Retire Early with Less Than 10 Rentals? She Did It, Starting in 2022

0:00Brandon Turner:You do not need a big, expensive, stressful rental portfolio to retire early. Today's guest retired in her late 30s, all with a small, manageable rental portfolio that she built after 2022. That's right. High rates, high home prices. She dealt with it all and was still able to retire completely on her own terms. Just a few years later, she used an often overlooked source for her down payment that many Americans have access to and quickly bought her first three rentals in just three months as a complete beginner. But she never wanted to scale to a dozen doors. In fact, it took her only half that many to retire from her W-2.

0:40Brandon Turner:She's sharing exactly how she bought the rentals, how much they make in monthly cash flow, her yearly income with real estate, and why knowing you're enough can get you to early retirement decades faster.

0:58Brandon Turner:what's going on everybody i am henry washington welcome to the bigger pockets podcast today we are bringing you an inspiring investor story featuring lucy hines from cincinnati ohio let's bring her on lucy hines welcome to the bigger pockets podcast thanks for having me henry so glad to have you and as always as we get started i want to know what your background was like before you got into real estate investing, especially since you have a little bit of a history with personal finance. Yes. Thank you so much. So I'm actually a veteran of the United States Army. Thank you for your service. Thank you.

1:32A fun fact about me is I used to jump out of perfectly good airplanes and helicopters. So that's always my good icebreaker question.

1:40Brandon Turner:Yeah. I have a hard and fast rule about that. To not do it. Yeah. If the plane's going to land, then I'm going to not jump out of it. That's my pretty hard and fast rule. But that's awesome. I do live by that now. Paratrooper? Is that what they call that? Paratrooper, yes. I was a big Dave Ramsey girl. So I read the Total Money Makeover and drank the Kool-Aid big time about staying out of debt and eliminating debt. So I lived that life for years and years, I'd say, until I happened upon Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And that really changed my mindset about debt. Yeah, it absolutely does open your mind to how money works.

2:22Brandon Turner:I think people, I mean, everyone can accredit their start in real estate to reading that book, but it's not a real estate book. It really just teaches you about how money works and how to think about money differently. That's what I remember most about me reading that book. All right. So what made you become interested in real estate? Because that's a big shift. So I think just kind of analyzing my my portfolio, giving me an idea that I wanted to build some passive income and how could I do that? So I realized that after the COVID spike in real estate, that I had quite a bit of equity in my home.

2:59And after reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I thought to myself, well, how can I leverage this as debt potentially to make myself more money? And, you know, I went down different rabbit holes of buying a business or starting vending machines. And then real estate was one of the options of as well. And then I dove deep into that rabbit hole. And that was that was it for me. I'm like, OK, we're we're doing real estate. I had a home equity line of credit for up to one hundred seventy six thousand dollars that I could get started. And you know what I did with that hundred seventy six thousand dollars?

3:34Brandon Turner:I'm guessing you used it to buy some property. I bought three in 90 days. Wait, wait, wait. Hold, hold, hold, hold, hold. Yeah. Okay, okay. So hardcore Dave Ramsey, read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, start to change your mindset, and then you take out a home equity line of credit. So for those who don't know, you can tap into the equity in a property. It doesn't have to be a personal residence, but that's what's most commonly used. And typically when you do that, they'll give you access to about 75 % of the equity. So it sounds like you had a good bit of equity in your property, you applied for a home equity line of credit, and then you didn't just go buy one house.

4:17Brandon Turner:You bought three in 90 days? Yes. So they were back to back. So I was busy working on getting any updates that I needed, getting tenants in immediately and filling those houses. And I had all three houses with tenants and signed leases all before I even had a single mortgage payment. And that was a win for me. Well, that's impressive, first and foremost. But let's back up a second, because it's hard enough to find one deal that you feel like it's worth buying, but you found three consecutively. So how did you locate these properties? Yes. So I found everything on the MLS, no wholesaling or insider deals.

5:01I found my first baby. I call my houses my babies because there's nothing wrong with that. They're near and dear to my heart. and nobody messes with my babies. I bought my first house or baby in a nearby neighborhood. I'm in the Cincinnati, Ohio area. So actually all of my properties are within a 30 minute radius. So all the greater Cincinnati area. Found my first one on the MLS. I purchased it for$215 ,000. It's a three bedroom, two bath slab house, no basement. We like that for, you know, less things to go wrong. It's around probably 1400 square feet. Just a great little starter home. We did a little bit of work to it.

5:45My husband and I. So my husband does help with some of this too. We did a little bit of work to it to get it ready on the market. Maybe a week or so. We just did some little painting and upgrades. Nothing crazy.

5:58Brandon Turner:So super cosmetic. Yeah, just small things. And got that on the market. Like I said, got a tenant in right away before we even had a mortgage payment. The jumping off point was once I had the lease signed, I was like, hey, I can do it. I did it. Let's look for the next one. And the next one is actually in that same neighborhood. You could literally throw a stone to the second house that I bought. So I'm like, I'm playing Monopoly here. I'm buying up all the trees, right? So I was like, okay, I'm playing Monopoly here. I'm having a good time. And the second one was completely turnkey, absolutely gorgeous.

