Speaker 1: Cody Berman first appeared on our show 8 years ago on episode 26. Since then, he became a millionaire at 25 through a combination of hard work, exploiting his unfair advantages, and more than a little luck, all things he was already doing back in 2018. He continued to grow his wealth over the next 5 years through these same principles and ballooned his wealth to $5 million by age 30. Today we’re discussing his path, the options that you, my dear listeners, have if his path isn’t the right one for you, and that early retirement is still possible in 2026. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my Achieved FI by 30 co-host, Scott Trench.
Speaker 2: Thanks, Mindy.
Speaker 3: We’ll have to retire the word “retired” on this, but I’m excited to talk about that and this concept of retiring by 30 with a very special guest here, Cody Berman, who was on episode, I think it was 26, 8 years ago here at BiggerPockets. I think you might have been just in college or just out of college at that point talking about the approach. And so it’s awesome to see you again. And boy, that worked out well. We’ll kind of get to that here. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s been going on the last 8 years?
Speaker 4: Yeah, what a lead up. What’s been going on for the last 8 years? Well, first of all, thanks for having me back. And I just watched that episode today in its entirety, and I’m still cringing hard. So hopefully this episode will be a lot better than that one. I had zero polish. I had just graduated college. I was living in Australia. And I remember I rented out this little kind of soundproof room to record with you guys because I was so excited. And yeah, it is cool to see that all the things that I talked about in that episode, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to be doing to make money or exactly what I would be investing in, but the stuff did work. I increased my income, I decreased my expenses, I invested the gap, and I was able to hit financial independence just about 3 years after we recorded together, at age 25. And now I’m age 30. I have my book, Retire by 30. And I’ve done a whole lot of different side hustles since then. I have kept a nice healthy gap between my income and my expenses, and I have invested aggressively into things like the stock market and real estate. And I guess we can just take that in any direction because I could talk about my last 8 years for an hour plus.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that I loved most about episode 26, and if our listeners have not checked out that episode, I highly encourage you to check it out, because Cody is the epitome of taking advantage of your unfair advantage. He had a disc golf company that he started in college, right, Cody? College or high school?
Speaker 4: College. Yep. I started my sophomore year.
Speaker 1: And he partnered with a friend, and the friend happened to be a mechanical engineer and happened to have access to CAD software. So when they needed to make changes to their discs, they could just have the partner do it on his CAD software on his off time, which is a huge expense if you don’t have this unfair advantage. And then continued this disc golf company. And if I recall correctly, because I didn’t just listen to it, but it stayed in my head, if I recall correctly, you were generating all of your living expenses just from the work that you were doing at that disc golf company, which I believe worked out to like 5 hours a week.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Some of that is correct. So he was not in the military. I can’t do the stolen valor thing, that’s a no-no. He was a mechanical engineer, so he had access to the CAD from his work.
Speaker 1: Okay, that was my mistake.
Speaker 4: No worries, no worries. I just don’t want to be stealing valor here on this podcast right off the bat. And in terms of how much it was bringing in, I think at its peak I was taking in personally about $2,000 per month in profit. So at the time, that was covering my living expenses, because my living expenses were extremely low. But to fast forward, actually, we could talk about this a lot today—that was not the business that made me a millionaire, allowed me to achieve financial freedom, but it was the business that was the stepping stone for all of the other businesses and all the other side hustles and all the other things to come. So what that business was, was just the foundation. It was so many learning lessons, so many failures, so many things that I didn’t know that I didn’t know until I tried it with this disc golf manufacturing company.
Speaker 1: And when better to fail at a business than when it doesn’t count? Like, you weren’t using this to sustain your life, and if it didn’t work out, you would be homeless, you would be starving. You were also in college. So if it didn’t work out, you could still live in the dorms or the apartment or whatever, and you would still have food and you would still have, like, you had a big safety net, which is one of my favorite ways to start a small business—to not need the income to survive.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The path to doing this very early involves some kind of outlier outcome, right? An investment tailwind that takes off, a career that is in really explosive income categories, entrepreneurship, joining a startup, those types of areas. And, you know, as you kind of think about it, what is repeatable and what is luck in the context of your journey? Like my journey, luck—obviously joining BiggerPockets as an early employee and taking over as CEO. How do you separate that out in this area? Because I can see a lot of people saying, well, sure, I mean, you can talk about this, but it’s outlier tails that you’re betting on here. What is the median outcome going to be?
Speaker 4: It’s funny, because in our last episode, Scott, we talked about this, and I said one of my favorite quotes from you was talking about kind of the surface area of luck, and getting lucky is just exploiting opportunities that come your way. And so it’s funny that we’re repeating ourselves 8 years later here, but for me it was just, I tried so many different things. I tried so many different businesses, so many different side hustles. So it wasn’t like I started one and it was the best thing ever and I got lucky and then that was the thing that made me. It was, I tried 20 different things. I quote-unquote got lucky with one of those businesses later on. But like, you know, in a different dimension, in the alternate universe, it could have been another business that allowed me to put my income into hyperdrive. So yes, parts of it were luck. Like, was I in the right place at the right time for my digital products business that took off? Was my real estate in the right place at the right time when I started investing there? Has the stock market been on a tear? Absolutely. So I did get lucky in all of those different dimensions. But if I wasn’t trying at business, if I wasn’t investing in real estate, if I wasn’t investing in the stock market, I wouldn’t even have the opportunity to get lucky. So is my 100% exact journey repeatable? Maybe not. But I’ve seen so many different examples of people doing similar things. Maybe it’s in a different vertical, maybe they have a different business, maybe they do it in corporate. But people get lucky in all sorts of different ways. But the people who get the luckiest are the ones who take the most action.
