491: Why You DON’T Need a College Degree to Reach Financial Freedom

24:46That way you can come and hang out with us. We have meetings typically every other Sunday. And then if you get lucky, you'll get put in my goal getter group on our Thursday calls. Yeah, so that's how to get a hold of me, get a hold of Dan. Awesome. And if you need any of those links, they will be in our show notes, or you can always email me, Mindy, at biggerpockets.com, and I will connect you up. All right, Adrienne, this was so much fun. I really appreciate your time, and I cannot wait to hear from you in August when you have blown through the goal that we have set today. Mindy, Scott, it was an honor.

25:18I appreciate it, and y 'all have a great rest of y 'all's day. Thank y 'all. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. AutoTrader is powered by auto intelligence, the hyper personalized way to buy a car. AutoTrader's tools sync with your exact budget and preferences to tailor the online car shopping experience totally to you. Budgeting lets you input your info to see listings in your price range. Search and inventory helps zero in on your dream car. You can choose from new or pre-owned, the style of the car and features like engine size, color, all the way down to whether you want a trailer hitch. Go ahead and get picky.

25:51Don't worry about scrolling endlessly. Auto Trader, powered by auto intelligence, only shows you vehicles based on what you can afford and what you want. And pricing shows you which listings are the best deals, so you can feel like you're winning the negotiation without negotiating. You can even choose how to close the deal, online, at the dealership, or a little bit of both. Auto Trader, powered by auto intelligence, makes the process of buying a car less of a process. Try it today. Visit autotrader.com to buy your perfect ride. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously.

26:23On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt from renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20 % year over year. You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds you a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S &P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's.

27:03Go to public.com slash BPM and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash BPM. Paid for by public investing. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Incorporated. member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC registered advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. I love math, said no one ever. Nobody starts a business thinking, you know what would make this more fun?

27:35Calculating quarterly estimated taxes. But somehow every small business owner ends up doing it. Your dreams of creating, selling, and growing get replaced by late nights, chasing receipts, juggling invoices, and wondering if that bad sushi lunch with Scott counts as a write-off. Change all that with Found. Found is a business banking platform built to take the pain out of managing money. It automatically tracks expenses, organizes invoices, and even preps you for tax season without you doing the heavy lifting. You can set aside money for business goals, control spending with virtual cards, and find tax write-offs you didn't even know existed.

28:06It saves time, money, and probably a few years of life expectancy. Found has over 30 ,000 five-star reviews from owners who say, Found makes everything easier. Expenses, income, profits, taxes, invoices even. So reclaim your time and your sanity. Open a Found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D.com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by LeadBank, member FDIC. Don't put this one off. Join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with Found. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast?

28:41Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. That means you can stop struggling to get your job notice on other job sites. Indeed's Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out and hire the right people quickly. Your job post jumps straight to the top of the page where your ideal candidates are looking, and it works. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45 % more applications than non-sponsored posts. The best part? No monthly subscriptions or long-term contracts. You only pay for results. And speaking of results, in the minute I've been talking to you, 23 people just got hired through Indeed Worldwide.

29:12There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash BiggerPockets. Just go to Indeed.com slash BiggerPockets right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash BiggerPockets. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. When I think back on past holidays, the gift I remember most wasn't expensive at all. It was this lumberjack-looking plaid winter coat my grandmother gave me when I was little.

29:45It smelled like her house, mothballs. It was a little too big, and it made me feel safe in a way I didn't understand yet. I wore it everywhere. Until the fabric wore thin and the zipper gave out, I always wished it had lasted a little longer, because what I really miss is the feeling of how protected she made me feel. And that feeling is why I turned to policy genius. As I got older, I realized the gifts that truly matter are the ones that protect the people you love. And with nearly half of American adults saying they'd faced financial hardship within six months if they lost their primary income earner, real protection matters more than ever.

30:13Policy Genius makes something overwhelming feel clear. It's an online insurance marketplace that lets you compare quotes from top insurers side by side for free. And their licensed team helps with questions, paperwork and guidance every step of the way. With Policy Genius, real users have gotten 20-year$2 million policies for just$53 a month. Don't wait until next year. Give your family the gift of security today with PolicyGenius. Head to PolicyGenius.com. I am so excited for Adrian's success. I know that he is going to do huge things with his business. And the two things that really stand out about him is that he didn't have an idea and then hem and haw about it.