6:37This house was a little bit higher on purchase price. It was$240 ,000, but similar layout, just nicer appliances and finishings and things like that. So that was $240 ,000.

6:48Brandon Turner:So you got access to this line of credit. You started buying properties like crazy. what were you doing for work at that time? I had left the army active duty in 2017 and I didn't start buying properties until 2022. So I was working a regular W-2 job in a few years in between kind of where we left off. My career I'll say was in HR and we can talk about this more later, but I'm retired now. I retired early from my rental income. I worked in human resources for my whole civilian career, if you will. I was doing well for myself being like a mid-tier manager, making six figures. Nothing crazy though.

7:30So that would go toward the down payments or it would go toward the HELOC, toward paying off the HELOC.

7:39Brandon Turner:So let's chat about that for a second. So the first property said you paid$215, assuming you use conventional mortgage, so 20 % down. And I'm guessing that's what you leverage the HELOC for. Am I right? I actually always had to put 25 % down. Just that was the agreement that I had with my current lenders. So it was around$54 ,000 of the cash down that I had to put down on that 215 at that 25%. And I started with some cash that I had and some of the HELOC funds. Okay. So you rented it out fairly quickly. And so tell us what your rent is and then what your mortgage is, if you don't mind. Sure. So the purchase price was$215 ,000.

8:23The rent is$2 ,150. I know in the real estate world, we love to talk about the 1 % rule. So that's usually what I'm going for on these. The mortgage is$1 ,227.

8:36Brandon Turner:Oh, wow. $1 ,227, bringing in $2 ,150. That's awesome. That's a great cash flowing deal. Cashflow 923. Yeah, that's a pretty awesome deal. And then you were like, all right, proof of concept. I did the thing. I rented it out. They're paying the rent. I didn't have to do much work to it. Let's go do another one. And then you found another one in the same neighborhood on the MLS again. And so this one purchase price was a little higher. It was$240 ,000. $240 ,000, but it was a little bigger, a little nicer, nicer finishes, totally turnkey. So you did nothing. You put 25 % down off the HELOC. So So what was your mortgage payment on that one?

9:17The mortgage payment on that is$1 ,480.

9:22Brandon Turner:And it rents for? $2 ,225. So you're just knocking them out of the park now. You're just like base hits, single doubles, no big deal. It's good. It's not exactly the 1 % rule, but it was good enough. You know, cash flow is about$750. I'm good with it. And at the time, too, I mean, the interest rates on these are high fives and into the sevens. That's so I wasn't even buying during the two, three, four period. So to make that kind of money, even with that type of interest rate, I'm good with it. You know. So here's what I like so far is that you are buying these and you're essentially putting a decent size down payment down.

10:06Brandon Turner:What that's doing is it's reducing your principal and interest. That's allowing you the room to cash flow. So yeah, second deal, not quite 1%, but it doesn't really matter because you put a good chunk down, which allows you to still cash flow, even though it doesn't quite hit the 1 % rule. The 1 % rule, guys, is just a rule of thumb. It's not the law, right? And every deal is a little different. The more money you put down, the lower you can be. You don't have to quite be at 1 % and still cash flow. And what I like about your strategy is that you are buying good quality assets. You're not buying the cheapest house that you can find and having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing it up.

10:45Brandon Turner:You're buying good quality assets in good quality areas. And the reason I want to highlight that is because you leveraged your personal home on a home equity line of credit. Where I think people get in trouble with this strategy is they have equity in their personal home. They tap into it, which is great. But then they don't do enough research to buy a good enough asset at a low enough price point for that deal to be a good deal. And you never want to leverage your personal home and then go buy a bad deal because now you put your personal home at risk. Because if your deal is bad, you end up having to pay to feed that deal and you still got to pay back that line of credit.

11:27Brandon Turner:And so you can get yourself into financial trouble pretty quickly by doing this strategy and not purchasing a good deal or not putting enough down when you purchase a good deal. So I like the fundamentals that you use, and I want to make sure that we call that out for people. I don't think home equity lines of credit are bad. I don't think they're good. I think they are a tool in the toolbox. and the way tools work on any job is you have to use the right tool in the right situation and you have to use it in the right way for that tool to be effective. And it sounds like that's exactly what you did.

12:03Brandon Turner:So amazing, but you've only told me about two of these and you said you bought three in 90 days. So I wanna hear all about this third deal and we'll do that right after the break. A lot of rental owners think their only two options are either keep managing properties forever or sell everything and take the tax hit. But there's actually another path. Flock Homes helps investors retire from being a landlord without selling your property. Here's how it works. Instead of selling your property and buying another one in a 1031 exchange, you contribute the property to Flock Homes through a 721 exchange.

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15:44Brandon Turner:All right, we are back on the BiggerPockets podcast. I am speaking with investor Lucy Hines, who has leveraged her personal home to get a home equity line of credit and use that to start building a rental portfolio that has eventually sounds like led to your financial freedom. But you only told me about two of the first deals that you did. And you said you bought three in 90 days when you first got started. So what that third deal look like? First two were single family homes, a stone's throw from each other. Was the third one the same? The third one is in a different neighborhood, but still within that 30 mile radius of the the Cincinnati area.

