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Finance Friday: Fighting Cancer, Starting a Family, & “Planting Seeds”

The BiggerPockets Money Podcast
47 min read
Finance Friday: Fighting Cancer, Starting a Family, & “Planting Seeds”

It’s hard to imagine what someone is going through once they’re given a cancer diagnosis. The last thing many people want to think about during such a troubling time is finances. This was true for Zachary, who’s combined net worth with his partner more than doubled while he was supporting her throughout her chemotherapy and cancer surgeries.

Even though it was a medically troubling year, Zachary and his partner were able to almost double their income, while keeping expenses fairly low. This allowed them to set a 50% savings rate and keep enough to pay for treatments, retirement investing, and even save for IVF (in vitro fertilization). Since IVF is such an expensive treatment, Zachary wants to know how he can best position himself to pay for it while his partner reduces her time at work to take care of their future children.

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Mindy:
Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast, show number 214, finance Friday edition, where we interview Zach and talk about the most advantageous asset allocation.

Zachary:
The three quarters time, this is an idea Nikita thought of which was essentially trying to still have a full-time job, especially for her because she does need the health insurance and it’s just hard to get it elsewhere. But trying to find a position that allows us either to work fewer hours during the day, or just take more time off during the year.

Mindy:
Hello, hello, hello, my name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my sunshine on a rainy day co-host, Scott Trench.

Scott:
Well, always a pleasure to be with my beaming co-host, Mindy.

Mindy:
Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, to introduce you to every money story, because we truly believe that financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter where or when you’re starting.

Scott:
That’s right. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, going to make big time investments in assets like real estate, start your own business, or simply move to a part-time or three quarters work world, we’ll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way, so you can launch yourself towards those dreams.

Mindy:
Scott, I’m so excited to talk to Zach today. His situation is already advantageous. He and his wife make a very good salary and they have a rental property in another state. They have their own home that they Airbnb in the basement. So a bit of a twist on the house hack and they seem to be doing really, really well. They do have a rather large expense coming up in the form of in vitro fertilization treatments in the next couple of years. And that is something that we haven’t discussed on this show before. So that was really interesting to talk about. And then there was a nice bit of discussion over, should he buy locally versus should he buy more real estate in the Midwest where it’s lower cost of entry? I think this was a super fun episode and I hope that a lot of people get a lot out of it.

Scott:
Yeah. I thought it was a great episode and I think he’s got a really interesting approach and really strong position from which to attack the next phase of his financial journey from.

Mindy:
He has a lot of different options. What I really about his strategy is he’s thinking about different things. He’s thinking outside the box, but he’s also getting ready to do a lot of research before just jumping in with both feet, which is the way that you become the most successful, is by being prepared. Before we bring in Zach, we are going to read the stuff that my lawyer makes me say. The contents of this podcast are informational in nature and are not legal or tax advice. And neither Scott nor I, nor BiggerPockets is engaged in the provision of legal tax or any other advice. You should seek your own advice from professional advisors, including lawyers and accountants regarding the legal, tax and financial implications of any financial decision you contemplate.
Okay, let’s go give Zach some financial decisions to contemplate. Zach and his wife are making good money in their jobs, have and investment property out of state and spend less than they earn. But they work high stress jobs, and 2020 wasn’t even bigger kick in the teeth for them than for most. A cancer diagnosis has them rethinking how they want to spend their days. They’re looking at starting a glamping business and they want to make sure they’re optimizing for their asset allocation. Zach, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

Zachary:
Very excited to talk to you guys too. Thank you for having me on.

Mindy:
We have a lot of things to get to today. So let’s jump right in. What does your income debts and expenses look like?

Zachary:
All right. Pulling up the spreadsheet now. It looks like we have, so 2020 has been, like you mentioned, an interesting year. We both got new jobs that are significantly higher paying. That’s been a great happening. This time last year I was working at a software implementation job that made in the mid 50s. And now as of next week, I’m going to be starting as a Salesforce admin at a startup with a starting salary of $92,000 a year. Nikita’s W-2, she got a new job and then got a raise at that job. And now she’s making $78,000 a year. We also moved to Utah and bought our first house that we’ve lived in, although it was our second house that we bought, and Airbnb the basement. We could probably cover our mortgage if we just went all in, but we have people visit and so we block it off a lot or if we’re just tired of doing it, we block it off.
I’d say average is around $1,000 a month. We’ll find out at the end of the year what that will be. We also live about 25 minutes from some ski locations. So the winter likely will make more than the summer months. I have a side gig right now. There’s a program that helps people get into Salesforce and I run some of the volunteer projects along that, that makes 5,000. And if I didn’t say Airbnb, yeah, $1,000 a month, so 12,000 a year. I did little calculations, estimating the taxes and dividing it by 12, and I think all in were probably around $12,000 a month in income.

Scott:
All Right. That’s a tremendous income there and it’s all relatively new. How new is that? Is that in 2020? Is that starting now?

Zachary:
Yeah. Well, I started making more mid 2021. But I started at a consulting firm and that was the job that was stressing me out. We’ll see how this next one goes. I think it’ll be a little bit less stress. I’d say this time last year I was making 50, Nikita was making 60. We didn’t have Airbnb or side gigs, so yeah, doubled in the last year for the pandemic.

Scott:
All right. That’s awesome. How about your expenses?

Zachary:
Expenses have gone… Well, I don’t know. They’ve been all over. This is another difficult thing that we have going on. They went up because of medical bills. But we also for about six months lived with my parents in Colorado because the health care was a little bit better there. And so that living expense went down and we subleted our apartment, although we were still losing a lot of money on that. And then we bought a house in Utah which went up, but then we also Airbnb, so that helps with the expenses. And we think of the Airbnb as money that we will use to make improvements on the house. It’s a 1960s house that overall is pretty nice, but there’s a lot of things that we’d like to do with it. Build a deck out back. We just got chickens, that actually didn’t cost that much money.
Potentially put a second bathroom in the basement. So that upper Airbnb rents and put it in if we wanted to do a long-term rental, we could. The expenses have gone up. I did look back at 2019, we use an application called, You Need a Budget. We’ve been doing that for three or four years. 2019, I believe our annual expenses were about 60,000, all in. This year it’s looking like it’ll probably be about $75,000. We did have some creep, bought a Peloton, bought a home gym. You can see behind me, this is an infrared sauna that I have in my spoffice. We did spend some money on some things, and I don’t know if it was just because we needed a release valve or if just buying a new home, we bought a bunch of tools for a retaining wall that we just built, spent a couple thousand on a retaining wall. Expenses are a little bit more but not in comparison to the increase in income, I’d say.

