How We Retired Early With $540K At 40 In Colorado

I started gettingdiagnosed with some fairly serious medicalailments. I just began to realizethat I had been working for a retirement that Imay never enjoy. We just knew we wantedthe freedom to make our own choices with ourtime. And that's wherefinancial independence came in. Then it turnedinto how fast can we do this? Let's get it doneas fast as we can.

We started to accumulatereal estate in the vein of let's have anadditional source of income besides my job. We accumulated 19 unitsover the span of just from 2016 to 2019. I'm Debbie and I'm Chris. We are 43 and live inColorado and retired by the age of 40. I never wanted to be amillionaire.

That was never a goal,even, you know, now in my forties, I just wantedto have enough money to be able to pay my bills. When I was 21, 22,somewhere in there, I remember reading TheMillionaire Next Door. It was eye opening to mebecause the stories they highlighted in that bookwere very similar to what we do. Once it became inthat realm of reality that I could maybe be amillionaire, then I did.

Become fascinated withthe idea of being a millionaire in bothhealthy and unhealthy ways. Once Debbie left herjob, we're now completely dependent on my job. Honestly, like, I'm surethere was more than this, but I tell the storythat basically I just stopped going to Subway. Obviously, that's notthe whole case, but.

That's all it reallyfelt like. Once we started trackingour spending a little bit better with budgeting, Iwas the guy that was always trying to turnthe knob down on our spending. Chris used to think itwas fun to like try to spend $100 a month ongroceries and just eat what came out of thepantry. So we both kind of hadthis thought, what if you.

Want to leave your jobsomeday? That thought easilyturned into how can we use our money to buy usmore time? I was mainly hearing alot of stories about rental real estate. Some people were werebuilding mega empires with rental real estate.I wasn't looking to do that. I just wanted tohave additional income. And in the in theprocess of going from we.

Don't know anythingabout being landlords and real estate owners tolet's buy our first property, I scoured theInternet and spent a lot of time listening topodcasts, watching YouTube videos, readingblogs and forums. And we got this likeeight and a half by eleven vision board typeof thing. So it was just somethingthat we could write on with chalk that we hadin our kitchen that would.

Remind us of our goals. And, and as I waswriting those goals down, I believe we had like bythe end of 2016, we were going to have twoproperties and by the end of 2017 we were going tohave four properties. We were gettingproperties that other people didn't want. There was something thatwas a bit of an ugly duckling about them.

For me, a very difficultpart of this was a lot of elbow grease, fixing upthe ugly things, working on the houses, gettingsmoke, smells out, painting everything,tearing a bunch of flooring out. I'mspending full days over there. Chris is gettingoff work. He's spending nights andweekends over at these rental properties to getthem ready for tenants and make them niceplaces to live.

And as we were doingthat, I'm still saving 50 to 60% of our incomethrough my paycheck. All the extra money weweren't spending out of your paycheck was goingtoward buying more rental homes. All of the cashflow we were getting from rentals was going towardbuying more rental homes. We accumulated 19 unitsover the span of just from 2016 to 2019. So it was a prettypretty fast and furious.

Four years. We actually ended upreaching fire at least three years earlier thanwe had projected. So gross income from ourrental properties can vary based on vacancy,capital expenditure, rehab, repairs, thosekinds of things. But it is between 8 to10000 per month and our net income from ourrental properties is between 4 to 6000 amonth.

So the money we live offof comes purely from our real estate investments. We do have mortgages onall of our rental properties that weconsider business debt. Our tenants pay thosemortgages for us essentially, and rentscontinue to rise as they do so as the mortgagegoes down. Right now, ourinvestments look like we have about $350,000 in acombination of.

Traditional IRAs andRoth IRAs and a brokerage account, $35,000 setaside in a 529 account for our girls andanother $20,000 in bonds. The insurance that shesells for one month a year provides that extracushion of safety or comfort, as well as someother discretionary spending. Our budget nowin FIRE, it looks very similar to what it waspre FIRE in that none of our categories reallywent any different.

Direction except fortravel. We usually have about$10,000 in our travel budget over the courseof any time, and it's more than we spend. Instead of having a jobwhere I would work 48 weeks a year and havefour weeks off, I would say now that I workprobably four weeks a year and have 48 weeksoff. And we found in our livesthat meaning and purpose.

Are important to ouremotional and physical health. And part of thatis around work. We are really enjoyinghaving this freedom of time to makeconnections, to travel and explore. Ourdaughters are getting older whether we like itor not. They'll be graduatingand I'm excited to be a part of of their livesas they move forward into their next chapters andhave the abundance of.

Time to be able to be intheir lives as much as they will allow us or asmuch as as feels comfortable. I think when we weresearching for financial independence, what wewanted was freedom and independence from havingto go to a place and do with things someone elsetold us to do. And we still want thatand we value that. But I think what wefound through it is a.

Much deeper, fuller,richer life.

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