Speaker 3: I think that there’s a real weak spot in a section of the financial independence community that just doesn’t grasp the entrepreneurial side of the journey, the path to FIRE, because for an employee, it’s a formula. You save and invest and you hit your number and then you retire, right? And it’s very formulaic. And that’s especially if you’re doing it in passively managed investments. But in the business world, tails compound very quickly. You can sit on something, you can hit your number, and then 6 months later you’re way past it, or something else has evolved in that world. So I think the headline is, you have a net worth of well over $5 million now at age 30. And it wasn’t like, oh, I had my number here at $2 million, and then I just—you blow past it in the path that you’ve taken here and have a lot of freedom, and you take risks, right? There’s going to be a different approach there. And I think that this is very incomprehensible to many other people on the other path. There’s no right or wrong in this, it’s just very challenging to wrap your head around, like, how do I think about this approach here? Am I conjecturing this correctly, with your business career, that as these opportunities and these businesses compounded, it just shot you way past your goal, and now you have an explosively large number of options, more than you’re thinking you would have at this point?
Speaker 4: That is 100% right. You put that really, really well. And these are the types of people that I butt heads with hard in the FIRE community. And so, kind of what I did to give people some real numbers—I know we’re all money nerds here, we like talking about real numbers—I did what I like to call a financial freedom sprint. So for 3 years, from 22 to 25—I interviewed with you guys back, I think, right after my 22nd birthday—so basically the 3 years after that last interview, for people who listen to episode 26, that first year in entrepreneurship, I made $96,000, and I was grinding my butt off. I was working like 16-hour days. I had a billion different income streams. I had the disc golf stuff, I had the digital products, I had a blog, podcast, freelancing, yada yada yada. So the next year, some of my stuff started to catch, and to your point, Scott, with entrepreneurship, things are more scalable. Like, at some point you hit this hockey stick growth, and all the work that you’ve been doing, even though it might not be working in month 6 or year 1, maybe year 2 or year 3, it starts to explode. Some people hit—yes, but that hockey stick growth is usually only possible in entrepreneurship. You don’t typically get someone in corporate who has hockey stick income just from corporate. Maybe, maybe your company IPOs or you make some crazy career jump, but it’s more typical in entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2: Mortgage is going to be smaller and the kids are almost launched. So instead of buying one giant 30-year policy you’ll overpay for, you stack a few—say a 10-year, a 20-year, and a 30-year layer. So your total coverage steps down as your actual obligations step down.
Speaker 3: You only pay for what you actually need when you need it. I had the same thing happen as an employee at BiggerPockets, right? Not very different, but the same in concept here, as employee and then CEO of BiggerPockets. Very parallel. So many, I think, employees, executives, or tech workers at FAANGs, for example, have experienced a version of what you’re talking about here. Okay.
Speaker 4: So yeah, maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know the exact percentages or statistics, we don’t have to argue that. But for my certain case, for my specific scenario—so that first year I made $96,000 in entrepreneurship, I was spending $24,000 a year. I was extremely frugal, living on $2,000 a month. I had a lot of role models like yourself, Scott. I remember meeting you at Camp FI, and then I read Set for Life right after, and I was just like, okay, I need to keep my expenses really low, I need to boost my income really high. So I had like a $76,000—whatever that maths out to. Yeah, $76,000 gap in that year one of entrepreneurship. The next year, my income doubled from my entrepreneurial ventures, and I made $198,000.
Speaker 3: Can you give us, at a high level, the mechanics—you’re not spinning off the disc golf company, pun intended, and doing this. This is another business, right?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is several other businesses, but the one that took off the most was my digital products business, Gold City Ventures. That started to take off in like mid-2019, 2020. That was the lion’s share of the income I was making. I was also doing a bunch of freelancing projects. I was also podcasting, blogging—what else did I have going on? I was just literally doing whatever I could in those early years to make money. That’s why I like to call it my financial freedom sprint, because I did not let up. I was not jogging at all. I was just like, I want to hit FI, I want to hit FI. I was sprinting to my goal. So yeah, that second year, $198,000. I kept my expenses the exact same.
Speaker 3: Where were you living during this period as well? Like, were you nomadic at this point, or were you hunkered down in a basement in a dark room?
Speaker 4: So just post-college, I moved back home for 7 months. This is while I was working at corporate America, which is funny because I hadn’t even started my career in corporate America when I last talked to you guys on the podcast. But I lived at home for those 7 months. Then I moved to a small apartment in Boston, where I kind of not house-hacked in a sense, but I shared a room with someone else. So my rent per month was only $450 per month. And then, kind of in the middle of year 2 or year 3 of that financial freedom sprint, I started house hacking, and that completely changed the numbers for me, and my expenses went even lower. And I was starting to make money on the income front. I know it’s kind of not like I house-hacked, or I did a lot of different things during those 3 years, but you know, what’s typically the biggest expense for most people—my housing was $450, was the peak during those years. $450 per month.
