What Happens if High Expenses Extinguish Your FIRE?

Mindy:
If you think you’ve achieved financial independence and have left your W2, but then your lifestyle and expenses change, does that mean that you’ve really fired? We’re going to find out in today’s episode. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my still working his W2 because he likes it. Co-host, Scott Trench.

Scott:
Oh dang, Mindy. I would come up with a fun pun for that type of intro, but it’s just too taxing to come up with one on that particular item there. Alright, today we’re going to discuss how Caitlin built, I think a fairly traditional portfolio in real estate. Very aggressive, very smart approach. We’re going to dive into those details for sure and walk through. But the story kind of hinges around buying a lot of real estate in 20 16, 20 17, 20 18, having a great run, making smart decisions, a lot of things that maybe a lot of BiggerPockets folks did in the 20 teens, but then we’re going to talk about how she fired in 2021, unfired shortly thereafter moved her family to a high cost of living area and are we still fire? How do we think about a portfolio that got there, that got the job done in the last couple of years when we want more today?
And I think it’s a really interesting philosophical discussion and I think today’s episode is going to go through all the things, the very beginning of the journey, the grind, the buildup, the achievement of fire, and the burning question that I think a lot of people have as they’re pursuing fire is will it be enough? What happens if I want more? What happens if my expenses go up? So really fantastic guest today. You’re going to love it. Alright, today’s show is going to be sponsored by BAM Capital, your path to Generational Wealth with Premier real estate opportunities CY over 1000 investors have invested with BAM capital at biggerpockets.com/bam. That’s biggerpockets.com/bm. Alright everybody, we have a special offer for BP money listeners because we’d love to meet as many of you as possible at the BiggerPockets conference. So for 1500 bucks, you and a guest can attend the 2024 conference in Cancun, Mexico this October at the all inclusive five star resort of Moon Palace. That’s three all inclusive nights, October 6th, seventh, and eighth, and full conference access for you and a guest. And the ticket also comes with a one hour private call with me and or Mindy before or after the event. This call can be about anything you want including a for entertainment purposes only. Of course, private finance Friday.

Mindy:
This offer is first come, first serve and will be given to the first 10 BP money listeners to receive the offer. Please email our events director [email protected] and let her know you heard about the offer on BP money.

Scott:
Now let’s get into the show. Caitlin, thanks so much for joining us today.

Caitlin:
Well, Mindy and Scott, I’ve learned from both of you since early on in my real estate investing career, so it just feels great to be here.

Mindy:
Ooh, I love to hear that. Well, let’s go back to the beginning. What did your life look like before you discovered real estate? What was your career and what was your financial situation?

Caitlin:
Yeah, early on in my career I had an entry level job. I was working at a tech consulting company and for a 23-year-old I was making 40 KA year, which was certainly not bad, but certainly was an entry level salary for back in 2007. And I was in a good position. I had a couple of things going for me. One was that I had no student debt, so that put me in a great financial position. And number two was that I had really good savings from work that I had done in college. So by the time that I had graduated and eventually got a job, I had a good steady paycheck and I also had a pretty decent amount of savings. And those were two motivators for me, I think to push on with what was my front and center financial goal at the time, which was to buy a home.
So I eventually practiced some house hacking even before I knew what house hacking was. This was in 2008 when I was in the thick of my home buying process. So the economy wasn’t great and I had a lot of people telling me, you should not be buying a home. What if you lose your job and you’re not going to pay your mortgage? Little did I know. I mean that decision to buy a home back when I was in my twenties really just set the groundwork for a later real estate investing career. I mean, I was able to build equity in a very much appreciating market of Denver and that just really set me up well for real estate investing down the road.

Scott:
Hindsight, really good timing. We had someone on recently who bought in 2007 right before, right at the very tip of the peak, and that really set him back for many years on this. But how do things progress and when does your journey with to fire begin?

