Tag: Starting A Small Business

How We Retired Early With $540K At 40 In Colorado

Jason 0 Comments March 24, 2024 Retire Wealthy Retirement Planning Tips for Retiree's

I started getting
diagnosed with some fairly serious medical
ailments. I just began to realize
that I had been working for a retirement that I
may never enjoy. We just knew we wanted
the freedom to make our own choices with our
time. And that's where
financial independence came in. Then it turned
into how fast can we do this? Let's get it done
as fast as we can. We started to accumulate
real estate in the vein of let's have an
additional source of income besides my job. We accumulated 19 units
over the span of just from 2016 to 2019. I'm Debbie and I'm Chris. We are 43 and live in
Colorado and retired by the age of 40. I never wanted to be a
millionaire. That was never a goal,
even, you know, now in my forties, I just wanted
to have enough money to be able to pay my bills. When I was 21, 22,
somewhere in there, I remember reading The
Millionaire Next Door. It was eye opening to me
because the stories they highlighted in that book
were very similar to what we do. Once it became in
that realm of reality that I could maybe be a
millionaire, then I did become fascinated with
the idea of being a millionaire in both
healthy and unhealthy ways.

Once Debbie left her
job, we're now completely dependent on my job. Honestly, like, I'm sure
there was more than this, but I tell the story
that basically I just stopped going to Subway. Obviously, that's not
the whole case, but that's all it really
felt like. Once we started tracking
our spending a little bit better with budgeting, I
was the guy that was always trying to turn
the knob down on our spending. Chris used to think it
was fun to like try to spend $100 a month on
groceries and just eat what came out of the
pantry.

So we both kind of had
this thought, what if you want to leave your job
someday? That thought easily
turned into how can we use our money to buy us
more time? I was mainly hearing a
lot of stories about rental real estate. Some people were were
building mega empires with rental real estate.
I wasn't looking to do that. I just wanted to
have additional income. And in the in the
process of going from we don't know anything
about being landlords and real estate owners to
let's buy our first property, I scoured the
Internet and spent a lot of time listening to
podcasts, watching YouTube videos, reading
blogs and forums.

And we got this like
eight and a half by eleven vision board type
of thing. So it was just something
that we could write on with chalk that we had
in our kitchen that would remind us of our goals. And, and as I was
writing those goals down, I believe we had like by
the end of 2016, we were going to have two
properties and by the end of 2017 we were going to
have four properties. We were getting
properties that other people didn't want. There was something that
was a bit of an ugly duckling about them. For me, a very difficult
part of this was a lot of elbow grease, fixing up
the ugly things, working on the houses, getting
smoke, smells out, painting everything,
tearing a bunch of flooring out. I'm
spending full days over there. Chris is getting
off work. He's spending nights and
weekends over at these rental properties to get
them ready for tenants and make them nice
places to live.

And as we were doing
that, I'm still saving 50 to 60% of our income
through my paycheck. All the extra money we
weren't spending out of your paycheck was going
toward buying more rental homes. All of the cash
flow we were getting from rentals was going toward
buying more rental homes. We accumulated 19 units
over the span of just from 2016 to 2019.

So it was a pretty
pretty fast and furious four years. We actually ended up
reaching fire at least three years earlier than
we had projected. So gross income from our
rental properties can vary based on vacancy,
capital expenditure, rehab, repairs, those
kinds of things. But it is between 8 to
10000 per month and our net income from our
rental properties is between 4 to 6000 a
month. So the money we live off
of comes purely from our real estate investments. We do have mortgages on
all of our rental properties that we
consider business debt. Our tenants pay those
mortgages for us essentially, and rents
continue to rise as they do so as the mortgage
goes down. Right now, our
investments look like we have about $350,000 in a
combination of traditional IRAs and
Roth IRAs and a brokerage account, $35,000 set
aside in a 529 account for our girls and
another $20,000 in bonds.

The insurance that she
sells for one month a year provides that extra
cushion of safety or comfort, as well as some
other discretionary spending. Our budget now
in FIRE, it looks very similar to what it was
pre FIRE in that none of our categories really
went any different direction except for
travel. We usually have about
$10,000 in our travel budget over the course
of any time, and it's more than we spend. Instead of having a job
where I would work 48 weeks a year and have
four weeks off, I would say now that I work
probably four weeks a year and have 48 weeks
off.

And we found in our lives
that meaning and purpose are important to our
emotional and physical health. And part of that
is around work. We are really enjoying
having this freedom of time to make
connections, to travel and explore. Our
daughters are getting older whether we like it
or not. They'll be graduating
and I'm excited to be a part of of their lives
as they move forward into their next chapters and
have the abundance of time to be able to be in
their lives as much as they will allow us or as
much as as feels comfortable.

I think when we were
searching for financial independence, what we
wanted was freedom and independence from having
to go to a place and do with things someone else
told us to do. And we still want that
and we value that. But I think what we
found through it is a much deeper, fuller,
richer life..

As found on YouTube

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