Speaker 1: I think house hacking, when you’re the one renting from somebody else, is still house hacking. You’re not paying the entire rent. Did you say you shared a room with someone?
Speaker 4: So we had a 3-bedroom apartment in Boston. It was $2,700 per month. Each bedroom was $900. I split a bedroom. My rent was $450.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So did you split a bedroom with your girlfriend, or just some random person?
Speaker 4: No, just my buddy from college.
Speaker 1: Okay. So Dave Ramsey has a really great quote. It’s “live like no one else now so you can live like no one else later.” There are plenty of people who are in your same position, or were in your same position. They’re like, I’m out of college, I am not gonna have a roommate anymore, I’m gonna have the whole $2,700 rent my own self. You paid $450. Do you live like that forever?
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: But you live like that when you’re already used to living like that and you boost—like, did you spend all the rest of your money on beer and restaurants?
Speaker 3: Nope.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I kept all my expenses very, very low those first 3 years. My expenses rarely eclipsed $2,000 a month. The average was about $2,000 for those first 3 years of FI, my financial freedom sprint from 22 to 25.
Speaker 3: So what happened with your business trajectory over this period as well?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that first year, $96,000. Second year, $198,000. The third year, things started to take off, and I made $403,000, and I still spent that same $24,000. So my gap—that year 3—was $379K. And so that year I bought 11 rental units. I invested like $200K in the stock market. And it was at the end of that year that I proclaimed FI. I had like $3,700 per month that I was bringing in in rental income, net PITI, CapEx reserves, all that fun stuff. And then I had about $500K invested in the stock market. And then I had a mostly passive digital products business that was bringing in like $10K+ per month.
Speaker 3: Let me break down a couple of things here, because you just claimed $400K in income. Rental units are being bought, stock investments are being made, and we have $10K in passive income. So that implies like $300K in actively earned income as part of that. Is that the right way to frame it? It’s kind of a blur, I imagine, with the business, where some of it’s passive and could continue, but a lot of it is you executing it. Help us understand that.
Speaker 4: So I guess the full financial freedom snapshot—so right before my 26th birthday, my net worth was just over $1 million, I think $1,035,000. I have the screenshot again. I had $500K in the stock market. So using the 4% rule, I could live on, like, what is that, $16,667 per month or something like that via the 4% rule. Then I had the $3,700 coming in from my real estate portfolio, and then I had roughly $10,000 in passive income, mostly passive income, coming in per month from my digital products business, which was a template library, courses and membership, all that fun stuff. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: I think you could even do it faster if you were applying your framework today the way you’re talking about it. So, from there, we have $1 million at 25 and we have jumped to $5 million by 30. Can you give us the high-level overview of that extrapolation?
Speaker 4: Business continued to take off. My income continued to double. The digital products business, real estate, and then my personal finance brand, if you will, which I’ll just put my podcast, my now book, my social media, all that stuff underneath it—those became kind of my 3 main sources of income. The other things started to just kind of peter away. And I’m kind of famous for being the side hustle guy, where I had like 30 streams of income that I tried, and then I really dialed in on these main 3. Again, my gap was growing like crazy. I think the biggest gap that I had was like $750K in one year. And I’m just pouring all of that money into tried and true assets, like real estate and the stock market. I have a very, very small percentage of my portfolio in things like individual stocks. I have a little bit of crypto exposure, but it was just, make money in active businesses, keep my expenses low, put said money into tried and true asset classes, and boom, they’ve appreciated like crazy. And we’ve been in a crazy bull market. So to your point before, Scott, have I gotten lucky? Absolutely. But because I was putting so much money into these markets, I had the opportunity to benefit from those gains.
Speaker 1: So this is all your income, Cody Berman’s income. This isn’t—the $700,000 is actually split between partners.
Speaker 4: That’s all me.
Speaker 1: Okay. What are your taxes like?
Speaker 4: A lot more. More than I’d like to admit. I try to optimize as much as I can. I’ve done things like designated Lauren as the real estate professional, and we’ve been able to offset our active income with depreciation that way. And, you know, we’ve done a lot of different tricks and strategies, but I have not been able to be one of those guys who’s like, “I make $5 million and my income tax is zero.” But we try to optimize as much as we can. But yes, I do have pretty hefty tax bills every quarter.
Speaker 3: And this wealth, do you put a value on your businesses, or is this excluding any of the value in your businesses?
Speaker 4: I put a very small, very conservative value on my main business, Gold City Ventures, which is like 1x EBITDA for the year. We’re not planning on selling it. It’s a very small percentage of my net worth, but I do include that. But no, nothing else. I’m not like, “Oh, I could sell my podcast for 10x earnings this year.” Now, it’s mostly like—I have my net worth breakdown actually, if you guys are interested. I pulled all the numbers for this interview.
Speaker 3: That’d be great.
Speaker 4: So it’s—I’m just about $5.1 million in total. 41% of that is in index funds, so about $2.1 million. 34% is in real estate, about $1.7 million. Business equity, about 13% at $663,000. I have about $510,000 in cash, which is about 10% of my net worth, which is way higher than I’d normally have. But we’re in the process of building our forever home right now. And then I have about 2% of my net worth in crypto, which is just over $100K.
