Can I Still Reach FI by 45 If I Quit My Job?

Mindy:
Today’s Finance Friday guest is a repeat. She’s returning to the show. Last year Alex joined us on episode 395. She was at a fork in the road whether she should invest her large cash savings into real estate or the stock market. In today’s episode, we’ll hear an update on her financial position and how she’s now reached a new crossroads and might finally be able to leave her W2 and five before 45. Let’s find out today. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my blueberry loving co-host Scott Trench.

Scott:
Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here and really excited to jam out with you. Right, that’s a good intro related, related intro right there. BiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You’re in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for anyone, no matter when or where you’re starting, whether you’re deciding to invest in stocks or real estate. Alright, today we are going to discuss Alex’s new FI number and how she should adjust her portfolio allocation to avoid the messy middle and we’re going to discuss diversification of her current portfolio. Alex, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Money podcast.

Alex:
Thank you guys for having me back. Excited.

Mindy:
Alex, for our audience who didn’t yet listen to episode 395, can you share a little bit about your money background?

Alex:
So my money story begins when I grew up raised by a single mom and a retired grandmother and money was always kind of tight for us. I was always very aware and conscious of us not having a lot of excess money. We always had what we needed, but we didn’t take say vacations every year. We went down to the Jersey Shore. We kept things within our budget and the conversation around money was always more of a scarcity mindset, so that’s kind of how I feel. I was conditioned growing up and as I approached college and after college I graduated college with about $25,000 in student loans and then that same year I also got a new car. So that rounded me out for that year after college with about 40,000 between student loans and a car loan and after those years I was trying to be as diligent as possible paying off that debt. That was really my main priority and I lived at home for a few years and got that taken care of thankfully. So now as my income has grown and my net worth and my savings and investing has grown, I just continue to find myself in a position where I have I guess somewhat of a good problem in having a lot of cash on hand, but also having investing goals and real estate goals and just trying to allocate as best as possible.

Mindy:
Okay, and when we last spoke you had a large cash position and you were considering putting it into the stock market or putting it into real estate. What did you end up doing?

Alex:
Yeah, so the last time I was on the show I believe I was speaking about wanting to have a house property in the town that I live in and gratefully we were able to purchase a property here. It’s a house hack. I’m sitting in one of the offices in my house now and we were able to renovate this home founded off market. I think I had also mentioned that I was doing direct mailers and those sort of things to try and find things off market as well as keeping my eye on the market while being a realtor. And thankfully someone reached out to me on one of my direct mailers and I was able to make it work. So we renovated it. We have a tenant downstairs. It’s been a really interesting kind of intro to real estate investing and also definitely reducing our monthly expenses for housing significantly relative to the apartment that we were living at, which was, they call it a luxury apartment, but I was okay, but it was definitely over fries. So that’s been fun and exciting. So that’s definitely where a lot of that money went last year.

Scott:
Awesome. Can you give us all the details on this House Act? How much did you pay for it? How did you finance it?

Alex:
Sure, so we’ve purchased it for 480,000. We financed it with a conventional loan with 15% down. That was allowed for the primary residence. I honestly thought it was, I wanted to put less down, but that was the minimum at the time. Now I know it’s different but all good. Yeah, so that was our financing situation and our monthly payment is about 3,600 a month with taxes in insurance. The taxes in New Jersey, as I’m sure you’re aware, quite high. So my annual taxes are about 10,000 a year and our insurance is about 1500 a year, so that rounds us out at about 3,600 and then we get rent downstairs for a two bed, one bath in the multifamily for 2,700 a month.

Scott:
Okay, so it is duplex up down duplex?

Alex:
Yes, it’s a two unit. Yep.

Scott:
That’s awesome. 2,700 for the downstairs unit is awesome. What’s the upstairs unit? How many beds and baths and what would you get for rent on that part?

Alex:
Sure, so we live in the upstairs unit and it’s a two bed, one bath with this office. The space that I’m working in is like an additional office space and we would probably get, we have an unfinished attic as well. We plan to finish it. We would like to, so that would probably increase it, but for simplicity’s sake we would probably get about like 2,800 I would say for this unit as it is maybe more.

Scott:
Sorry, that was 2,800, is that what you said?

Alex:
Yeah.

Scott:
That’s awesome. That’s a 50, if I’m doing the math right, that’s $5,600 a year, 55, $500 a month on a $3,600 pity. You probably should be able to make that work when you account for property management, CapEx, maintenance, utility, all that kind of good stuff. That’s a great cash flowing rental property in New Jersey it sounds like in 2023 in the face of a higher interest rate environment. I thought that was impossible.

