This ALL OUT Entrepreneurial Approach to FI Got him to $5M by 30

17:50Cody Berman:And I'm just pouring all that money into tried and true assets like real estate and like the stock market. I have a very, very small percentage of my portfolio and things like individual stocks. I have like a little bit of crypto exposure, but it was just like 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, like 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.

18:21Mindy Jensen:So this is all your income, Cody Berman's income. This isn't the 700 is actually split between partners.

18:28Cody Berman:That's all me.

18:29Mindy Jensen:Okay. What are your taxes like?

18:33Cody Berman:A lot. 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, 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 if 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. And this wealth, do you put a value on your businesses or is this excluding any of the value in your businesses?

19:04Cody Berman:I put a very small, very conservative value on my main business, Gold City Ventures, which is like 1x EBITDA for the year. Like 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, you know, I could sell, you know, my podcast for 10x earnings this year. No, it's mostly like I have my net worth breakdown, actually, if you guys are interested. I pulled all the numbers for this interview. That'd be great. So 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.

19:41Cody Berman: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 like just over 100K. Awesome. I'll call us out. Like I'm eerie here with some of these. I have a very similar makeup for my position, right? My financial portfolio, 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.

20:16I mean, not because I don't think they're valuable. It's just because I just totally exclude them when I think about my wealth. I don't even put a one times or half times EBITDA or anything on there in those assets. Then I have my house, right? And so that's the position. This is another point in favor of a lot of people, I think, who are, you know, at these outlier ends on the wealth spectrum early in life, you know, 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.

20:48I think, at least in the fire community, I find that very rare to find the person who is overvaluing these illiquid components of their portfolio.

20:55Cody Berman:Is that what you see in your experience? 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. That's right. I separate it. I have my net worth, and I have my financial independence portfolio, my FIRE portfolio, and that includes my real estate and stocks. And I separate my house. It's included my net worth, but it's not included in my FIRE portfolio.

21:24I just imagine you're going to do something similar when you build your forever home here.

21:26Mindy Jensen:So you have said that you have three current income streams, the Gold City Ventures, the real estate and your personal brand. Is that correct?

21:36Cody Berman:Yeah, that's pretty much how I summarize it.

21:38Mindy Jensen:OK, do you consider yourself retired?

21:40Cody Berman:No.

21:41Mindy Jensen:Did you write a book called Retire by 30?

21:44Cody Berman:Yes. I was just about to say people could see this big side 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 four hour work week, like his intention is not to get everyone down to a four hour work week. Like if you go from 40 to 30, huge win, absolutely massive win. So like 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, like retire just had a stronger kind of punch than financially free or fire by 30.

22:20Cody Berman:That's like 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. Like they're doing something else. Maybe they pick up a hobby. Maybe they start golfing all the time. Like they're doing something else with their time.

22:50Cody Berman:So that's how I like to define retirement is at the point where you can do whatever the heck you want with your time.

22:55Mindy Jensen:Yeah, I like that. So how much of your time is spent on each one of these three income streams?

23:03Cody Berman:It depends heavily on the season that I'm in. So I love to work in seasons. Like I'm the type of person where I, even though I've hit FI, I enjoy working and I butt heads with people in the FI 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, if just because someone's fit is should they stop working out? Like it doesn't make any sense to me. Like, yes, I've hit five by the numbers. Does that mean I can't work in my businesses that I enjoy at all 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.

23:37Cody Berman: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 much I'm invested, like how much I'm into a project. And so I can't give you just like a, oh, this is exactly how many hours I work every week or every month.

24:07Cody Berman:It totally depends. 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 years, we've really stopped emphasizing the retire portion of that. And we've basically, you know, there's still probably a few places we'll use it, you know, carelessly or in there, but we've really started using it as a, as a core term, because I think that word is so polarizing on it. And so aside from the old editor thing, like, 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?

24:41Cody Berman: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. Like 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. 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 kind of exhausting to go back and forth about the word with strangers on the internet, you know, about whether that word applies in this situation or not.

25:16So that was more of the philosophical debate there.