Scott:
Yeah, you’ve got just a huge income and you’re spending less than half of it. Is what I just heard from that.

Zachary:
Actually I moved it over to a spreadsheet for you, Scott, so hopefully you appreciate that. And that was the first time I noticed, with my new job, we will be at that 50% mark, which is like, we’ve been going for that forever, trying to basically invest half of our income and live on the other half. I think last time I remembered calculating that we’re at 35, 36% and we’d always been going for 50, so it looks like we’ll be there soon.

Scott:
Before we get to the investing and net worth stuff, because you have a lot left over with that. We mentioned there’s a cancer diagnosis. Is that impacting timelines or thoughts or anything like that or is that something we don’t want to discuss?

Zachary:
The cancer definitely was a major part of 2020 for us. It was actually, tomorrow’s our anniversary and that’s when we noticed something might have been wrong for the first time. About a month later, the diagnosis came in, she had stage three ovarian cancer, had to immediately go in for surgery, then did infusions of chemotherapy. That had a massive impact on her health. But also since we’re on the money show financially, she was on a plan where there was, I think it was $6,900 out of pocket. And so we paid that essentially instantly with all the hospital bills and whatnot. And then her health insurance renewed in September because she is a teacher, and so we paid that again. That was a pretty big out of pocket expense that we had to do.
Although fortunately we did have some cancer insurance. She had bought cancer insurance about three or four years ago, because she her heritage is Ashkenazi Jew, which have higher rates of the type of cancer that she just got, breast and ovarian cancer are the two most likely ones. And so that almost paid for our out-of-pocket expenses, that netted things out. The other big impact that it’s going to have is her ovaries were removed, so we’re going to have to do IVF which Mindy and I were talking about beforehand, the low end estimate is about $20,000 for just one round of giving it a go. We’re hoping it goes on the first one, but that doesn’t always happen.

Scott:
Now, it sounds like though that the biggest health issue was resolved favorably with this.

Zachary:
Yeah. Fortunately the surgery got all of her cancer, the cancer drugs did their job and she is currently cancer free and this new program that she’s on, is the reason why we can’t do IVF earlier than this, is an oral chemotherapy that she’s going to be on for two years. And the studies just came out a month before she started them. And it reduces the rate that she is likely to get it again, in the 30%, which is just awful. It was just like how basically we’ve got a huge, huge chance of this happening again. It’s a very aggressive cancer. It went from… We don’t need to get into details, but very, very aggressive cancer to less than 1%, which is the rate of normal cancer just in the general public. Really just luck the heck out with that at least so far. We’re hoping that luck continues.

Scott:
That’s fantastic. Going back to the finances of this, in the scheme of your finances that’s not going to be a major issue relative to your income and your expense ratio with that, that will impact a lot of those things, and I think that’s wonderful.

Zachary:
I imagine Nikita is going to be going to our out-of-pocket max for the foreseeable future. So you’ll see in one of the expenses I just put $1,000 a month for medical.

Scott:
Yeah. Okay. Fair enough there with that. More important thing is that the health issue has been resolved here and you guys are in a relatively strong position where you can plan around that, I think.

Zachary:
Yes, yes. Yeah.

Scott:
Okay. Well, let’s go to investments and net worth then. What’s the current state there?

Zachary:
It is, man, another, as horrible as 2020 was for a lot of reasons, both the real estate and the stock market seemed to think things were awesome. Our net worth really, really jumped up. This time, last year, I’m trying to look at, it’s going to get to May. Actually I’ll just do all dates. I’m looking at my YNAB that has a net worth tracker. If I look at, what is it? 2020, our net worth was in the 160s, and now it is coming on 400,000, maybe about between 350,000 and $400,000. That primarily is made up in retirement accounts and real estate equity. I can go through the individual numbers if you want, or we can just summarize things. How would you like me to?

Scott:
Let’s summarize, what’s in the retirement? What’s the total bounds for retirement accounts and can you give us a high level picture how that spread across? It sounds like you have multiple.

Zachary:
Yeah, absolutely. It looks like retirement accounts have $183,000 in it. We have about 50, $60,000 in cash and the equity in real estate. One of them for our out of state property, which is in Muncie, Indiana. Probably shouldn’t say that, it’s a very good price to rent ratio there. So feel free to look that up. The prices have gone up since we bought, and it was just this summer. But it’s still great. And if anybody needs a reference to a great property manager I have one. And then our home equity is about $50,000. That’s another thing, I just checked the Zillow last night, we bought at 450, which was well above asking, and this was in February, we finally closed. And Zillow’s already saying, I know that’s not a great thing, but it really is that the comparables are really going up about 515 as of last night.
I’m going to conservatively say that we have 50,000 in equity with that, because we only did put 5% down. So we’ve got a 427 in a mortgage, and then that plus the increase in equity is about 50.

Scott:
Well, I love it. What is the goal?

Zachary:
Yeah, I’m glad you asked. We were talking about that last night, because I was like, okay, well, I’m going on the BiggerPockets, and I’ve got Scott and Mindy. I think one of the things that you guys are both really, really good at is looking at the end goal and then trying to come up with a plan based off of that. I was like, Nikita, what do we want to do? In the next two years, or wait a minute, two kids in the next five years. But really at the end of that two year period where Nikita will be done with her treatment, we want to start doing the IVF, so that bill will come pretty quickly. In the next five years also be three quarters time. This is an idea Nikita thought of, which was essentially trying to still have a full-time job, especially for her, because she does need the health insurance and it’s just hard to get it elsewhere.
But trying to find a position that allows us either to work fewer hours during the day, or just take more time off during the year, is what we’d like to do. I think we’re both in careers where that might be possible. But that’s our goal. And if that is less possible to try to create some income stream where either one or both of us didn’t have to work, or maybe one of us can be part time because Nikita did want to start to play a big role in raising the kids and I would just like to work less.

Scott:
It sounds like the goal is not to sprint towards a huge net worth as rapidly as possible, but rather put yourself in position where in the next three years, let’s say, you can work three quarters time and your wife can not work at all.

Zachary:
Yes. Actually that sounds good. I think we were thinking both of us work three quarters time, but I think her not working at all and then potentially doing some of our real estate ideas that we were talking about, I think she’d be a good fit for that role. She does 90% of the Airbnb right now. We like hosting, and that might be something that she could do while she’s raising our kids. The only thing about that though, to go back on it, is health insurance for her. She still may need a position, whether it be half time or three quarters time or something that would allow her to still get health insurance-

Scott:
Or you need a position that would provide health insurance for the family. Right?