Alex:
I mean few and far between. I don’t ever promise it to my clients. So

Scott:
What do you think it’s worth today?

Alex:
Well we actually, we took out a HELOC recently, so I had it appraised and it came in at 730,000 and I think that’s pretty accurate. Between 730,700 50,000 is probably the current worth.

Mindy:
And you bought it for four 80. How much did you put into the rehab?

Alex:
A fair amount. We did a lot upfront but then the past few months we did the roof, we got two new boilers, we got a water heater, so we’re rounded out at about like 160 ish thousand that we put in

Scott:
And that’s been a theme that I’ve seen across a couple of deals that I’ve heard about recently is that they’re there flipping maybe back to a certain extent and a lot of these markets and folks that are cash strapped don’t necessarily want to put in $160,000 into a property and so there’s opportunity there for folks who are willing to put in the work there and you still have an opportunity to get a good chunk of the benefit of the gain here tax free. I don’t think you’ll be able to get a hundred percent of it because you’re treating half of it as a rental property, but you can get half of a couple hundred thousand dollars gain it sounds like, or maybe $150,000 gain. So this is an awesome buy it sounds like for you guys and congratulations.

Mindy:
Thank

Alex:
You. Appreciate it.

Mindy:
Okay, let’s look into these numbers. Current numbers I have income, which I just love actually let’s go into investments first. We have 120 ish in cash, a hundred in a Roth 401k 25 in a Roth IRA 36 in a SEP IRA 306,000 in an after tax brokerage account. Scott, she is not going to hit onto that middle class trap, not with all of her money being in Roth Roth and after tax brokerage, so I love that. I’m going to come back and talk about this 120 in cash you have sitting around treasury note of 5,000. That’s interesting, I’ve never seen that before. A HELOC balance and about 367,000 in home equity. Your income, I love this. 68,000 at your full-time job, 96,000 at your 10 99 and additional 20,000 in bonuses for a whopping $184,000. Nice. Let’s look at those expenses Scott, I’m not even going to read ’em off because her total expenses are $4,000 a month on $184,000 salary. I’m sorry, $184,000 income. Part of this is W2 salary and part of this is real estate commissions, which everybody knows can be a little unpredictable.

Scott:
Alright, we need to take a quick break, but we’re going to hear more from Alex when we’re back and we’re going to find out if Alex can or should drop her W2 today.

Mindy:
Welcome back to the show.

Scott:
Let me ask a question here. I just want to make sure we’re not misleading ourselves with this because Alex, you’re declaring your income as between you and your partner I believe, and I’m seeing on the expenses you are half of the mortgage payment and those types of things. So is this half, are we looking at income on a household basis and expenses on a personal basis or some combination there?

Alex:
The income is just my income and then the expenses are just my expenses. Yeah,

Scott:
Okay, got it. So you have a full-time job and a 10 99 and that’s what we’re looking at here to add these both up. Okay, got it.

Mindy:
Yep. Okay, so back to what I was saying, 184,000 coming in 49 going out. I don’t care about your expenses because doing okay, you’re doing better than okay,

Scott:
And the reason you’re doing that well is because your housing cost is 500 bucks. If you build the mortgage in heloc, okay, you’re spending 3,500 everywhere else talking. If we were adding in 3030 $700 a month in rent, we’re talking about expenses a lot here, but that’s the beauty of a house hack is now we don’t have to talk about expenses. That’s just not, you can spend as much as you want in some of these other categories. It probably feels luxurious despite the fact that you only spend in 50 KA year. I don’t know. Is that right?

Alex:
I don’t know. Maybe definitely not living in luxury, that’s for sure.

Mindy:
Well, and you could afford to spend a little more if you chose to because you’re not even spending all of your W2.

Alex:
Yeah, and I think a lot of that actually is going to change this coming year with what I would like to talk to you guys about too and kind of increasing my real estate business because even recently, just this month I’ve kind of invested a fair amount of money into more systems and lead gen things. So I think that that’s also a great thing about being able to say live, have less expenses and having it allowing it to be allocated towards say a business opportunity.