Speaker 3: Awesome. I’ll call this out. I’m eerily similar here with some of these. I have a very similar makeup for my position. My financial portfolio is 50% real estate, 50% stocks. There’s sometimes a bigger half depending on the market, but it’s very much bouncing between those two. On this, I mark all of my business interests actually to zero. Not because I don’t think they’re valuable, it’s just because I totally exclude them when I think about my wealth. I don’t even put like a 1x or half-times EBITDA or anything on those assets. Then I have my house. And so that’s the position. This is another point in favor of a lot of people, I think, who are at these outlier ends on the wealth spectrum early in life, or even maybe potentially later, probably are very conservatively marking their wealth positions, because these illiquid assets do not usually get marked at a very premium asset value. I think, at least in the FIRE community, I find it very rare to find the person who is overvaluing these illiquid components of their portfolio. Is that what you see in your experience?
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I think that’s totally fair. I think most people in the FIRE community—I mean, there’s even debates: is my house an asset in the FIRE community? Should I include it in my net worth? Most people in the FIRE community, from what I’ve seen, are just counting their index fund portfolio that they can withdraw from and use the 4% rule on.
Speaker 3: That’s right. I separate—I have my net worth, and I have my financial independence portfolio, my FI portfolio. And that includes my real estate and stocks. And I separate my house. It’s included in my net worth, but it’s not included in my FI portfolio. I imagine you’re going to do something similar when you build your forever home here.
Speaker 1: So you have said that you have three current income streams—Gold City Ventures, the real estate, and your personal brand. Is that correct?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that’s pretty much how I summarize it.
Speaker 1: Okay. Do you consider yourself retired?
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 1: Did you write a book called Retire by 30?
Speaker 4: Yes, I was just about to say people could see this big sign behind me. It was intentional—it’s to get people going a little bit. I kind of used Tim Ferriss’s strategy here. I did a lot of research before I named the book. And when he wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, his intention was not to get everyone down to a four-hour workweek. If you go from 40 to 30, huge win, absolutely massive win. So if you become work optional by 43 from reading my book, that is amazing. You don’t have to hang it up at 28 in order for this to be a win. And to use the word “retire”—retire just had a stronger punch than financially free or FIRE by 30. That’s a little too obscure. So I went back and forth a lot with the editors here, and retire was the one that was the punchiest. But retire, in this context, just means getting to the point at which you do not have to work for money, where work becomes optional. Because most people, even in traditional retirement—like someone works for 40 years, they hit 65, they quote-unquote retire traditionally—usually that person isn’t doing absolutely nothing. They’re doing something else. Maybe they pick up a hobby, maybe they start golfing all the time—they’re doing something else with their time. So that’s how I like to define retirement: the point at which you can do whatever you want with your time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that. So how much of your time is spent on each one of these three income streams?
Speaker 4: It depends heavily on the season that I’m in. I love to work in seasons. I’m the type of person where, even though I’ve hit FI, I enjoy working, and I butt heads with people in the FIRE community on this all the time. They’re like, “You hit FI, why are you still working on your businesses?” It’s like, because I like to. It’s like—just because someone’s fit, should they stop working out? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Yes, I’ve hit FI by the numbers. Does that mean I can’t work in my businesses that I enjoy anymore? So for me, when I’m fired up about a project—like when I was doing the book launch, I was working some weeks 60 to 80-hour weeks, and people are like, “You’re insane.” Maybe, but I was having a lot of fun doing it. I was getting lost in the work. Other weeks—like I’m actually leaving this Saturday from when we’re recording this on a three-plus week European vacation—I’m going to be working like 30 minutes a day, maybe just checking in on emails and Slack and stuff. So I’ll have months where I work 30 minutes a day, I’ll have months where I’m working eight hours a day. It completely depends on the season, the projects I have going on, how invested I am, how much I’m into a project. So I can’t give you just like, “Oh, this is exactly how many hours I work every week or every month.” It totally depends.
Speaker 3: Let’s keep honing in on this word “retire.” We used to just use it as part of the FIRE acronym for a long time, and in the last couple of years, we’ve really stopped emphasizing the retire portion of that. We’ve basically—there’s still probably a few places we’ll use it carelessly here and there—but we’ve really stopped using it as a core term, because I think that word is so polarizing. So aside from the whole editor thing, what do you think about that word in the context of what we’re discussing here and what you’re going to be doing with the next 35 years as you approach traditional retirement age?
Speaker 4: I mean, obviously I’m okay with using the word, given that I named a book and dedicated years of my life to writing this thing. But I don’t know, to me, like I said, retirement is just the point at which you do not have to work for money and you can go pursue anything that interests you. I hate hating on words. It’s just a label. If you have an issue with it, that’s fine, and you can use different verbiage or different terminology for it. But I don’t know, to me it’s totally fine.
Speaker 3: I don’t have a problem with the word either. I don’t think Mindy does either. But we just kind of have moved away from using it because it’s exhausting to go back and forth about the word with strangers on the internet about whether that word applies in this situation or not. So that was more of the philosophical debate there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t have any issue with the word retire. I have an issue with people focused on the R-E part of the acronym FIRE. They’re like, “Oh, I want to retire early.” Focus on the financial independence part. Scott and Cody and I are all three financially independent, and yet we choose to work. Cody, do you do anything you don’t really want to do?