Zachary:
Oh yeah. I forgot you can do that because we’ve always had separate health insurances. Yes, yeah, nevermind, problem solved. There we go.

Scott:
Because what I’m hearing you say is that, it sounds like the goal is to have at the earliest point possible the option for one of you to work three quarters time and the other not to work a formal job at all. That’s what I’m hearing, but I want to make sure I’m not putting the words in your mouth.

Zachary:
That sounds like you clarified what we were talking about last night. I like that idea.

Scott:
Okay. And it sounds like you’re at least a year away from trying to get pregnant or anything like that.

Mindy:
Two years.

Zachary:
Yeah. But basically two years, basically two years, although some of the expenses will be coming up sooner. But yeah, two years from starting that. That’s the timeline where as soon as hopefully she gets pregnant, she can start stepping down and I can be in a position where I’m not working 50, 60 hours a week at a high stress job.

Scott:
So you got two years plus probably a little bit, plus or minus, to put together a financial position that would make this really easy, is kind of what I’m backing into with that. I see you sent us a really nice spreadsheet ahead of time. You put something called Coast FI into your spreadsheet. Is that one of the concepts you’ve been noodling on as you maneuver towards this goal?

Zachary:
Yeah, that was something I heard on Joe’s podcast at one point or another. I did like the idea. Originally when I reached out to Mindy my microphone wasn’t working so we had to reschedule. The idea was to potentially get in a position within a couple of years to have reached Coast FI, and then start a glamping business. This is an idea that I heard from a YouTuber called Rob, can’t remember his last name, but his YouTube channel is Robuilt. Really fun, entertaining guy. He just doing what we did. He bought a house that was maybe a little more than he needed, did a basement apartment, and then he actually built a tiny house in his backyard. He was living in California. So that’s allowed as well as it’s really expensive there and higher Airbnb rates.
And then he started doing sites in Joshua Tree, and either tiny houses or yurts or A-frames. I really liked the idea of that we’re a few hours from Moab, which is near Arches National Park. I thought that would be an interesting idea for us to move out there, buy a property with a little bit of land on it, so four or five acres, and then on that property, we could either Airbnb the whole property or live in that property and put campsites around it. If you look on Airbnb in that area, we’re definitely in some of these summer months, so the prices might go down a little bit because it is very hot in Moab. But you get 150, 200, $100, just depending on what type of glamp site you set up.
It seemed to me to be a crazy ROI where you spend, let’s say, $30,000 on a year and make it really bougie, do three or four of those on your property and make your money back in the first year and then can coast on that as well. Kind of crunch some of the numbers, and I felt we could with five units pretty easily after expenses be making about $60,000 doing that. That was one idea, and that would potentially get us to the end goal of Nikita not needing to work and me working less. But it doesn’t have to be the solution.

Scott:
What I’m hearing you say is, you’re not willing to maybe cut completely on your spending side right now, but you are willing to put in a lot of creative thought and hustle and entrepreneurial endeavors into creating income streams over the next year or two to fortify this position as much as possible as long as you’re working towards an asset that can produce repeatable income. Is that what I’m hearing?

Zachary:
I think so, with the real estate stuff, I find it fun. I love just looking at Zillow, looking at Airbnb, see what the different rates are, seeing what we can afford and how much revenue that would come in. And right now since we’re in such a good cash position, both having reasonably good paying jobs and no kids and being able to offset our living expense with Airbnb, it seemed a good time to just start building assets. And that’s essentially what I want to know, is what do you think would be the best way to build those assets up? Because I have done the long term more traditional and that’s been decent. We make about $300 a month right now after being pretty conservative about CapEx and other expenses.
We believe at our next lease signing, we will be able to make $1,000 a month because we just did a $30,000 renovation where we added two bathrooms, renovated a third bathroom and added a new washer, dryer to the basement. It’s a 10 bedroom. It’s basically a sorority. But we made it a lot nicer. And so if we can get a few more people renting it. It’s I believe six girl, no, maybe seven girls are renting it right now, but if we can get 10 girls in there, the price would actually go down for each of them and we would be making more. That’s the guy. I only suggest Dane, if he can actually get us that. That’s our property manager who suggested the renovations, found the house and we’re already doing well with it.
But even then, it’s like, okay, well, that’s $1,000 a month, it’s going to take a lot to get to that. And we invested quite a bit too, because I believe we put 20 to 25% down and then the renovations and we don’t want to do a cash-out refi because the rate we got was so low, we got it in August, and I think it was around 3.5% for an investment loan, which was decent. We can only do maybe one more of those in a year. I’m trying to think, what can we do with essentially $6,000 a month in the next two years? So it may be like $100,000, maybe a little bit more of money. How can we put ourselves in a position to where maybe the option of walking away for both of us is there, but definitely the option for one of us walking away and another one maybe stepping back a little bit.

Scott:
Well, I love it. I think this is great context. I can’t speak to buying a sorority house and the cashflow potential in that, or buying in Moab, and producing income. Although I visited Moab and we paid a tremendous amount of money for an Airbnb that was like 300 square feet in an alley. But it was great. But it was just like, you open the door there’s the bed, and that’s the property with it. I think you’re onto something with thinking here. What I’m hearing you say is, I’m investing a lot of time and energy and thought and excitement into this real estate stuff and I believe the ROI is there and that there’s multiple opportunities that my creative brain can seize over the next year or two in a way that’s going to produce returns that I cannot have a risk adjusted odds of replicating anywhere else, in a realistic sense.
I’m convinced of that, based on what you’ve said here. And to me that says, okay, if I go back to the strategy and we had a sneak peak, thanks again to your great preparation for some of these things, about where you’re allocating your money. I think based on what I’m hearing here, I would say, yeah, go ahead, allocate that away from those retirement accounts and into these approaches, because you’ve clearly got interest and the ability to model it and the ability to think through it, and the willingness from a strategic perspective to operate it in future years. I think based on what I’m hearing here, you believe and I have no reason to doubt you, that you’re going to drive a much better ROI from these activities than you can from just about anything else, that will give you much better odds of being in that position you want to be in two years from now, than dumping it into an index fund inside the Roth. Even though I love Roths. What do you think Mindy?