30:56He started it. He took action. He created this lawn care business and then his friend came up to him and said, hey, we can make a lot of money hanging Christmas lights. And he said, okay, let's do that. He took action again. And then on top of that, he paid for a course to jumpstart the side side business of hanging Christmas lights. I think that takes a lot of maturity and a lot of courage to fork over money to learn how to hang Christmas lights. That's maturity I don't have at, what is Adrian 22? I'm a little bit older than that. And I would not have paid to, how hard is hanging Christmas lights?

31:39Well, it turns out that there's a lot of things that you need to know. And he took a course and now he's way better at it. And that just jumpstarted his business and he's making huge numbers. And next year, I know he's going to blow our predictions out of the water. Yeah, it makes your mind turn about these like seasonal businesses. I mean, he makes so much money in such a short period of time. that is going to be so freeing and so powerful for him. I'd hope he doesn't sell the business in the next couple of years, because I mean, think about the optionality that that gives you. Come back to San Antonio for a two to three month period during the holidays, make a hundred grand, and then you could be traveling the world, do whatever you want.

32:15All right. Now let's talk to Javier. Now 26, Javier catapulted his career by making a strategic decision early on. At age 18, he ran a cost, benefit, and time analysis and decided he'd forego a bachelor's degree and opt in for a straight path to fire instead. Javier is now a successful real estate investor who has reached financial independence. Javier, welcome to the BiggerPocketsMoney podcast. I cannot wait to jump into your story. That's awesome. I cannot wait to talk to both of you guys. I'm honored to be here. Thanks for having me. We got to start this with this analysis that you did at 18.

32:54Walk us through what that was, what that looked like, and what was going through your mind at the time. Sure, yeah. So at 18, I had just gotten my first job as a janitor, actually, because my parents didn't save money for college for me. And the goal was for me to go play football, actually. And I got some half scholarships, but it was even with the half scholarship, it was going to end up being like$16 ,000. for tuition. And I decided to opt for a community college instead. Did a couple years of that just because it was going to be$3 ,000 instead of$16 ,000 a year. And then it was actually when I was 20 years old and I got my first internship at an engineering firm.

33:37And I was looking around and seeing all the other engineers that were, I was noticing, extremely grumpy and pretty overstressed and overly worked and severely underpaid, in my opinion. When I kind of, you know, looked at my path and saw that I had the opportunity to kind of make a decent amount with just my associate's degree at where I was, I had a job opportunity to go work for another engineering firm still as just an engineering assistant, nothing that required a bachelor's degree and making$42 ,000 a year. And the engineers in my firm that I was currently working at were making$45 ,000 a year.

34:20And within three years, they're going to be bumping them up to like$60 ,000 a year. So that's what I had to look forward to. I can go to school, get my mechanical engineering degree, continue on with that and pay another$20 ,000 in tuition cost for another two years. So 40K in tuition plus forgoing the opportunity cost of earning$42 ,000 for the next two years. So two years later, I might come out with my bachelor's degree and I'll be$124 ,000 in the hole compared to me without it. And I'd be, my reward for that would be a stressful job making$3 ,000 more. Maybe, maybe I'd get another$18 ,000 more.

35:01and after kind of putting in an excel spreadsheet and like looking at the difference of where that would put my net worth if I just kept my 70 % savings rate I found out that it would take 13 years for the bachelor version of myself to catch up to the net worth of myself without a bachelor's degree but the interesting part was that I could be financially independent within eight years without a bachelor's degree. So there was no point in, I guess, getting the bachelor's degree if I could do it sooner with less risk and less time and energy effort upfront by doing it without. What kind of engineering was this?

35:39Mechanical engineering. I was at a MEP firm. I was just an auto cadger after at the time, writing blueprints in the computer for smart people. So we interviewed Preston Cooper from FreeOp, who did an analysis on the ROI of a college degree. Yes. Fantastic data science. So it sounds like you've seen that one. That's absolutely. And I try to push people towards that resource as much as possible. I was actually looking through it in preparation for this interview. And for example, the college that I was looking at, I won't say the name, but out of the 48 degrees that they have on freeop.org for that ROI of college website, 24 of the college degrees had an ROI of under$100 ,000.

36:27And the part that was awesome about Preston's, or the part that's not explained in that interview is that it's not emphasized enough, is that that's over the course of a working career of 42 years. And so$100 ,000 over the course of 42 years is like, you're really not seeing that until like the last, the back end, the last 10 years maybe of that. Like it takes a while for you to dig out of your hole that you dug yourself into by getting all the debt to go to college in the first place. So but if like people that are pursuing the financially independence, you know, and trying to retire at an earlier age, it almost it doesn't make sense to do that.

