Current: $____ per month between 14 syndication investments and some note-lending funds. I suspect the reason this post didn't get a lot of response is because this is a very personal subject matter for a lot of folks, but I'm happy to contribute and let you know I'm well on my way to meeting my goal! Best of luck to you
Current: W-2 job, Rod Khleif's Bootcamp this Friday, Jake and Gino's multifamily event in Oct. (Everyone has a beginning to syndication, welcome to mine)
It depends. Being financially free to me means walking away from my 9-5 with enough dough to cover my expenses and do what I want - let's call it $10k/month. However, my goal is to parlay from my current day job to my passion job (which currently makes very little due to limited time) while continuing to invest in real estate. Eventually with the goal to make $30K/month. But $30K is way more than I need to be "financially free."
Vehicle: SFR working up to small then large multifamily in B areas.
@Danielle Wolter, your response resonated with me as I am currently "stuck" in a well-paying soul-sucking job with very little time to do my "passion" job. If I were to quit my current job and do my passion full-time, I would take a 75% pay cut. :-( Do you have a plan to transition? I'm working on one.
I have 2 numbers - one with and one without some form of health insurance. With, it is about $10k a month. Without... 35-40k.
For those of you that have hit your goals and left your w2, how have you managed to pay for healthcare? My wife takes medication 1-2 times a month (avg about 1.2) that is $22k if I use a freaking coupon.. And we’re not even over 40 yet, so it will only get more expensive
@Stephen Dumaine Currently I have a food blog as a side business that brings in some money. It has seen a lot of growth in the past year. My goal is to have that make enough to cover my mortgage while building my real estate empire (LOL) to cover my daily expenses. I also have a pretty good emergency fund saved up. I expect that when I'm able to quit my 9-5, both of these areas with be able to grow substantially with the additional time I will have to grow them. I would love to eventually go part time and take a 50% pay cut in the next couple years. But I'm pretty sure it'll be a hard sell! Good luck to you!
I am currently in the planning and leaning stage as I am brand new to Real Estate investing. I work on the road so it is very hard to network and meet with agents, bankers, and contractors to build relationships and trust. I'm interested in the BRRRR strategy and hope to have 5-10 properties by this time next year. Hoping to be able to leave my full time job in two years.
My initial goal is $10,000/month. My hope is a combination of SFH, MF, STR. Healthcare is the wildcard... as who knows what it will be in 10-15 years when this can be a reality.
@Bruce C. Am I seeing this right? Are you saying your wife’s meds are 22K per month?
That is correct. Currently I have good health insurance through my W2 job, and it is covered. That would be our price if we had to buy it ourselves (even purchasing through Canada). I have no idea what we’re going to do without my w2 insurance.
@Bruce C. Well I am sorry to hear that. How is the school board benefits in your area. Usually the health insurance is pretty good. If so, consider bus driving. It doesn't pay much but if the insurance is great it might be worth driving 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening. You can dedicate the rest of your day to REI. It might not be ideal but it seems to be better than waiting until you are making 30K-40K on REI before you quote your 9-5.
@Aaron Bonne Great question as this is something important to think about.
At $10k per month, I believe that I could leave my W2 position. At $15k per month, I believe that I would leave my W2 position.
Note that this includes my wife staying in her position which would keep benefits for both of us. (There is also an option to have me stay and my wife retire early.)
I am building up my portfolio with the current goal of owning 12 units. I realize 12 units in MN does not lead to $15k cash flow so obviously I will need to expand from there to other forms of passive income.
10k a month is plenty to live a comfortable lifestyle off of, without working. So I would call it my "freedom" number.
My personal goal is $1M/yr in passive income, however, which maths out to a bit over $80k/mo. This is a pretty tough number to get to passively, so I prefer to take the entrepreneurial route where I work to generate the highest non-passive dollar amount as an active investor, and grow revenue & my cash stockpile until it's primetime to buy undervalued assets very aggressively. To get to the $1M/yr passive mark, it may take a few market cycles. So I'll probably sell these undervalued assets when the market re-peaks, engage in more short term projects, and repeat with the next downturn.
At a 10% CAP rate, and a 20% cash on cash return with financing, it looks like $5M of cash would need to be invested in approximately $25M of property (if purchased traditionally) to get to the $1M/yr passive goal. Ambitious, but not unattainable if you make it a point to be in the REI "business"!