Caitlin:
Yeah, so things started to progress not right away. Like I mentioned, I was a homeowner and I was just really happy to be living in a home that I owned. And really I wasn’t paying more for my mortgage than I had been for rent prior in Denver. So for several years I was living in this home. I later met my boyfriend who was now my husband, and he and I were talking about our dreams to live a little bit closer into the mountains outside of Denver. And eventually we were able to swing it so that we could come up with money for a down payment for a home outside of Denver where I didn’t have to sell this home that I already owned in Denver. And that’s when I started to kind of daydream about what would it look like if I could be a landlord?
What are people paying for rent in my neighborhood? So I went to trust Craigslist At the time, there was no Zillow for rental markets back then and I was shocked that in my neighborhood people were paying well more than what my mortgage was. And I wasn’t very calculated at that time. I was like, I just want to cover the mortgage. And I look back now and kind of cringe at what I did as a very first time landlord, but I just was able to tell based on those numbers I can make this work and decided to make that home a rental. And we waited at least a year of getting checks in the mail that were proving to us that this really could be a business when we decided let’s really make this a financial goal. So up until this point, I hadn’t been thinking about real estate investing.
My financial goals beyond just having owned this home was I’ll just keep saving for retirement. And then when it became clear that this rental was actually making an income, that’s when my husband and I got motivated to turn this into more of a rental business. So we started to slowly get serious about it, but there was nothing that really turned the table for us at that point in time that made us accelerate growing our portfolio. So we started to do it slowly and we started to do a lot of research and I was on BiggerPockets all the time and I was trying to find more about real estate investing strategy and tax strategy and that’s when I first heard about the fire movement. So what really attracted me to the fire movement was the idea of freedom and not being just tied down to a particular job until I was in my sixties. So I was less attracted to the extreme frugality and aggressively investing in the stock market to hit my financial freedom number. And I was more attracted to this idea of maybe I can generate some passive income to help me break away from my dependency on a job until I’m 65.

Mindy:
How was your job going at this time? We alluded to you leaving employment. Were you becoming disenfranchised with your job or were you still enjoying it?

Caitlin:
I was still enjoying the work that I did. I really enjoyed the people whom I worked with. But what was happening is eventually my husband and I were living this life on the weekends that we just really started to love. We were adventuring off in the mountains of Colorado every single weekend doing what felt like really fun and healthy activities. We were meeting up with friends and it just felt like this is the life that we want to live.

Scott:
So this is 2021, right, that you’re having this discussion.

Caitlin:
So this evolution started to happen really back in 20 20 15, 20 21 is when I actually left my job.

Scott:
I would love to dig a little bit more into the timeline and numbers here. Could you give me a couple of milestones? We bought the first property in 2008. What does your position look like in 2015 when you start to get serious about fire and what does it look like in 2021 when you fire?

Caitlin:
In 2013 is when my now husband and I bought a home together away from that first home. So that’s when I made that first home of mine into a rental. So 2013 is when I say the real estate investing career really started and that felt more like a trial. Let’s just see what happens here. We hadn’t bought that first home with the mindset that we were going to rent it out. I didn’t have any practice doing any sort of underwriting on that first property. So at that point it was just, let’s see if we can make some money while renting this out and it does well. So we took at least a year to test that out and after that first year we decided this is going to work, let’s do it again. So we were trying to scrape up enough money for a down payment on another property in Denver.
Ironically, we felt like in 20 14, 20 15, the market in Denver was just too expensive for us because that’s how it always feels, right? I’m sure that anybody listening right now is wishing that they had the opportunity to buy 10 properties in 2015 in Denver, but we decided, okay, we’re really going to try and build up enough money for another down payment. It took us a while to be able to do that in Colorado, but we did. We bought another single family home in Colorado in 2015, so that was the first property that we bought with the intention we’re going to rent this out. So we ran the numbers on it and then again, it was taking a really long time for us to try and save up again for another down payment. And because we felt the market was so expensive, that’s when we decided let’s invest out of state and see if we can accelerate this.
I also started to do a lot of work to try and find the right team in Grand Rapids, starting with an agent who we felt like really could think like an investor who we could really trust and who understood that we were out of state and could help us find properties out of state. And I would say that the biggest accelerator to our entire real estate portfolio was when we decided to use a HELOC to start being able to fund down payments for our new properties. So I know sometimes this is a little bit of a controversial aspect of talking about real estate investing because we knew that we were going to be extremely leveraged. We were taking on additional risk, but we were also underwriting all of our properties to ensure that we would have enough cashflow left over from all of the expenses from the home to also be able to cover the loan pay down of our heloc, so not just the debt service of that particular property.
And we built that into our underwriting and our process became that we would fund the down payment with our heloc and then we would just focus crazy to pay that HELOC back down. As soon as we did that, we were already looking for the next property. I would look back and say that was the timeframe back. This was like 20 16 20 17 where we used leverage to really accelerate our portfolio. And that just completely changed the pace. Our timeline looked like it was growing like crazy, 20 16, 20 17, 20 18. And then we were sort of switching things around, upgrading consolidating markets in 20 18, 19 and then into 2020 we did happen to start slowing down. I mean, it helped that the market was also slowing down a little bit, but we had gotten to a point where we felt like our portfolio was really stabilized. That’s actually when we hit our financial freedom number. And that’s when we also started to look into other investment strategies as well.

