Don’t Quit Your Job, “Fire Your Boss” on Your Terms w/ Rahkim Sabree

Mindy:
Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast, show 217, where we interview Rahkim Sabree from I Fired My Boss and talk about quitting your job to become an entrepreneur even without a solid liquid emergency reserve.

Rahkim:
Having grown up without money and understanding what’s scarcity looks like and how that can impact either saving or overspending, I think out of sight, out of mind for me has worked in saying, “I’m going to invest it all so that I don’t accidentally splurge on this nice thing.”

Mindy:
Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my breath of fresh air cohost Scott Trench.

Scott:
Thank you Mindy. Great to be here.

Mindy:
Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else to introduce to every money story because we truly believe that financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting.

Scott:
That’s right. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big time investments in assets like real estates or start your own business, even before reaching financial independence, we’ll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of way, so you can launch yourself towards those dreams.

Mindy:
Scott, I am super excited to bring Rahkim Sabree into this show today because he tweeted a few months ago about how he quit his job… or actually, how he fired his boss and his thought process and his whole money story surrounding leading up to this I thought was so fascinating. I wanted to bring him in because he truly does embody the beginning of our show where we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting.

Scott:
Yeah, I think it was an interesting and unique perspective that we haven’t really had too much on the show with a lot of these things where someone is really got that entrepreneurial bug, but is not really ready to build a liquid emergency reserve and has a full-time job that is not approving or appreciative of those outsides efforts with that. So I think it’s really interesting and a new perspective for us.

Mindy:
Rahkim Sabree, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today.

Rahkim:
I’m super excited to be here.

Mindy:
Rahkim had a viral tweet about firing his boss, which is different want to look at it I think, and I saw that tweet and I said, “I have to tell this story. This is so awesome.” So Rahkim, why don’t you start off with where your journey with money begins. Let’s look at what led up to the quit.

Rahkim:
My journey with money problem began when I started working in banking. I started working in banking at 21 years old, that was back in 2011. I didn’t know anything about money. I didn’t know anything about money instruments. I actually grew up in poverty, so certain aspects of my life I had limiting beliefs as it related to what money looked like and what money looked like for me.
I tell a story in a Ted Talk I did that I aspired to be poor, and what that meant was I saw that mom had Section 8, my mom had food stamps, and so I said, “Hey, when I get old enough I’m going to have Section 8 and I’m going to have food stamps.” It never occurred to me that I could own property or what a credit score was or any of the things that accomplished later in life.
So getting started in banking really opened my eyes to that world and seeing what the spectrum of behaviors look like and certainly some of the like luxuries that come along with having access to money.

Mindy:
So let’s look at your main milestones. What did your financial position look like when you graduated high school?

Rahkim:
I had no money.

Mindy:
[inaudible 00:03:57]

Rahkim:
I had no money and no savings. Actually, I went into college and took out student loans because I was told everybody has student loans. My first year of college I had no money for books, so literally every class that I had I either had to make copies or borrow, didn’t have money to deck out my dorm room and have all the snacks, so I really kind of relied on the kindness of others and that made learning difficult. You can’t really focus on your education if you’re worried about eating and studying and what tools you have or don’t have.
So didn’t know anything about credit. I think that was my first exposure to the world of credit. A lot of people were telling me don’t take out credit cards, that I was going to be offered every credit card there was because I was 18 and I was told to shy away from that.

Mindy:
When you’re 18 that can be really, really good advice.

Rahkim:
For sure.

Mindy:
We have spoken to a lot of people who they go to college and, “Hey, if you fill out this credit card application we’ll give you this free T-shirt.” “Great.” Now you have a bunch of garbage T-shirts and a ton of credit card debt because they don’t educate you on how that works. So that’s not necessarily bad advice for an 18-year-old. What does year two look like for college? Did you get a job? Did you find money?

