Choosing Side Hustles (& Happiness!) Over Full-Time Employment

Mindy: Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast, show number 107 where we interview Kevin Ha from Financial Panther and get his story of financial independence.

Kevin: It only takes up a lot of time if you’re really going out of your way to do it, but if you’re incorporating it into the stuff you’re already doing that it really doesn’t feel you’re adding hours to your day. If you’re walking your dog during your lunch break, does that count as you working a half hour or was that time that would have been spent doing nothing anyway? Same with my commute home. If I’m doing delivery on my way home, is that work or is that I’m just getting paid to go home?

Mindy: Hello. Hello. Hello. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my fantastic cohost, Scott Trench. Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else and show you that by following the proven steps, you can put yourself on the road to early financial freedom and get money out of the way so you can lead your best life.

Scott: Wherever you are in your financial or life journey, you can begin rapidly moving towards a position capable of generating a great income, saving a huge percentage of that income and setting yourself up to make larger and larger investments on your way to financial freedom. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big time investments in assets like real estate or start your own business. We’ll help you put yourself in a position capable of launching yourself towards those dreams.

Mindy: Scott and I are super excited to announce that we have a new Facebook group. Go to facebook.com/groups/bpmoney to join. We would to make sure that we are giving you the show that you want to listen to. We’re thinking hard about ways to make this show even better and we really want your feedback. If you would take five minutes out of your day and go to biggerpockets.com/moneysurvey, there’s a few questions to answer. It’s a very quick thing and that way, it helps us make the show what you’re looking for.

Scott: Please do join that Facebook group. We love just chatting about whether it’s the show, general money topics or whatever or even just terrible jokes. We’ll be in it and lively and engaging in there and we’d love to chat with you guys and get to know you a little better.

Mindy: Well, I will say that 50% of us like the jokes.

Scott: 50% of us like the jokes. That’s right.

Mindy: If you have a question-

Scott: The dental pun off, you’ll see why it’s relevant later in the show today, we’ll drill those into you. Brace yourselves. All right. Before we bring on Kevin, the Financial Panther, you know the drill. We’ve got a note from today’s show sponsor.

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Scott: Big thanks to today’s show sponsor.

Mindy: Kevin, the Financial Panther, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. I’m so excited you’re here today.

Kevin: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Mindy: I am really interested in getting your money story because you are a licensed … Is it licensed attorney, practicing attorney? How do you say that properly?

Kevin: Yeah. I was a practicing attorney for five years. Now I’m still a licensed attorney, but I don’t practice anymore.

Mindy: At all?

Kevin: At all. I don’t practice at all.

Mindy: Do you have any income?

Kevin: I do. It comes from my own things I’m doing.

Mindy: You don’t have a real job?

Kevin: Right. I’m like a bum now. Yeah.

Mindy: Great. Welcome to the Financial Panther, unemployed bum show.

Kevin: Exactly.

Mindy: Kevin, tell us where your journey with money begins.

Kevin: For me, I come from a family with two immigrant parents, and so they both came here, both are not college educated or anything. My dad owned a Chinese restaurant, a Chinese takeout restaurant. My mom just worked in an office as an administrative type person. Growing up, we didn’t struggle or anything but obviously, as immigrants, they were frugal. They were pretty non-spendy with their money and generally pretty good with it. They didn’t ever talk about money with us though other than telling us not to spend it, which I think probably happens to a lot of people. We really didn’t know very much about anything with money growing up. A lot of the stuff we were focused on was get education, get a good job, very traditional immigrant-type thing that you would do.

Kevin: I went to college. I was fortunate enough that they were able to pay for my college, and then afterwards, I went off to law school. For that one, they couldn’t afford to pay for that one so I had to take out student loans for that. When I did do that, I got a half scholarship so it cut my student loan balance down by a little bit, and I did that. When I first got my real job, I realized, hey, I need to start learning something about how money works because I had a paycheck for the first time. I’m 26 now. It’s my first real paycheck and I really didn’t know anything. That’s how I first started learning about money and trying to do something with it. Whereas before, I was taking whatever money I had and just spending it all and not really having anything to show for it, which is a pretty common thing I think for a lot of people.

Mindy: Yes. The American, not the American dream so much as just the American way of life.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly.

Mindy: You assimilated really well. Good job.

Scott: We don’t talk about money forever in your life and then just one day, you get a paycheck and you figure out what to do with it after all of that.

Kevin: That’s exactly right. No one talks about it. I never knew what my parents made. I had no idea if we were … We were doing fine, but I had no idea, do we have money? How are my parents doing? Even today, I have no idea. I assume they’re doing fine, but I really don’t know.

Scott: I remember, this is very embarrassing so I’ll go ahead and tell it anyways. I remember my first paycheck and it wasn’t after law school or anything so it was $48,000, $50,000 a year job out of college and get my first paycheck. Previous to that, I had always thought about dollars partially in terms of how many cases of Natural Light you can purchase with those dollars. I was like, oh my, gosh, this is 200 cases of Natural Light.

Mindy: Natural Light beer?

Scott: That’s right. Yes, Natty Light.

Mindy: Oh, Scott.

Kevin: It’s like the official beer of college.

Mindy: [crosstalk 00:08:37] yeah. I was like, what do I do with this now? It’s so much money. I’ve never had anything like this to spend in my life before. What do I do? Anyways, what was your balance sheet and position when you got this first paycheck? You had student loan debt. What was the nuts and bolts of that situation?

Kevin: My student loans afterwards were $87,000, which is actually pretty good because most lawyers nowadays come out with $160,000. The reason my balance was that low was because I had that scholarship, and it was a weird thing because it was cheaper for me to go out of state and live on my own than it was for me to stay back at home going to law school and living at home simply because of that scholarship. That wouldn’t really help me out. When I ended up paying off my student loans, I added it all up. I ended up paying about $100,000 after all the interest and everything accumulated. That’s about what the damage was for law school for me.

Scott: Got it. What was your plan of attack starting in that position? Were you passive about paying them off at first or did you jump right into it and get going and paying them down?

Kevin: I got pretty aggressive right off the bat. One of the things is I started off at a big law firm, and the environment was probably … I knew that wasn’t for me so I was like, okay, I need to make sure that I am not stuck here and I can do something else that I have to. My basic plan was like, well, I’ve been spending the last seven years of my life living with basically no money so it’s not going to be that hard for me to just do that still. I was just thinking, well, so how many Natty Lights do I need to live this month? While a lot [crosstalk 00:10:26].