37:09If you kind of find these strategies early on, just because all the sacrifice is front loaded and you don't get to see the benefits to the end. But you end up being retired by then anyway. Just a couple a couple of points here on that. Right. That analysis is fantastic. Great work from Preston Cooper and Freeop. Absolutely. the assumptions that are you going to work a full career, there's a 5 % cost of capital assumption in there. And if you've put the stock market 10 % assumption in there, that changes the ROI of many of those degrees in there. If you're a house hacker, a real estate investor, and you can get much more than 10 % on that, that further diminishes the value of those degrees.

37:45That's a key assumption in the model. He doesn't hide it, but it's one you can't change when you're looking at those ROIs in there to really nerd out about the modeling here, which it sounds like you started doing at a ripe young age of 20. But one of the things that surprised me about what you're saying here is, you know, overwhelmingly the engineering degrees, like one of the takeaways was a degree matters more than the school, right? And engineering is almost always a positive ROI career choice. And anthropology is almost always a negative ROI career choice, for example, right? And there are many other, many other degrees that I could use or pick on or talk about as high or low ROI.

38:23So no problem with any of those, but just the fact that you did it on a mechanical engineering degree at a state school for$16 ,000 a year and still came to this conclusion is pretty concerning for the ROI of college for a lot of people that are contemplating going there. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. And that's, it kind of blows my mind just the fact that there's so many people that are still like touting college as being like the most efficient way to become successful when there's so many other options. And, you know, I did part of college, but I mean, I still did it as cheaply as I could getting my associate's degree.

39:03And I think I used that, you know, efficiently. I learned how to do AutoCAD in my associate's degree and that got me my internship. And then eventually, like I skilled up from there and like branched out and got raises in other ways, primarily using FU money and all the tactics that I learned from the FIRE community. And I feel like the financial literacy portion has been more beneficial than most education that you can get from college. And that stuff is all self-taught or you learn from people that are willing to teach you. I love that. And to anybody listening who is like, hey, what Javier is saying makes some sense, but I'd like more information.

39:49We interviewed Preston Cooper back on episode 251 to talk about his enormous study over 30 ,000 different degrees, undergrad degrees, episode 251. He came back again on episode 293 to talk about master's degrees. There were fewer master's degrees. But again, the ROI conversation is the same. And Preston is an absolute master at taking this very complex information and distilling it down and being able to explain it really easily. So there's lots of links in the show notes. There's a link to the actual article and the documentation that he used. And it's fascinating. If you're on the fence about college, those are two great episodes to listen to.

40:38So, Javier, since you didn't go to college or you only went for two years and you need a four-year degree in America to be successful, how on earth did you become FI in just not even 10 years after graduating high school? Me and my wife got to cash flow FI, is what I like to call it, by house hacking, moving into a camper, and saving and investing 70 % of our income. What'd you do to earn that income in the meantime? And then I'd love to go through those three choices. Sure. Mainly, so other than doing that engineering internship, skilled up and went to another internship for a while. But the awesome part around there is like following the financial independence community, you pick up on skills and just the concepts of having FU money.

41:29And there was a point where I was able to do kind of like an office space moment where I told my boss that, hey, we didn't have a lot of work at the time. And the other engineers were like kind of stressing out. So I told him, hey, the engineers can have my hours. I'll take a step back. Maybe later on, you can hire me on full time or as a permanent employee because I was temporary at the time. And like, they'll be happy. I'll get some time to go spend with my family and stuff. And a couple of days later, he came back and like gave me a promotion and like a 12K raise. Like, I don't know if he thought that I was leaving or if he just liked the initiative.

42:03Whatever it was, I was like, whoa, this is more than I expected to make for the rest of my life. I was content with 42K for forever. The math still worked, but I'll take the raise. That happened for a while. And then eventually later on in my career, during COVID, I was laid off. And thanks to FU Money again and also paying attention to FIRE podcasts, I came across the Salesforce careers that were like talked about a lot on. I heard it first on the Chooseify podcast, and I took like a three-month course, took a$100 certification exam, and got the skills needed to go and eventually acquire a job paying$100K salary.

