Breaking the Golden Handcuffs with 5 Kids | Sunny Burns | Ep 575

23:39I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. I should probably start telling this. I do have some like general things like, hey, you know, this apartment we painted with this machine in this color, just so that we can do touch-ups here and there. And I have like a lot of things like that recorded and stuff, but I just have in my head like, oh yeah, I can go into my invoices and just be like, oh yeah, we did replace that water heater 12 years ago or whatever. But yeah, I think categorically I should probably just have a spreadsheet with the maintenance logs. That's a good idea. That would be cool. So it sounds like you have been the property manager for much of this time.

24:09Has that changed or are you still property manager? Well, so I spent 12 months in Japan. I took my whole family. There was a big opportunity through my work, the Department of Defense to work as a like almost like an ambassador engineer and work for the Japanese Ministry of Defense for a year. And I was like, hey, I'll volunteer to go. So we did that. So for a whole entire year, we were away in a foreign land and we still had to manage these properties. So that's from 2022 to 2023. Awesome experience. And, you know, the DOD paid for my housing there. I rented out my house for the entire 12 months here.

24:40So I was making so much money financially by doing that exchange. But during that time, you know, I was a 13 hour time difference away. I was how many thousand miles away. And so I need to hire like a property manager, someone boots on the ground that could take care of things. And so I actually ended up talking to my landscaper and he ended up, you know, I put him on group text with every single one of my tenants and he was a kind of a handyman too. So he started, you know, I would wake up a lot of mornings in Japan and the tenant would have been like, hey, you know, this issue happened. And he was like, I'll be right over.

25:11I could see the text message when I woke up and be like, hey, it was already taken care of. Awesome. Good job, Danny. Thank you. And it worked out really well. So yeah, we were doing that while there and he still helps out with the property now. Although now I'm a little more hands on for the bigger things. Okay. Because yeah, I'm curious. So if you're making a net profit of approximately 123K, and of course, that's going to go up and down a little bit at the margins, but how much are your family's annual expenses? Like, what are you trying to cover as far as, so not the expenses on the houses?

25:41Cause I know last time you gave us all that granular detail, like in essence, it's like, okay, here's what our life costs X, all the properties. Right. I'd put us right around a hundred K that's about our entire expenses. If you include our single family house too. Gotcha. Okay. So all in your life costs a hundred grand and you're making just from the rental about 123. Yeah. Okay. So you have a savings rate. And then also that whatever it was about 800 ,000, I think was off the top of my head of the, the other savings you have in, in various vehicles. That's just sitting there compounding, which is wonderful.

26:14You you're hopefully never going to have to touch that or not have to touch that for many, many decades, which is great. So I guess, and this is my own bias, of course, but like, is there a thought to just going totally hands off with it and hiring a property manager? even if it's 10%, like you, you have some wiggle room in there, right? You've got about 20 % of wiggle room. Is that a thought? Well, it is. But you know, you say 10%. When I was thinking about going to Japan, I started interviewing these property managers. And I got people, you know, around the seven, 8 % range in our North Jersey rents, which is a lot higher near New York City.

26:46So they're okay with seven, 8%. But that's a gross rent. Yeah, I misspoke. I realized that as, as you were going into that, I realized it's on the gross rent, not on the net profit, obviously. Our gross rent is like$274 ,000. So it's a lot more than our net. It's more than double our net. And so it would be a huge chunk. And not only that, I just didn't like how the property managers were incentivized. They were like, okay, so when we have an issue, the toilet's clogged, we're going to call a plumber. And that plumber is going to charge$1 ,000 or whatever to unclog it. And we're going to charge 15 % on top of whatever they charge just for making that call.

27:23I'm just like, so why don't you just pick the most expensive one so you get the highest 15 %? You know, it just didn't seem to incentivize correctly. And I don't know. I just, you know, we've worked really hard to place really good tenants, to take really good care of them. I mean, a lot of them became friends and just, I guess I'm a little resistant to change that up and introduce a new factor that could mess it all up. And I like the concept of that, you know, small and mighty landlord. You know, we haven't bought anything since 2020. We're not like empire builders. We just want enough for our financial independence to buy our freedom.