Scott:
Stay tuned for more on how Caitlyn achieved buy with a small real estate portfolio after a quick break. In the meantime, if you’re looking to invest out of state, just like Caitlyn did, starting with a real estate agent is vital. You can go to biggerpockets.com/agent to find a great investor friendly agent in the area you’re looking at.

Mindy:
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. Let’s jump in.

Scott:
So I want to just react to a couple of things here. First, I wish we had all the things we have now at BiggerPockets back when you were doing this because we’ve built a bunch of things like I’m going to plug very hard a couple of things here, like the market finder, which talks about affordability, rent to price ratio, net inbound migration, those types of things in various markets. And I totally like the approach that you took there. I wouldn’t go for the best cashflow market in the country, even if I wanted cashflow, I’d go for the best cashflow market that was nearby or I had some tie to. I think that’s a really good way to reframe that to a large degree. I think there is a really power in there. We have the deal finder to help you find all the cashflow. We’ve got the agent finder and the lender finder and the property manager finder, all of those things. I wish they were there when you got started, as I’m sure that they would’ve been very helpful.

Caitlin:
But you know what, Scott? They were just, they weren’t called those things. It was a great old school tool that we could still use that where we would just ask the questions on these forums and people would answer. And now it’s great because people can just go and use those specific tools. But I’m so grateful that we had the BiggerPockets community to just answer some of our questions about like, Hey, who knows a great investor minded agent in the Grand Rapids market?

Scott:
Well, love it. And then going back to the HELOC component here, I want to first ask, before I react to the heloc, what was your relative income at this point in time? If you’re not comfortable sharing the specifics of the income, can you just give us a range? Was it high, low, medium in order for you to be able to fuel this investing?

Caitlin:
Totally. Our combined income at the time was about 170 K and that plus or minus, based on the range of years that we were working on this strategy. So we weren’t really particularly high earners, but we were in a good position to, and we both had great credit and at this point we had a lot of equity on our primary home. And that I think is what really helped us to get a great heloc.

Scott:
Awesome. Okay. So we had high okay income, pretty good income here with middle, upper middle class incomes each combined to generate a good amount of cash. What would you say you were accumulating that was investible on an annual basis?

Caitlin:
So our savings rate, which was always once we started to invest, it was kind of hard to calculate because we threw all of our savings at one point, we just said we’re going to throw all of our savings back into our rental business. And that was after we both were contributing to 401k match contributing to HSA. So we were doing kind of the traditional steps for contributing to certain retirement vehicles. And then after that we had a pretty aggressive savings rate of it was between eight and 10 KA month,

Scott:
Eight and 10 KA month. So we’re saving a hundred and a hundred grand on 170,000 combined income. So you’re not living large during this period at all.

Caitlin:
Right.