42:55For people who are not quite familiar with Salesforce, what is that? Because this is a comment that I have heard from multiple people. Yeah, I took a three-month course and now I make$100 ,000 a year. That just seems like, honestly, that seems like a scam. And I know it's not, but it sounds like a scam. What is Salesforce? Yeah, honestly, I would have agreed with you. And if the podcast that I was listening to had not built my trust over the course of four years, I would have absolutely thought the same thing. But I felt like there was enough people saying it, enough people were talking about it that I was like, well, what the heck?

43:32I have seven years worth of financial runway, and I'm laid off right now. I can take this time to kind of take a step back and figure out what would be best for me. I kind of had a couple options. And I know this isn't what you asked, but was able to kind of choose the thing that worked most and had all these perks of being able to do remote work. And to answer your question, what Salesforce, I guess, is, it's basically a software that businesses use to optimize their business processes, whether it's selling to people or getting customer data into places or, you know, just making sure that all their backend processes are working correctly and the customers have nice websites to view.

44:25and essentially what happens is Salesforce is a software that is sold to companies and these companies now have the Salesforce software but they have no use no no way they don't know how to implement it into their into their business model so they hire people that have Salesforce certifications that know what they're doing in order to implement it for them and they hire them as typically W-2 workers, and they become their Salesforce administrators. Or you can do a bunch of other stuff. You can hire contractors, and the contractors handle the stuff for you. Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not calling Salesforce a scam.

45:09It is a legit company. It's just, it sounds like such a scam until somebody explains it. And even when somebody explains it, you're like, yeah, but three months in, and I can make$100 ,000. I know so many people who work for Salesforce and do this exact same thing. And they're all making six figures. Remind me how much the Salesforce program costs. So Salesforce actually gives away all their training for free. You just go onto their site and trailhead.com and they just, they want everyone to know how to do this stuff. They want people to go out and learn how to use their platform. And then it's not that Salesforce is hiring me directly.

45:46It's other companies that are using Salesforce, the software, and they hire me because they want someone that knows how to use the software. So to me, Salesforce does not sound like a scam, right? We use a different CRM here to run business processes called HubSpot, which is very similar competitor to Salesforce. Salesforce is also very reputable. Lots of different, you know. But this makes perfect sense. There's a free training you can get. And within a year or two of taking that free training, you can get a six-figure income. And you did that instead of going to college and getting a mechanical engineering degree and are thriving now in this role right now and financially independent.

46:24That's pretty awesome. But a big part of this story that I feel like we just missed is you said, I have seven years of financial runway and what the heck, I'm laid off, I'll take a shot on this thing. That's a powerful position to be in that a lot of people don't have and they can't take a chance on this thing that might be a scam, even though, again, it's a very reputable company, but maybe somebody else might be thinking, hey, that's gonna be a waste of time. How did you get to seven years of financial runway to be able to have the luxury of making this choice that has paid off so well? Yeah, that's fair enough.

46:58So during that first internship, I had started – I'd picked up – Set for Life actually was the first financial independence book that I ever – I did not know that. Yeah, yeah. That's great. Thank you for the plug. Sure thing. You're actually, you know, I've been, I feel like I've been doing a good job holding in the fan boy, but you're kind of my role model, Scott. And yeah, so I've been really, you know, happy to be here and meet with you and talk with you because I try to model a lot. Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. Try to model a lot of the stuff that I'm doing based off of like how you've done things in the past.

47:36I really appreciated the book and how actionable the steps inside of it were. It felt like it fit perfectly in my life, starting from scratch, zero net worth. How do you get to become financially independent in a reasonable amount of time? You save aggressively, you increase your income as much as you can, and you invest it wisely. House hack if you can, because that's going to be the biggest ROI you can get. and basically just implementing those things. I never really got a fancy car until recently, but originally it was just like getting kind of junker cars, $1 ,000,$2 ,000, using them for two years.

48:18And then once they broke on me, I could still sell them for the same$1 ,000 to$2 ,000 that I bought them for because there's so much utility that a car has and it won't go below a certain value. But just doing all the little stuff that the fire community talks about. And they just kind of stack up over time. Fantastic. Well, tell us about your house hack. How did you get into this property? Or your first one, maybe. But let's go through them. How did you get your house hack? Okay, sure. So the first ever deal was actually my wife's house. So we weren't together. We were just getting together. and she had this new construction three bed two and a half bath house that was getting built.

