Scott Trench

So I actually stumbled across two resources that guided me, my thinking back in 2013 on my journey.

One was called Mr. Money Mustache, funny named financial blogger who had a really big impact on me, who retired in his very early 30s, and then BiggerPockets.com.

And I was going to combine these two schools of thought, or that was my plan.

That's what I did.

It was frugal my way to financial freedom.

Frugality is extremely powerful, even if it sounds unappealing at first as a financial lever, because it both increases the amount of capital you can accumulate in your personal portfolio, and it reduces the amount of wealth that your portfolio needs to generate for you to live off of.

my plan wasn't necessarily to be frugal forever, but it was to start with frugality to get the compounding approach working.

We can talk about that later if that's interesting.

The real estate component was the other path to this.

I just thought real estate offered a chance for better returns and more stable long-term returns than other areas to invest, which can support time freedom, right?

The cashflow from a payoff rental property, for example, is a very reliable relative stream of income compared to other investments, very inflation adjusted.

So I...

decided I was going to house hack by moving to rental properties one by one and be really frugal to save up for those to get the snowball rolling.

It's funny with this ambition thing, because yeah, sure, if you go and start your own business, you can always do better than even joining as an early employee.

But BiggerPockets, when I joined, I was a fan of it.

I already had the playbook.

I knew that if I followed this, maybe I wouldn't be a multi-multi-millionaire, but I'd be really well off in five, seven, 10 years.

It was so obvious to me how special

company was and what BiggerPockets was doing for me and likely for other people.

I didn't even really put an analysis to it.