Mindy:
Yeah. Well let’s go back and look at your cash for a second. You have 120,000 in cash and you have expenses of 49,000, let’s call it 50,000. So you have almost two and a half years of current spending just sitting there in cash. So now could be a great time to strike out on your own and try to be more focused on your real estate agent career. However, I keep hearing how the market’s about to crash. What would happen if you quit your job and then all of a sudden, I dunno, interest rates went to 1970s levels 17% and nobody’s buying a house. What are you going to do?

Alex:
I guess I have two years, right? So I guess I could wait it out two years, but I think alternatively, I think around here, especially in northern New Jersey, the market is less even about the interest rate unlike a lot of other parts of the country where I guess I’ve heard a lot about the market slowing down because the interest rate was increasing. That really wasn’t the experience around here just because the inventory here is very limited and they can’t build a lot. So here, not to say that it’s impossible, but it’s very unlikely. I feel that home prices around here are going to significantly decrease and the market would all of a sudden be at a huge surplus unless some catastrophic event occurred and now all of these homes are on the market because even in New Jersey the foreclosure process is also two years. So it’s a very long extended process to kind of have some kind of incentive for more homes to go on the market to indicate some kind of a crash. That’d be my opinion. Of course,

Scott:
I saw a stat as well with the real estate settlement, Mindy, that before the settlement was announced, average buyer agent commissions were 2.65% of total purchase price value, 2.65% and since then they’ve decreased all the way down to 2.59%.

Mindy:
Oh, okay.

Scott:
Which is nothing, it is a joke. It has not impacted the actual commissions for buy-side agents like all this doom and gloom was talking about for that. So I think that there’s one argument, one school thought that now is potentially a great time to enter into the agent business and if I think you’re asking Alex, Hey Scott and Mindy, do you guys think I should go in and lean into this agent business and leave my full-time job? Is that the question you’re gearing up to ask here?

Alex:
Yeah, pretty much Just kind of overall thoughts.

Scott:
I have two questions and I’ll not even bother shying away from it, but I think the answer is almost certainly yes, but let’s couch that with a couple of other questions around this. First one is what is the likelihood of your $68,000 per year salary increasing dramatically at your current job?

Alex:
I do get a 10% raise every year, so I don’t know that that’s necessarily dramatic, but yeah, it’s likely that it will be going up, but at the same time I think it’s more about the time for me even than the money, it’s more about the flexibility and not spending any more time commuting and those sort of things over money. I think I could kind of whip up $68,000 maybe if I needed to. So for me, I think it’s a lot more having to do with my own fears and of course personal choices and loyalty to my employer type of things, which of course isn’t something that I expect you to resolve, but at the same time I also want to think through what that life looks like as a full-time agent and those sort of things. Of course, considering the income, but

Scott:
So you work full-time at this job 40 hours a week plus commute?

Alex:
Yes, so I work for my broker, he has a construction management company, but it’s down the shore, so I know down the shore is a jersey term, sorry, it’s like an hour 45 down and then another two to two and a half up and I go three days a week. Quit quit last year

Scott:
And you generated $96,000 in brokerage in agent commissions on the side while working 40 hours a week, 24 of which were in person in this office and on top of that there’s another, what is that? Seven, eight hours of commuting time and you still generated $96,000 on the side.

Alex:
I guess that’s true.

Scott:
So the big risk is if you talk to how long have you been getting agent commissions again, how many years of tax returns show commissions from your aging profession?

Alex:
I want to say five or four or five. I want to say this was definitely by far my highest commission year. It’s been more an average of say like 50 to 60 and yeah, this has been definitely a lot more.

Scott:
So we’ve had a couple of employees here at BiggerPockets who have gotten licensed and then go onto a situation like this. One of the example was Craig Op, he came in and did finances for us and one day he came in and he is like, Scott, I sold 30 houses last year side here, and it’s like, Craig, you graduated here. He went on to start the PHI team and it’s wonderful, a success story. You can’t be the job here. Somebody else needs that job for $68,000 a year to go and work there and you need to go and make your $250,000 a year as an agent, which is just waiting there. You’re leaving on the table in this situation and it’s time to graduate I think from this job and I think that’s a celebration and your broker’s not going to be upset about that. He’s going to be, or whoever this person is going to be super thrilled for your success on this front and wish you well, almost certainly if they’re a successful agent and are thinking about that, this is ridiculously good outcome for a side hustle here and it is time to thrive. I think

Alex:
I appreciate the perspective very much that maybe it’s a good opportunity for somebody else who’s maybe more local

Scott:
And it’s going to be like you’re going to resent your job too, because it’s like you’re going to make half of what you’re making from an agent business on the side and you’re going to be like, what am I doing driving down here? So that’s going to also, you have a risk of, I don’t know if this is happening, I’m sure it’s not, but you have a risk in the next year of becoming a problem for your employer in this type of situation. I wonder, so is that at all?

