I started getting diagnosed with some
fairly serious medical ailments.
I just began to realize that I had been working
for a retirement that I may never enjoy.
We just knew we wanted the freedom to make our
own choices with our time.
And that's where financial independence
came in. Then it turned into how fast can we do
this? Let's get it done as fast as we can.
We started to accumulate real estate in the vein
of let's have an additional source of
income besides my job.
We accumulated 19 units over the span of just
from 2016 to 2019.
I'm Debbie and I'm Chris.
We are 43 and live in Colorado and retired by
the age of 40.
I never wanted to be a millionaire.
That was never a goal, even, you know, now in my
forties, I just wanted to have enough money to
be able to pay my bills.
When I was 21, 22, somewhere in there, I
remember reading The Millionaire Next Door.
It was eye opening to me because the stories they
highlighted in that book were very similar to what
we do. Once it became in that realm of reality
that I could maybe be a millionaire, then I did
become fascinated with the idea of being a
millionaire in both healthy and unhealthy
ways.
Once Debbie left her job, we're now completely
dependent on my job.
Honestly, like, I'm sure there was more than this,
but I tell the story that basically I just
stopped going to Subway.
Obviously, that's not the whole case, but
that's all it really felt like.
Once we started tracking our spending a little bit
better with budgeting, I was the guy that was
always trying to turn the knob down on our
spending.
Chris used to think it was fun to like try to
spend $100 a month on groceries and just eat
what came out of the pantry.
So we both kind of had this thought, what if you
want to leave your job someday?
That thought easily turned into how can we
use our money to buy us more time?
I was mainly hearing a lot of stories about
rental real estate.
Some people were were building mega empires
with rental real estate. I wasn't looking to do
that. I just wanted to have additional income.
And in the in the process of going from we
don't know anything about being landlords and
real estate owners to let's buy our first
property, I scoured the Internet and spent a lot
of time listening to podcasts, watching
YouTube videos, reading blogs and forums.
And we got this like eight and a half by
eleven vision board type of thing.
So it was just something that we could write on
with chalk that we had in our kitchen that would
remind us of our goals.
And, and as I was writing those goals down,
I believe we had like by the end of 2016, we were
going to have two properties and by the end
of 2017 we were going to have four properties.
We were getting properties that other
people didn't want.
There was something that was a bit of an ugly
duckling about them.
For me, a very difficult part of this was a lot of
elbow grease, fixing up the ugly things, working
on the houses, getting smoke, smells out,
painting everything, tearing a bunch of
flooring out. I'm spending full days over
there. Chris is getting off work.
He's spending nights and weekends over at these
rental properties to get them ready for tenants
and make them nice places to live.
And as we were doing that, I'm still saving 50
to 60% of our income through my paycheck.
All the extra money we weren't spending out of
your paycheck was going toward buying more rental
homes. All of the cash flow we were getting from
rentals was going toward buying more rental homes.
We accumulated 19 units over the span of just
from 2016 to 2019.
So it was a pretty pretty fast and furious
four years.
We actually ended up reaching fire at least
three years earlier than we had projected.
So gross income from our rental properties can
vary based on vacancy, capital expenditure,
rehab, repairs, those kinds of things.
But it is between 8 to 10000 per month and our
net income from our rental properties is
between 4 to 6000 a month.
So the money we live off of comes purely from our
real estate investments.
We do have mortgages on all of our rental
properties that we consider business debt.
Our tenants pay those mortgages for us
essentially, and rents continue to rise as they
do so as the mortgage goes down.
Right now, our investments look like we
have about $350,000 in a combination of
traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs and a brokerage
account, $35,000 set aside in a 529 account
for our girls and another $20,000 in bonds.
The insurance that she sells for one month a
year provides that extra cushion of safety or
comfort, as well as some other discretionary
spending. Our budget now in FIRE, it looks very
similar to what it was pre FIRE in that none of
our categories really went any different
direction except for travel.
We usually have about $10,000 in our travel
budget over the course of any time, and it's
more than we spend.
Instead of having a job where I would work 48
weeks a year and have four weeks off, I would
say now that I work probably four weeks a
year and have 48 weeks off.
And we found in our lives that meaning and purpose
are important to our emotional and physical
health. And part of that is around work.
We are really enjoying having this freedom of
time to make connections, to travel
and explore. Our daughters are getting
older whether we like it or not.
They'll be graduating and I'm excited to be a
part of of their lives as they move forward into
their next chapters and have the abundance of
time to be able to be in their lives as much as
they will allow us or as much as as feels
comfortable.
I think when we were searching for financial
independence, what we wanted was freedom and
independence from having to go to a place and do
with things someone else told us to do.
And we still want that and we value that.
But I think what we found through it is a
much deeper, fuller, richer life.