Scott: We all drink better beer now, right?

Kevin: We all do. Now we’re all craft beer.

Scott: Good.

Mindy: I hope so.

Kevin: That’s the way I approached it. I don’t need to inflate my lifestyle. I’m 26 years old. No one expects a 26-year-old to be making bank and living in some luxury apartment anyway. I was like, well, I’m just going to keep living in this regular apartment, taking the bus to work or bike in to work, not buying a car, not really upgrading my clothes. I had just normal stuff.

Mindy: Yes, yes, yes. I didn’t do this. I went the opposite route and oh, I’ve got money. Now I can move out of my parents’ house into my first apartment. That didn’t last very long because I’m so cheap. I can’t just throw away money on rent. I have to buy something, which led me down a whole different path. So many people, they get that first paycheck and they’re like, now I can spend it. I need a car. I deserve this. I’ve worked hard for it. What were your friends doing? Did you have a lot of attorney friends as well?

Kevin: Yeah. That’s the thing. It’s harder especially in a law firm because you’re around all … Everyone in the law firm is making the same as you. You can see what all your friends are doing. All of them would do the same thing because they’re all living in fancy apartments, buying houses after a while, and just living much more lavishly than I was living. My normal friends, my friends who weren’t big-shot lawyers or living regular lives but day in and day out, I was surrounded by these people who are making pretty good money and spending a lot of it to show that lifestyle. Who am I going to compare myself to or who am I going to put as my baseline? Because the way I saw it was if I live a normal 26-year-old and not a big-shot lawyer, 26-year-old, then I can have so much more and give myself more options later down the line.

Scott: How many hours a week were your peers at the law firm putting in on an average week?

Kevin: Because it’s a 60-plus hour week type thing, which is really tough, and it’s not always 60 hours of just straight working. Sometimes it’s just waiting around because you are getting … The thing about a law firm is every partner is your boss. You’re just there. If you’re there at 9:00 and then you’re getting ready to leave at 5:00 and then some random partner comes up and says they want you to do something at 5:00, now you’ve got to do that and then you’re leaving at 9:00, 10:00 and you basically spent the whole day, didn’t really do a ton, and then now you had all this work at night and so your day was really long even if it didn’t feel like you did a ton of work that day.

Scott: People are in the office on average 60-ish hours a week, right?

Kevin: Yeah, I would say so.

Scott: How long are they maintaining that for?

Kevin: How long do they-

Scott: How many years?

Kevin: A lot of people do it for three to five years and they start to realize, well, this isn’t going to work, and you see them start jumping around to different types of jobs. The people who are really hardcore about it, who are just built for that kind of thing, they stay for … They go all the way to make it to the top.

Scott: It sounds like you were in the other group you mentioned earlier. How long did it take you to realize that you didn’t want to climb the ladder to the top or make that a career move?

Kevin: I knew pretty much right away that this was not going to be the right fit for me just because of how I wanted to live my life. The only thing that was really holding me back though, of course, was that I had these student loans and I wanted to get rid of them really fast so I needed to stay in that. I ended up staying in that job for three years before making a switch to a government job that I thought would be easier and with a better work-life balance. That one was not. It was just as much work actually, except for a big pay cut, so that wasn’t [crosstalk 00:14:34].

Scott: At this time, you stayed three years and you pay off your entire student loan balance, I take it, and then you jump ship to the government job. Right?

Kevin: That’s correct.

Scott: You’re 29 at this point in the government job. How long does that lasted? Let’s pick up the story from there.

Kevin: I took that government job. I was there for a year before I made another switch to a nonprofit job. During that government job, it had really good benefits but the hours were … One thing is it was a $50,000 pay cut from what I was making before, which is a pretty big amount to drop in one year. It’s funny. Lawyers have a weird thing where sometimes most jobs, most career paths, you have a steady up increase in income. With lawyers, it can actually go backwards where if you don’t stay in the big law firm, you can actually flatten out or drop. Another reason why it’s really important to avoid the whole lifestyle creep with lawyer type jobs.

Kevin: I got to this government job and the hours were just pretty much similar to what the big law job was. It wasn’t a large state agency. Essentially, it’s just a big state law firm essentially, but they just had so much work to do, and it was just a lot of late nights also.

Mindy: That sounds terrible.

Kevin: Right. That’s the one thing about the whole grass is greener. It sometimes isn’t, which is why I ended up staying there just a year before I made another switch into nonprofit that I thought would be a better work-life balance for me. The nonprofit was a law adjacent field. It was for my state bar association. That one was fine. I was there for about a year and a half or almost two years, but it just wasn’t particularly that interesting to me. Meanwhile, I had all these little … I ended up doing my blog on the side. I’ve been doing all these little side hustle things I was having a lot more fun doing. I was thinking to myself, well, why don’t I just do this instead and see where that can take me? I’m still young. I can always go back and get something else or switch over to something else if I need to. That’s my career progression.

Mindy: What was your salary at the nonprofit compared to the government job?

Kevin: Do you want … I’m cool sharing specific numbers if you want.

Mindy: Sure.

Kevin: My highest salary at the big law firm was $125,000. My salary at the nonprofit was $57,000. It was a pretty big reverse.

Mindy: That’s a little bit different.

Kevin: Right. The really interesting thing was even though I took such a big pay cut during those stretches, because I had been so used to living on less, I was still saving money with no problem. I always had a huge surplus. I had never had any problem it seemed just because I hadn’t really inflated my lifestyle very much during that five, six years of working, and so it didn’t really impact me to drop down. Yeah, I could have saved more obviously if I kept working at the big law firm jobs, but it wasn’t making me happy to do that.

Mindy: You only have one life. Why live it stressed out and miserable when you can live it happy and doing what you want? It doesn’t sound like law was really your dream job. Did you dream of being a lawyer as a kid or did it just fall into place?