Mindy:
I have a lot of questions. Number one, I am not in any position to tell you what you can do with your money with regards to the IVF treatments. And I hope that it is a one and done and takes it takes the very first time. Have you guys talked about how many times you’re going to go through it before you say, okay, we’re done? That’s something that you and your wife should talk about, because I have heard a lot of stories about people who, just one more time, just one more time. And we’ve already put this much money into it, what’s one more time? I’m sitting here at a very advantageous position where I already have two children. So who am I to say, you can only do it twice or you can only do it 27 times or whatever? That’s something that I want.
I know that’s a downer and I’m sorry. I hope it takes on the very first try. But even if it does, that’s still $20,000. That is something you can comfortably afford because you have such a great income, but five times isn’t necessarily unheard of, and that’s $100,000 right there. That’s something that I just want to plant a seed, so that you guys can start thinking about that. Health insurance is a big consideration. You said that you have separate health insurance plans. Is it more financially advantageous currently for you to have separate plans? Sometimes the employer will cover the employee 100% and then the spouse is extra. In which case it would make sense for you each to do that.

Zachary:
The reason right now we’re on separate ones, is when you combine health insurance plans, your out of pocket max, essentially doubles. We want her out of pocket max to be as low as possible. And then mine, I did just break a toe, but I almost never have health expenses. I’d rather just have it at one right now. But I think that’s probably why I blocked it out. We’d made that decisions. It’s like, oh yeah, we got to be on separate healthcare plans because otherwise we’re just going to spend a lot more on healthcare. That was the current thinking on that, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t change that in a few years.

Mindy:
And you said that you have an HSA plan, is that the best option given her situation?

Zachary:
HSA is relatively new. When I have current investments, this is current planned investments for 2021, I actually just got my HSA. And then I realized that don’t the fees in this one, so I’m rolling it over to another one. And then I didn’t realize Nikita’s health care plan was a high deductible one, so we could do the same with her. That was the plan, just because of the tax-free going in, tax-free going out, tax-free gains. We were honestly planning on just using that as an FI tool versus using it for her medical expenses, which we could do, but the plan was just using it as essentially our second, even better Roth IRA.

Mindy:
Can you put an air conditioner in a yurt? Because I’ve been to Moab too, love Moab, but it’s like being on the surface of the sun. It is so hot in them summer.

Zachary:
That is a good question.

Mindy:
I’m a bit of a diva, I would not rent your yurt if it didn’t have an air conditioner.

Zachary:
I imagine we could do a little side unit. And that’s the nice thing about doing the land hack, where you have a property because you already have electricity that you could potentially pull off of. Otherwise solar might be a possibility for a small unit. although I doubt that would be enough for anything besides some lights and charging your cell phones and whatnot. But that’s a really good thought, I had not thought about AC. And to go back to your question about, how many times? I think that’s a really good one. I think Nikita and I have a conversation to have around that. Part of the IVF process, we’re a little bit new to it. There is some genetic as well as quite a bit of psychological testing, because we, we do have a family member who’s going to be a donor and I believe those questions would be brought up on that. Just knowing how we’re going to do it.
I believe the family member only wanted to do an egg donation once and that’s our assumption. So it does feel for me like it would be, we try otherwise foster or other options, but we haven’t had that conversation, I think that’s a good one to have.

Mindy:
Okay. Yeah. And you’ve got a couple of years to have this conversation and really get comfortable with it. But I think that that’s something that should be considered. With regards to egg donation, I think they harvest a lot in one go. I don’t think they just go in and take one.

Zachary:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s the hope, it’s like we harvest 20 and these are all maybes, harvest 20, 10 are viable. Three of those make embryos. One of those makes the baby. We’re newer into the process, but the was one of our first conversations that we had, is the statistics around that.

Mindy:
Yeah. I just want to plant a seed, because that’s what-

Zachary:
No, I want to plant a seed.

Scott:
Nice.

Mindy:
That was good. That was good.

Scott:
That was great.

Mindy:
Well, let’s go back to the glamping. It sounds like you’ve done your research and I don’t know anything about yurts. I think the idea is super cool. I would love to rent a yurt, but I want it to be comfortable on the inside. Moab is a great city. I just read something where Arches actually has to close off the entrance at 9:00 AM. There’s too many people. So people are going to what’s the one around the corner?

Scott:
Canyonlands.

Mindy:
Canyonlands. And then Canyonlands, it’s beautiful. It’s almost better. I was there before everybody got there, so it wasn’t as crowded, but it’s gorgeous. That whole area is gorgeous. I would definitely look into that more because that’s a really, really popular area, but I want to be comfortable in my yurt. I want to make sure it’s warm in the winter time and it’s cool in the summertime. Let’s go talk about your Muncie rental property. You have a 10 bedroom sorority house that you rent out to 10 women, and I am going to be the one to say, you need to have a plumbing clause in your lease that says, do not flush wipes down the toilet, do not flush tampons down the toilet, they’re not flushable. Here is how you dispose of them, in the garbage can. If you clog my plumbing, I will make you pay for the plumbing repair.
And that’s the clause in this particular situation, that’s the clause you need to have every single girl who rents your property sign, initial that right next to the plumbing clause, read it to them, tell their parents. I’m assuming their parents are guaranteeing the rent, read it to the parents and say, I will make you pay for the plumbing repairs, because this is huge, 10 girls. We’re going to get real girly today. Your cycles all sync up and then you’ve got a big old mess all at once. That is something that I would love to see in your property. Now, you said it, you’re cash flowing $300 a month right now, did you rent the entire property to a group of girls or did you rent individual bedrooms to individual people?

Zachary:
We bought the property from another person who was already renting it out. And it came with the tenants in it and it was six girls, I believe at the time. We had them resign the new lease, which I will check to see if there’s a plumbing clause in there. Otherwise maybe do an addendum or something like that. That’s a very good idea. Because it is, my wife, when we’re buying it, it was the same thing. It was that and then also just the mess that might be made in the very few bathrooms that were available for a 10 bedroom. But we fixed that problem.

Scott:
Is there a legal consideration around that, because you would not put that clause necessarily in for a group of men. Is that a potential problem?

Mindy:
I would not think that it is, but I don’t know. Wow. What a good question. Ooh. If you’re listening to this-

Zachary:
We can also throw condoms in there and then-

Mindy:
There you go. That works. And then should you decide to transfer from a sorority house to a fraternity house, you put the same clause in there and the whole clause is about condoms and tampons. Wow. What a great-

Zachary:
And also we call it a sorority house because it is a lot of girls in one house. Technically it’s not Greek, it’s not anything of that nature. I believe some of the girls in there are part of the Greek society and it’s very close to, Ball State University is what it’s close to in proximity. And so I believe there are other actual sorority and fraternity houses nearby, but it is not designated as one.