27:58And I think these 11 units, you know, it's very manageable for me. I probably put in on average, I think like five to 10 hours a month on these properties. Oh, wow. You know, most of the regular maintenance is taking care of all the landscaping. You know, I have a landscaping guy. I know all the contractors now. I know all the plumbers. I know all the electricians. So I can give them that call, say that 15%, know what's going on, know what's being handled in a way that the tenants are happy with. and keep that connection with them. So I don't think I'm pivoting away from full property management just because I don't want to give up that 8 % of gross.

28:30And also just, I like being in the loop. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Yeah. And I guess it would be about 20 some odd thousand, low twenties in terms of, I mean, that's, yeah, that's not nothing to stroke a check for$22 ,000. So that makes a ton of sense. I'm curious, you referenced small and mighty real estate. So that's Chad Carson, our great friend, has a book called The Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor. And I think this is fantastic. I think this is, for me, this is like the five mentality for real estate investing. It's finding that enough point and then trying to optimize your rentals as much as you can to make them as easy as possible.

29:10Like Chad talks about his buy box. And basically, he's always taking his most troublesome properties and trying to sell them and then only looking to buy properties that are similar in his buy box, quote unquote, that are similar to his top performing properties. And it's just this continual process eventually get to the point where you have a plus plus properties that are just not bothering. That's a I'm making that up, but like that just simply aren't bothering you. And it's just smooth. with. I'm curious, do you guys plan? I think you said you had about$1.3 million in mortgage. Do you plan on paying these off?

29:45Is this a long-term play? No, we do not plan to pay off the mortgages. I mean, if we have a crazy surplus of cash, maybe we will, but they're all under 3.5 % interest rates. It just doesn't seem to make sense to pay off them early when I can just go to a high-yield savings account and make more interest on that. That's the only reason. If interest rates start shrinking, then sure, we'll start considering paying off those debts. But at three and a half percent and lower, like one of ours is 2.8%. And it's just like, I don't see the reason for paying them off early. Okay. All right. That makes sense.

30:17And obviously they're kicking off enough income to cover your life. So there's no massive need to change, but man, that will be real nice when they're paid off. You have this empire of real estate. Pretty good. Yeah. That'll be another $60 ,000 bump. You know, 60 ,000 is just going to mortgages. Interesting. I like it. All right. So Sonny, I know you are not limited to just rental real estate and house hacks and things like that. You have a whole bunch of side hustles. One that you started since we last talked was a Turo rental car business. So I know you told us last time about your car flipping days, which I think were when you were younger.

30:55But I was interested to hear that there's another car related side hustle. Yeah. So Turo is kind of like almost Airbnb for cars. So we bought a minivan when we had our third child. And so I had this 2009 Toyota Yaris with roll up windows, and it was just kind of sitting there. And I'm like, I always want to optimize always want to use my liabilities to make them into assets. And so I started renting it out on Turo, which is like a car exchange service, like I said, Airbnb for cars. And so I was only renting it for$35 a day. You know, I was in Garfield, New Jersey, middle of nowhere, New Jersey.

31:31And I'm like, is this really going to make money? But the first year I earned$6 ,400. That was in 2020. And then the next year I earned another$5 ,500 in 2021. From one car that I bought for$5 ,000. So I'm earning more than I bought it for year after year. And then unfortunately someone did total the car. No one got hurt. They hit black guys, hit a guardrail and it was totaled. But Turo paid me a$4 ,000 settlement on a$5 ,000 car I bought. So in total, I think I made like$18 ,000 on this car that I bought for$5 ,000. And I could still use when I really needed it. But yeah, it was an awesome experience.

32:12And now my little brother does it. My other brother is thinking about doing it. So yeah. Wow. Okay. All right. So you're going to have to pass along some actionable tips here because I suspect there are people who are, their antenna are raised here. How viable is this for everyday people? How much effort is it? How much like schlepping, like delivering the car to people? Like how much trouble is it? Yeah. So I just parked the car right in front of our house on the street. I had a lockbox right on my house and with a code and I give the code to the renter and they just go to like it was right under the mailbox.

32:47They'd go to it. They put in the code, grab the keys and then just rent out the car. Honestly, it's very easy. And I like that. You know, it's not a huge I mean, cars, used cars are more expensive now. And your car has to be under 13 years old. that's the limit that Turo gives. And I think there's a mileage, maybe like 120 ,000 has to be below that, something like that. But yeah, you know, a lot of people don't have the capital to maybe buy a rental property, but they have the capital to buy a car. So that's why, you know, my little brother's like, how do I make some passive income? I'm like, hey, try Turo.