25:18Mindy Jensen:Yeah. I don't have any issue with the word retire. I have an issue with people focused on the RE 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?

25:42Cody Berman:Sometimes, but I've really tried to eliminate or delegate the things that I don't want to do. Going back to the four-hour work week, 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've tried to, I really try to fill up my day with the things that light me up and to reduce as much as possible the things that I'm not so excited about.

26:07Mindy Jensen:Yeah, same. I want to go to a portfolio question here next. And again, let's break this dichotomy apart, right? 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, you know, 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.

26:40And there's a formula for that. Within that world, I think that 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 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.

27:17Because unlike an employee who's approaching this 4 % number, let's say a whole$2.5 million target, they get there, there's a transition phase, and they stop, begin withdrawing and deaccumulating. 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.

27:53Because 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. You've mathematically optimized for over the next 60 years. There's something else that you're going to be doing with your money.

28:15Cody Berman:So I think I'm going to introduce a framework to answer this question, but then I'll get down to my portfolio split. But so one of the first things I did in my book, because I think this is what's different from kind of what I talk about, what I preach versus traditional FIRE, which is the 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 it's going to last you for the rest of your life. So I like to bucket financial independence into two main strategies. There is the nest egg approach, which is the one I just talked about, 4 % rule, and the cash flow FIRE approach.

28:46Cody Berman:And since you guys have probably 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 who likes to have a more conservative approach. But like you could have, in theory, like$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.

29:21Cody Berman:That is cashflow FI. The other way, and this was the way that I was first introduced to FI, was like the nest egg method. And 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? So I was like really attracted to this notion, this idea of cashflow FI. So to get back to your question, Scott, about like portfolio breakdown, for me, I like having both. I kind of have like a three-pronged approach to me hitting FI. I had like a small business that was bringing in passive income.

29:51Cody Berman:I had my real estate portfolio that was bringing in passive income. So those are both the cashflow 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 three-pronged approach, the business real estate index fund portfolio was what felt most comfortable for me. And then in practice, that circularity and that redundancy and that conservatism, I imagine, allows you to just invest it all aggressively. Like you can use leverage in the rental portfolio and then put it all in equities in the stock portfolio.

30:25Is that what you're doing?

30:26Cody Berman:Yeah, I have a pretty even split like you. I'm like 50-50 stocks in 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. Awesome. I think that that covers the discussion point there. And I think that the big thing for me is there's nothing wrong with all these different approaches for financial independence. But for someone to come in and say that your approach is not optimizing for happiness or freedom or autonomy is just simply incorrect.

31:02It's just, 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. I mean, 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 here. If you're in, you know, you're someone who's in their 20 to 25-year-old range right now, or maybe even older or a different life stage. But do you think it's more or less or different from a repeatability standpoint now than it was when you started?

31:31Cody Berman: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 five faster than I did at 25 today, just because of some of the tailwinds that we have. Like it is easier than ever to spin up a business. Back when we started business, like building a website was hard. graphic design stuff was hard. Like now you have AI to help you. You have all these different resources to help you. Like you can literally start a business in a day now, which where 15, 20 years ago, it was way, way more difficult. Like even when I started my disc golf company back when I was 19.

32:07Cody Berman:So that was 11 years ago at this point, it was so much harder. Like I was learning HTML to like make an edit on my website. Now you can literally just type into Claude, like build me a website that looks like this website and it spits it out in five minutes. It's, it's, it's absolutely insane. So the people who are willing to learn the new technology and the new tools, like, man, I am like, I'm excited and scared to see like how big people are going to scale. I mean, there's already one person companies doing like eight or nine figures and they just have like a team of agents working around them and all these SOPs and automations.

32:38Cody Berman:And it's, it's wild, Scott. So like, 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 five faster than I or you or any of us talking right now could ever have in our generation, in our timeline. I completely agree. And I think that the thing that you're going to have to stomach right now is I think that that could be for many people much lower risk than the traditional employment route in knowledge work has been, despite it seeming crazy. Because I think that like, hey, do you really need this person to code your website anymore?

33:14Do 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. 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 that I put through it. So I think that's right.

