hey guys retired at 40 I'm going on a little road trip today just me and Murph
and last week I reached a milestone on my channel and I hit a million views
total and 10,000 subscribers in the same week since I've been getting requests
for quite a long time about how I retired at 40 and I'm on a long road
trip right now I figured what better time to share the story so without
further ado here's the retired at 40 story so before I get started I want to
say that this is not in any way a brag story in fact I'm definitely not a showy
type guy I enjoy very simple things in life and money to me is more of just a
vehicle to be able to retire young and have my family live a comfortable and an
easy life and to be able to enjoy lots of life experiences and be comfortable
in life before I'm old and gray so really the journey began in about 2002
graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in marketing and business
and by that point I have met my wife Kelly she had already graduated from
school and she was kind of waiting for me and we wanted to move west out of the
Midwest to move west see some new territory and get closer to the outdoors
so I grabbed my degree ran out the door packed up my 1987 Ranger fully equipped
with eight foot hay racks full of all of my personal belongings and we drove to
Littleton Colorado and at this point in my life I had $200 in my pocket and
Kelly had about the same so being completely naive and basically
completely broke but with a degree I was on the search for the best suit and tie job
that I could possibly find so I bounced around for a couple months
just working some kind of halfway jobs and I quickly realized that I did not
want to wear a suit and tie and I wanted nothing to do with the man and working a
nine-to-five job well Kelly had found a job in a real estate office working the
front desk and she had become friends with a couple of the big-time Realtors
there one of which you caught wind that I had some handyman type skills but he
made me a deal that if he paid cash for a house and I fixed it up that he would
split the profit with us 50/50 and at this point in my life all I saw was
dollar signs if I was completely blown away that there was someone that could
pay cash for a house this is coming from a guy who had less
than $200 in his pocket at this point it was pretty much scraping by I tried to
hold back my excitement to him but naturally I said yes please let's do
that I was working the graveyard shift at Target stocking shelves I'd worked
for 10 hours I would go home grab a little bit of breakfast and I'd head
over to the property and work on it for another five or six hours I try and
catch a few hours of sleep and then I would rinse and repeat it was at this
point in my life that I learned a few different things one you really have to
dig deep to reach your goals in life because I was not getting paid by the
hour and at this point I didn't know how much money I was gonna make I didn't
know if I would make $500 when this was all done or if I was going to make
$5,000 when this is all done so I learned that a lot of things that can
benefit you financially you have to put in the work upfront without knowing what
your final outcome is going to be after about three months which seemed
like an eternity of working seven days a week for sometimes 15 sometimes 20 hours
a day on this house the house was ready to go on the market and it was all
finished it looked great and then before you knew it it's sold
and then the house closed and at this point I still didn't know what we were
gonna make off it but for me it didn't matter the hard part was done I didn't
have any of my own money into it I just had my time basically so the guy we were
doing the investment with hands me an envelope and I opened it up and at
$8,000
being twenty-two years old and having $8,000 I might as well have hit the
lottery and that brings me to my second valuable lesson that I learned and that
is being responsible with money
so when you have $8,000 and you're 22 years old a lot of people would go buy
a new car they'd go buy some flashy things some pretty things but to me I
had realized that if I can make $8,000 once I can make $8,000 again and again
and again and again so I can either go p*&% the $8,000 away that I had worked my a#* off for
or I can take that $8,000 and do exactly what he did but do it myself and
potentially make twice or three times as much money so my wife being in a real
estate office we became acquainted with quite a few smart people financially
smart people we learned a lot about real estate very quickly because we were
willing to learn which is my next valuable life lesson
is that you never stop learning so we took our $8,000 we put a small down
payment on a condo in Littleton because we realized that giving someone
else our money was you might as well be throwing it away we wanted to be working
towards something and it own something on our own so we took our other four or
five thousand dollars and we started our search for a real estate investment that
we could do all of our all on her own and get a hundred percent of the profits
so after some searching we did find a place we found a small town home it was
not in as nice of area as we were living it was smaller it needed lots of work
but that takes us to our next light life lesson that we learned and that is to
sacrifice for a greater payoff in the future so we had only lived in our condo
for a very short time but we realized that if we moved into the real estate
investment that we could rent out the place that we are living at and move
into the place that we were fixing up that we'd have to be paying a mortgage
on anyway we had our first real estate investment and we had our first rental
so being 22 years old and owning two properties and carrying two mortgages
and at this point I'm still working at Target was a pretty scary proposition in
life but all I could see was that $8,000 check they had started to change our
lives I also want to point out and kind of give a shout-out to my parents and to
my wife's parents because neither one of our parents ever handed
us anything in life they always made us work for what we achieved
in fact when we move we tried to convince my parents to co-sign on our
mortgage for the condo that we bought and they said no way at the time I was
very very mad at them and I thought I would never forgive them
in hindsight it was one of the best things they've ever done for me
because it just made me have that fire in my belly and really just want to work
to get what I wanted so back to having two mortgages that was a completely
scary thing in my life I was making something like 10 dollars an hour at
Target I think Kelly was making $13 an hour at
the real estate office she was working at we could barely afford the condo we
had but now he had two. God bless the banks lending money to anyone at that
point on the very plus side of that we learned that someone else can pay our
mortgage and we're basically getting that money for free and then later we
figured out that there are many many many tax benefits and huge benefits of
owning a rental property
so we quickly learned that trying to pay for materials and the things needed to
fix up an investment property on just barely over minimum wage is not easy to
do the thing that happened next couldn't have come at a more perfect time so all
of a sudden I had money to spend to fix up this house
and it would just get me to that next big paycheck that much quicker so that's
what we did we fixed up the house we doubled our money we rolled it into the