Scott:
I’d be careful about that. I think Mindy’s advice is great with that and not something I would have considered. I would just noodle on it, maybe ask for your property manager or anybody else, if they have any thoughts on that subject. I think it’s totally fair if you experience a problem, to then be like, if this happens again, you’re going to pay for it. I just think that it’d be good to think twice, just make sure that there’s no problems that would occur if you do it preemptively based on the gender of the tenants with that.

Zachary:
Fair enough. I don’t know, I didn’t do the inspection because it was out of state. But they did have to do quite a bit of new plumbing to do the bathrooms that were upstairs. They added two bathrooms upstairs and then renovated another one. Hopefully the plumbing is relatively fresh, but the sewer is the main concern that I would have, as soon as Mindy brought that up.

Mindy:
And I would even preemptively have your property manager come in and have a sewer scope or have somebody come in and, really I think a sewer scope is a good idea because if it’s all a brand new pipe, then it’s not as big a deal. But if it’s an old clay pipe and there’s root intrusion, things that are being flushed that shouldn’t be flushed could get caught up on the roots and because a big backup. Ask me how I know. Also if it’s a cast iron pipe, those rust from the inside out, ask me how I know that one, because one day your basement is dry and the next day it isn’t.

Zachary:
All right. That is something we could do, because with our current property in Utah, we got it scoped and it’s fine for right now, but we’re going to do something more preventative for it. So that makes sense to do it in Indiana as well.

Mindy:
I just had a sewer scope the other day, shout out to the sewer mall, my new sewer-

Zachary:
Why did they make it out of clay?

Mindy:
Because there’s lots of dumb things that happened in the past. One last question I have Scott, and then I’ll let you jump in, is, does your company or your wife’s company have a 401(k) match? Because Scott said that it might be a good idea to stop contributing to those programs, but if they have a match, then I would recommend to continue to contribute until you get the match.

Zachary:
The one I am leaving right now did have a 4% match. The one I’m going to has no match and I’m also needed to wait three months before I can even invest in it as well. That was the thing, out of all of the retirement accounts, the one I was most interested in adjusting, I really liked the Roth. And the HSA also seems an even better deal than the Roth. It seems if we continued to put 15 to $20,000 in traditional retirement accounts, we’re still diversified a little bit, not just going all in on real estate. The other concern that I have is just the crazy real estate market, is potentially not being able to find something that does have as good as numbers as I was able to get with my first couple of properties.

Mindy:
Are you continuing to look in the Muncie area? Because if you like your property manager and you said that your property manager is really awesome, I would want to look there first. And Muncie is a far more affordable market than Utah is.

Zachary:
That was our original plan maybe a year ago, is try to continue to build up properties there, it’s the Midwest, it cash flows well, we won’t get a ton of appreciation, but that’s all right. But I don’t know if that quite aligns with our goals right now, of trying to get into a position of not needing to work as much, but still maintaining a reasonable degree of income. And that’s why I was going for the short term rentals, because it seemed the immediate cash flow was so much higher. It’s more work, but we would have the bandwidth to do it if Nikita left her full time job. I’m open to it. The reason we haven’t looked right now, is because we had a big down payment and then a big renovation, and I want to wait to see if that renovation actually translates into the rents that we think it will. And if it does then potentially going in for another property or two.

Scott:
I like that approach. I think that that makes perfect sense to me. It’s not passive income, but it’s high dollar per hour work with that. And that seems to align with where you’re thinking you want to be in two to three years with that. I think, based on what I’m hearing you say, you’re going to have a good chance at driving substantial income through one of those short term rentals or those types of things in the next couple of years. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity in that short term rental market over the next year or two, because of the big shortage that we have right now and the travel opening back up in a general sense in this country with that. I like that thought process. It is not passive.
If you’re going to try to do something passive, that would be where I think maybe you go back to Muncie, Indiana and think about more of those properties. But to me that makes perfect sense. I think that, yeah, validate the Airbnb rental at your home. And then if you can replicate that a few times and that’s way better, and it’s only a few hours a week, that seems like a winning formula there to me.

Zachary:
The other thing about the short term that I tend to like is, okay, maybe the property is more expensive, but we can cover it with the short term rentals where with long term, the margins are just a little tighter. So as soon as the price gets a little too high, you’re maybe making $100 a month, which doesn’t feel like, even though the mental overhead is a little lower, you still got every month to see what expenses were coming up. I’d say we spend maybe an hour just doing things. And it’s mainly because we try to, instead of using a normal accounting system, put it into YNAB, which kind of works, but that’s not what it’s built for. That’s probably what’s taken us in the most time.

Scott:
What do you think Mindy?

Mindy:
No, I like that idea, but I really like what you said, Scott, that this isn’t passive to have more Airbnbs closer to you. You can make it a little more passive by hiring out everything. I’m not sure. I’m assuming that you clean your own basement Airbnb right now. And if you had something close, you could clean it. I mean, it doesn’t take that long to clean a property, although some people are pigs. Sometimes it does take a lot longer to clean the property.

Zachary:
We’ve had really good luck. I think we started in maybe about three months or so, and we haven’t had a bad experience yet. If we did something that wasn’t in our basement, I would very much want to find a very reliable cleaning person that can also be the lookout person, pay her or him well and have that just be part of the cost. We’d still be doing some of the exchanges, booking, answering questions, but there’s also a lot of tools that can automate big parts of the process as well. And so if we started getting into more than one or two, I would look into that automation that’s possible.

Scott:
Where again are you located in Utah?

Zachary:
We’re in a city called Sandy, which is south of Salt Lake City.

Scott:
And you said you’ll buy a ski resort, that would be the appeal for the most part?

Zachary:
For our place, yeah. And then also, we’re close enough to Salt Lake. We get a lot of cross-country travelers that would just do one night. They’re going from Boise to Denver and Salt Lake is a good mid ground. That’s what I’ve been getting a little bit more for the summer. People who are visiting family.

Mindy:
The thought, the seed I want to plant in your mind is, what is the cost of the property in Utah, and how long will it take you to save up for the down payment? Because it’s a rental property it’s going to be 20, 25% down, and how much are you going to make, versus how much is the property in Muncie? How much would you have to put down? How much could you make there? Can you more quickly get the down payment for the Muncie property? Probably, unless you’re buying another 10 unit that is the same price. I know that Utah’s expensive and it’s just getting more expensive. The ski resorts, I’ve been looking for a ski property for personal, and all of a sudden everything is now triple what it was, not really bit.