Kevin: No. Law is one of these things. I talked about this with people where law is one of those jobs where you can default into and you have no idea what you’re doing. Unlike the medical school, med school or dental school or any of those type of professions, law school doesn’t have any prerequisites other than that you can just take a test, a multiple choice, fill in the blank or bubble test. As a result, a lot of people … You see people that graduate from college and they’re like, well, what am I going to do? They don’t really know. They just go, well, lawyer. That’s a job that you know. It’s a very clear job with very obvious steps to take to get to certain types of jobs. Even now, if you gave me your GPA and your LSAT, I can tell you exactly what law school you can get into. It’s literally you know just from the numbers and there’s nothing else you need. It doesn’t matter what you majored in. Whereas, med school, you need O-chem and all that stuff, so it makes it a little …. There are more barriers to get it.

Kevin: For me, I graduated college in 2009, which was in the recession, and I had no job, nothing to do. I was like, well, I’m just going to go to law school.

Scott: I think it’s interesting just this dynamic where a lot of people who go down your career track, they will spend themselves into a lifestyle that eats up basically all of their income. That’s what you do, and then you lock yourself into this perpetuating cycle of this career where you’re progressing here. Whenever you want to exit, you have to make an incredibly painful cutback on your lifestyle, which most people can’t handle. You’ve just successfully bypassed all of that with the career choices that you’ve made, which I think is fantastic. I’ve seen many people’s lives … not many people.

Scott: In my life, I have seen the devastation left by a forced reduction in lifestyle. When people go from $250,000 a year of spending and they’re forced down to $80,000 a year of spending, it’s this existential problem, and it doesn’t have to be that way, right? If you’ve already won the game, why don’t you just spend reasonably, live like a normal person and generate a massive surplus and then do what you want to do, which is the rules of the game that you figured out right away and have reaped the benefits of basically your whole career after you knocked that back to zero and paid off your debt.

Mindy: Scott, then he can’t show everybody how successful he is by driving his BMW and his Mercedes and taking these lavish trips that he can tell everybody about.

Scott: He gets to come on the BiggerPockets Money Podcast and talk about it.

Mindy: That’s better.

Scott: There you go. Yeah. That’s better than a Ferrari. Come on.

Mindy: I know you’re married. When did you meet your wife? At what point in this career or schooling? Did you meet in school?

Kevin: I did. Yeah. I was in law school and she was in dental school when we met.

Mindy: Oh, dental school. You have now paid off all of your student loans, but dental school I have heard is a little pricey.

Kevin: It is. It’s crazy pricey, ridiculous even when you’re in state. Actually because my wife actually had to go out of state because her state didn’t have a dental school, so it made it even more pricey. Even the in-state rates are still really expensive these days too.

Scott: Did you guys merge finances or how do you hand handle money in your relationship with the different dynamics of debt there? We heard about your story and it sounded like that was an individualistic approach, but let us know.

Kevin: When I had my student loans … We got married in 2017 and we met when we were in school. We met in 2012. We’ve been dating for a while and we had our own separate finances. She had her things. I had mine. Her schooling was a lot longer because she also did a residency so she actually didn’t even start her first real job until last year. She’s been on school for a long time. For me, my whole thing with student loans was like it was my student loans. We weren’t married yet so it was my own thing. My goal was … We got engaged during that stretch, but I was like, I’m going to pay off these student loans before we’re even married so I’m fresh and out of it. That’s what I did.

Kevin: With her now, we’ve combined our finances now and so for her right now, we are working on it. We’re actually doing a little different compared to how I did it. When I paid off my student loans, I was just dumping money into it as I went. This time, because of hers, I like having that big surplus so instead of throwing it down every time and the money is now gone, we’ve actually just been setting it aside so just in case something happens, we’ve got the cash that we can use just in case. Not to buy a car or something but just in case there’s something that happens that we need it, that we need a little flexibility. It’s nice to have that little surplus cash and then once it’s enough, we can just get rid of her student loans.

Scott: Is your position largely basically cash then and then the debt and you’re just slowly paying that down and swelling your cash reserve? Do you invest at all as well?

Kevin: Yeah, I’ve got my investments pretty strong, and most of my money is actually invested, the money that I had made when I was working. After I paid off my student loans, I was just saving money and putting it into investments. For my wife, because she started her career so late, she actually just started investing because she had no money before and now she started doing it now that she has a significant income. For her, her side of the balance sheet with debt is definitely very cash heavy. That’s where we are. Right now, we’re pretty cash heavy, but it’s not that way because we’re scared to invest because we are still hitting the investments hard. We’re just keeping a cash position right now until the student loans are gone.

Scott: Got it.

Mindy: Do you have an estimated time of her debt payoff?

Kevin: Yeah, we think we can pay her debt off by next year, which is the goal. We are doing it. Yeah. There’s a couple of reasons for that. She had a lot of student loans, and these are things that are different than most people. She had $300,000 of dental school loans. Crazy, I know.

Mindy: Oh. You’re paying that off in one year?

Kevin: No. What’s happening is because her father passed away before I met her, and her father had a lot of life insurance, which she had been just holding on to. A few years back, she put about $200,000 of that into the student loans, which brought it down to $100,000. That’s what’s happening now. Now we only have $100,000 of her student loans, which is very low, but she started with $300,000. It’s a unique situation. It’s not the best one, but that’s what happened for her.

Scott: Got it.

Mindy: I wouldn’t say $100,000 in student loans is low.

Kevin: For a dentist, it’s really low.

Mindy: For a dentist, yes. They get up to $400,000 or $500,000. Right?

Kevin: Yeah. I have a lot of dental school friends, one of them is $400,000 student loans. I have another who’s over $500,000 in student loans. I’ve got another person who has been doing residency. I wouldn’t be surprised if his student loans are over 500 also. It’s like a huge mortgage.

Scott: It’s all relative to your income. A dentist is going to make a very strong income, which is one of the reasons why it’s an attractive profession. That $100,000 in debt is just not that … It’s half a year maybe of salary for, I don’t know on average how much a dentist makes, but it’s probably in that ballpark, maybe less.

Kevin: Right. Well, dentists are a little bit different. They do make a lot or they can make a lot if they own their own practice, but not so much if they are just working for someone. That’s one thing my wife did, is she bought a practice right after she was done with her residency, and so that’s really helped her out a lot. It’s a lot more work obviously, but it’s her business, which is how you can make a lot more as a dentist compared to just working as an associate for someone.

Mindy: You are no longer employed. I believe we called you an unemployed bum at the beginning of the show. You still generate income, right?

Kevin: Correct.