33:47And 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.

33:58Mindy Jensen:Scott and I talk about your unfair advantage all the time. It's the thing that you have that puts you above what another person in the same position would have. 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?

34:22Cody Berman:I think it's what you said before, my willingness to fail. Like I will throw out a hundred different ideas, whether that's a new business or within the confines of digital products in Gold City Ventures. I mean, I've created like over a thousand digital products. Hundreds of them have fallen flat on their face. They don't sell at all, but like 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 like 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.

34:55Cody Berman:Like 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 like 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. I think that's right. I think I want to do a framework here from an entrepreneur perspective that is really important, which is when executives at BiggerPockets would fail.

35:24It was because I'm going to spend a million dollars and six 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 two of them worked really well. and it was almost all of them were very low cost, right? And that's the framework here. If you're going to go into entrepreneur, like 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 a hundred of them and iterate each time, that's a completely different risk profile in the entrepreneurial world.

36:01And 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, entrepreneurs have a high failure. Yeah, if you try one, but 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.

36:27Mindy Jensen:Yeah, Scott, what's your quote? If 9 out of 10 small businesses fail, start 10 businesses? Yeah, I think it's now it's 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 of these, but you try a hundred things. And then that's when you know if something's failed. And that's a quarter of work. One idea a day. Scott, do you remember when we met Cody Berman at Camp Fi in January of 2018? Because I do. I seem to recall there was a pull-up contest among anybody who wanted to do it.

37:02Mindy Jensen:And do you remember who won? I certainly do. I certainly do.

37:06Cody Berman:I like that guy. Yeah.

37:07Mindy Jensen:Cody, do you remember who won?

37:09Cody Berman:I remember I tied that other guy who owned a CrossFit gym and I was so mad because I wanted to win.

37:15Mindy Jensen:No, I thought you won.

37:17Cody Berman:No, I tied him. We both got like 23 or 24.

37:20Mindy Jensen:Oh man, I thought you won. I like your memory though.

37:24Cody Berman:I like that memory a lot better. But no, I mean, we tied. We tied for first. I didn't lose. I just wasn't a clean win. I assume that the new home, the dream home is going to have a home gym. 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. Like for those three years, the financial freedom sprint, I was really bad at spending money, like very bad scarcity mindset ingrained for me from very early on. But I've gotten a lot better at turning up what Ramit Sethi calls the money dials.

37:55Cody Berman:And so like 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. And it's just not something that interests me whatsoever. So we have gotten a lot better about like loosening up the wall a little bit on things that matter to us. The home gym is so, is so huge because there's just no excuse. Like even, even like on a bad day that you don't work out, you can just get like a couple of sets in, in between emails.

38:21And 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 they're part of their five journey is like, 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 health care costs low across a lifetime. It's still luck of the draw. There's still random chance that can blow that up. 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.

38:51Mindy Jensen: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? All the things.

38:59Cody Berman: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 at goldcityventureseverywhere and goldcityventures.com. Me, my personal brand on every social media platform is at Cody D. Berman. And then I also have a podcast, The Financial Independence Show, wherever you listen to podcasts. And I think those are the main ones. Yeah, I also want to call out that I posted, I think that I had this Instagram post that was too cheeky a while back. I was like, if you want to retire by 65, save 10%.

39:28You want to retire by 55, save 25. You know, 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 think that I was not calling you out that. I think, I think, you know, if you want to retire by 25, you know, you're going to have to do some kind of entrepreneurial thing while you spend 2000 bucks a month and then reassess your options at 30. And Cody is a great resource for that. And, and not a scam. Thank you, Scott.

39:53Cody Berman:Yeah. I was like, Hey, come on, Scott. I don't think, I don't think Cody appreciated that. I didn't think about that when I did that. I was just thinking a joke, but it's all good. Your approach has got a great, is a great way to fire people up on there. And if you miss, you know, 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. 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, like, you know, it's real estate or die.

40:22Cody Berman:Like if you invest in index funds, wasted money, retirement accounts, or a scam, I love the kind of even keeled level-headed approach that you guys bring to everything you talk about. And there, there isn't one way to fi. That was something I wanted to make abundantly clear in my book. Like 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. Like 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.

