesome rental portfolio.
**Scott:** I wonder what car he’ll show up with uh, at at uh, his graduation. He’s and his daughter’s graduation at that point in time.
**Mindy:** 2008, what is it? 2008 truck? He has a 2008 something. I did, I don’t remember what it was.
**Scott:** Let’s see. Whatever he’ll, whatever he drives at that point, it’ll be paid off. But yeah, it’s, he’ll live like no one else can. That’s gonna be an epic retirement um, uh, for Dave in a couple of years here.
**Mindy:** Yeah, that’ll be awesome. All right, Scott, should we get out of here?
**Scott:** Let’s do it.
**Mindy:** That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying, “Until next time, lime.”
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