Mindy:
Yeah, you’re right. Is there anything you can do remotely for this job that would allow you to have a safety net to test out this full-time real estate agent thing or do you really need to be there three days a week?

Alex:
Yeah, it’s a good question, Mindy, because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently that I do plan to present, which is exactly that. I do a lot of numbers, bookkeeping, admin type of things and certain things. Yeah, sure, I do have to be there, but it would be say if it was once or twice a week at least for the time being then I think that that should be a doable ask. So I’m hoping that that would be agreeable essentially.

Mindy:
So when you’re working as a real estate agent, you are essentially working nights and weekends. Every once in a while there’s a daytime thing. I mean closings are always during the day, but it’s mostly nights and weekends. So you could give yourself more financial security by presenting this to your boss. Hey, I don’t want to drive down the shore anymore spending 12 hours in my car every week and that’s not fun. So here’s what I propose, and then if he says no, well then you have a different question to ask yourself, but how easily would it be for you to generate $50,000 in commissions in your pocket after your splits, after your taxes, after everything? I am estimating that’s like selling 6, 7, 8 houses.

Alex:
Yeah, it’d be about five or six I would say.

Mindy:
Yeah. So how easy would that be for you to do?

Alex:
It’s definitely doable. I think I have enough people in my book even right now that should convert.

Mindy:
Okay, so that’s all you need to do. That’s your minimum. So let’s say you need to sell six houses start in January. How long does it take me to sell six houses? Oh look, I did it in January. Okay, you don’t need that job anymore,

Scott:
But I think it’s chicken or egg. Alex, do you mind asking how old you are?

Alex:
I’m 31.

Scott:
I mean you got it right here. You’ve got so much right here in this situation. You’re going to have all the energy in the world to go after this. You’ve got how much cash, where is it? Yeah, $119,000 in cash. You got 300 grand in your after tax brokerage account, which is more liquidity around there. Your expenses are low. I mean, and your current income is going nowhere relative to this thing has taken off like a rocket ship. It’s a hundred grand and you’re doing it in part-time. You can double. There’s every reason to believe on paper you could double or even triple that income stream if this becomes your full-time profession within two years and that ain’t going to happen at your job in this particular situation and your risk is so low because of the cash position and your expense profile and the upside of, or the worst case scenario I think is that you quit the job and you get another one like it a year or two that’s closer to home on it. You’re already going into the office. Lot of it’s kind of hard to hire people that go into the office on a regular basis. You do that somewhere closer to where you are, you’d probably be able to get a job that’s just as high if not higher paying if you just switch jobs today. I don’t know. You seem like you’re nodding along with that. That’s true. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what it smells like to me from over here in Denver.

Alex:
Yeah, I think from over here in Jersey, I think you’re picking it up. Okay,

Mindy:
I changed my mind. Quit.

Scott:
I think you’re there from what I’m breeding here and yeah, you can definitely lose. You could come back next year and say, Scott, I didn’t sell any houses that ended up terribly. But I mean there’s bets, there’s outcomes and there’s separating the two quality of the bet, the quality of the execution and the outcome. I mean this is just absolutely screaming to me, quit the job and move forward. It’d be totally different if this was all in 4 0 1 Ks if you didn’t have a cash position, if you’re spending $65,000 a year on there, maybe I would be thinking about it differently, but this is screaming to me, you’re ready for entrepreneurship in every respect in this situation.

Mindy:
I appreciate it. Stay tuned after our final ad break.

Scott:
All right, let’s jump back in with Alex.

Mindy:
Only caveat I will give is on your financial goals, you want to acquire two to three more rental properties over the next two to three years. It’s more difficult to get a loan if you have self-employment income instead of W2 income. So I would pick your favorite lender and reach out to them and say, here’s my financial situation. Can I get a loan? Does your partner have the ability to get a loan?

Alex:
Yes, but he’s also a self-employed entrepreneur, so I think that’s been the parlay a little bit, but I think it’s possible.