33:15So he's been doing it for like a year and a half now. It's gone really well. He, I just added a second car to his fleet of rental cars. Some people, this is their livelihood. I know someone in Colorado out with 28 jeeps and that's how he makes his family income you know that's all he does is rent out his 28 jeeps and yeah you have some issues sometimes with the lower end cars you know 35 a day rental you know i sometimes they'd come back and smell like weed so i bought an ozone generator you know you learn little tricks to get rid of smells and things so there's some issues but more likely than not they're good people uh they would leave it back clean maybe i'd have to take my hand car vacuum and do a little 20 minute cleaning i don't honestly thinking about doing it again.

33:53It was a little annoying with one car. I think with a fleet, where I am being a multimillionaire now, it's just not worth it so much. But I think it would be a great thing for my son. Maybe I can go in with him as a partnership and he can clean the vehicle and do a quick 20-minute turnaround each time. And I think it's a great investment and a passive income stream or semi-passive income stream for people who want to build a smaller rental business like this without going into properties. And it's funny. And I swear to you and to everybody listening, I'm not making this up in the last 48 hours.

34:26I had this thought experiment. I was undertaking this thought experiment of like, what would it look like to invest in something that could generate cash flow that like maybe people aren't doing because they don't have assets. Like you said, they're not multimillionaires, right? Whereas I have some assets. Are there things I'm even thinking like, I don't know, landscaping equipment or like heavy duty, like tree stump grinders or something. you know like like literally just as a thought experiment and taro was one of the ones that crossed my mind but again like you i wouldn't want to do just one car because that's a lot of hassle whereas like what if you had 30 or 50 cars 55 000 cars okay well that's not an insignificant amount of money but if you have well you just grow it iteratively yeah right but like what would it look like to hire someone to run that for you what would it look like where do you where do you park them?

35:17Like, these are the questions that I'm, again, at the very beginning of this journey in terms of thinking about it. And frankly, am I going to actually do this? I doubt it, but it's fun to think about. And I think Turo is something that, so let's talk about your brother. What is holding, is it cash? Is it assets to like, that's holding him back? Like, is he planning on doing five, 10, 20 cars? I think that's the plan. I mean, he's only 26, you know, so he's a lot younger than me. So yeah, he just didn't have a lot of capital. So he had enough capital to do one. He's been doing it for a year. He finally got enough capital to buy a second one off that business, really.

35:51And so I think he likes it. So I think he's just going to keep going for it and keep growing that fleet and getting that passive income to keep going up and up and up. Okay. All right. I like this. So yeah, my mind is spinning. Because right, is it viable in this day and age to find a$5 ,000 car? Yeah, maybe, maybe not for most people. But if you look hard enough, and again, it's about learning. And I think, Sonny, that's what's interesting about you to me is that it seems like you just approach these problems and you just kind of knock them down, right? Like, you know, in my mind, you've been buying and selling cars for your whole adult lifetime and maybe even when you're a teenager, frankly.

36:26And like, you know, when I said, can you find a$5 ,000 car? You just nodded and said, basically, yeah, of course. And in my mind, I'm like, oh, I don't know if you could, you know, yada, yada, yada, right? But I suspect you can. And could you turn that into, like you said,$6 ,400 in one year,$5 ,500 in another at just$35 a day? Like, that's not bad, right? That's more than 100 % return in one year. I mean, someone had it up for 80 days. They took an 80-day trip. So, you know, you can make a decent amount of money. Okay. I like it. All right, Sonny. So switching gears to yet another one of your, I don't know if we'll call this a side hustle, but it probably qualifies.

36:59So you have a family of seven. I know now you have a lot of time and travel is a massive aspect of your current and future life, but also your not too distant past life. Also, you mentioned the year long trip to Japan. You mentioned renting out your single family home, the house that you guys live in. But that suggests to me you haven't sold it since, but you're still traveling for intermediate and or long periods of time. Talk to us about what does this cost? How do you afford it? Like, what does travel look like for a five family of seven that has a house in a high cost of living New Jersey area?

37:36Yeah. So we love to travel. We've always been traveling. You know, I'm making it a goal, you know, by spring next year to have gone to 46 states with my wife. We're at like 25 right now, but we're playing this massive 60 day long road trip all across the country, taking all the kids with us. And so it's going to be exciting. But yeah, so we got all this freedom, you know, for the last eight months haven't been working. So, you know, we homeschool our kids. So no school obligations. We do have some obligations to co-op, but we can get covered in things like that. And so, you know, we're like, we have all this time, but with all this time, we want to travel a lot.