49:07I was currently looking for my house hack like I was looking for a multifamily but it wasn't happening and eventually she wanted to kind of we or we both wanted to move in with each other so we kind of struck this deal to where the house was still hers. I would move in we'd live in the same bedroom and I would pay for all of our groceries. But I would also manage any house hacking stuff that we would do because she was interested in doing it also. I mean, I kind of told her about some of the pros of not having to pay for, you know, your housing. And she was like, okay, I'm for that. Like, okay, are you okay with renting out some bedrooms?

49:48She said, yeah, yeah, I'm okay with that. I had roommates in college. So I said, okay, neat. I would be like the property manager and I'll get to learn along the way. You'll get all the profits, obviously, because it's your house. And we did that. Her mortgage was$1 ,150. We rented out the bedrooms,$750 each, I guess, furnished. And that includes utilities and everything. Our utilities were about$300 a month. So it worked out to be like, we're getting$1 ,500 of rent and the mortgage and utilities was$1 ,450. She had like an extra$50 to go shopping every month if she wanted to. It was a good thing.

50:32And eventually we kind of decided to try out Airbnb just because we heard like that could maybe make some more money. And we might not be perfect at it at first, but we decided we wanted to at least learn. And that was, we learned a lot and it let us perfect our craft for future house hacks and other investments. So three huge barriers to getting ahead financially, right? The negatively cash flowing assets that most Gen Zers and millennials acquire, right? Are the finance degree, the financed car and the expensive house, right? And you've now avoided all three at this point in the story. And you've accumulated a bonus asset, which is the cash flow positive spouse.

51:17Oh, yeah. In the process there. So that's pretty fantastic. That's a pretty powerful set of advantages on the journey to financial dependence. So what happens next after this house hack is rented out with that tongue in cheek? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, my spouse is definitely my number one asset for sure. Um, she's, she's too embarrassed to come on like a podcast like this, but man, she's, she's great. And, uh, yeah, like you said, it's, there's nothing like having someone that's willing to like go in the deep end with you and, you know, go along with all your crazy adventures and someone that's actually just as passionate about it.

51:55So it's, um, it's awesome having that. And we're both rowing in the same direction and I'm super appreciative of that. My wife is in the air force. So we were originally living in San Antonio, Texas, and she was going to get orders to move to another duty station eventually. That's where the Salesforce career kicked in, and I was looking for something that would be remote. That filled that void, and now I can go work anywhere and move along with her. We ended up moving to a little town called Crestview, Florida. It's right near Destin, Pensacola area, the Panhandle of Florida. a pretty popular little tourist destination.

52:31But we moved like 30 minutes more inland. So it's kind of away from a lot of the tourist stuff in an area that was more affordable. And we found the only duplex in the entire like tri-metro area out of like 1 ,500 listings. We could only find one house that wasn't even labeled as a duplex. It was a single family, and I had to look through all the pictures to notice that there was a mother-in-law suite. So we closed on that deal. Thank goodness, because it almost backed out a couple times, and our hopes were so high for that thing, because it was the only thing we could find that we could house hack.

53:14But eventually, we rented out the mother-in-law suite on Airbnb. That was a 2-1. and that one was bringing in anywhere from it was probably averaging about three thousand dollars a month on airbnb and the mortgage for this place is 1960 so that was and we were now we upgraded from living in a a master bedroom in a house to living in a three bedroom one bath like main house that we had all to ourselves and there was just a mother-in-law suite along this next door that we were renting out had a full driveway we never saw them so we had all this privacy in a huge house and we were living for free plus some cash flow while we were doing that we were renovating this house the main house that we were living in we were adding another bedroom and a bathroom and eventually we're like slowly acquiring furniture to do an airbnb for this house as well.

54:18And eventually we moved into the backyard of this house in a camper because we always wanted to do the tiny house thing. And yeah, that made the house hack numbers a lot prettier, brought in an extra$4 ,000 a month of income. So now we're living in a camper that most people think is kind of weird, but we're pretty excited about it, at least at this stage in our life, when there's just two of us, it's pretty fun. And we get to take it. Are you in it now? No, no, no. This is a big house. This is the Airbnb. I was going to say, that is a roomy camper. That is not a tiny camper. Okay, so you are bringing in$7 ,000 a month.

54:58And I get it. Destin is going to be super seasonal, right, for this. So, yeah, that's your average. You have$1 ,900 payment. So, you're making almost as much as you are from your six-figure sales force implementation job from this property. and you wanted to live in that camper, if you didn't want to and you wanted to move back in the main house, you'd still be positively cash flowing your house hack in a pretty nice house for a young married couple. Presumably you don't have kids yet. Correct, yeah. So there's no, yeah. So I mean, this is fantastic. Is it just the two houses that you own right now?