Scott:
Can I just chime in and say, that’s why I like Utah rather than Muncie, Indiana, is because of that phenomenon. I buy in Denver, Colorado. Why? Because I think it’s going to get more expensive in Denver, Colorado with those types of things. I like the rising income and the rising property values that I think occur over a long period of time in a place like this, or Utah rather than Muncie. That’s a fundamental philosophical question is, in 30 years, I’m going to be better off, in your case three years, but you also have to keep the long term in mind, if you buy a bunch of property in wonderful locations in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 15, 20 years, 30 years, are you going to have a different wealth profile than if you buy 15, 20 properties in Muncie, Indiana, with that?
To me, from my seat, that answer seems clear. There’s no question in my mind that Denver, Colorado is going to outperform Muncie, Indiana over a 20, 30 year period. Now, I think people will strongly disagree with that, but to me that’s how I run my investments and life with that. And if you can cash flow more with the Airbnb, that also seems really appealing since you lived there and are willing to do it. Those are some of the things that I like around that.

Mindy:
I’m just planting a seed, Scott. Something to think about.

Scott:
No, he’s planting a seed. I always tell this joke.

Zachary:
I think that plays into my thinking too, is just believing in the mountain west region. And so while prices have been jumping by leaps and bounds, we moved from Austin, Texas, and we lived in Denver before that. We’ve always been just behind being able to afford a house. We’ve been trying to buy a house for a decade almost. And as our incomes rose, and they’ve never written as dramatically as they did in the last year. But as they rose, it would continue to be just, now we could afford it, but we would be house poor, or man, do we really want to spend that much money when an apartment is so much less than has a pool and a gym, and doesn’t have a bunch of maintenance that we have to deal with? I just could never get myself to want to actually pull the trigger, because just the high cost of living areas.

Mindy:
Yeah. That is a consideration. I just want to throw that out there. Can you get more cash flow in Muncie versus the Utah properties?

Zachary:
Well, if it was going to be a long term rental, it would be negative cashflow for sure. But that’s where the short term comes in. Or maybe I could find some places that will break even. I’ve heard that philosophy a lot that you should have that out. But I don’t know if it’s going to be possible. This is something that just needs more research as well on my end.

Scott:
I believe that out is important, is to have that ability to cash flow under reasonably conservative assumptions. For me, it doesn’t have to be much, but I’m actually trying a rent by the room approach right now, the property, and if it was a traditional or Zach style with the sorority house. That property would be fine. It would be neutral maybe a little bit better, but a very poor, one or 2% cash and cash return in a traditional rental style, but that’s a good backup to have. And then it will generate a lot of income as a rent by the room, a property with that. And it’s a high quality, wonderful asset and a great location with that.
I think that to me, that makes a lot of sense because it allows me to apply the fundamentals, the philosophy of buying a great location and wait for the years to drive it up in value on both sides of that, against a fixed interest rate debt. I have a really good shot at getting that additional cashflow. I like that approach. Again, I come back to, I like the Salt Lake City market. I think that’s a great. I think there’s no doubt in my mind that in 30 years Salt Lake City is going to be even more attractive than it is now to live in or even more price appreciative.

Zachary:
I keep hearing you say Salt Lake, and I’ve been thinking about the areas that are closer to national parks. But hat wouldn’t really have a good backup rent by the room, but maybe it would. You’re thinking Salt Lake is-

Scott:
No, I’m saying I’m going to go rent by the room, and my backup plan is traditional long term rental for each of the units. You’re thinking about Airbnb, I’m saying that your backup, I think should be that traditional long term rental thing there. And making sure that that’s very close to breakeven or a little pot, slightly positive, but maybe not great cash flow, that would be a good backup plan for those things. So you’re not having to pour money into the investment over a long period of time with those types of things. I also think that going next to national parks makes a lot of sense, but you’re going to have to build, get really clear on the seasonality of that business. You know you’re going to have seasonality in this, but Moab to Mindy’s great point, if you build a yurt, you’re not going to have any business in the summer, except from a very specific type of clientele for that.
And so you need to be aware of those types of dynamics, and it sounds like they’re a little farther away from home. So you’re still going to be managing remotely, three, four hours if you have any success at all, you’re just not going to want to deal with that at all. That might as well be in Muncie, if it’s that far away.

Zachary:
The difficulty would be, especially with the national parks strategy, I think the seasonality you can just plan for and just check on the numbers. It’s the finding a good person to run the operations. That would be the big struggle, I think.

Mindy:
I was also under the impression that you were doing it a little closer to home where you could take care of it by yourself, if you wanted to. I know that a lot of people who are running Airbnbs are running into problems finding people to do the cleaning or finding people to do the management. It isn’t so much a problem of getting people to the property, it’s taking care of the property afterwards. So if you do it a little closer to home, then there’s always that option, the cleaning lady just quit, now I can run over there and clean it as opposed to driving three hours to Moab to clean it, and then coming back. I was going to say, does Sandy have Airbnb laws? Because other people listening to this, not just you, I’m going to say, if you’re planning on buying an Airbnb-

Zachary:
Well we’re technically an unincorporated white city, so we can do whatever the heck we want. We’re surrounded by Sandy, so we’re good on the laws. We had the paperwork for Sandy set up but then realized we actually didn’t even know we were in this little pocket which doesn’t have any restrictions currently. That would be the other thought, is the changing laws. And if you go into a place that, you’d want to look into, are laws already established? Would they be prone to change? I would have to do more research if Salt Lake is a better place for that, or Moab or Zion, or Denver or wherever, is going to be more friendly to these short term rentals.

Mindy:
Not Denver.

Zachary:
Yeah. Where the risk would be for that.

Mindy:
And in general, the more touristy the area is, the more lenient the Airbnb laws.

Zachary:
That’s what I was thinking and that was part of the reason why I wanted to go that direction. And I might not be as averse to not having as strong a backup option, maybe my backup option is long term rental and lose $200 a month, but I can swing that until I sell it or whatever it happens to be. But I feel that area would be less likely to change those laws and therefore that’s a lower risk, and so I can take that gamble.