38:08But if we travel a lot, then our expenses are no longer what they were. And how can we afford to travel all this time? So, you know, I'm thinking, and so I was like, I got the idea to start Airbnb-ing our primary residence when we go on travel. And I call it our perpetual travel machine, because we can actually make more money Airbnb-ing our house than we spend on traveling. And so we first started this in August of this past year. We went on a 10-day bicycling adventure across the Erie Canal from Buffalo, New York to Albany, 360 miles. We took all the kids with us. My oldest 10-year-old pedaled the whole thing.

38:42My wife had an e-bike and she could take like three kids with her. And I had one kid on the back of my bike. And we just, over 10 days, we did like about 36 miles a day. We biked from town to town to town. I forget how much we spent. I think we spent, you know, we were staying in hotels every night. our motels. So we spent about like 1200 on the trip, so a decent amount. But we Airbnb'd our house the entire 10 days we were gone. And we made like$2 ,300 of the 10 days we Airbnb'd it. So we made more money Airbnb'd our house than that trip. And then for the entire month of August, we made 5 ,800 Airbnb'd our house.

39:18And so my wife went to Austria, took her aging kind of parents. That was kind of a dream of hers. She had the little baby too. I had four kids with me. We We went camping, nonstop camping. We spent more hours outside in the month of August than inside, if you include being in a tent. So I took my kids down the shore. We went camping on the beach. I took them to Lake George. We had a whole island to ourselves. The state of New York has island camping on Lake George. We had a whole island to ourselves with$28 a night. We could camp on it. We paddled there two miles. So we made bank, just airbeaming our house and having a great time outdoors with our family.

39:49And so this month, later on, in two weeks, I'm doing an Ironman in Mexico. I'm bringing my whole family with me We're going to spend two and a half weeks there So we're going to Airbnb the house Someone's going to be enjoying our house on Thanksgiving They're going to have a We're going to put in the leaves in They're going to have 10 people here Enjoying Thanksgiving at our lake house here that we live in And then in January we're going three weeks to Brazil I've never been to South America I'm like hey let's do it So we're going to Brazil Oh I have a cool hack about that I could talk about But yeah so we're going to Brazil Mexico and Brazil we did all with miles So I'm super excited about that because it's hard with a family of seven to do everything with miles.

40:24It's so many miles, but we did Mexico and Brazil with miles. So I'm excited about that. And then next year in the spring, we're planning a 60 day road trip across the country and we'll be Airbnb-ing our house the whole time. So we make more money than we spend traveling. And so I'm so excited about this perpetual travel machine that we've created. That's unreal. Is there something special about your house? Like what, are you near New York city? Like, are you, you basically, I think you said you're not. Yeah, we're an hour out of New York City. So we're kind of we're in Morris County, New Jersey.

40:56It's not special. We're not in the boondocks. We're like in the suburbs. There's really nothing special in a small tiny town called Minehill, New Jersey. Even New Jerseyans have never heard about it. But you know, our house, we kind of picked like this. It was only$360 ,000 in New Jersey. That's pretty low. We bought that in 2020. But you know, it backed up to woods. And then there's a lake back there. I have a kayak rack with six kayaks. I'm an avid biker. You know, I take my kids on biking adventures. We have 25 bikes in the garage that people can use. I put a full-size trampoline in our basement.

41:27I can put a link to our Airbnb if you want. It's pretty cool, our house. You know, we have a blow-up hot tub. I like to do ice plunges in the lake and then go into the hot tub. I have pictures of that in our Airbnb thing. I don't know if guests will be doing that. But we have a pool in the summer people can use. It's just a cool house. You know, nothing really special. And people just seem to like to rent it. And I'm honestly surprised how quickly things get booked up through Airbnb. I think there's just a lot of people who travel and want a place that can accommodate like a larger family. And we encourage, you know, we say right on it.

41:58This is our personal residence. We don't want trouble with our neighbors. So we encourage families to say we say no to parties, no parties allowed. And so far, our guests have been awesome. So I think we have seven stays at this point. And everyone has left the place like spotless. I'm honestly shocked. And I think it's because it's primarily families that have stayed and they've left it so clean. It's amazing. Like, I'm just shocked, honestly. That's incredible. Yeah, I'm thinking about all the limiting beliefs that I would have or people would have. And yeah, it would be, how could I rent out my own place?