Scott:
Let’s talk about the HELOC here for a second. I think you phrased it the way you did because I’m such a bulldog about not using a HELOC to purchase investment property for most folks, right? And my rationale for not using a HELOC and a down payment, is it just the destruction of cashflow until the HELOC is paid back. So for example, a $60,000 HELOC is going to be a thousand dollars a month to repay over the next five years, 60 months before we even talk about interest. Not many rental properties with a $60,000 down payment from a HELOC are going to produce enough cashflow to offset that. So while you can get an IRR on it, the property is sucking cash out of your life for the duration of that heloc. You used a HELOC here. What was the size of the HELOC for various of these purchases?

Caitlin:
We were not using the size of our HELOC for sure. We were using a pretty small percentage of it, but we were using down payments in the amount of 20 up to 50 K when we bought our most expensive property with it in that market. So a relatively small amount depending on what you’re used to paying for a property. But I couldn’t agree with you more when it comes to if you’re doing the underwriting, I think heloc, especially today, look, I mean this was back when HELOC rates were pretty low, like sub four and then hovering on four. And so that’s when we felt like it made sense rather than take money out of the market rather than disrupt any other savings rate, having a HELOC where we’re paying 4% interest is going to make more sense for us to try and come up with this down payment.
And then it became our first and foremost goal to just pay that HELOC down. So I would agree with you, Scott, that you have to be really diligent that these numbers have to make sense and it became harder and harder for us to keep making those numbers make sense with a HELOC when rates started to rise and then when cashflow margins started to shrink anyway. But I will also talk about another benefit that we had, and you can apply this, it doesn’t just have to be a HELOC goal, but we started creating these goals in our head of, we just bought this house, we used a $20,000 down payment from our heloc. We have to pay this HELOC down asap. And it literally became like an everyday thing, should I pay for this or should I put this into the heloc? And having that short-term goal was a complete game changer for us.
I mean, I think that really helped us live in a way that we were trying to not have lifestyle creep and it made us feel like it was hiding our income too, because any extra bit of income that we had that we could save, we put right down into our heloc. So we also weren’t just depending on the property, although we were underwriting to make sure that the property could cover this HELOC down payment, we were also supplementing that pay down with our own W2 income just to make sure that we could pay that down quicker and just keep using that as a revolving door.

Scott:
Got it. And the reason I wanted to cover this is the thing that I talked about there that let’s say that your position was you’re saving a thousand dollars a month and the HELOC is the only way you’re going to get into this rental property. Well then it becomes a huge burden. You have one property and this is a real major pain in your life and it’s going to take you a year or two to pay off the heloc. That’s what a lot of people do when they’re using the HELOC to buy rental properties. And that’s where you’re going to come to just hate real estate. It’s going to, it’s take cash out of your life and you’re going to be paying that thing off for the next two years instead of going on vacation or doing something fun. When you’re saving $10,000 a month on your savings rate, then the HELOC for 20 K used a down payment.
You’re just accelerating your down payment by two months from this or maybe five months on the $50,000 basis. And then you pay it off as a motivation. The rules change I think to a little bit. You’re just accelerating it by a good bit. Still wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but it makes, it’s not all of a sudden, it’s a very different world between those two scenarios. And I love the way that you guys approached it with this. It obviously paid off really well and it was a motivating factor to save more. So I think that’s a much better use of a HELOC than what I typically rail against with someone accelerating their real estate by four years because they otherwise couldn’t come up with a liquidity.

Caitlin:
Totally.

Scott:
Okay. So we bought a bunch of rentals in 20 16, 20 17, 20 18, high savings rate, fire, obvious outcome from that exercise here. Walk us through the moment of fire, how things went and why you’ve gone back to work