I see a lot of $10Ks out there. Seems like a common number many folks use.
Of course, the question on the other side of the coin is "What kind of lifestyle do I want to lead and where?"
There's a blog/site called retireearlylifestyle.com that I highly recommend if you want to see how wisdom, frugality, and the willingness to take a different approach to early retirement has been going on for 20+ years, before concepts like FIRE were main stream.
I'm a Dave Ramsey fan and we recently became Baby Step 6a Debt Free...all loans and personal residence paid off, but we still have rental loans. Working on getting rid of those ASAP. That's the "6b" part. Then we'll be truly debt free!
I don't see a reason to get 300 doors if I'm content with 30. For that matter, 300 doors are 10x the hassle factor, and if the idea is financial FREEDOM, it seems silly sacrifice the 2nd word (FREEDOM) for the sake of the 1st (financial). I'm not financially FREE if I have to constantly be one step ahead of a market downturn and have $2-3 million in debt hanging around my neck. "Good debt" is only "good" until life doesn't work out perfectly as planned; then it causes people to go bankrupt.
So maybe the best idea is to start with the end in mind. What would I do with $10,000 / month? Could I be happy with $8,000? How about $7,000? What are my plans other than volunteer for a local charity, go fishing, hiking, or roaming around the world?
I could live a pretty satisfactory, full life on $3,000 / month in my medium size town (pop 160,000). With no debt, there's not a whole lot to spend money on that's worthwhile, in my view. I don't really need or want to own a Corvette ZR1, I hate golf, and a wine cellar probably gets dusty after awhile and not that interesting. I don't need to live in a prestigious neighborhood in a "hot market" and go to trendy clubs just to make it rain $1,000 bottles of champagne.
Who am I trying to impress, after all? Maybe living with contentment is a good goal. Having enough for today and probably tomorrow too is definitely a "freeing" thought!
If I had the desire to leave my W2 job I’d need about 15k to support my family and live the lifestyle I would like to. I have no desire to leave my w2 job for another 15-20 years.
Once I work some more and retire early I’d like to have about 7k/month in passive income through a mixture of buy and hold RE, syndications and stocks. On my way but rerouting right now..... the further along I get the more passive I’d like to be.
Wow. I guess my goals are pretty dang low by these standards. I’m seeing 10-50k per month in here. I hardly make 50k per year on my full time job ...
If I could generate enough passive income that my enormous and completely useless student loan payments were covered ... I would quit my job literally right now. That’s 1,000$ a month.
I would keep working my second job (which is part time right now) and that could cover my living expenses. I don’t even care if I get to eat every day ... getting out of the 8-5 drag by covering debt is my primary goal.
I’m currently attempting to save a down payment to do that. But it has been a long process...
For my wife and I, our number is $10,000/mo. We just started buying and holding. Our business plan states this will take us 11 years. (The year my youngest son graduates) We have written that each door will produce $150 after all expenses, trying to leave $0 in each property. This equates to 67 doors or 6.09 doors per year or $909.09/month per year in passive income. These are our minimum requirements for purchases. Obviously we will try to beat these numbers. But these are our minimum requirements.
Currently we only have 3 doors, as we just started about 2 months ago buying and holding. Just closed on a duplex and a sfr. The sfr is being renovated as we speak. The duplex tenants I inherited are paying well below market rent. So it will take some time to get them to where they can be. If all goes well we will cashflow around $600/mo off of these 2 purchases with $0 left in them.
My comment earlier about seeing a lot of $10K is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I see that number thrown around a lot, probably by a lot of folks making less than $50K/year household income. It's in all the guru podcasts and blogs...
How many of us would actually keep our lifestyle the same, though? You'd get to $10K, then realize you want a fancier car / nicer house / luxury trips. Now you "need" $20K-$30K/month. Then that's not good enough either.
My thought is practice contentment and do what you enjoy. Sure, if you enjoy managing 300 doors and that leads you to have a $30K/month income, then by all means do it and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But don't worry...plenty of people have lived long, healthy, exciting, fulfilled lives on far, far less than $10K / month. It's just another status symbol, like so many other things.