42:31People are going to wreck it, whatever. Or frankly, why is anybody going to rent my house in a random suburban Richmond? Even though I know objectively I live in a great spot, like it's a nice place. But like my limiting belief is, oh, come on, who's really going to rent your house in Richmond, Virginia? But I guess, I mean, it's shocking to hear how quickly you've rented us. Yeah, I mean, people travel. So we used to for two and a half years, three years, we had in our four family house, we had a separate room. We couldn't really rent out as a fifth unit. So we had it as like a bedroom Airbnb.

43:02And we made it Japanese themed to kind of detract people. So people were sleeping on the floor on the Tommy mats. We had a projector with anime DVDs. We had a Japanese style bidet toilet. And we were a little close to New York City then, like 30 minutes out. So still not that close. But people, there was a funeral house in town. So people would come for funerals. People would just come to visit family that lived in town, you know, and they didn't have a bedroom for them. And they didn't want to stay at a hotel 20 minutes away. So they want to stay in town. There's always reasons people are staying wherever they're staying.

43:31So I think it's just, you know, it's easier than people think. Yeah. And I love just all the little hacks just embedded in what you said. Like even just the Lake George thing. So first off, for anybody who's ever been to Lake George, it's absolutely beautiful. It's a real nice place in New York State. But just renting a little island. What did you say? $28,$30 something? $28 a night. It's insane. We had a whole island to ourselves. Water is crystal clear. It's the clearest. I think it's the cleanest lake in all of the U.S., which is amazing because it's spring fed. And I think it's a top rated for water quality.

44:03It's a top rated lake in all of the U.S. And we were just snorkeling, seeing fish, you know, rope swings. We had such a good time. That's a great place in the summer. That's for damn sure. So, okay. Miles and points for a family of seven. Most people think that's impossible. How'd you do it? Honestly, I don't know how we do it. I think, you know, so for the last like seven years, I feel like we've kept everything domestic, like always road trips with the car just because seven tickets is so expensive on a plane. But we've still been opening credit cards and stuff. So we just had a lot of miles.

44:36I think like the United Airlines card, we have like 300 ,000 United miles. I can pull up those numbers if you want about how much we spent. I think we got good deals. So I can tell what we spent on Mexico. But we just had a lot of miles over the years for United and American. And that's what we booked Brazil and Mexico with. I think this might be the key is with your flexibility. Right. It wasn't like, hey, we need to travel on July 4th and come back on July 19th. it's, hey, we want to travel. It wasn't even necessarily Brazil and Mexico. Right, right, right. So I was looking at the calendar and being like, okay, yeah, so I'll go like five days before my Ironman event just because it was the cheapest miles.

45:17And then we'll stay, I think we did end up staying like four days longer than I was just saying, oh, we'll be there two weeks. So I'm like, okay, we'll just make it two and a half weeks just because it's cheaper on the miles. Yeah, right. And that's the cool thing about flexibility. I think this is just one of the myriad of ways is that we can benefit from being fi and being flexible with our time, right? Like I was listening to another old episode and it was, it was something about like, Oh, people, Oh, it might've even been the roundup actually that, that you were on was when do most people go to the grocery store?

45:50Well, they go on Saturday or Sunday or Costco Saturday or Sunday at three o 'clock when everyone else is there and you have to stand in line at Costco for an hour. Right. Whereas like when your fi you can go whenever the heck you want yeah i get there at 10 a.m when it opens i'm the first person online because i run through the store and i don't wait for one second we took our whole family to six flags yesterday a thursday a random thursday in the middle of november and we took them to six flags so they knew there was going to be no lines and that's another hack so we went to lake george and they have a six flags at lake george yeah which is 20 cheaper season passes than new jersey so we ended up getting 60 season passes for this year and next year at Six Flags.

46:32And anyway, we used them yesterday. Oh, and so my daughter, my older daughter is a roller coaster enthusiast. So she actually went to that Six Flags by Lake George this summer. And we've been to the one Great Adventure is obviously the great one in New Jersey. And yeah, it's amazing now with the merger of Cedar Fair and Six Flags. Now there, I think there are 40 odd parks that are all reciprocal with those. Dorney Park too. We just went to Dorney Park. Nice. Very cool. Yeah. We've got King's Dominion down here, which is great. So that's another one. That's pretty good. But yeah, that's a great talk about a nice fi hack or way to spend money.