Speaker 4: Sometimes, but I’ve really tried to eliminate or delegate the things that I don’t want to do. Going back to The 4-Hour Workweek, which I mentioned in my previous interview, that was the book that changed it all for me. And Tim has the DEAL framework, where he delegates and eliminates tasks that he no longer wants to do. So I really try to fill up my day with the things that light me up and reduce as much as possible the things that I’m not so excited about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, same.
Speaker 3: I want to go to a portfolio question here next. And again, let’s break this dichotomy apart. So a person who’s pursuing financial independence as an employee is going to start at their base salary, increase that year after year, save, invest, likely in tax-advantaged accounts. There’s a very clear tilt towards Boglehead passive indexing, probably rightfully so for this person. And there’s every reason in the world that these folks can retire in their 30s or 40s following a trajectory like that with a high savings rate. It works. It’s not a controversial thing—it happens, and there’s a formula for that. Within that world, I think the FI community is hyper-focused on this concept of keeping the goalposts from moving and hitting their 4% withdrawal rate number in the portfolio and then maximizing spend. And this “die with zero” concept comes into play. That’s a driving worldview that I think people are very passionate about. It’s a correct worldview—it’s not an incorrect worldview—it’s just not the only correct worldview. And let’s go back to your position here, because your approach, the entrepreneurial approach, I think in many cases fundamentally breaks how that works. Because, unlike an employee who’s approaching this 4% number—let’s call it a $2.5 million target—they get there, there’s a transition phase, and they stop, begin withdrawing, decumulating. That’s a very clear mathematical progression. You’re going to overshoot by a little bit—almost everybody overshoots by a hair, just to be conservative if they can, and they’re not forced out early. When it begins withdrawing conservatively, that’s one thing. But in the entrepreneurial path, there’s every reason to believe that those last few years of growth are going to see this huge compounding. You’re going to blow past your number, which I think also then circles back to what the optimal portfolio strategy is. Because if you’re going to blow past your number and you have a very high concentration of your wealth in a certain asset, how does that change the way you think about investing, especially as someone who’s 30 years old? Because I imagine you’re not moving yourself into a 60/40 stock-bond portfolio or decumulating your portfolio at the highest possible withdrawal rate you can, mathematically optimized over 60 years. There’s something else that you’re going to be doing with your money.
Speaker 4: So I think I’m going to introduce a framework to answer this question, but then I’ll get down to my portfolio split. So one of the first things I did in my book—because I think this is what’s different from what I preach versus traditional FIRE, which is save up your 4%, or save up 25x your annual expenses, and boom, that’s your FIRE number. Then you can withdraw, and you have this percentage chance that’s going to last you for the rest of your life. So I like to bucket financial independence into two main strategies. There’s the nest egg approach, which is the one I just talked about—the 4% rule—and the cash flow FI approach. And since you guys probably have a pretty big crossover with real estate investors, this is one that a lot of real estate investors pursue. So cash flow FI: let’s say you spend $60,000 a year, you need $5,000 per month to live. Once you have $5,000 per month in passive or mostly passive income, that is financial independence. I’m someone who likes to have guardrails and a more conservative approach, but in theory, you could have $0 in the stock market or in index funds—you could just be making $5,000 per month in passive or mostly passive income and hit FI that way. That is cash flow FI. The other way, and this was the way I was first introduced to FI, was the nest egg method. I was like, well, if I’m spending $60,000 per year, that’s times 25—that’s $1.5 million that I need to save up in index funds in a stock portfolio. Which one can I get to faster? I was really attracted to this notion, this idea of cash flow FI. So to get back to your question, Scott, about portfolio breakdown—for me, I like having both. I kind of have a 3-pronged approach to hitting FI. I had a small business that was bringing in passive income. I had my real estate portfolio that was bringing in passive income. So those are both the cash flow FI route. Then I also had this nest egg, this stock portfolio that I could withdraw from using the traditional 4% rule. I think I’m just a slightly risk-averse guy, even though I’m an entrepreneur. And so the 3-pronged approach—business, real estate, index fund portfolio—was what felt most comfortable for me.
Speaker 3: And then in practice, that circularity and that redundancy and that conservatism, I imagine, allows you to just invest it all aggressively. You can use leverage in the rental portfolio and then put it all in equities in the stock portfolio. Is that what you’re doing?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have a pretty even split, like you. I’m like 50/50 stocks and real estate. I know I mentioned the numbers earlier—it’s like 41/34 right now—but that moves throughout the year. And so, yeah, I’m constantly reinvesting in index funds. At this point, I’m not buying as many personal properties, if you will. I’m investing in syndications, but I’m still getting my real estate exposure that way.
Speaker 3: Awesome. I think that covers the discussion point there. And I think the big thing for me is there’s nothing wrong with all these different approaches to financial independence. But for someone to come in and say that your approach is not optimizing for happiness, or freedom, or autonomy is simply incorrect. It’s a viable approach among others. I think there’s a lot of reason to be very attracted to it from the get-go here. This is not an extreme sacrifice, I imagine, for those first couple of years, relative to the lifetime of optionality you’ll have on a go-forward basis. If you’re someone who’s in their 20-to-25-year-old range right now, maybe even older or at a different life stage, do you think it’s more or less—or different—from a repeatability standpoint now than it was when you started?