Mindy: How are you doing this? You were a lawyer. Now you’re not a lawyer anymore. What makes you money?

Kevin: I have a couple of things. I have my blog, which I was working on since 2016 and so that’s what I consider my primary profession now. I’ve just been building that up on the side. That was a thing I was doing at nights and weekends to get it going. I do a lot of stuff in the sharing economy and gig economy, which is stuff I was doing even when I was a lawyer. I can just go through the list of what I did, all the stuff I do.

Mindy: Yes. I already know a lot of this list and I love that you do this. Please share all the things that you generate income with and if you could give us a little bit of an idea what that pays.

Kevin: Yeah, sure. I rent out a room in my house on Airbnb, and I sometimes rent out my whole house on Airbnb when I go on trips and stuff. That one I usually make about $1,000 a month from the Airbnb, which this is great because it’s just a room in my house that would otherwise be empty.

Kevin: I dog sit using an app called Rover. That’s a dog boarding website. Think of it as an Airbnb for dogs. That one, I usually make about $3,000 a year doing, somewhere around the neighborhood of $3,000 a year doing that. The thing that makes Rover so good for me is I already own a dog so it’s not any extra work for me because I already have to walk my dog and feed my dog and do all that other stuff. It just integrates in my life perfectly. I’ve been doing that for five years now. I have this base of repeat dogs that I keep watching that are so easy, so cute. I probably watch them for free honestly but that’s like a bonus.

Scott: Do these dogs come stay with you or do you have to go to these other residences?

Kevin: No, they stay at my house. Basically I just have a second dog in my house a lot of the time.

Scott: Perfect.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s awesome. I also do food deliveries using my bike for apps like Postmates, Doordash, UberEATS and Grubhub. This is one that I think is super underrated if you do it with a bike specifically and not with a car because I bike around the city and I’m getting paid basically to essentially do what I would already do anyway because I’m a heavy biker. I bike for exercise and for fun all the time. The fact that I’m getting to do this little treasure hunt is great.

Kevin: The great thing too is the way I usually did it is I would combine it with … The way I usually do it, I combine it with my commutes. If I’m coming home from downtown, I will grab some deliveries that are going back towards my house, which I’m already biking to anyway. It’s like I’m getting paid to go home even if it’s a little bit of a meandering route, but that’s something that I think is super underrated to essentially get paid to exercise.

Scott: You can set that up in the app. You can set it up so that, hey, I want to go generally from this direction to this direction. Give me a delivery that meets that criteria.

Kevin: No, you can’t do it that way, but you just wait around because you can reject any order that comes in. If you’re sitting in your office and you’re getting ready to go, you just turn on the app and just wait until … Turn all the apps and just wait until the deliveries that you want are going in the direction you want to go. The best thing is if you can double up and have deliveries, this is how you really make money on it. You double up and have deliveries from multiple apps at the same time, going in the same general direction, because then you’re multitasking essentially.

Scott: Nice. Wow. That’s a great tip.

Mindy: What does that pay?

Kevin: That one, I typically make … because I only do it during prime times, essentially lunch and dinner, I’m always making about $20 to $25 an hour. I’ll usually do an hour of it and make 25 bucks. What is that? It’s usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 or 500 bucks a month just doing that in my spare time.

Mindy: When I’m working out, I’m paying to work out. I’m not getting paid to work out.

Kevin: This is great. I discovered these apps, these delivery apps from my brother because he lives in DC and back in 2014, he was like, “Yo, you got to try out this app.” He was doing these deliveries on a skateboard and stuff and was like, “This is so fun.” He owns a business and he still does deliveries just because he thinks it’s fun.

Scott: We’ve got the dog sitting. We’ve got the delivery.

Mindy: Airbnb.

Kevin: Airbnb.

Scott: The blog and the Airbnb. Do you have other sources besides that?

Kevin: I’ve got a whole lot of other sources.

Scott: Let’s do it. This is awesome.

Kevin: Another thing I started doing is a few years back is an app called Wag. It’s an on-demand dog walking app. Think of it like an Uber for dogs. When people need to get their dog walked during the day, they’ll put the thing in the app and then you can just pick up walks if they’re near you. That one was great because I would do that back … When I had my 9-to-5 day job, there were all these apartment buildings all around my office and so I could just walk outside and grab a little dog walk during lunch, which is when most people want their dogs walked anyway.

Kevin: Each time I walk a dog, it would be a half hour, I’d make $16. Basically instead of sitting at my desk eating a sandwich and just wasting time on the internet, I would just go for a 30-minute walk around and get a little exercise, get a little fresh air and walk a dog and get paid while I was doing it. That one was great. Now I would make 100, 200 bucks a month doing that.

Scott: Great.

Mindy: All of these little side jobs add up to a full-time income but they don’t sound they take a lot of time out of your day. You can go and walk a dog at lunch. Like you said, you’re not sitting at your desk. Connor Center, if you’re listening to this, there’s another way to make a little bit of extra cash because we’re going to have all of these apartment buildings right by our office. There you go, Connor. I know he listens to the show. He works at our [crosstalk 00:33:23].

Kevin: Right. Exactly because it only takes up a lot of time if you’re really going out of your way to do it. If you’re incorporating it into the stuff you’re already doing, then it really doesn’t feel you’re adding hours to your day. If you’re walking a dog during your lunch break, does that count as you working a half hour or was that time that would have been spent doing nothing anyway? Same with my commute home. If I’m doing delivery on my way home, is that work or is that like I’m just getting paid to go home?

Scott: Awesome. Let’s keep the list going.

Kevin: I can keep going. Yeah. Another one, this started in 2018, was charging up Bird and Lime scooters. If you’re in any big city, you’ve probably seen these scooters around. Basically what you do is you sign up to be a charger, a scooter charger and you take them back in your house and just plug them in and then you bring them back out in the morning. You have to drop them off in certain spots. If you live in a dense area, which a lot of especially young millennials do like new college grads and that thing, you can really … It’s so easy because I live near a large university, so there’s a ton of scooters.