55:35So we just recently, like, this is pretty new. And like within the past two months, we listed our, I guess we, okay, four months ago, we purchased a, another duplex in the nicest part of town. She was on deployment and the goal was to just start paying off debt and like small things here and there. But we, this deal kind of fell in our lap and we did an owner finance for another duplex and basically right on the lake of this beautiful park in like downtown Crestview and decided to Airbnb that place as well. So now that is two additional listings. And then we actually have, so it's a two bedroom, one bath on each side, but we also have it listed as a four bedroom, two bath.

56:30So you can rent both of the size of the duplex together. So it's kind of like three extra listings that we added to the portfolio. And that's really kind of what gave us the extra little push to get to our cash flow FI number. Awesome. So what are the numbers in that one, if you wouldn't mind? How much are we doing there? And what's the seller finance payment? I believe, so it's only been live for two months now. The first full month that we had, this is probably our slow season right now. And it made about$7 ,500 for the month, which is pretty good. And I'd be okay with saying that that's the average for the year, just because we don't really have the data for the rest of the months.

57:15So$7 ,500 in gross revenue and at least the mortgage part is about$2 ,200, maybe$23 once you include insurance. but there's also expenses that are yeah your jaw is kind of dropped many but uh yeah there's also expenses include like along that come along with airbnbs we we pay cleaners so that we're not having to do it ourselves we have to pay utilities and restocking uh supplies and stuff like that and one-off uh repairs here and there but overall it's very worth it how much cash did you put into this deal? That one, we did the down payment. We put a down payment of 50K. And then it was about$25 ,000 in furnishings.

58:08And that was, that's it, 75K. And then the seller financed how much? 325. Awesome. So, and that, I mean, this is just fantastic. So you have two home run properties nearby each other in Crestview near Destin. I had Destin in my head for a sec for a minute there. And you're generating easily$10 ,000 in cashflow, 8 ,000 easily, 10 ,000 probably from these properties on an average basis per month. Yeah. I mean, so I have the numbers on me, or at least I have them memorized, at least for the entirety of our real estate business, where it's about$16 ,500 in gross revenue from both properties on the Airbnb side and the property back in Texas that's a long-term rental now.

59:02The expenses for all of those properties comes out to about$11 ,500. That That leaves us with about$5 ,000 left over of cash flow a month. But that's after all expenses, after tax and everything. And that's being, I think, pretty conservative because we're taking into account our low season numbers instead of our high season because we just don't have the data for that. If you're going to run numbers, you want to run them at the low season because if you're saying, oh, I'm going to make$5 ,000 this month and then you make 10, you're like, oh, that was a bonus. But if you think you're making 10, you're like, wow, I only made five.

59:38I wonder what happened. Like it's the reverse doesn't work. So I love that you're running your numbers conservatively. I love that you're making so much money in real estate. I thought you couldn't make money in real estate right now. Yeah, I think house hacks kind of break that rule a little bit. And then the, you know, sometimes you just get lucky or you put yourself in a position to get lucky and we had enough resources and there is a person willing to sell at a good price with a good owner financing in the perfect location in a small town that most people don't consider doing Airbnb in. And we were just able to get a good deal.

1:00:14Yeah. So I hate to correct when my guests say something that is completely inaccurate, but you just said something completely inaccurate. You said, we got lucky. No, you didn't. You prepared. You prepared. You saved your money. You were investing 70 % or saving 70 % of your income. and you were prepared to take action when something popped up that met all your criteria. You didn't get lucky. You were prepared and luck happened or the perfect thing happened and you were ready to take action. So sorry, I have to correct you. You got lucky, but only the people with cash and time and the skillset and the experience set that Javier has built up are in position to get lucky.

1:01:00Yes, it's not luck. It is preparedness. And you took advantage of something that you were able to take advantage of because you were prepared. You're saving for the future. And now the future is here and you took advantage of it. So there you go. But yes, I agree with all the rest of it. You're awesome. Well, thank you. Yeah, I guess that's that's what financial independence is about, right? It's just about, you know, creating opportunities and building options and flexibility into your life. And that comes way before you have, you know, your magic fine number. I was, you know, every year or so came across like an opportunity of whether whether it was like increasing my income or finding a good deal.