Scott:
You know what I’d rather have than a better loan, another $150,000 in income to me. I agree with Mindy, go talk to three lenders and talk about it and get pre-qualified, go get pre-qualified for a loan for the next property right now there’s no reason not to do that. You are an agent. You should have those connections around there, talk to ’em about it. But that’s why I asked earlier about your history as an agent. You have five years of tax return history for that and agents are able to get loans on houses, so you’re not going to be solving a brand new problem. If you had one year of history, then that was why I asked that. I might be asking you different questions here because you wouldn’t have that history to lend against, but I would bet. Tell me I’m wrong and please email me if this is the case, but I’ll bet you that you’re going to be able to get pre-qualified more than you think on the next one.

Scott:
And what’s going to be better than that is you have a year of rental history now on your tax return and that is going to also help you qualify for the next load because you’ll have tax return, you’ll have rental income on your tax return in addition to your agent history. So I bet you your ability to borrow has increased dramatically or will increase dramatically once you file your tax return for 2024 and 2025. So that’s actually the order of operations. I would talk to a lender now and confirm those things and then get pre-qualified if I’m right, once you have filed your tax return in 2025 and you might want to delay, this might be a year for your consideration if that answer is hazy to file your return in January or March or February right away so that you have that available to take to the lender and get that information.

Scott:
But that’s the one question mark in your situation. I think you’re going to find it’s not going to be an issue for you from a lending perspective. In fact, in your situation, if you’re trying to buy more rental properties, when you go full-time as an agent, you’re going to get real estate professional status and you’re going to be able to use the depreciation on the next rental property you buy to offset your agent income to a large degree. So you’re going to have a field day with this. It all comes together for me and I’m expressing much more confidence than I usually do where I’m weighing a lot of options because I think it’s pointing in this direction for me very clearly.

Alex:
I appreciate the passion very much, Scott. I’m

Mindy:
The one that gets worked up, not Scott. So for Scott to get excited about this,

Alex:
That’s great. No, I really appreciate it and I didn’t even think about the income from the house either. I really was kind of missing that. I will say, not that it makes that much of a difference, but in terms of how I laid it out in income, that’s 68,000 that’s after tax. So that’s kind of like what I see. I guess it’s like a $90,000 base, but once again it’s kind of picking so it’s not really makes that much of a difference in terms of my decisions. But yeah, you bring up a lot of great points and I think that that’s definitely a lot of why, similar to what Mindy suggested initially, why I want to reduce the time because I think I would feel even more confident in making that leap when I feel like I have a little bit more time and I’m allowing myself to optimize my earning potential in real estate prior to going. So that’s my first step. But I agree with you Scott. I think it’s kind of time overall.

Scott:
Your boss is an agent, right?

Alex:
Yeah.

Scott:
Maybe you just in the context of it, say, Hey, I just made, does he know that you’ve made,

Alex:
I don’t think so, honestly.

Scott:
What brokerage are you with where you hang your license?

Alex:
Oh, it’s a small brokerage, like a small local brokerage.

Scott:
There’s even possibly a way where your employer’s like grief, yeah, come join my brokerage, hang your license here, we’ll hook you up with all the systems that you need to sell property and we’ll take a cut of the commissions like any other brokerage up to a certain amount for it.

Alex:
Oh, I understand. I understand your question now, Scott, sorry to interrupt you. So I have my license with my broker, so he has my license.

Scott:
So you still work for your broker,

Alex:
Right? Either way. Basically I’m not running away anywhere pretty

Scott:
Much. So there’s a different question here.

Alex:
It’s kind of funny though because that almost makes me feel a little bit stranger at times because I guess the dynamic is a lot to explain for a short podcast. But yeah, it kind of is also a funny thing because I would be essentially, I guess I could be framing it better. I could be framing it as I’m going to be allocating more time towards the brokerage as opposed to the building company.

Scott:
I mean you could have pad this guy stats and make him look like a hero by just stopping doing whatever the heck you’re doing at your full-time job right now and selling analysis. Because what he wants is they want to be like our firm sold a hundred million dollars in real estate last year, 250 and if he just unleashes you, you’re going to be a superstar for, I’m like probably not a lot of agents in that business are going to do a hundred thousand dollars in GCI this year, gross commission income for the non-real estate listening nerds here and you’re going to be able to up that dramatically next year and increase the sales volume for the brokerage to a certain degree. So we don’t even have to talk about quitting necessarily, which is going to make your case for the lender even better going into next year. I think that he would way rather have you selling houses than at this rate than doing the other functions that you’re doing.