47:06It's like it's under$100 usually for thereabouts for an annual pass, depending on what park you're getting at. And you can just go an unlimited number of times. It's really pretty wild. It was great. It was only$60. Yeah, I was amazed. Like only$60 for a season pass for this year and next year. And then the parking is$40 by itself. So with the season pass included, I'm like, man, we would have paid$40 for parking. So yeah, that was pretty good. Yeah, that's very good. So right. So going back to the miles just real quick is, yeah, with some flexibility, I always tell people like that is the key in terms of succeeding at miles and points is can I be flexible?

47:42That is the first rule of succeeding at miles and points. It just is. And if you can be flexible, you can go almost anywhere you want and you can go for nearly free. And I think there's a lot to be said for that. And so for anybody who's new to this, we have a ton of resources at chooseavite.com slash travel. And also we have our credit cards list at chooseavite.com slash cards. And you can basically find all the information there. I'm going to be doing a bunch of episodes in this in 2026. So stay tuned because really travel rewards is a way for most of us to take one or two close to free vacations, at least every single year, if we're smart about it.

48:18And it, I mean, Sonny, you know that that adds up to real dollars. Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, you said, I don't want to let this slide. You said there was some hack for Brazil. Oh, yeah. So Brazil, for Americans, they charge, we were going to have to pay over$1 ,000 in visa fees to go to Brazil as Americans for my family of seven. So I think it just adds up to like, it's like$150 a person or whatever. But so we are dual citizens. Actually, my little daughter is a triple citizen, Japan, Austria, and America. So I'm also a dual citizen. So I can use my Japanese passport to go into Brazil and not pay any visa.

48:53And my kids are all Austrian citizens. They can go into Brazil, not pay any visa. So we save us a thousand dollars by using our alternate passports by going into Brazil. I mean, I don't have applicable that is in your audience, but I thought it was cool. Well, maybe the passport thing. Are there any interesting stories on getting the Austrian and Japanese passports? It's just like my mother-in-law, she's Austrian. So she could pass that down to my wife who can then pass that down to our kids. Japanese is similar, but you have to do it within three months of birth for the Japanese citizenship, which I didn't know for my older four kids.

49:25So I could only get it for my fifth child. Oh, gotcha. Okay. So yeah, I've looked into this a little bit and it really does vary country by country. So I signed up for ancestry.com just to see if I knew I had some Eastern European ancestors. So this is still like in the cards for me potentially, because it looks like I might have, I think Poland might be a slightly easier one and Italy, but you need to be able to definitively prove. I think it's up to great-grandparents, but it depends on the country. So nobody quote me on any of this or Sonny, obviously. But the key is having multiple passports, it can be really, really valuable, especially in a FI life.

50:02Not just in this case where you get this nice little reciprocal benefit to get some visa fees for free. But really, there are a lot of rules, let's say, in the EU where you have to I think it's what, 90 days and you have to leave the country. Whereas if you have an EU passport, that doesn't apply. So like that can be a massive, massive bonus. If you happen to have grandparents, great grandparents that you can definitively prove came from some European countries like that might be something to really look into. So I suspect, Sonny, that's going to help. There's going to be a good handful of people at minimum.

50:35I'm going to set our sights conservatively here and say that that's going to help just this one random little one off comment, you know, I like it. So, OK, the 60 day road trip next year. Are you guys RVing it? Are you staying in hotels? What are you doing? So we're so cheap. I just can't bring myself to buying an RV that gets five miles per gallon and go six thousand miles around the country. So, you know, we're just sticking with that Toyota C &A minivan. And 2011, just hit 200 ,000 miles, going strong still. I did just buy on Facebook Marketplace a roof rack, so we'll have a little more leg room than we're normally accustomed to in our trips.

51:12But yeah, we are just going. We're going to be staying with friends and family. My brother just bought a, renting a house in Colorado. He just moved there. We're going to visit him for a week. I have family in California. We'll stay there. But we're also just going to go to a lot of national parks and do tent camping. We love tent camping. We do backpacking all the time too. But yeah, we're going to stay at Glacier National Park for a while. Go to Yellowstone, go to Yosemite, go to Mount Rushmore. And yeah, just go to a lot of these cool places. I'm so excited because, yeah, I haven't been to that part.