Kevin: Every night, I’ll just grab six scooters. It’ll take me 15 minutes max. I just literally walk out the door and just grab six scooters. I do this on foot, so it takes a little skill for me. I’ve learned how to do it. I can basically stack all the scooters up on top of each other and ride a big stack home. I got to show a video to understand how it looks like, but it’s a pro move. Every night, each scooter here in Minneapolis pays $5 a scooter. Every night, I’ll make $30 just taking these scooters home, just walking outside my door, and then the drop-off spots because again, I’m in a dense neighborhood, all the drop-off spots are right around my house too so a block away. I’ll just bring them back out in the morning.

Kevin: As a bonus when you’re using these, when you are charging scooters, you can basically ride them around free. Sometimes if I’m feeling a little lazy, I’ll use the scooters to do deliveries. It always gets a laugh when I bring it … I’m delivering food and I’m on a Lime scooter. They’ll be like, “What’s this? Are you paying for that?” I’m like, “Oh no, this is a little strategy I use.”

Mindy: What does that do to your electricity bill?

Kevin: Yeah, that’s a question people always ask. These scooters, the batteries in these scooters are a battery in a laptop. They don’t take up a lot of electricity. People have done the math on them, and it’s two to five cents to charge it from zero to 100%, which most people don’t realize that, like, oh right. Because they’re this micro mobility thing, the batteries don’t have to be that big to move the vehicle. The battery is not a huge, giant battery that just take a ton of electricity. It’s essentially like charging up a laptop basically.

Mindy: I would get extra electrical service in my house and bring a boatload of these things and charge them up. How long does it take to charge?

Kevin: It takes four to five hours to charge them from zero to a hundred. You pretty much just put them there overnight and then in the morning, you just wake up and drop them off.

Mindy: I’d be doing this all day long. Do you get a little notification this one needs to be charged?

Kevin: You don’t get notifications. You have to just look in the app to see what’s available. I’m always just looking in the app because I just like to grab the scooters. For me also, I just like riding these scooters around because sometimes I’ll just charge them and then not put them back out and just hang on to it and just ride it around.

Scott: Are these scooters, do you average six per night?

Kevin: Yeah, I do. Six per night is my goal and I hadn’t … At least during the summer, I had no problem doing it. Here in Minneapolis, they take them out during the winter so they’re gone now. I had one month where I made over a thousand bucks charging up these scooters and then the rest of the summer, I was at $800 or more every month, literally just walking out the street, picking up the scooters. It’s funny because I had some people here and they saw how I did it and they’re like, “Oh man, I’m going to do that too.” I have friends now who are also doing it because they live in downtown areas and they just are like, “Yeah, these scooters are everywhere.”

Mindy: This is also not a huge time commitment. Right?

Kevin: No.

Mindy: You grab the scooters. You plug them in and then you walk away, and that’s 30 bucks. That’s dinner, your utilities for the month, every single night. You could almost pay rent just by doing that.

Kevin: You could almost, yeah. The main thing, the caveat is this is very location dependent because-

Mindy: That is true.

Kevin: If you live somewhere that doesn’t have a lot of scooters, you live farther out from the city center, I don’t think it would be worth it because then you’d have to drive probably and you’d be wasting your time going back and forth. If you are in these neighborhoods that all the young millennials are living, that is where you can do it because there are just so many of them around.

Scott: Have we exhausted list or how much longer does this go on?

Kevin: Oh yeah. I can just jump through some quicker ones.

Scott: Keep going. Yeah, this is great.

Kevin: Another thing I sometimes do is, and this is the only one that my wife does with me because she just loves doing this, flipping stuff. If we find furniture in the street, we’ll sell that on a Craigslist or Facebook marketplace. We sometimes go to Goodwill and we’ll just find stuff that we think is worth more than it’s selling for and flip it.

Kevin: Another place, there’s a place called Goodwill outlet. It’s wild. You go there and you buy stuff by the pound. You literally just dig through bins looking for things, and it’s paid for by the pound, but you find some sweet stuff. I once found a Burton snowboard bag. I didn’t know what that was, but my wife knew what it was. That thing cost me, since it’s by the pound, that thing must have cost me a dollar to buy and I sold it for $50.

Mindy: We live in Colorado. Scott and I live in Colorado, so there are mountains right there. There’s a lot of snowboard gear that gets donated. Ski gear too. I’m not discriminatory, but I do snowboard so I go there first. There’s a lot of stuff that gets left at the resorts, and you go to the thrift stores up in the mountains. I got a Columbia ski jacket for $15 and it fits perfect. I got my sister snowboard boots and snowboard bag because she lives in the Midwest for $15 each. For $45, she’s set to go. She can go snowboarding in the Midwest, which doesn’t have great places, or she can come out here and it’s a brand name board. I think it’s a Burton or a RIDE or something. They’re just so cheap and people will pay a lot more. I used to sell snowboards online on eBay. They’re really expensive to ship.

Kevin: Oh yeah. That’s the nice thing about that bag. I could fold it up and stick it in a box.

Mindy: Do you sell anything on eBay?

Kevin: Yeah. I sell on eBay also. Most of the stuff I find that are clothes stuff, I sell it on eBay.

Mindy: That’s awesome. Is there any tips for things that you thought would sell but wouldn’t sell or things that sell really well?

Kevin: It seems like if you’re going to do any of these reselling things, you need to pick your lane that you’re good at. For me, whenever I see anything that’s sports related, I instantly grab it because sports stuff tends to sell, I find sales pretty well. It makes sense. If you’re looking for … Especially college sports stuff specifically because if you need a college hoodie or something, that’s just something that people are going to buy no matter what I find. That’s what I aim for.

Kevin: I recently found a University of Wisconsin, Columbia jacket. I’ve got that currently listed up for $40 and we’ll see. I’ll probably get 35 or 40 bucks for it. I paid a dollar for that thing at the Goodwill outlet. When I saw that, I was like, “Oh my, gosh.” I just snatched it out there. Someone else there grabbed the Minnesota jackets. They got a hold of that before I could get it.

Mindy: People are so, I don’t want to say this and sound negative, I don’t mean negative, but they’re so rabidly fanatic about the college that they went to. Hey, Scott. Where did you go to college?

Scott: I went to Vanderbilt University.

Mindy: Yeah, I knew the answer to that. I don’t know how many times you’ve said that on the show, but in real life, that comes up frequently. I’m not talking smack about Scott. He’s proud of where he goes. I guess rabidly fanatic isn’t the right word.

Scott: Go Dores.

Mindy: Go Dores.

Scott: Commodores.