Mindy:
You’re probably right Alex. You have a gap between your income and your spending of $134,000 a year-ish. Where are you putting that money?

Alex:
So as you can see, a lot of it is in cash, but other than that, I put it in my brokerage account. I put a lot of it in my brokerage account. I max out my Roth IRA, my jersey came out really heavy right there, but

Scott:
It comes and goes in a wonderful way.

Alex:
Yeah, it’s like certain words, you should just throw some words at me and I’ll say with ’em however you want. So then I’ll max out the SEP up to whatever my CPA tells me I’m allowed to and what else? I don’t have a traditional 401k at my company, so that’s kind of why I do rely on the brokerage account pretty heavily and just kind of know that I’ll have enough cash to maximize the Roth and the SEP when the time comes. But I think the one predicament I did point out for you guys to hopefully help me with a little bit is kind of taking advantage of more tax advantage accounts because unless I’m wrong with this, the Roth IRA, I might not qualify to contribute to a Roth IRA anymore because of my income. I guess it depends on how my taxes are going to be filed at the end of the day, but it looks like the cap is at 1 45 and I’m making a lot more than that, so that kind of takes away that other tax advantaged account. So I just wanted to see if you guys had any other suggestions for something like that where it would, I’m just going to be relying on my brokerage account basically otherwise, which I’m fine with.

Scott:
Can you do the backdoor Roth as a self-employment Mindy?

Mindy:
Oh, I’m going to let you do that while I talk about the self-employment amazingness of the self-directed solo 401k. If you have self-employment income and you do not have any employees that work for you more than a thousand hours a year outside of your spouse, you can open up a self-directed solo 401k. You can put the 2024 contribution limits or $23,000 so you Alex can put $23,000 in and then your company can match your contributions up to 25% of your salary capped at 52 or $54,000.

Scott:
Mindy, I looked this up while you were doing this as well and I think Alex, you’re going to be able to contribute up to 25% of your self-employment income, which I think will be your brokerage dollars there to the solo 401k and then you should research the mega backdoor Roth solo 401k mega backdoor, Roth Solo 401k, what a handful. Go Google that term and discuss that and maybe bring in your accountant and A CPA just to make sure that you are following all the rules, but that’ll be an option for you. And if things go well, there is a reasonable path here where you start doing this full time, you’re going to have a lot of income and you’re going to need to shelter that income from taxes because you spend nothing and you don’t need to realize much income to sustain your lifestyle. You can invest huge chunks of it and I think if you were to generate $300,000 in gross commissions, for example, in a year you could shelter $69,000 and potentially put it into a backdoor Roth.

Scott:
Now the Roth will eliminate some of your tax advantages, but you could do a solo 401k and shelter it, which might be an option for you on some of these higher income years and then do the backdoor Roth in other years when your income’s lower for example. That would be one option. The second thing you can do with the rest of that cash is to buy real estate and depreciate it, do cost segregations and then you’ll be able to reduce your A GI even further based on those depreciation, especially in higher income years, which I think you are likely to have in 2025 if you follow the sign of thinking or you have a reasonable shot of at least. And those would be two super powerful tax strategies for you. You could pop up in three, four years with a lot of income earned and very little in the way of taxes paid and some interesting options in your life at that point.

Alex:
Okay, cool. Yeah, I’ll definitely look into those. I appreciate it. Mega backdoor, Roth Solo 401k,

Scott:
That’s it.

Alex:
Okay.

Mindy:
Do you have a high deductible healthcare plan? I do. Okay. Are you maxing out your HSA

Alex:
Contributions? I know that was one that Yeah, definitely.

Mindy:
So the way that the HSA works is it’s an account, the health savings account is only for people who have a high deductible healthcare plan. You put up to 41 50 if you’re single and 8,300 for a family into an account, you pay no taxes on that money that goes in, it grows tax free, you withdraw it for qualified medical purchases. So what I do is I contribute, I have a family of four, so I contribute the max of 8,300 this year. I cashflow all of my expenses, which is something you can do because you have so much, I hate to say extra cash. There’s no such thing as extra cash. It is leftover outside of your spending a surplus if you will. You have a surplus so you can cashflow all of your expenses and then save the receipts and down the road maybe next year when, well, next year’s going to be a little too soon, but let’s say in 10 years you have a very down year, you want to go to Jamaica for six months out of the year, you’re not going to sell any houses. You could start cashing in these receipts, $20 for this, a hundred dollars for that $500 for this, and you can take that money and put it right into your pocket because you’ve already paid those expenses. You’re just reimbursing yourself. So that’s a great, it doesn’t grow super fast, but it’s a great account to be contributing to.