Scott:
I think in these vacation rental markets, I’m a little wary personally about going into them, because I feel unless you really know what you’re doing and really understand the market and have some competitive advantage, those towns are designed to suck money out of the people visiting and buying property in those areas, not putting money into your pockets with that. You see the property management rates for people’s condor, people are not, you’re not competing with other investors in a lot of cases, you’re competing with wealthy executives who are buying their second home and are just renting it out to offset the cost of keeping that house. And so that’s I think a challenge you need to be ready for if you’re going into one of these vacation rental spots.
I don’t think it’s going to be quite your same problem at some of the national parks, but Moab, I know people like to go to Moab all the time during in season. And you might be competing with that phenomena in Moab, for example, or near any of the ski resorts in Colorado or those types of things. That’s what you’re competing with. There are ways to get around it, and our colleague, Dave Meyer has a really successful vacation rental property out in the mountains, but it’s like 25 minutes away from any resort. And it’s a big house in an unincorporated place like what you’ve got there and that’s how he swings it. I know he’s had lots of trouble cleaning it and managing it, to the point where he’s had to pay people from Denver to drive out there and then clean it because it’s cheaper and easier than finding anybody out in those towns.
It can be done, but I think you need to be ready for that kind of challenge if you’re going to go into a vacation rental market. I love the Airbnb concept in your local area because you bring that competitive advantage to it. And that’s part of your strategy, is to work part time in two years or to have that option. And so if you’re willing to do that for five, 10 hours a week, you can probably have a really good shot at an excellent income with that. That’s why I was thinking I liked the Salt Lake City thing, but if you can find that creative, if you’re going to invent a new approach or jump on, as long as it’s just been proven out and you’re an early adopter, you probably can be successful with it in one of those towns like the yurts with that. That’s how I was thinking about it.

Zachary:
I like that, because what we do, I think one of our potential strategic advantages is, I’m interested in the finance side of things, the buying of the property, getting the interest rate and all of that jazz. And my wife is really interested in the design and the hosting aspects of it. The idea of having an expensive property management company eat most of the profits when it’s something that we would actually enjoy doing, doesn’t sound all that great. The idea of doing it because we are 25 minutes from a couple bigger ski resorts and it is legal in our area. And maybe just we’ll look at the end of the year, if we had fully booked this out, how much could we have made? And if there’s another property that we could do that with, and then we can run the whole show ourselves and, or find an affordable cleaning service, because we’re close to a major city and we’d be able to do that. I like that. Yeah. That’s a good tweak to what I was thinking.

Mindy:
Great. Well that’s what we are here for.

Zachary:
Paid for the mic. I appreciate it, Scott.

Scott:
All right.

Mindy:
That’s what we’re here for, to plant seeds.

Scott:
Are there any other big topics that we can cover that would be helpful for you today?

Zachary:
Those two goals are what we had, which you had some good tweaks on, is just being able to have kids hopefully in the next couple of years. And so Mindy’s thoughts on talking about how much effort and money we’re going to spend towards that goal if it doesn’t work out for us the first time or two. And then the tweak to being not necessarily full time within the next five years and potentially be able to do that by buying short term rentals near us, that we can manage, that would have a reasonable cashflow and then also a chance of appreciation. No, I’m trying to think, yeah, what are your levers? I’ve got it in my other notes. One of the things that we always talk about is reducing our food bill.
I listen to all your podcasts and families of five are constantly $600, and we’re constantly $900, and it’s just the two of us. I don’t know how we do it month to month. I think Starbucks plus just buying more expensive food is our issue, but I don’t know. It seems to always come in high. Levers, make more money. I am in a pretty good position to continue to make more money. I can work on more side projects. Salesforce is a pretty in demand skillset that I over the last year have built up a good base for, that I think we’ll continue to grow. And I think Nikita could potentially start to make more money if she joined an ad tech company. But as we talked about, that might be a little bit more short term if she wants to focus on raising a family. Spend less and invest more. Yeah, no, I think that’s good. The main lever was, how can we invest in a way that’s going to pay us sooner?

Scott:
I agree. I think you earned a ton of money right now and that’s brand new to you guys, the level of income versus the effort expended to earn it. It seems to have dramatically changed in the last couple of months and you’re going to be minting cash, even if you aren’t the tightest with controlling your expenses, not saying you shouldn’t, but you can certainly do that. I think that would be an area to investigate, but I think you’re easily going to accumulate 50 to $100,000 in liquidity over the course of a year. And you’re willing and able to do lots of creative things with that. I think that’s the biggest mover you can have in the next year or two, I think is figuring out what to do with that, rather than making other tweaks to some of those other areas.
It’s an end game, you could do both, but I think we did focus the discussion likely in the right area with that. I think it’s exciting. I think you’re thinking about a lot of cool things. I don’t know how it’s going to play out for you, but you have a lot of good options if you’re this interested in real estate. Worst case scenario, it sounds like you have a great property manager out of state and can get a pretty solid cash flow compared to what other people can get in the real estate market nowadays. That’s a good backup plan, if you don’t find anything better in your current market.

Zachary:
Yeah. Or just VTSAX. So I just throw it in the market. That’s what would be a reasonable backup plan that would probably get us to full FI. And if we continued both working full time, maybe seven years, I think I was running the numbers. That is an option. Then we have to figure out health insurance and then how to get to 59.

Scott:
Let me just say, other things that we didn’t talk about but that are relevant to your situation. You have basically no debt besides your mortgage. You’ve got a huge personal cash cushion that’s at least eight to 12 months of expenses with this, which is perfectly in line with what you’re thinking of next two years, to keeping that or making sure that you back into a position where when you’re thinking about starting a family, with those things, that you maintain that, I think that will be huge, given some of the challenges with the health that you articulated earlier. I think you’ve got all those fundamentals in place, which allow the discussion about asset allocation to be the big one. This is the fun stuff that everybody wants to get to. You’re in perfect position to be thinking about this and it is the biggest lever in your financial position, in my opinion.

Mindy:
I don’t have anything to add. I think that you’re doing really well, and continuing, this is the slug part of the journey now where you’re just saving and saving and, where should I put this money? It’s not, how do I find money to put it, it’s where do I put it, that’s most advantageous. But I think you’re thinking on the right path on pretty much everything. I would just make sure that there aren’t any 401(k) dollar, match dollars that you’re leaving on the table or that your wife isn’t leaving on the table. Think about the health insurance, I keep hoping that they’re going to fix it and they keep not fixing health insurance, and it’s always tied to, it’s always tied to employment, and because of the cancer diagnosis, it is going to be harder to get insurance down the road. That’s something that you have to think about.
You don’t have to work and she stays home, you could work for a little bit and she stays home. And then she decides she wants to go back to work and you stay home. That’s what happened in my life and that works out great. I have a job that I love and it provides great health insurance and a lot of other things. It doesn’t have to be an either or, it doesn’t have to be well, now Zach has to work for the next 25 years, at least recorder time. And when you’re good at your job, your company will be more flexible with you. You’ve got a couple of years that you’re going to plan to work anyway, just kill it at your job and your company won’t want you to leave completely. There’ll be more willing to work with you in my opinion.