Caitlin:
The moment of fire. I wish it was like this real moment of fire. It was so anticlimactic. I mean, we hit our fire number, which for us was a cashflow number and that was 10 K. Our cashflow goal was 10 KA month. And we had always talked about once we hit that number, at least one of us should quit our jobs. We’ve got two young kids and we’re grinding, but none of us quit our jobs. We hit that 10 K number and we didn’t quit our jobs. And I think there were a few things going on. One is that we had grown pretty comfortable with our savings rate and it’s not like we wanted to keep growing our portfolio at the same rate that we had been. We knew that we wanted to slow down, but it’s just hard to walk away from that income and the savings rate.
So many people talk about that. Probably one of my biggest regrets in that transition is that I had in my head, I’m going to work this job and I until I could just quit and then I don’t have to work anymore. But ultimately I’ve realized I’m not happy just not working. So me leaving my W2 job didn’t feel great, and it also made me feel a little bit like a failure because I felt like I wanted to be a working mom. I wanted to show that I could do that. And there were so many factors at play in terms of why it just started to feel more and more impossible. And that included covid when we had to pull our two kids out of daycare and we were trying to work full-time jobs with two young kids at home. And it included having an employer who really didn’t give a lot of space to their employees and didn’t really walk the walk when it came to providing some space and flexibility.
And then it felt hard to walk away from my job. And then when I eventually did it was because I hit a breaking point and it didn’t feel as good. So unfortunately I didn’t celebrate my financial freedom right away. So it definitely took a little time for me to reflect on that and to come around and say, you know what? It’s okay. That didn’t have to be the outcome and I can create a new outcome for myself, which really was, it took a lot of time for me to just learn about what is it that makes me happy. And it turns out I do like to work and I like to be kind of on a team striving towards common goals with other people and really building towards those goals. I just want to make sure that I can do that on my schedule.

Mindy:
We have to take one final break, but more from Caitlin and her financial journey right after this

Scott:
Art, everybody. We have a special offer for BP money listeners because we’d love to meet as many of you as possible at the BiggerPockets conference. So for 1500 bucks, you and a guest can attend the 2024 conference in Cancun, Mexico this October at the all inclusive five star resort of Moon Palace. That’s three all inclusive nights, October 6th, seventh, and eighth, and full conference access for you and a guest. And the ticket also comes with a one hour private call with me and or Mindy before or after the event. This call can be about anything you want, including a for entertainment purposes only. Of course, private finance Friday.

Mindy:
This offer is first come, first serve, and will be given to the first 10 BP money listeners to receive the offer. Please email our events director [email protected] and let her know you heard about the offer on BP money.

Scott:
Welcome back to the show.

Mindy:
I think this is really valid. I think there’s a lot of people who are thinking just like you, and I think it’s because the fire movement has been historically get to your fine number and then quit. Well, it’s okay to like your job. I like my job. Scott likes his job, and it’s okay to continue to work even if you hate the job that you have, but still want to produce something. You don’t have to leave employment altogether.

Scott:
You mentioned you had 10 KA month in cashflow. I’m phrasing my question poorly here. What were your lifestyle expenses? What’d you need to live?

Caitlin:
Our conservative average at that point was about 6,500 to 7,000. So we had built in a contingency there expecting that there are unforeseen expenses as we grow. What if our portfolio dips? And also we always were trying to say, whatever leftover that we have on this conservative number, we can then just continue to invest or create more savings, more investing opportunities.

Scott:
What do you need today to fund your lifestyle? Did that number go up?

Caitlin:
That number hasn’t yet gone up, although it’s funny that you asked that because we just moved to a new town. And so on that note, actually, I will say that it’s 2024 now, so this is really four years after we truly hit our financial freedom number. But where we are now is my husband did leave his job. So even though he really enjoyed his W2, and he loves his coworkers, and I think he still considers himself very much a part of his old company, we both realize this is our time to be with our five and 8-year-old kids, and we just want to spend as much time with them as we can. And the impetus for him leaving his job too was that we’ve always had our eyes set on this paradise place in Colorado where we’ve always wanted to live and we were finally able to make it happen. We moved there literally a little over a week ago.

Scott:
Islands Ranch, right?

Caitlin:
Yeah.

Mindy:
How did you guess crested beer?

Scott:
Crested Butte. Okay, awesome.

Mindy:
Oh my goodness. Okay. I have a friend who’s moving from Crested Butte. That’s a beautiful town.