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42:24Up to$3 million in coverage, some policies as low as$30 a month. So building a two or three layer ladder that used to take a month of appointments is something you can knock out before your coffee gets cold. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash bpmoney. That is E-T-H-O-S dot com slash bpmoney. Application times may vary and rates may vary. I feel like we are, or I don't know how to speak from Indy, but I feel like an extremist against extremists. I really cannot stand purity people who have like one way to do things on it and like one tool for it and judge the other guy's approach there. I used to judge.

43:01So this is an evolution for me for sure. But I think that that's, that's where I'm, where I'm at. And I think like 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's risks. There's real problems. This is not for everyone. There's a selection bias from Cody here.

43:36you know it's possible you appeared on our podcast you know in some other form you know the version of you and we just haven't had that person back on yet because they hadn't they haven't talked about it right so we have to you know you're here because you've been doing this for eight years so that's real but also it can work and so you have to weigh both of those things to to fairly

43:53Cody Berman:assess what's right for you well appreciate both you guys and thank you for having me on again after these eight long years we'll talk again in eight in eight more years when you buy the lakers Perfect. Mark them on calendar.

44:04Mindy Jensen: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 is that if you want to succeed, you have to do the thing. This is like another level from the approach that I mapped out and set for life. I mean, he kept his expenses of 2000 bucks, went straight into entrepreneurship and hustled and hustled to earn a, you know, that first year salary.

44:46I'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, you know, 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.

45:17And I think that it's a valid approach. And then again, like I said in the show, I think it changes the way that financial theory needs to be applied to a situation like, 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 four 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.

45:53And so I think that that's the thing that makes this fun for me is talking about this. And 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.

46:12Mindy Jensen: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 your hours that you're going to work. Your 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 401k 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 skillset, that you are going to enjoy, that is going to generate income.

46:56Mindy Jensen:And like you keep saying, Scott, if nine out of 10 small businesses fail, start 10 small businesses. 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. I'll take credit for that quote. That sounds like me. Well, should we get out of here, Mindy? All right, my dear listeners, that wraps up this episode of the BiggerPocketsMoney podcast. But you are not done learning just because we have stopped talking.

47:26Mindy Jensen: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? 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.

48:00Mindy Jensen:If you buy one of our free resources and you don't like it, I will send you all that free money back. Yeah, I have a great pricing page for this, actually. Yes, there's different tiers of free. Tier one is free. Tier two is free. Tier three is free. We just want to help you get to financial independence. The master tier, our most expensive product, has the complete BiggerPocketsMoney 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. Just kidding. That's for entertainment only. And then our actual emails, Scott at BiggerPocketsMoney, Mindy at BiggerPocketsMoney.

48:35And then I think you have an email for complaints, Mindy, that you posted on the site at idontcareatellsomebodyelse.com that Mindy has put on there. And then, yeah, access to those tools. Yes.

48:45Mindy Jensen:However, if you do find a bug or something weird in one of the resources. Legitimate feedback and corrections, we want that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Send that to Mindy at BiggerPocketsMoney.com or Scott at BiggerPocketsMoney.com. Yeah. But, like, complaints about my mustache, no, you know, like, that's okay. There's a poll for that on YouTube if you want to do it. And, yes, most people will want me to take it off. Hey, does your wife like it? She did not like it at first. She likes it now. Okay. If your wife likes it, what's that phrase? Happy wife, happy life? That's right. All right, Scott. We have kept our listeners for long enough.

49:15Mindy Jensen:Thank you so much for listening to us. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Indy Jensen saying do not let inflation fry your fi. I'm skeptical of a lot of financial products, but life insurance isn't one of them, at least not term life. For the vast majority of you listening, term life is simply the right answer. And the smartest way to buy it isn't one big policy, it's a ladder. Your need for coverage isn't flat. It declines over time. You've got a 30-year mortgage, a couple of young kids, maybe a spouse mid-career. In 15 years, the mortgage is going to be smaller and the kids are almost launched.

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