Mindy: I’m like, you’re the Dores? My high school-

Scott: The Vanderbilt Commodores. That’s right. Yeah.

Mindy: What’s a commodore?

Scott: It’s someone who commands a fleet of ships.

Mindy: In my high school, we were the tugboats, the porters.

Scott: Cornelius Vanderbilt had a canal system transportation network that he oversaw and facilitated. I’m probably butchering that and someone will beat me up who listens to the show and knows that a little better than me. The Vanderbilt Commodores. Yes.

Mindy: Vanderbilt Commodores.

Scott: I have nothing that says Commodore about it.

Mindy: Kevin, did you find anything from Vanderbilt?

Kevin: Right. Because if he wants to go to a football game or something or a basketball game, he’s going to need a hoodie or a sweater or something. Right?

Scott: I’ve got plenty of that stuff, to your point, yeah.

Scott: All right. Hope you’re enjoying the show. We’ll be right back after a word from today’s show sponsor.

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Mindy: What else are you finding?

Kevin: I selling coats and stuff too. I always find that those are pretty light and they sell for a lot more than they cost.

Mindy: That’s a good plan.

Kevin: Especially if you find a down coat like that Columbia coat, for example. If you can find one like that, you can sell it usually for 30 bucks. If you can buy it for way less than that, and it’s very easy to ship it out, you just stuff it into … or you just save. Whenever you order something, you just save the box for it and you just stuff it into those. Those are what I focus on.

Kevin: This is one of those things that does take work to go to it, but it’s just funny because my wife, she’s a dentist making very good money and she still goes to the Goodwill outlet. She’d be like, “Hey, do you want to go there today?” I’ll be like, “Not really.” She’s like, “Come on. Let’s go.” She likes digging around, looking for treasures to see if she finds anything good.

Mindy: That was going to be my other point. I had two points to make about this. First of all, all of these side hustles are doable by anybody. Maybe not the Lime scooter. I live in a suburb. We don’t have any Lime scooters or any other scooters so I can’t do that one, but I can rent a room in my house. I can go to the good … I love going to the Goodwill. I could be a hoarder, and that’s not a good thing. If I can go there and buy things and then sell them, I’m making money. I still get the experience of going to the Goodwill and then I don’t have to have all this stuff in my house, but I have never found anything that sells well for me so I just gave it up. I think I just picked dumb things to try and sell too.

Kevin: It takes some time before you can figure out, okay, what is it? The great thing is if you pick stuff and it’s not good or it doesn’t sell, well, you won’t be out a ton. You don’t have to spend tons of money buying stuff.

Mindy: Exactly. I just paid it for a dollar so I can donate it.

Kevin: Right.

Mindy: The other point is you’re a lawyer, your wife is a dentist. Why would you waste your time doing this when you could be making more money on teeth and the law?

Kevin: Right. For me, a lot of the reasons I started doing all these, I started almost all these side hustles while I was working at the big law firm. For me, a lot of it was just this was a stress relief for me. It was a way for me to manage how I was feeling because I could go and do a bunch of deliveries on my bike after work and not even think about work and I could be doing something active. It was something totally 100% different than what I was doing for the last 10 hours, which was sitting in front of a desk, typing something or searching for something. That is why I first started doing this stuff.

Kevin: I just found them fun. The fact that yeah, it’s definitely beneath me and yeah, I could go and do something else. I could probably try to do some other law related thing, but do I want to after I’m already spending 10 hours not enjoying what I was doing? Do I really want to go do something more of the same thing that I’m doing that I’m not having fun doing? It’s how I ended up doing this stuff.

Scott: What does a day in the life look like?

Kevin: Right now, the day in the life is I wake up in the morning, I take care of my dog, I go for a little walk, and then I try to work on my website and stuff during the morning. I have a coworking space downtown that I go to, to keep myself a good schedule so I’m not just sitting at home all the time. During lunch when the lunch rush hour comes, I usually to hop on a bike and start doing deliveries around lunch for the lunch crowd downtown, which is always super easy because they’re always really close. It will be the five guys down the street, the building that’s across the street. I do that. I’ll work in the afternoon and then maybe pick up some dog walks or something again because there’s so many around me.

Kevin: In the evening I’ll usually, this is what I was doing for a while, I would grab scooters and try to scoot them home. I’d grab two or three scooters and ride them back towards my house. I was getting a free scooter ride home and making money along the way. I also sometimes, depending on the day, I’ll do deliveries on my way home as well.

Scott: Got it.

Mindy: You’re making $150 a day without having a boss telling you what to do, without feeling stressed. You get to be paid while you exercise. You get to ride a fun scooter. The scooters are super fun.

Kevin: They’re so fun.

Mindy: I asked the question about why don’t you do something that pays more just because I can hear somebody listening to this saying, well, why doesn’t he just go back to work? Well, because that’s work. That’s somebody telling you what to do. That’s the partner coming to your desk at 5:00 as you’re packing everything up, “Oh, hey, you got four extra hours.” No, I didn’t. Well, now you do.

Kevin: Right. That’s how I started thinking about it. What can I do that makes me happier? Since I don’t need a lot to live, I have a lot more choices now because if my baseline was I need a hundred grand every year to live, that means I only have a few types of jobs I can do. Whereas, if I only need half of that or less, I have the whole spectrum of jobs that I can do.

Scott: Let’s break this down real quick. You just listed a set of activities where you make about $150 a day through your work specifically, which is the deliveries, the ride share, the dog walking, all that stuff, but you’re also building an asset, which is your blog, right?

Kevin: Correct.

Scott: You passively make money through your Airbnb, through your residents there as well. This is all made possible by this very low cost lifestyle and the fact that you have no personal debt, outside of your wife’s debt.

Kevin: Correct. Yeah. This is what I did because I had the regular day job and then I had a scalable business that I had started up and then these side hustles. It’s nice because now, I got rid of the regular job and so now I have my scalable business, and then my side hustles basically give me a floor, if that makes sense. I know whenever my business does, at least I can make it a little bit at least. I’m not going to be rich obviously, but at least I’ll be okay just doing the other stuff. It gives me a little comfort I guess.

Kevin: I think of it like when I was working, I thought of my side hustle as this little side hustle emergency fund. If something happened, I knew, well, I’m not going to be digging all my savings because I can make some money on the side doing these other stuff just more often.

