My name is Todd Baldwin.
I'm 27 years old.
I live in Seattle, Washington, and I make $615,000 per year.
Money by itself really won't make you happy.
All it is, is a tool to get you what you need.
It's security and you know, it can provide you a great life, but it
doesn't buy you happiness.
Like people think it does.
Out of the $615,000 we bring in, we invest almost all of that just back
into the business, back into more real estate or into different brokerage
accounts. So we don't actually see a lot of that because it's all invested
out. But yes, it's a very comfortable lifestyle and it helps that we're
incredibly frugal.
All for free.
I earned the bulk of my money through real estate investing.
We're bringing about $460,000 per year doing that, and about $150,000 is
profit and that is after living completely for free and all expenses are
paid. We bought our first house at age 23.
We are now 27 and we have $4.4
million dollars worth of real estate.
So some people think that the hardest thing about real estate will be
either insurance or taxes.
Luckily, I work in insurance and my wife is a CPA working in tax, so my
wife and I live completely for free by house hacking and having roommates.
So we live in a brand new duplex and we have the other half of that duplex
on Airbnb and we live in the main half.
We also converted one of the garages into a studio apartment.
We have that on Airbnb as well.
And in our main unit, the half that we live in, we have roommates, so we
rent out one bedroom for $1,200 and another bedroom for $850.
After living in our duplex completely for free by renting out the other
half, the downstairs garage, and the bedrooms on our side, we live
completely for free. Plus we make $1,850 in profit.
I was raised by a single mom and I watched her struggle working four jobs
to try to feed three kids, and she was worried all the time about money.
And I saw it and I could feel it.
And it wasn't a good feeling.
And from a very early age, about 12 years old, I told myself that that's
not something that I wanted in my later years, that's not something that I
wanted for my family, and I had to make a change and do something
different. I got my first job literally shoveling manure for $3 an hour.
And I came home one day and I think I counted up six dollars worth of
quarters. And at the time it was more money than I personally had ever
seen. And ever since that moment, I was like, all right, I've got to make
millions of dollars. I've got to be successful.
I've got to get my money right.
And I've been on that track ever since I started making money online when
I was 15.
And then I started investing at age 19.
But I really just, through reading books, listening to podcasts and
watching YouTube videos, I really just kind of had to figure it out and
learn as I go. When I first got into the commercial insurance
business, I had a salary of $50,000 and I was making 9% commission on
sales. After my first month with that firm, I actually broke a record for
the most amount of appointments set via cold call.
After about nine months with that firm and doing really well there, my
base salary went up by about $4,100 per month and my commissions went from
9% to 40%.
When I was 12 years old, I had the goal that I wanted to become a
millionaire by the age of 30 and after working like crazy and investing
and acquiring properties,
our net worth crossed $1.2
million when we were 25 years old.
Some other things I refuse to spend money on will probably be eating out
and movie theaters, but only because I know how to get paid for that.
I'm so frugal that I can't fathom spending money on that stuff.
So in my mind, it makes sense to get it for free and get paid to do it.
They will hire mystery shopping firms to find independent contractors like
me to basically go pose at their establishment as a regular customer, buy
their product or service, and then report on that product or service when
you get home on an online platform, and when you do that, you get
reimbursed for whatever you bought.
Plus, typically some profit on the top.
We have a punchcard, so our free coffee is adding up to an additional free
coffee. So it's like compound interest basically just on free stuff, which
is mind blowing.
When I was in college, I was completely broke and my wife now but
girlfriend at the time, I wanted to take her out, but I didn't have any
money. It took me two months of saving just to take her out on our first
date. And two weeks later, I got a check in the mail.
And ever since then, we've been going to different restaurants and hotels,
resorts, casinos, getting paid for all of that and getting reimbursed for
what we spent life to date.
We've made just over $30,000 by secret shopping.
The best part is it's stuff we would otherwise do.
I grew up in Washington State.
I met my wife in college.
Although our net worth is seven figures, we don't do a lot of the typical
things that most people envision millionaires doing.
We share one car, which is a 2009 Ford Focus.
We are super frugal and you know you're a real estate guy when you have
$4.5 million dollars of cash-flowing rental properties, but you spent $12
on your wedding ring made completely out of rubber.
I am not a showy or flashy guy, but I do want the Tesla Roadster.
I don't want it to go floss on Instagram or for anything like that.
I want to because it's the fastest car in the world.
I've got a lot of places to be and zero time to waste.
Personally, I would be OK flying first class and doing stuff like that.
My wife won't let us or she doesn't let us fly first class even though we
could very easily.
So we're just, we're very frugal.
We're not cheap, but we would just rather spend money on things that also
make us money. We don't really like spending money on expenses.
We could probably actually retire now if we wanted to.
But our goals are so much loftier than that.
I want my 6,000 apartments by the age of 60, so I don't know if I'm ever
the type of person to truly retire in the traditional sense.
If anything, I want to spend a little bit more money on my wife to
surprise her or do something special for her, but she is so frugal that it
usually doesn't go over well.
So I ended up taking it back and doing something else entirely.
So this is going to freak a lot of you out.
And Dave Ramsey, if you're watching, don't have a heart attack.
I have 13 credit cards and I actually collect credit cards.
Now, I don't carry balances on any of them.
I use a strategy called credit card churning, which is basically opening
up a new credit card, taking advantage of that new account bonus, paying
it off completely and then rinse and repeat with the next card.
When we were converting our garage apartment into the Airbnb, I knew that
there was gonna be some expenses with that.
So I opened up a new credit card where if you spend $1,000 in the first
three months, you get $200 cash back.
Now, I'm not telling anyone to go out of the way to spend $1,000 to make
$200. Otherwise that's an $800 loss.
We would have spent that $1,000 anyway, so we might as well take advantage
of the $200 and we can get cash back.
I used to box in high school, I was a boxer for two years.
Now my wife won't allow me to compete, but I still do training when I can.
My MMA gym is $100 per month and although that's a little bit more, it's
still well worth it for the training that I'm getting.
Our L.A. fitness gym membership is $30 per month and that is well worth it
because your health is your wealth.
It doesn't make sense to be the richest man in the graveyard.
So we've got to keep going to the gym and taking care of our bodies
in the next couple of years.
My wife and I do want to start a family of our own and being in that
position of just knowing that we can pay for their college wherever they
go and we can go on the family vacations, and the biggest thing is being
able to be there and be a present father.
I think is huge.
It's a huge blessing that we've been able to accomplish everything that we
have so far.