Zachary:
I like it.

Mindy:
Okay. Well, it’s time now for the famous four, because you have answers to the famous four, which I’m very excited about. Are you ready, Zach?

Zachary:
I am very ready.

Mindy:
What is your favorite finance book?

Zachary:
Everyone does say Rich Dad Poor Dad, that didn’t have an effect on me. Just like planted the seed early to want to buy more assets versus liabilities. I think that was part of the reason why I just, even though, we wanted a backyard, we’ve got dogs, we want to do projects around the house, I was never willing to buy a house where it was going to be just such a liability. I did love Set for Life. Your Money or Your Life is another really good one, that is a little more woo woo, but I like the idea of you’re getting life energy. Money is equal to life energy, and I think that’s played into the role of wanting to work a little bit less. But I was thinking as a kid, there was this book. So if anybody has, I would say four to seven year old, that is into math and money and numbers. How Much Is a Million?
I remember having my mom read me hundreds of times. It’s an older book by Steven Kellogg, great illustrations with it. It talks about just how much is $1 versus 100, versus 1,000, versus 10,000. And showing you the scale of how money works and grows, and if you stack up so many dollar bills, it’ll go to the moon. I just really liked that book growing up. I thought it would be a different book to talk about.

Scott:
All right. We have not heard that one, I have to go check it out. What was your biggest money mistake?

Zachary:
It wasn’t a complete life mistake because I did meet my wife in this program. But I graduated in 08, which was not a great time to find a job. So after doing a banking job that I didn’t like and having some other just try to make ends meet jobs, I decided to go into teaching and I got half a master’s degree in teaching before I decided that was not a good fit for me. And it was fairly expensive. University of Denver, so you know, they’re not cheap.

Scott:
Oh yeah, they’re a great campus. Great place.

Zachary:
You got to pay for that gold roof somehow.

Mindy:
What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out?

Zachary:
Just starting out and over just overall, finding a good life partner. I don’t think Nikita was originally as into FI and all these things as I was, but she was very willing to come along for the ride and we can work together around our various goals. I think that’s a good piece of advice for anyone, regardless of where you are in your journey.

Mindy:
I don’t hear that advice enough. And you are 100% correct. That’s excellent advice.

Scott:
What is your favorite joke to tell at parties?

Zachary:
What do you call somebody who does not fart in public?

Scott:
I don’t know.

Zachary:
A private tutor.

Scott:
I was going to say, I was thinking a liar.

Zachary:
I thought you’d get it, being the pun master. I was pretty sure you’re going to get the punchline.

Mindy:
I was going to say polite. Okay. Zach, where can people find out more about you?

Zachary:
I do have a website called zacharysexton.com. It’s probably going to be talking about Salesforce stuff going forward. So if you’re interested in that at all. Otherwise that’s it. I’ve got a contact form on there if you wanted to chat about anything, feel free to reach out.

Mindy:
Are you in our Facebook group?

Zachary:
I am, but I don’t go on Facebook very much.

Mindy:
Okay. That’s fair. That’s fair.

Zachary:
I can, after the show. How about this? After the show is released, I will be in that Facebook group for two weeks.

Mindy:
Perfect. Okay. And you can find that Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/bpmoney. We will link to everything in our show notes, which can be found at biggerpockets.com/moneyshow214. Zach, thank you so much for your time today. This was really fun and I’m super excited for your journey, because you have a lot of levers to pull and I’m excited to see which ones you pull and how they affect your financial situation.

Zachary:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the advice.

Mindy:
Okay. We’ll talk to you soon. Okay. That was Zach. Scott, what did you think of the show?

Scott:
I thought it was a great episode. I think he’s done a really good job of setting himself up in a really strong financial position. I think his position has exploded in the last year it seems like, from both the income and time perspective. I think he is right to be sniffing the opportunity that that presents, to really expand his portfolio over the next two years. And so I thought it was a great discussion. He’s built a position of financial strength from which to begin attacking the investment opportunities in front of him. And that requires trade-offs. But that’s the fun spot to be in with this, with all of the foundational work done to a large extent,

Mindy:
I’m excited for his journey because he does have so many options and he seems to enjoy doing the research into the options. And that yurt idea, I think that’s kind of fun. And if it had air conditioning, I would consider staying in a yurt. I just need the air conditioning. I think we gave him a lot of really great things to consider. And now he and his wife have some good things to discuss. I’m excited for his journey. I hope he comes back in a year or two and gives us an update on what levers he decided to pull, because he has a lot of options. And really where he’s at, is such a wonderful place for someone to be, because he has the option to pull, less spending. He has the option to pull, make more money. He has the option to pull, invest intelligently, and he has the option to pull, create a business. Those are your four options, Scott, and he’s got all of them. It’s great. I’m super excited.

Scott:
I think it was really fun. I was like, what do we do here with this? Well, you’re intelligent, willing and able to explore a large number of alternatives that include both totally passive and semi-passive or even that require part-time work to achieve your ends. The world’s your oyster from that position, especially when you’re minting 50 to $100,000 in free cashflow on an annual basis. He can do whatever he wants with this and I think he’s got very good odds of success. And so evaluating those opportunities across that spectrum, I think he’s got better odds of success doing that outside of the realm of retirement accounts and traditional things, excluding matches and those types of things there. I think it was fun to get out of that bubble and move into the more active side of investing.

Mindy:
Scott, I’m excited for his options and I’m really glad we were able to give him other things to think about. That’s what this show is all about. The Finance Friday is too, when you’re in it, you’re like, this is what I’m going to do. Well, what if you did this? I didn’t think about that. He was set on getting an Airbnb in Moab, well, like you said, you might as well have something in a different market altogether that’s not really local. Have you considered local? I didn’t think about that. There were several of those ideas this episode, which really made me feel good.
Okay. Now to you, our listener, have you not yet heard your story, would you like to share? We would love to review your finances on this show. You can apply to be on the show at biggerpockets.com/financereview. Scott, should we get out of here?

Scott:
Let’s do it.

Mindy:
From episode 214 of the BiggerPockets Money podcast, he is Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen saying, don’t forget to be awesome.

 

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In This Episode We Cover

  • Becoming cancer free after a stage three diagnosis (wooooo!)
  • Doubling your income by making intelligent career changes
  • Short-term rentals vs. long-term rentals and the risks of both
  • Planning for medical expenses like IVF
  • Contributing to HSAs, Roth IRAs, and 401(k)s
  • Managing a 10-bedroom “sorority house” 
  • And So Much More!

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.