Caitlin:
Yes. I mean, we’ve been visiting here for over a decade and before we had kids, we were actually on our rental portfolio. We can just will go and find a place and just live there. And then we had kids and that dream changed, but evolved over time and then we realized we’re still in love with this place. Every time we visit with our kids, they love it too. It’s been a dream for us to relocate and create this, what I call my financial freedom now, is really being able to live in our ideal destination. And it’s this place that we feel really accommodates the lifestyle that we want to live, being active and being very outside and having a really close community around us. So we’re really, really stoked that we’ve been able to make this move. But making it also means that we are expecting our expenses to jump.
So no, our expenses haven’t jumped yet, but we certainly are accounting for that to happen. And I mean, there’s a chance, honestly, our expenses, our expenses wind up creeping past what our cashflow number is. And so we know that there’s a chance at some point that what if we need to tap into our stock portfolio to be able to live off of that income instead. We have a lot of options, but honestly, we’re also completely open to the idea of either one of us. Going back to a quote, real job, like I mentioned, I found out about myself that I really need to feel a certain level of professional productivity in order to be happy. That’s just where I am right now. That doesn’t mean that’s always where I’m going to be, but I have started to build a small business on my own. It’s not, we certainly have not been able to rely on any income from this business yet, but I’m hoping at one point that maybe can supplement us. But until then we’re living off of the expense numbers that we had predicted. We totally expect that that could keep climbing up and our savings rate is going to get lower and lower and we might hit a burn rate. And that’s just a reality that we have. But we’re also in a position right now where we feel like, you know what? We created this rental portfolio and we feel like we can create a new lifestyle as needed.

Scott:
You can always move back to suburban glory in Highlands Ranch at another point in time too. So for those who don’t know the inside joke, so let’s talk about these locations a little bit. Highlands Ranch is where I live. It’s a suburb, perennial suburb like planned development, all that kind of stuff. Crested Butte is basically a resort town in Colorado. It’s four hours on the best possible conditions from downtown Denver to Crested Butte, so it’s way out there. So probably a little less touristy than places like Vail and even Aspen that are more, well particularly well known destinations, but definitely resort. Nice, nice spot here. It’s breathtakingly beautiful place. So very expensive, very high cost of living area out there. And that’s awesome. I think that’s a wonderful way to think about the optionality that business, your real estate, the sacrifices you made for many years to get to this point. That’s a great option to have here.

Mindy:
But I wanted to circle back to your specific situation and just highlight what you’ve done. You didn’t stop working until your cashflow more than covered your expenses, so you are still able to save. That’s a plus. You have a $3,000 buffer every month-ish, two to $3,000 and some months you’re going to go over some months you’re going to be under, but you also have other buckets to pull from to fund the difference. If you go over, and the third thing is let’s say you start consistently going over your $10,000 stays the same cashflow wise, but you’re consistently going a thousand dollars a month over $2,000 a month over. How easy is it to get a fairly, I don’t want to say easy job, but not a super stressful, complex job that can cover that expense. If you decide you don’t want to pull from your stock portfolio or you don’t want to pull from all these other things, you don’t want to buy another rental, your rents never go up, ever.
There’s all these different contingencies that you’ve built in place and it just goes back to the beginning where you made calculated moves to get to this position. And I think that’s really what I want to highlight here is PHI doesn’t happen accidentally. Frankly, it does every once in a while, but it doesn’t normally happen accidentally. It happens because you did a bunch of things on purpose and it doesn’t happen overnight. So I love everything about your story because you’re thinking things through. You’re not jumping in with both feet, flying by the seat of your pants, all the other cliches that we could throw in here. And instead, you’re making calculated moves based on research and information that you’ve gotten from other people and kind of crowdsourcing your knowledge so that you can, oh, this worked for this person. I think I can make that work for me too. And I like what they did. I could do that too. And I love that you have such a repeatable story, repeatable kind of with an asterisk because we had these lower interest rates, but you can make money in any real estate market. So what advice would you have for somebody who’s hearing your story and saying, I’d really like to repeat this, but I’m not sure that I can because interest rates are higher now.