1:01:42And that came along just because, you know, I was on the journey at all. It didn't have to be at the end of my journey when I already had the, you know, the numbers to say that I'm financially independent. You're a member of Sheik's Freaks. Can you walk us through how you joined that community and if that's been helpful to you? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think I found it on one of your podcasts where you brought Jabbar on your podcast. And I was like, holy cow, there's another young person doing this stuff. And he was way younger than I was. I mean, he's a he's a rock star. But yeah, I heard heard his show on your podcast and decided to check it out.

1:02:17And at least I think I messaged Dan and, you know, he told me to come check out one of their one of their Zoom meetings. And I was hooked like as soon as I saw like all the youthful faces that I was not used to seeing and like the five space. I was like, man, this is awesome. I'm like the old person here. I was used to being like the weird young one whenever I'd show up to all like the choose a five local groups or camp fives and stuff. And so it was neat meeting other people that were super fired up about it. And the fact that I could help them out in some ways was awesome. But just the fact that you find some community and like it helps you normalize the goals that you have.

1:02:58And that's the best part about it, honestly. Do you have a piece of advice for other young people who want to repeat your rapid attainment of financial independence here? Yeah. OK, so I would say never stop learning and prioritize financial literacy while you're young, because that's going to give you a lot more options and flexibility than just the standard advice of someone saying go to college. do the math on big financial decisions rather than just taking standard advice and find a community that normalizes your goals like i just finished saying so um yeah in any way that's possible sheiks freaks was awesome i'm glad i'm glad i found it when i did at 25 but i wish i would have found it at 14 so if if any of the listeners or have people that are young adults or or they are young adults themselves i encourage them to go check it out and we'd love to have more people and uh you know get to share and encourage and um you know get to fight together so we have some friends to hang out with when when we're all young and looking for things to do but it's not just like chic's freaks also there's a ton of other places uh i i've did uh five local group meetups camp fives um economy is another place the economy conference um but even just listening to podcasts blogs and reading books like that was basically my community for the longest time like i wasn't comfortable going and like seeing other people in person i was just like well i'm just gonna do this stuff and listen in my in my ears um to you guys and and everybody else and the fire space.

1:04:49And that was honestly enough to like make it to where I surrounded my myself with people that were giving me good encouragement and like good advice. And yeah, it made me feel like everything was normal because I knew other people were doing it. And now to a point where when I hear other people not doing this kind of stuff, it seems like they're the weird ones and not me. I completely agree with that statement. It feels I live in Longmont. It's kind of a hub for financial independence. And it feels very weird when I meet other people who aren't doing this too. And I have to temper my comments and my facial expressions because you saw me today recording the show.

1:05:31I'm like, ah, oh my goodness. And in real life, people say that. I'm like, really? What are you talking about? So yeah, it's sometimes difficult for me. But finding community is so important. People who speak your language, people who understand what you're trying to do, then you're not constantly trying to explain it or trying to defend your choices. People just automatically get it. And that just helps. It encourages you. You're surrounding yourself with people who are doing the same things that you're doing. And everybody lifts you up. It's fantastic when you find people that speak your language.

1:06:09So I'm so glad that you found the Sheik's Freaks. That Jabbar Adesada episode really paid off in massive dividends. Shout out to Jabbar. He was a great guest on the episode. We just had him on a couple of weeks ago as well. Javier, this was so much fun. I really appreciate you sharing your story with us. Is there any place that people can find you to talk more? Yeah. If y 'all show up in any of the Sheik's Freaks conversations, I'll be there. and then on top of that you guys can find me on instagram um at five by 30 i try to put a little bit of financial content it's nothing big i tried the short form stuff and it's just it's not my jam but you know sometimes i just have something to say and i'll i'll put it out there and little blurbs here and there and i even have some videos of me working on some of my airbnbs so love it i think you're very conservative and your projections yet again with your instagram handle yeah fair enough one last question um that i would ask you here is you you talked about other people and all that kind of stuff and not you know the community aspect when you look around at the peers maybe you graduated high school with you know how how like like is it just a completely different landscape um out there is any are you seeing more people starting to go down this path to some degree.

1:07:32I think that it's hard for me to see that. You know what? I will say that there is some progress being made. I know that Florida in general, they just passed a law last year to make personal finance required to be taught as at least a half credit to high schoolers before they graduate. And I was super pumped about that. And I don't know what the curriculum is that they're teaching, but something's better than nothing. And like one of the things I remember on Rich Dad, Poor Dad that hopefully is no longer going to be true if more states pass laws like this is that like rich people stay rich and poor people stay poor because money is something that's taught at home.