Scott: What law school did you go to?

Kevin: I went to University of Minnesota.

Scott: Great. Other law school grads from Minnesota who start off in a big firm, if they’re still there, they’re probably making in the ballpark of $175,000 to $200,000 a year. I don’t know.

Kevin: I don’t know what they’re making now my year, but yeah, they probably are [crosstalk 00:53:01].

Scott: They have one option, which is to continue basically doing that or they can take what seems a crazy reduction in hours but 70 to 55 hours a week at another job for a hefty pay cut. Those are their only two options.

Kevin: That’s their two options they think that they have.

Scott: That’s right. Yeah. The way you’ve constructed is you broke it down. None of this stuff that anybody can do is beneath me, to use your phrasing there. Exactly. I’m going to set this floor. I’m going to get rid of my debt. I’m going to manage my life in this way. I have a broad number of options. When it’s all said and done, you’re probably going to have a happier day to day and be more fulfilled with what you’re doing, and you might end up better off financially, downstream anyways from an income perspective, depending on how some of these side hustles and businesses end up growing downstream. For example, your blog or whatever it is you invest in and grow. It’s just a crazy outcome and a crazy situation when you break it all down like that where why would you lock yourself into that pattern from a spending standpoint and trap yourself in that mental cage that you have to imagine so many of these other lawyers and industry professionals similar to that are locking themselves into?

Kevin: Yeah. Just to talk about that. There’s a thing, especially with a lot of these professional professions where you start where you … Since you identify with it so much, you think that is the only thing you can do. If you look at my own work history, I jumped jobs a lot but I kept being unhappy and then jumping into another legal job, thinking, well, that’s all I can do because I went to law school. I am a lawyer. I still call myself a lawyer even though I don’t practice because I identify with that so much because it was a big part of my life. There’s a lot of lawyers who are unhappy and really want to do something else, but they aren’t able to quite get themselves in that mental position of maybe I can do something that isn’t law. Maybe there’s a huge world of stuff out there, and I could try something else, because it’s hard. It’s hard to do that. If you’ve been doing this thing, it’s not easy to think, well, what else can I do?

Scott: That’s right.

Mindy: I don’t think we’ve talked about the status part of it before. Being a lawyer is very impressive. Being a doctor is very impressive. Being a guy who plugs scooters into a wall at night I think is very impressive, but it’s impressive in a different way. How do you get over that?

Kevin: Yeah, that is a thing I have battled with a lot especially even for me, when I was changing jobs and stuff, I would keep taking jobs that would be seen as worse. I’d be around all these other lawyers who are talking about very prestigious things, the big cases they’re working on, the big law firm they work at. It’s something that honestly I don’t think you ever really get over that. You just have to be comfortable. That’s still a thing I have to work on too because a lot of people ask me, they’ll be like, “What do you do?” That’s what they ask. My natural instinct is just, “I’m a lawyer,” so that they know I am someone. If I’m like, “Oh, I’m a blogger,” then it’s like, “Oh, so this guy is a bum.” It’s something that I honestly haven’t gotten over yet. I’m still working through that myself. It takes a lot of work to be comfortable with what you’re doing and who you are and what makes you happy and what moves you.

Mindy: One of my favorite quotes is from Coco Chanel, the fashion designer. She said, “I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.” She’s super sassy. I try to tell that to my daughters who are in middle school and in the throws of all the drama that comes with the teenage hormones and all of that. It doesn’t matter. In the long run, it doesn’t matter what people think of you. It only matters that you are proud of yourself and you … I just did math on the calculator because I wanted to double check my numbers, but $150 a day times 30 days is $4,500. If you’re used to living on very low, $4,500 is livable, right?

Kevin: Oh yeah. It’s totally fine. I don’t feel I’m struggling or anything. It’s totally fine.

Scott: That’s your floor. That’s before Airbnb and before your blogging, right?

Kevin: Right. That’s the interesting thing, is that since I quit my job, with the combined everything, it’s more than I was making than my day job income. It was funny because when I wanted to make the leap to doing my own thing, it was such a scary thing because I have this steady income and I wanted to keep it, but I can do that myself. Since I was making less also than what I was making as a big time, big law lawyer, it was easier for me because I had lowered what I thought I needed to make. When I quit my job, I just need to make $57,000 this year and I will be exactly the same position as I was before. That was a lot easier for me to do than if I needed to make $150,000.

Scott: That would be very difficult with your current tasks, but within a couple of years, as some of these things grow, you never know.

Kevin: Right.

Mindy: I want to make a couple more. I keep making all these points. I want to just reiterate, this is before your wife’s dental income, which is not insignificant. I think that we should mention that again just because the mad scientist is married to an optometrist and he was in some article online. Well, yeah, but his wife is an optometrist. His wife is a doctor. Yeah, she is, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he can support them on his side hustle business and on all of his investments and everything. Just because she’s a doctor, it doesn’t make any less financially independent. Just because you’re married to a dentist, it doesn’t make you any less financially independent, and now you’re working all of these little side hustles that you could stop working if it suddenly decided to not make you happy anymore or if it suddenly didn’t make you happy anymore. All of a sudden, now it costs you $5 to hook up Lime scooters. You’re probably not going to do that anymore.

Mindy: You seem a happy guy. I have met attorneys who are extremely stressed out because their whole life revolves around being stern and doing all the lawyery things. They don’t seem happy. You seem real happy.

Kevin: Yeah, that is definitely true, and that’s what a lot of people have told me since they have seen me post my legal career that I am just much more happy. It’s because even though I’m not making the big, big bucks like before, that’s not as important to me as having more control of my life and feeling like I am in charge of it and not someone else. It’s been good. I’ve been able to travel a lot more. I’ve been able to visit people more, and I’ve just felt much happier with my day to day and no more. I’m not dreading Mondays. Today is Monday and I didn’t dread it as I was for the last five, six years.

Mindy: I always look forward to Mondays now because I get to record a podcast. This was awesome. I love, love, love that you do what you do without regard to what other people think. That’s really impressive.

Kevin: That’s a lot about money, it’s being comfortable with you and not having to feel like I need to keep up with everyone else around me or I have to do what everyone else around me are doing.

Mindy: Exactly. That is so perfect. Well, now, it is time for the famous four questions. It’s the same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Kevin, are you ready?