next one so we kept bouncing from house to house quite a few times and that
sacrifice of from going from a nice house to live in to going to a crappy
house to live in to fix up to making it nice again to going to another crappy
house to fix up it became pretty stressful but we always had our eyes on
the prize "are you still with me Murph?" after doing this two or three times I
remember getting a check for the last one and the check was forty one thousand
dollars so at that point it didn't make sense to
work at Target anymore so I just started doing it full-time but we never took the
big proceeds from the real estate and put it into our actual living we always
rolled it into the next property and that kind of gave us the baseline of
even how we live today we always live well below our means we take the money
that we make and we put it into things that will make us an income not into
something that will lose us money but you do have to treat yourself every once
in a while otherwise there's no reason to make the money in the first place
Kelly saw many of the high producing Realtors making large amounts of money
so she decided to get a real estate license and she created her own real
estate business so now we really felt like we had the world by the balls
because we were getting paid a commission to buy the property and then
we were saving half of the Commission when we sold the property and I was
fixing him up so we just get rolling our profits in rolling our profits in
rolling our profits in until family we were able to buy a house and now that we
could get a house we were playing with the big boys the profits were much
larger but so was the risk and we really didn't want to lose all the way it
worked for for the last couple of years so we did a few houses and we made some
great money but instead of selling them and pulling out our profits we kept them
as rentals
and it was at this point that we really started building up our rental inventory
at this point it was about 2006 or 2007 and real estate was starting to slow
down a little bit but we have purchased a large house I'm a courage that was
really a big risk for us it was a large house to fix up it was our biggest
project for sure it took us the most money to fix it up and we had the most
money into it so we lived in this house for about 8 months while we were fixing
it up and we kind of decided after doing about 12 properties that the moving all
the time was starting to get kind of old and we were kind of getting older
ourselves and we decided that we wanted to have kids and kind of settle down a
little bit
Murph are you with me? sometimes I feel like I'm just talking to myself
so after the eight months was up we finished the house we sold it and
shortly after the real estate market completely crashed the bubble had burst
and Colorado was one of the hardest hit States we got out of the house just in
the nick of time and not only did the real-estate market bubble burst we found
out that we couldn't have kids and it seemed like a real low point in our
lives but around 2007 when all this happened we realized our next lesson
with every negative there is a big positive that can be gained from it and
you can just use it as fuel for your fire
so the recession was tough we thought our great life had come to an end we
thought we were gonna have to get regular jobs you know people were losing
their jobs left and right people were losing their houses Colorado was hit
very very hard one of the worst states during the recession and we learned that
what goes up must come down and in this case it came down hard in
many cases not just real estate when things are bad that's the time to invest
and if you're smart with your money and you've been saving while everyone else
spending that's the time to benefit though from about 2008 to 2012 we were
buying rentals
so we were able to adapt I started doing contracting because that's pretty much
what I was doing before but now I had to be doing work for someone else and
Kelly's always been a mover and a shaker and even a bad real estate market she
was able to keep her business moving we were buying things for pennies on a
dollar and even though we were not making great money and in some cases
losing a little bit of money on rentals we were able to stick it out and after
lots of lots of years of lots of lots of heartache and lots of lots of doctors we
were able to have two boys
so about 2014/2015 real estate started creeping back up again prices kept going
through the roof and just when he thought it was the peak they just kept
going up stuff was flying off the shelves you could list a house and it
would have multiple offers within 24 hours
so we had about age 35 we were completely debt-free we had several
rentals that we were cash flowing we didn't owe any money on the rentals so
all that money was just rolling into a bank account when you have no bills and
you have an income coming in your net worth starts to grow very quickly so we
rode out the storm Kelly's business was doing great my contracting business was
doing great we have liquidated a lot of our real
estate in Colorado we had capital to play with we had two beautiful young
boys and then I fell to my knees crying like a little baby
I had herniated a disc in my back and I was on a walker for about a month
contracting for me was out of the question I didn't even want to think
about picking something up so I took some time off and I raised our kids
which at first I thought would just be for a few months and then a year passed and then
another year passed and I decided that I kind of liked it we had rental income
coming in Kelley's business was doing better than it had ever been in fact she
had started her own she had several people working for her and just as a
little side income I got to do what I love to do which is antiques I was just
buying and selling antiques so we were trying to be very strategic at this
point because we owned a fair amount of property in Colorado but we knew that
our ultimate goal was to retire at 40 and at the rate things were going up we
didn't want to sell too early because we didn't want to miss out on that upside
but we didn't want to sell too late because we didn't want to risk the
chance of taking a step back so as some regret we sold the majority of our
properties in around 2017 but this was a game-changer because we
were able to make cash for every rental that we purchased so we loaded up on
rentals in Iowa we actually purchased our property that we're going to move
into which is actually where I'm headed now
and that kind of brings us up to speed to current date I take care of our 10
rentals which keep which keeps me pretty busy just in itself i buy and sell
antiques i get to see my kids all the time we have a good rental income coming
in now we do youtube oh yeah we also do a couple fix and flips every year Kelly
has her real estate team with about 10 employees and in June of 2020 we're going to
retire at 40 so all in all life is great I have a wonderful family I have enough
assets and passive income to live a comfortable life
I don't need Ferraris and yachts to make me happy in fact for me it's quite the
opposite so if you're new to the channel take a moment to subscribe click the
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always available to answer questions and I love hearing from you guys I'm glad
you were able to enjoy my roadtrip with me I'm just pulling into the house right
now in the meantime this is retired at 40 remember to live life simple I'll
catch next week