Speaker 4: There’s headwinds, there’s also tailwinds. I think now, though, it’s probably easier today. And I have real examples of people who hit FI faster than I did—at 25 today—just because of some of the tailwinds we have. It is easier than ever to spin up a business. Back when we started business, building a website was hard, graphic design stuff was hard. Now you have AI to help you, you have all these different resources to help you. You can literally start a business in a day now, whereas 15, 20 years ago it was way, way more difficult. Even when I started my disc golf company back when I was 19—so that was 11 years ago at this point—it was so much harder. I was learning HTML just to make an edit on my website. Now you can literally just type into Claude, “Build me a website that looks like this website,” and it spits it out in five minutes. It’s absolutely insane. So the people who are willing to learn the new technology and the new tools—man, I’m excited and scared to see how big people are going to scale. There’s already one-person companies doing like 8 or 9 figures, and they just have a team of agents working around them and all these SOPs and automations, and it’s wild, Scott. So I think for the doers, the people who are listening to podcasts like this, who are willing to try something new and fail, they’re going to hit FI faster than I, or you, or any of us talking right now could ever have in our generation, in our timeline.
Speaker 3: I completely agree. And I think the thing that you’re going to have to stomach right now is that this could be, for many people, much lower risk than the traditional employment route in knowledge work has been, despite it seeming crazy. Because, hey, do you really need this person to code your website anymore? Do you really need an accountant in the same way that you did? No, you probably need the AI to do 95% of the accounting and then a quick pass with a real accountant for your bookkeeping or whatever. You’re going to take risks either way with it. It’s always been a risk to code something, or keep your books, or whatever, because a human can make mistakes. This you can do much cheaper. And who knows what the accuracy level is going to be in some of these things? I’m pretty impressed, as an AI power user myself, with what it can do and how accurate it seems to be from the work I’ve put through it. So I think that’s right, and I think that should really give people pause about—hmm, “I’m not entrepreneurial”—I think you’re giving up a lot to just close that door in your brain to these options here.
Speaker 1: Scott and I talk about your unfair advantage all the time. It’s the thing that you have that puts you above where another person in the same position would be. For Cody, it’s his fearlessness and his mechanical engineering friend from 100 years ago. Cody, what is your unfair advantage in the Printables, the Gold City Ventures venture?
Speaker 4: I think it’s what you said before, my willingness to fail. Like, I will throw out 100 different ideas, whether that’s a new business or within the confines of digital products and Gold City Ventures. I mean, I’ve created like over 1,000 digital products. Hundreds of them have fallen flat on their face. They don’t sell at all. But a couple of them did really, really well. And so you just never know. So I’m just willing to take so many shots at goal that a couple of them are going to go in. That’s probably my superpower. And to bring it back to financial independence, I think the fact that I started so early, that was also huge for me. I had a lot of time. You’d mentioned this before, Mindy. I didn’t have responsibilities. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have a mortgage. I could just kind of try whatever. My expenses were super low. So I had so much entrepreneurial freedom and I had a lot of financial runway, which is something I learned from Set for Life, Scott. I think I just had the cards stacked in my favor to take these risks and to exploit my unfair advantages.
Speaker 3: I think that’s right. I want to show you a framework here from an entrepreneurial perspective that is really important, which is when executives at BiggerPockets would fail, it was because I’m going to spend $1 million and 6 months building this thing, and we’re going to find out how it goes when it comes out. And the executives who would win launched 40 things in the same period, and 2 of them worked really well. And almost all of them were very low cost, right? And that’s the framework here. If you’re going to go into entrepreneurship, that’s, I think, what you have to separate here. If you’re going to go into a business that is, I’m going to launch a rocket ship and compete with SpaceX, that’s a very high failure rate. But if you’re like, hey, I’m going to use AI to spin up a digital product, and I’m going to do 100 of them and iterate each time, that’s a completely different risk profile in the entrepreneurial world. And I would push people toward the second option all day unless you are a true genius solving one of the world’s hardest problems and you’re willing to take the very low probability of success for the enormous payoff. But I think that’s what I’m hearing from you is you’ve just pursued tons of things, and each failure cost you almost nothing but offered the chance to win. That’s where people are like, oh, entrepreneurship has high failure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But if you try 100 and each one costs you almost nothing, then all of a sudden the probabilities begin to shift in a pretty dramatic way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Scott, what’s your quote? If 9 out of 10 small businesses fail, start 10 businesses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think now it’s if 9 out of 10 businesses fail, you start 100 businesses. And then the odds of success become overwhelming if each one— you know, you don’t actually literally put an LLC together for all these, but you try 100 things. And then that’s when you know if something’s failed.
Speaker 2: And that’s core of work.
Speaker 3: One idea a day.
Speaker 1: Scott, do you remember when we met Cody Berman at CampFI in January of 2018? Because I do. I seem to recall there was a pull-up contest among anybody who wanted to do it. And do you remember who won?