Kevin: I am. Yeah.

Mindy: What is your favorite finance book?

Kevin: My favorite one is probably JL Collins, The Simple Path to Wealth. That’s the one that when I first found that whole stock series thing, it really made it seem much easier than I thought investing and everything was. That is the book … Now it’s in a book form, which is even better. That’s the book I tell everyone if they just are trying to figure out how money works. I’m like, “Just get this book. This book is going to change your life.

Mindy: That is an excellent book. Jim was on our podcast, episode 20, where we asked him all about that book and the very simple path to wealth.

Scott: What was your biggest money mistake?

Kevin: For me, it was when I was college. I had jobs and stuff in college, and because my parents were able to cover me, I didn’t have very many expenses, and so all the money I made in college, I just spent it all on clothes.

Scott: Natty Light.

Kevin: No, not even Natty Light. It was on clothes and stuff that I had no business buying. I would buy Lacoste polos and really expensive stuff that I don’t have at all. When I look back on it, oh man, I really wish I had put that away or at least not spent all of it because when I graduated from college, I worked jobs that whole four years and I had zero dollars, nothing left to show for it even though I had no expenses. It was all spent on clothes and stuff that I don’t have anymore.

Scott: Makes sense.

Mindy: Yeah. Too bad you hadn’t discovered the Goodwill outlet yet, you go through and take to the bins.

Kevin: Right. You see, back then, I was trying to show off how awesome I was. I wouldn’t have wanted to go to that. I will only want to buy the fancy stuff at the mall or whatever.

Mindy: That one that you pulled out of the bin looks the same as the one you bought at the mall.

Kevin: Right, but I would know that it wasn’t and then that would get me. Oh, I need them to know.

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

Kevin: My best piece of advice for people starting out is just to not be afraid of trying things. I think that we get a lot into our head, and at least for me too, you can’t make any mistakes when you’re growing up and whatever. Life is so long. I look at it and when I was in my 20s, the reason I went to law school was like, oh, I don’t want to take any chances trying something else and seeing if I can do something else.

Kevin: In retrospect, I wish I had given myself that permission to try things and maybe fail, maybe make it, but just try it especially while I was a young, really young because life is just so long and we just have so many opportunities today. I think that the way we’re taught to just stay in your lane and just do that from the time … You know how when we’re kids. Shuttle us all into different things and then you’re told this is what you’re supposed to do. I just think that doesn’t work anymore just because there are so many more opportunities to do different things and see what is out there.

Scott: That’s a really interesting perspective we haven’t heard before. I think that I can relate here because also coming from an upper middle class background where parents paid for college and stuff, it was like, oh, I have to do everything perfect. Get straight A’s, be on the sports team, go to a good college, get the fast line career and the Fortune 500 companies, a similar dynamic to law but a little shift. It wasn’t like, oh, let’s experiment with 20 different things here. Here’s what seems the the good options. Go with that and go all in.

Kevin: Right, exactly. It’s funny because we act like, oh, if we do something wrong when we’re 22, that’s going to impact our life. It’s probably not. There’s a scene in one of the Transformers movies. It’s Transformers 3 or something where Shia LaBeouf, the main character, he’s trying to get a job outside college. He’s interviewing with this John Malkovich character. The dude in the interview, this first job is critical. It determines your life. I’m like, what? That is crazy, but that’s how some of those things, 22, get it right, right then because if we don’t, that’s it. We’re done. It’s crazy, I think.

Scott: Spend less than you earn and do what you love.

Mindy: Yeah. It is crazy. I have to tell you, I have changed careers now three times. This is my third different career. The first one was interesting, but I always felt like a fraud. I was a graphic designer, but I always felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. My second one, I sold quilting supplies, and I loved it, but it didn’t pay very well. I stayed home to have kids. We had been flipping houses forever, and this job at BiggerPockets popped up. I love this. This is my end career. I won’t do anything else after BiggerPockets. This is where I will spend the remainder of my working life. It’s because I love it.

Mindy: If you find something that you think you like and then you start working and then you decide, oh, this isn’t for me, it’s okay to pivot. If that happens at 22, if that happens at … I’m not 22, 23. If that happens at 30 or 40, it’s okay to pivot and try something else because being happy in your job, feeling confident that you know what you’re doing, feeling like you’re doing a good job is so much better than whatever high paying job you had before where you felt like a fraud.

Scott: What is your favorite joke to tell at parties? Been waiting for your dentist.

Kevin: I don’t have any jokes I tell at parties. I’m not great at puns and those kinds of things. My niece always has her joke that she says. Her joke is always, why did the banana go to the doctor? Because he wasn’t peeling well.

Scott: I love it.

Kevin: She always says it and laugh so hard. That’s the only joke I know.

Mindy: Do you want to give her a shout out?

Kevin: That’s a shout out for her.

Scott: On a related note, do you know what Beethoven’s favorite fruit is?

Kevin: No.

Scott: A ba-na-na. That’s my banana joke.

Kevin: Bananas. Yeah, a lot of jokes about bananas.

Scott: Where can people find out more about you?

Kevin: They can find me at my blog, financialpanther.com. On there, I write about financial independence and money and all these side hustles that I do. You can also find me on Twitter at financialpanthe, so no R at the end because it wouldn’t fit. I’m trying to get my Instagram going so you can find my Instagram at the_financialpanther.

Mindy: We will have links to all of these in our show notes, which can be found at biggerpockets.com/moneyshow107. Kevin, thank you so much for today. This was awesome. These side hustles that you shared, people can do almost anywhere and it’s not … I’m assuming this doesn’t take that much time out of your life that you can go and do whatever it is you want to do that makes you truly happy and probably also make a dollar because you’re riding your bike. By the way, I could just make a delivery on that route. I just think that’s so great. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing with us.

Kevin: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Mindy: Somebody reached out and asked, you have to interview the Financial Panther. I’m like, oh, I just met him at ThinkCon. That worked out perfectly.

Kevin: Yeah. That’s great.

Mindy: Okay. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for your time today. I’ll let you get back to scooter plugging in and-

Scott: It’s almost lunchtime.

Mindy: Yeah, it’s almost time to go walk dogs.

Kevin: Yeah, I got to go hustle.

Mindy: Awesome. Okay, well, have a great day,

Kevin: All right.

Scott: Bye.