Caitlin:
Yeah, I agree. It’s harder when you have higher interest rates in. I think that we probably would have, if we didn’t have a heloc, we would’ve done something differently to keep accelerating the growth of our portfolio. So what I would emphasize is we had a real turning point, and I think that that was when I had a baby and I was commuting a lot, and I knew all of a sudden that I was going to be spending a lot of time every day away from my new baby. And if I wanted to shorten the timeline on that, we really had to do something quick with our real estate portfolio. So look at what options are available and really make the numbers work. I mean, like I mentioned, going back to those eight months where we were just trying to be really patient, even though we had our goals in front of us, I felt like I had this newborn in my arms and I knew that I didn’t want to spend so many hours every day away from her, but it still was not enough reason for us to just keep jumping at every deal that came across our desk.
So continue to be diligent. Don’t slouch on your criteria just because you’re getting a lot of deals that are just slightly higher, slightly higher. And if it’s not a heloc, find another way to make it work. Maybe it’s just you’re putting money away If there’s a way for you to build additional passive income, or not even passive income, but a side hustle that is allowing you to create this additional savings rate. Or if there’s a way that you can cut down on expenses to keep that savings. And I always like to go back to that short-term goal that I think real estate investing has kept me disciplined in a way that other ways of investing really does not. And that is by providing you with your eyes on these short-term goals. Because you don’t get to fire with just one property. You have to build a bigger portfolio.
But in order to build that bigger portfolio, you do it property by property. So with each property, you have that goal in front of you. And those short term goals are what get us to our longer term financial goals. And I really don’t think it works if all you’re doing is saying, I just need to create $10,000 a month in passive income and I’m going from zero. So how do I do that? So you have to have these shorter term goals along the way. I think that that is really important, even though that’s not a tactical piece of advice. It’s something that really all of our minds need if we’re going to stay motivated because it’s not an easy path. We spent a lot of years really, really grinding, and if you don’t have those goals in front of you, it’s near impossible, I think, to work at that pace.

Mindy:
Absolutely. I mean, we glossed over your whole story in an hour, but it is not an hour. You didn’t start an hour ago and now you’re financially independent. You started 15 years ago and now you’re financially independent. And I think that that’s really important to note. There’s a long slog that isn’t a lot of fun. It’s just continuing on down the path. It’s like hiking the Appalachian Trail. You start at the beginning, you’re like, Woohoo, this is going to be so awesome. And then you get to the end and you’re like, yes, I’m done. But in the middle, there’s a whole lot of nothing. There’s a whole lot of uphill hikes.

Scott:
I just want to thank you for sharing your story here. Congratulate you on the incredible lifestyle that your sacrifices, hard work, smart bets, luck, all those things come together that have gotten you here. I look forward to seeing how the small business goes over the next couple of years and how the time and crested beauty goes. Are there any last concepts you want to share with us before we adjourn here?

Caitlin:
I don’t think so. I think I would like to congratulate you, Scott, for having being someone who loves your W2 in financial freedom. I think that it’s always important to give people permission to keep doing the work that you love no matter how close you are to your financial freedom goals. And I think that that’s not something that we talk enough about. So I love to highlight that. I love your intro on that, and I just appreciate being able to share my story.

Scott:
Well, thank you. And Caitlin, where can people find out more about you?

Caitlin:
Sure. I’ll share some of my socials. I’m at Rising Fem Wealth on Instagram, fem as in F-E-M-M-E. That’s my business profile. It’s something, a passion of mine now to help other women who are on a financial freedom journey. And my website is www.risingfemwealth.com.

Mindy:
Awesome. We will include links to these in the show notes. And Caitlin, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Caitlin:
Oh, it’s been so fun. Thanks for having me on.

Mindy:
Alright, and we will talk to you soon. Alright, Scott, that was a super fun episode and we ran a little bit long today, so I thank Caitlin for sharing her story with us. Should we get out of here?

Scott:
Let’s do it.

Mindy:
That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I am Mindy Jensen and he is Scott Trench, and we are saying Until next, timely. BiggerPockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. This episode was produced by Eric Knutson, copywriting by Calico Content, post-production by Exodus Media and Chris McKen. Thanks for listening.