Speaker 3: I certainly do.
Speaker 1: I certainly do.
Speaker 3: I like that guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Cody, do you remember who won?
Speaker 4: I remember I tied that other guy who owned a CrossFit gym, and I was so mad, because I wanted to win.
Speaker 1: No, I thought you won.
Speaker 4: No, I tied him. We both got like 23 or 24.
Speaker 1: Oh man, I thought you won.
Speaker 4: I like your memory though. I like that memory a lot better. But no, I mean, we tied. We tied for first. I didn’t lose. It just— it wasn’t a clean win.
Speaker 3: I assume that the new home, the dream home, is going to have a home gym.
Speaker 4: It is going to have a home gym. It’s going to have a home gym. It’s going to have a home office. It’s on a lake. It’s got all the things that we want. And that’s something I’ve gotten a lot better about. For those 3 years of the Financial Freedom Sprint, I was really bad at spending money, very bad scarcity mindset ingrained in me from very early on. But I’ve gotten a lot better at turning up what Ramit Sethi calls the money dials. And so, we were spending a good bit on this forever home, we spend a good bit on travel and experiences. Where we don’t spend a lot of money is the things that we don’t care about. I’m not driving a Lamborghini, even though I could afford to drive one. It’s just not something that interests me whatsoever. So we have gotten a lot better about loosening up the wallet a little bit on things that matter to us.
Speaker 3: The home gym is so huge because there’s just no excuse. Even on a bad day that you don’t work out, you can just get a couple of sets in, in between emails. And that makes such a difference in the compounding. So that’s great. Love it. And yeah, I would definitely encourage folks to think about that as part of their FI journey: how are you going to stay fit? Because if you’re privileged enough to go after financial independence, then staying fit is the number one thing to do to keep your healthcare costs low across a lifetime. It’s still luck of the draw. There’s still random chance that can blow that up. But that’s the number one controllable thing that you can do. And you just feel better, so you can enjoy the wealth you’ve created that much more, that much longer.
Speaker 1: So Cody, tell us all the things. Where can people find you online? Where can they find the book? Where can they find Gold City Ventures?
Speaker 4: All right, all the things. So my book, Retire by 30, right behind me. RetireBy30Book.com is where you can find that and some other fun freebies on there. Gold City Ventures, my digital products business, @goldcityventures everywhere and GoldCityVentures.com. Me, my personal brand on every social media platform is @codydberman. And then I also have a podcast, The Financial Independence Show, wherever you listen to podcasts. And I think those are the main ones.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I also want to call out— I think I had this Instagram post that was too cheeky a while back. I was like, if you want to retire by 65, save 10%.
Speaker 2: You want to retire by 55, save 25.
Speaker 3: You want to retire by 35, house hack a few times. And if you want to retire by 25, you’re about to get ripped off in a scam. I don’t— and you’ve responded to that. I don’t think I was calling you out. I think, you know, if you want to retire by 25, you’re going to have to do some kind of entrepreneurial thing while you spend $2,000 a month and then reassess your options at 30. And Cody is a great resource for that and not a scam.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Scott. Yeah, I was like, hey, come on, Scott.
Speaker 3: I don’t think Cody appreciated that. I didn’t think about that when I did that. I was just making a joke.
Speaker 2: But it’s all good.
Speaker 3: Your approach is a great way to fire people up on there. And if you miss, you probably learned plenty of things along the way and have more reps by 30 to approach your goals. So great stuff. And thank you for sharing this with us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you guys for having me. And I love the content that you guys put out because I feel like it’s so level-headed and even-keeled. Whereas a lot of other people, especially in the real estate world, are like, you know, it’s real estate or die. If you invest in index funds, waste of money, retirement accounts are a scam. I love the even-keeled, level-headed approach that you guys bring to everything you talk about. And there isn’t one way to FI. That was something I wanted to make abundantly clear in my book. I featured a bunch of people with case studies. There’s a million different ways. You can do corporate, you can do entrepreneurship, you can invest in real estate, you can invest in stocks, you can start a small business. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. So if you disagree with any part of my story today that I talked about, that’s fine. You can do it your own way. There’s a million different ways to do it.
Speaker 2: Use the code POCKETS at Monarch.com to get your first year half off at just $50. That’s 50% off your first year at Monarch.com with the code P-O-C-K-E-T-S.
Speaker 3: I feel like— I don’t know how to speak for Mindy, but I feel like an extremist against extremists. I really cannot stand purity people who have one way to do things and one tool for it and judge the other guy’s approach. I used to judge, so this is an evolution for me, for sure. But I think that’s where I’m at. And I think, put a pin in this story: the advantage to your approach is that it can win by 25 or 30 in the way that you just described. And most corporate careers can’t win to that level at that point in time. They can win— they have a higher probability of achieving a great outcome within the next decade from where you’re at right now. But that’s the challenge there. And I think that people should weigh that and say, yes, there are risks, there are real problems. This is not for everyone. There’s a selection bias from Cody here. It’s possible you appeared on our podcast in some other form, the version of you, and we just haven’t had that person back on yet because they haven’t talked about it, right? So you’re here because you’ve been doing this for 8 years. So that’s real, but also it can work. And so you have to weigh both of those things to fairly assess what’s right for you.