51:42A lot of those parts of those northwestern states, Utah, Idaho, Montana. I'm just excited. My wife's always talking about Montana, seeing horses there and just hear so much cool things about a lot of the national parks there. And just seeing a lot of friends that we haven't seen in a while. So we'll visit them. We told them, hey, we have a lot of camping gear. Just give us some floor space and we're happy. I love that. I love that. And yeah, that's really the cool part about FIIs. A, that flexibility. But B, you're doing this with your family, right? Like you set this out as a goal. My dream is to have a stay-at-home family.

52:12Yeah. And you succeeded. You and your wife succeeded, right? This clearly was a team. And you guys are there now. I just, I love it. So where do you go from here? So you have rental income that covers all your expenses. You have this, you're getting more and more equity, obviously every year that just even without express paying down your mortgages, you, you did it. Yeah. What is it? Like, I know your mind is not going to just stop there. I know. Yeah. So world school and the kids, that's a big thing. You know, we're starting to roll up taking baby steps towards that. That's a huge thing. And honestly, I thought when I was going to leave, when I left the federal government that I'd have all this time, you know, in 40 hours a week now, Now I could dedicate towards something else.

52:55But honestly, like having five kids takes a lot of energy. You know, I'm a soccer coach. I'm helping kids learn to read. I'm doing math flashcards with all the kids. I'm, you know, I'm in it with my wife. And I get a lot of fulfillment from that. But I thought I'd still have a lot of surplus. I'm also training for an Ironman, which takes a lot of time. You know, that's 2.4 miles swim, 112 mile bike, 26 mile run. It's a lot of time. My goal is to do it under 13 hours. So there's a lot of time dedicated to training for that. So I think once that's over November 23rd, I'll have a little more time again, because I had a lot of personal projects that I was thinking I was going to, you know, have that YouTube channel I'm trying to grow.

53:32I made a patent two years ago that I'm trying to make into I'm making prototypes for the product right now. But it's just so slow going. My goal was to have that launched by the time my my paycheck ended in September. I'm not there yet. So there's all these goals, but I'm just trying to have the perspective that really the goal was stay-at-home family, spend the time with the family, and we have. We've had so much fun this summer just going on all these trips and just being a stay-at-home family. That's the goal, and that's been my perspective. And honestly, it's a good life. This FI life is awesome.

54:06And yeah, if it's just baby steps I can take, then I'm going to have to be happy with that, and I am. I love that, man. It's a good life, this FI life. That's a pretty good quote. I like that. Yeah. All right. Well, that feels like the energetic end of the podcast here, Sonny. You know, it's just really cool. I'm glad we reconnected. I'm glad you came back on. And I'm just really happy for you and your wife and your kids. Sounds like you're just rock and rolling and just living that five life. And that means that might mean one of anything, right? Like one of so many different things that you can do, which is, hey, an Ironman.

54:40Hey, I'm teaching math. Hey, we're going to go on this trip. hey, we're gonna learn new things. Like it can be anything. And that's the beautiful part of FI is you're a young guy. You're I think 35 plus or minus. And you know, your wife I assume is roughly the same. And you guys have another 60 years and you can do whatever you want. And I think that is the goal of what we're doing here, right? Like this FI journey is the one reliable way for middle-class people to get wealthy. It just is. And it's a life of intentionality. And it usually takes somewhere between one and two decades to get there.

55:15And you did it and you rocked it. And here you are reaping the benefits of it. It's amazing. And I wish you a big congrats and good luck ahead of time for the Ironman. That's no joke. Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited. All right, Sonny. So you have a website that I don't know that you necessarily post to very often, but it's got a ton of resources, especially for people who are looking. there's this uh amazing scholarship that sonny talked about in the first episode episode 139 it's called the smart scholarship he has a whole article on that he's got like just a whole bunch of good stuff here so while it isn't updated that often it's still a great resource so it's famvestor.com f-a-m-v-e-s-t-o-r.com and sonny you have a similarly named youtube channel is that right yeah youtube channel is also called famvestor so yeah awesome i'm trying to be a little more proactive on that.

56:09Okay. Very cool. So yeah, if anybody wants to follow along with what his family's up to, definitely check it out. Sonny Burns. Thank you, my friend. Hey, it was a lot of fun. Thanks so much for having me.