1:08:15It's not taught in schools. And you tend to learn that stuff from your parents. And, you know, so if more of this stuff can be taught at the at the perfect age of like 18 before you make any of those big financial decisions or mistakes, like that's where it's going to create the most impact and give people some more options and choices that they can think for themselves rather than just listening to advice that's been passed around for like the past 10 decades. Something went really right with the way you thought about it coming out of high school and going into that second year of community college because you modeled it out.

1:08:52There's plenty of right answers for going to college. There's plenty of right answers for not going to college. but you did the work and modeled it out and made the decision based on that. And that's what counts. And I think that's, that's the starting point. I mean, you change that one decision, you just don't think, and you go there, maybe, you know, you're probably still successful. You're still, you're probably still your Instagram handle five by 30, but you're not five by 30 by 26. I bet you without making that decision very thoughtfully. So maybe the stakes weren't that high for you in particular, but yeah, love it.

1:09:21Awesome. Well, Javier, thank you so much for your time today. And we will talk to you soon. Thanks, Mindy. Thanks, Scott. It's been a pleasure. All right, Scott, that was two very impressive young men. Let's talk about Javier. Holy cow, to be able to, at age 18, run a cost, benefit, and time analysis on college. When I was 18, my plans were to go to college because that's what you do. I never considered that you don't go to college after you graduate high school. For Javier to make these decisions at age 18 shows a maturity that, again, I lacked, and I'm so impressed by him. We don't usually do this, but I think we have to allude to it in this one.

1:10:08We hung out with Javier for about 20 minutes after the recording, just chit-chatting. And a couple of things here, Javier didn't have a privileged upbringing, I would say. He was a janitor at 18, paying his way through a community college here. And I asked him, I said, is it hard or easy to build wealth for you? And he said, I think you're predicting this. It's easy, right? I mean, it's easy for him because he made a decision that was calculated around his college education that he ran the numbers on. He cut his housing expense to zero. He never incurred a large transportation expense. No student loans, no college education expenses, no housing payment, no car expense.

1:10:53Think how easy it is to build wealth, even without the six figure job that he went and got after training course, after several years of accumulating large amounts of cash, a penny by, you know, a bit by bit, month by month for that. And now he's putting down these big chunks of money. It's easy. And that's really, you know, that it's hard to, hard to, you know, say that, say it like that, because I know so many people are struggling to get by financially with it, but you make those decisions right early on. The game is easy. It's almost unfair. And he's going to, you know, unfair, you know, positive way for Javier, but I mean, he's going to be a millionaire easily by 30.

1:11:29He just works a job anybody could get after a training, a training module and has made a number of decisions there. And I did it because he did it before he had obligations and liability, you know, liabilities that he'd built up in his life. But man, that's, that's a powerful lesson for someone listening to the show. That's 18 or thinking about these choices. The answer is not don't go to college. It's make a decision about it. Make a decision about that housing. And I think it's something really powerful. Yeah. And it isn't, like you said, it isn't just don't go to college. It's choose to go to college on purpose, not just go to college because everybody says go to college after high school.

1:12:08If college isn't your path, then college isn't your path. And college didn't do much for me personally. If I would have thought about it when I was 18, that maybe I would have made a different decision. Maybe I would have jumped into the workforce right out of high school and had a different outcome. But instead, I spent six years in college getting three degrees that I don't use at all. And do I regret it? I don't know that I regret it. I made a lot of friends. I had a good experience, but financially it was a terrible decision. So don't just do something because it's expected of you. Do it because you want to do it.

1:12:50And I think that is the underlying message here. College is not for everybody. Or do it because it's a good decision, because a lot of people want a different type of college experience than one that provides higher ROI. All right. Let's give a quick shout out to the Sheik's Freaks group. You can find them at sheiksfreaks.com. That's S-H-E-E-K-S-F-R-E-A-K-S.com. Dan Sheiks is an amazing man. All right, Scott, should we get out of here? Let's do it. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. He, of course, is the Scott Trench. And I am Minnie Jensen saying, toodles noodles. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple.

1:13:32And if you're looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash BiggerPocketsMoney. BiggerPocketsMoney was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench, produced by Kaylin Bennett, editing by Exodus Media, copywriting by Nate Weintraub. Lastly, a big thank you to the BiggerPockets team for making this show possible.