Speaker 4: Well, appreciate both you guys, and thank you for having me on again after these 8 long years.
Speaker 3: We’ll talk again in 8 more years when you buy the lake.
Speaker 4: Perfect. Mark it on my calendar.
Speaker 1: All right, Cody, thank you so much for your time today, and we’ll talk to you soon. All right, Scott, that was Cody Berman, and that was his absolutely fantastic story. I just love having him on the show, even though clearly I haven’t talked to him since 2018 on the show. He has such an energy and he has such a great story. He is just focused and he does the work. And I think that’s the underlying theme that you can take away from this episode: if you want to succeed, you have to do the thing.
Speaker 3: This is another level from the approach that I mapped out in Set for Life. He kept his expenses at $2,000, went straight into entrepreneurship, and hustled and hustled to earn that first year salary. I’m sure that it was also a slope where he was earning much less than he would have earned at a regular job in those first few months, and then just shot out of a cannon from there in the next 10 years. I think that should give people a lot of pause because I think entrepreneurship— this is what’s possible from an entrepreneurial outcome. And it’s not like he built a huge business and sold it, right? These are businesses he owns and operates. I didn’t hear an exit come in there or a capital raise or anything like that into this story. This is possible for someone who’s wired a certain way and is hustling. And I think it’s a valid approach. And again, like I said in the show, I think it changes the way that financial theory needs to be applied to a situation like this. Are you going to tell me that he is not maximizing his happiness because he has not converted his portfolio into a totally passive stock-bond portfolio, harvesting it at 4% to 5%? No, you’re completely full of it if you think that that approach would lead this particular human being to more happiness. And so you’ve really got to reset the way that you’re approaching that, right? That’s the right approach for many people. But to call it wrong here is just preposterously silly. And so I think that’s the thing that makes this fun for me, is talking about this. We don’t have enough entrepreneurs, I think, on the show, because this is happening around us to a large degree. And I think versions of this story are possible for many people who achieve FI early in life in some capacity if they choose to apply themselves to business at some point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, Scott. I think that more entrepreneurial endeavors need to be featured on the show because it’s not an easy path, but it is a very clear path to financial independence by being the boss of your own self and choosing the hours that you’re going to work. An entrepreneurial endeavor doesn’t have to be a full-time job. It can be a part-time job that generates enough income for you to max out your 401(k) or max out your Roth IRA, or both. You don’t have to work 90 hours a week in order to be able to do this. You just have to choose the right thing that fits with your skill set, that you are going to enjoy, that is going to generate income. And like you keep saying, Scott: if 9 out of 10 small businesses fail, start 10 small businesses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a quote I saw recently from somebody— I can’t remember who it was— but it was like, it’s amateurs who have one big, bright, beautiful idea that they can never abandon. And professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory or work after work to achieve success.
Speaker 1: I’ll take credit for that quote. That sounds like me.
Speaker 3: Well, should we get out of here, Mindy?
Speaker 1: All right, my dear listeners, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, but you are not done learning just because we have stopped talking. Hop on over to BiggerPocketsMoney.com. We have a ton of new things on our website. We have a blog, we have resources like calculators and spreadsheets to help you on your journey to financial independence. We have templates. Scott is furiously coding with our tech team to bring you new things all the time. And Scott, what’s the cost?
Speaker 3: Free. We have a money-back guarantee, but there’s currently no way to pull out your credit card and pay BiggerPockets Money at this time. So thank you for listening and supporting us. If you want to support us, you can support our sponsors. That’s the best way to support BiggerPockets Money.
Speaker 1: If you buy one of our free resources and you don’t like it, I will send you all that free money back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a great pricing page for this, actually.
Speaker 1: So yes, there are different tiers of free. Tier 1 is free, Tier 2 is free, Tier 3 is free. We just want to help you get to financial independence.
Speaker 3: The Master tier, our most expensive product, has the complete BiggerPockets Money experience. It includes everything in the Builder and Explorer tiers and includes our FIRE and real estate case study vault, the free-only financial advice.
Speaker 2: Just kidding.
Speaker 3: That’s for entertainment only. And then our actual emails, Scott@BiggerPocketsMoney.com, Mindy@BiggerPocketsMoney.com. And then I think you have an email for complaints, Mindy, that you post on the site, at IDontCare@TellSomebodyElse.com, that Mindy has put on there. And then yeah, access to those tools.
Speaker 1: So yes, however, if you do find a bug or something weird in one of the—
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, legitimate feedback and corrections, that’s— we want that. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, send that to Mindy@BiggerPocketsMoney.com or Scott@BiggerPocketsMoney.com.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but like complaints about my mustache, nah, that’s okay. There’s a poll for that on YouTube if you want to do it. And yes, most people want me to take it off.
Speaker 1: Hey, does your wife like it?
Speaker 3: She did not like it at first. She likes it now.
Speaker 1: Okay. If your wife likes it— what’s that phrase? Happy wife, happy life.
Speaker 3: That’s right.
Speaker 1: All right, Scott, we have kept our listeners for long enough. Thank you so much for listening to us. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying: do not let inflation fry your FI.
Speaker 3: When I was CEO of BiggerPockets, Upwork was the number one place that we went to hire freelancers to power our business.