16:22This one is actually a townhome. So it's a little bit different. The first time dealing with HOA. So that was a little bit different. This one is a three bedroom, one and a half bath. So when I was kind of looking, I really wanted a three bedroom, two bath, but came across this great deal for these townhouse, three bedroom, one and a half bath. But the price was so good, I just couldn't pass it up. The purchase price was$157 ,000. Dang. Yep. And it's a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath. The mortgage and HOA together is$1 ,288 and the rent is$2 ,050.

17:05Brandon Turner:Boom. Did you have to do any work to this one? That sounds like a really good deal. Yes, we did put in a little bit of work. So we updated one of the bathrooms upstairs and we did a little bit of demo. There was some funky extra shelving going on in the kitchen, but not much. It was about$10 ,000 that we put into it. That's pretty good. So MLS deal, bought it, put a little cash in it. I'm assuming you used the same type of loan. So that cash you put into it had to come out of your pocket. Yes? Yes. And like I said, I always live below my means. It would regularly be there. Awesome. So another decent deal.

17:43Brandon Turner:Are these deals that you've left all your money in or have you refinanced these deals to pull any cash out? I have not refinanced and all of the money that I've ever made on this business has gone back into the business until I retired. Say that again for the people in the back. All of the money that I ever made from all of the deals that I had went back into the business so that I could continue to grow it, so that I could continue to buy, so that I could continue to pay down the HELOC while I had it, while I was working a W-2 job. It's not until I decided that I hit financial freedom and then wanted to retire that I would then begin using the money from the business to live off of.

18:32Brandon Turner:There you go. That is how you get to financial freedom because the whole point people wanna get into it is they wanna generate cashflow from their rents. But if you do that on your first couple of properties and you're taking your cashflow and you're putting it in your pocket, what people tend to find out is you gotta pull it back out of your pocket sometimes to fix things, to solve problems, to be able to purchase more. And so when you're growing and scaling, the best way to do that is to take the cash flow and reinvest it into your business so that you can get to your retirement number faster.

19:09Brandon Turner:But it sounds like you've got a history of fiscal responsibility, having gone through Dave Ramsey and just having being a saver, it sounds like. So that definitely seems like it's helped you. So as someone who, you know, you were a Dave Ramsey acolyte, you followed the Dave Ramsey plan, drink the Kool-Aid. Was it difficult for you to make the mental transition to taking on debt? Because I've seen I've seen people really struggle with it who are hardcore Dave Ramsey folks. A hundred percent terrifying. You think jumping out of planes is scary? You're a little scarier of taking on some debt after you've been obsessed with Dave Ramsey and his teaching principles for years.

19:55Jumping out of a plane is less scary than that. Okay?

19:59Brandon Turner:But what I want people to see is you can leverage responsibly. And Lucy is a great example of how she's leveraged the assets that she has, but she's done it in a very responsible way. She has found very good quality assets that she can afford. She has made sure that the rent is going to more than cover what she is spending. She's putting a little more money down so that that ensures that cash flow and gives her a way out if she needs out. Leverage is good if it is used properly. Leverage is very bad if it is used improperly. And I want to make sure that we're like harping on that for people. So what you told me previously was that you now don't work anymore.

20:46Brandon Turner:So because you've leveraged this responsibly, how long did it take you kind of from start to the day you decided you were going to be full time? How long did that take you to get there? So I bought my first property in July of 2022. And I officially retired in September of 2025. So just about eight months ago. Awesome. Congrats. Thank you very much. and I actually, you know, I hit the number, I'd say earlier than that. That's just how the timing worked out. I figured I would stay till the end of the year and then just things happened at work and I was like, you know, it's time to go. Yeah. It's funny how when you start having some cash flow coming in, things that weren't as annoying to you at work, all of a sudden just are a little more annoying than you, than you used to be able to deal with.

21:38Brandon Turner:But three years is pretty quick to reach financial freedom. But I think, again, I think your journey to financial freedom was accelerated because you weren't spending that cash flow when you got started, you were reinvesting, you were putting money down, and you were in a strong financial position prior to investing. So I know a lot of people may not be in that strong of a financial position, and that's okay. There are ways to invest without that. But again, this is just highlighting that you can accelerate your journey. A, if you're putting your money back in. B, if you're investing responsibly.

22:12Brandon Turner:So great, great work. So when did you buy your fourth deal? Was it immediately? Because you just rapid fired three in 90 days. Did you do your next one shortly after or did it take you some time? So I bought the next one almost a year later. So it took a break. So you sat down for a minute. It went hard for 90 days, okay? And then I was like, whew, I'm tired. Let's take a break. Also, this HELOC is looking a little big. Let's take some time to pay it down so we can kind of reset, relaunch, right? And just let the dust settle for a little bit. Because it was quite a feat. I don't think, you know, for most people to buy three houses in 90 days.