Scott:
Alex, you had another question here about cash that I think is really important for us to talk about here. You have $119,000 in cash, which is two and a half years of spending, and I want to encourage you to not do anything with the cash, leave it there, don’t invest it in this particular situation because you were thinking about going out on your own. And I believe that the returns of going out on your own are going to be far outpace the returns you get even if we have a great year in the market next year around that. And I think you should see how things are going come July or August of next year and if you sold a ton of real estate and that cash position is growing plowed into a rental property investment or start putting that into the market at that point and your confidence will be there and if you haven’t sold anything, it’ll have dwindled to 60 to $75,000 and you might go get your resume ready or something like that and it’ll feel a lot better at that point. That would be my advice to you in terms of the cash position in your situation rather than putting it into the market at this point. Mindy, what do you think?

Mindy:
I agree. If you’re going to leave your job, then you have a two and a half year emergency fund and that emergency fund is going to be funding your life while you are ramping up your agent business. I asked you earlier, how easy would it be to replace the amount of money that you’re spending with real estate sales and you think it would be pretty easy to do so if you can just cover the 50,000 that you spend every year, you won’t have to dip into this or you dip into it a little bit and then replenish it as soon as you get a commission. But I think that that emergency fund of cash should stay in cash, should be as liquid as possible. Don’t put it in the stock market, don’t put it into another real estate property or keep your eyes out right now on real estate properties while you still have a job. If something pops up that’s really amazing, maybe you push back your quit date a little bit while you are waiting to replenish your cash fund because again, you’ve got that surplus of 134,000, you’ll be able to replenish that pretty quickly. I mean, overall you’ve got six different really great options to choose from.

Scott:
It’s all because you spend so little, you house hack and you accumulate a lot of cash and wealth outside of your retirement accounts. You didn’t buy a house if you bought a regular house last year around this time for $600,000, you’d have less cash. You wouldn’t be producing cash on a monthly basis. Your expenses would be a lot higher and you wouldn’t have these options. So that’s how powerful that single decision is. I think in making all of this so easy for me to be confident in your chances an entrepreneur, yes, you can fail and you can also get fired next in three months for some other reason from your job or that company can have there, but I just think your positioning couldn’t be better to go after the career as an agent here.

Alex:
Yeah, I appreciate that a lot and I think I’ve been thinking similarly, so I appreciate the validation very much as well.

Scott:
Yeah, well you come back on the show in a year and a half to two years when you have so much income that you have to play all these games like the mega backdoor solo, Roth 401k, and you have to use depreciation from rental properties to offset your $300,000 in commissions and those types of things, or it doesn’t go that way. Tell us that too. But I would love to hear how those advanced strategies actually play out if that’s what you end up pursuing, which I think is odds on you can again put the caveat that there’s certainly things that could go the other way.

Alex:
Yeah, I mean maybe I will replace the Google tool and I will have to just come on as an expert in mega our Roth solo 401k. And that’s

Scott:
I think the homework that I would definitely get you going with is first I talk to your boss or I figure out, I think about how to float around to your boss like, hey, maybe the best thing I could do for the company is to make a lot more money as an agent here. That conversation I think thought through appropriately is going to go fairly well. Second, I would talk to multiple lenders and ask them about what your borrow your capability to borrow is going to look like in March or April or May of next year once you file that tax return. And I think you’re going to find really good news on that front. If you don’t let me know because that’ll be surprise to me around there. And I think the mega backdoor, the solo, whatever the phrase was for this Roth thing

Alex:
Needs an acronym.

Scott:
Yeah, you probably can do it this year. You may have to do it this year if you want to do it, but I would talk to a CPA or really get really self-educated a lot on that because I think you’ll only be able to do that with 25% of the $96,000 in commissions that you estimate you’re going to earn this year. But that could be wrong. There could be more nuance to how the other W2 income is there, but think those would be the three homework assignments that I would suggest you go off with. And then everything else, all of that is subordinate to how do you get the agent business to take off, which is obviously the main focus.

Mindy:
I think focusing on the agent business now that we’ve looked at all the different numbers, I think that’s the right play here because you’ve got such a strong cash position. Somebody else who calls in and they’re like, Hey, I have no cash, I have no savings, I have no investments. I’m going to quit my job and become a real estate agent while I’ve never done it before and I’m facing headwinds, I have not had any drop in my real estate agent business, but I think you and I are fairly anomalistic, we’re anomalies, and I’m hearing from so many people, my agent business is down. I’m thinking about quitting and going getting a job, blah, blah, blah. So if you don’t have the exact same set of scenario that Alex does, then don’t take the same steps she’s going to take to grow her agent business, grow your agent business on the side while you’re still doing your W2. But Alex has two and a half years of cash. She has five years of real estate agent business. She thinks that it is very easy for her to at least make the money that she is spending over the course of the year in next year as an agent. So that’s kind of a, go ahead. I don’t want to say no brainer, but it’s kind of an easy answer to come to. I

Scott:
Think in 10 years you’d regret not taking the chance way more than if it blew up in your face. The year you lose the year of $68,000 in income, you lose. Congratulations on the wonderful progress and great options that you have here. Please do let us know what you end up deciding and how it goes.

Alex:
I appreciate it. I definitely will.

Scott:
Alex, before we go, we would love to give your agent business a boost here. Could you tell us what you do, how people can find you, and if someone’s looking to repeat your house hacking success, how can they call you and find you as an agent?

Alex:
Oh, sure. Okay, so I am, my full name is Alexandra Prezi osi, so you can Google that. I’m very active on LinkedIn and Instagram. I think my Instagram is Alex Preziosi realestate, but I’m based in northern New Jersey. I work in Bergen County, Essex County, Morris County, P State County, basically anywhere. But those are my focuses. And you could also find me on BiggerPockets, Alexandria, posi, and yeah, if you’re looking for a house hack or looking to sell or buy, I’d definitely be more than happy to help.

Scott:
Awesome. Yeah, and Alex has got one of our featured agents. You can find her if you’re looking for an investor-friendly agent under agents BiggerPockets com slash agents. You can find her in those parts of New Jersey. So go check her out there and on her Instagram on her social handles, we’ll link to all those in the show notes. Alex, hopefully that helps you do a couple more deals next year.

Alex:
Yeah, thank you guys. Appreciate that very much. Very, very much.

Scott:
Well, thank you so much. Congratulations on the success so far. Amazing progress in one year. Really appreciate it and can’t wait to hear where things go in the next year or two. Please come back on and give us an update.

Alex:
Will do. Thank you both very much.

Mindy:
Thank you, Alex, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Alex:
Bye-bye.

Mindy:
Alright, Scott, that was Alex, and that was a fun problem to have. I’d liked her story because she has been so conscious of where her money’s going and conscious of what she’s spending on, and I don’t think that I would give the same advice to many people, but she’s really set herself up for life. Scott.

Scott:
Yeah, she certainly set a really good foundation. I mean, you could tell how excited I was getting as we were getting into the conversation here because her foundation is so wonderful for entrepreneurship, self-employment, the opportunity to go after big income. There’s so many reasons to believe in her financial situation, her story, her current net worth and current income, that there’s going to be a really significant future income stream that she can go after that there’s so much downside protection because of the little amount that she spends in the cash that she generates and that there’s such great investment opportunities that go along with that because of the tax advantages of self-employment and self-employment in her case, and the real estate professional status piece, that’s a really good foundation to go after some serious wealth building. There’s certainly risk associated with it, but again, that risk is mitigated with a $50,000 a year annual expense and $120,000 in the bank. So I love it. And that’s a situation where you can really make some big plays. And I wish, I hope that BiggerPockets money is helping more people build financial situations that look a little bit more like that because that’s what really unlocks human potential in a different way. And that’s what we’re all about here. Alex is going to take over the world here, and that’s what we want. We want as many people as possible to do that.

Mindy:
Yeah, absolutely. I think she has, you used the word potential, Scott, I think that’s great. She has so much potential and she’s staying at her W2 is almost going to hold her back.

Scott:
Yeah, I mean there’s been three or four times on the BiggerPockets Money podcast where we’ve had a situation where the job is so obviously the problem in the situation, in the sense that it’s irrelevant. It’s just such so has so little meaning in the context of the future, the ability to build wealth going into the future. This is maybe one of those three or four times. So this is not typically the advice that we give. Go quit your job now and get going. But this is one of those situations where I think that that’s really, really clear.

Mindy:
Alright, Scott, should we get out of here?

Scott:
Let’s do it.

Mindy:
That wraps up this awesome episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen saying Cheerio dingo.