Rahkim:
So year two I stopped going to the school that I went to. So I went away and lived on campus year one. Year two I was in the transitioning stage, I was getting ready to move across country. I grew up in New York. My mom decided that she wanted to go to Texas, so I was like, “All right, I’ll go with you.” So I stopped going to the school so that I can help her get her affairs together, pack up, do what we needed to do, so still no money.
Once we landed in Texas I got a part time job in retail. It was very little money, very slow money, but it was money for me to play around with. I didn’t have really any financial obligations. I was still going to school online, but I had grants to cover it and money was a toy at that particular point in time for me.

Mindy:
Money was a toy doesn’t sound like this is going to end well. What happened after? So you moved to Texas. Did you go back to school eventually?

Rahkim:
I was in school when I was in Texas. I enrolled in a community college that was local, it’s in New York and I just took all online courses. So I was taking online courses in Texas for a New York. Did terrible because online learning was just not working for me, so I would hate to be a student last year, this year during the pandemic, but I did both. I juggled what was my online education and what was my part time job. Again, no money. I did end up going back to school once I finally… I relocated again from Texas at the end of eight months to Connecticut and that’s where I ended up working in banking and I went to school alongside my part time and full-time endeavors.

Mindy:
And what were you studying in school?

Rahkim:
It was general studies, but it was specific to psychology. I actually wanted to be a psychiatrist and then I learned that I wanted to be a psychologist. So all of my classes was really focused around covering those electives.

Mindy:
So let’s fast forward to graduation. Did you graduate in four years?

Rahkim:
I did not.

Mindy:
Same.

Rahkim:
I actually did not graduate with a four year degree. I stopped in my associates degree. My mom warned me once I started working that I was going to want to keep making money and not finish school and that kind of came true. I had gotten to a point where a lot of my peers who had started school around the same time that I did were graduated but couldn’t find jobs or couldn’t find jobs in the field that they studied for. So now they were carrying around a tremendous amount school debt, but not getting an income that could pay for that, whereas my situation was the reverse. I had some loans because of my first year of school, but I was making money, I had a career going and really started to pick up steam as I ascended through the ranks there.
So once I got my associates degree I was like, “You know what? Here’s the degree. I’m going to stop here.” That’s when I started to focus on entrepreneurship as well. So I say, “You know what? If I’m going to go to school for anything it’s going to be for me, not for a promotion, not for a raise, just because it’s something that I’m interested in.”

Mindy:
Nice. So what year did you stop attending school?

Rahkim:
I want to say 2016, 2017.

Mindy:
So how much debt are we talking about from that first year?

Rahkim:
I took out, I think, $12,000 and that really mostly went towards room and board. So a lot of the education was covered through scholarships, grants, but the room and board was the most expensive. I went to a private college in New Jersey, it was called St. Peter’s College at the time, but now it’s called St. Peter’s University, so it definitely was a little pricey.

Mindy:
Yeah, anytime you put private in front of the word college you just doubled your costs or tripled them. So we graduate from college with a two year degree in 2016 with $12,000 in student loan debt and you are now working full-time in banking in Connecticut, so I’m assuming you’re making a decent salary.

Rahkim:
By that time, yes.

Mindy:
Did you start paying down your debt or did you start accumulating more?

Rahkim:
Well, I started paying down the student debt and I certainly accumulated more debt outside of that. So we’re talking 2016, 2017. I bought my house in 2016, so definitely took on a lot of debt there.

Mindy:
In Connecticut?

Rahkim:
In Connecticut.

Mindy:
They have expensive houses in Connecticut.

Rahkim:
They do. I actually bought my house as a part of an estate sale in not too expensive an area, so I actually bought my house for about $165.

Mindy:
Oh.

Rahkim:
Yeah, and it’s a multifamily. At that point I had already started well on my way through the financial education. I read Rich Dad Poor Dad. I actually took part of his Rich Dad training. So I was all about the multifamily and I wanted to become this multifamily portfolio holder.

Mindy:
Let’s talk about this multifamily because you said you bought a house, you didn’t say you bought a multifamily.

Rahkim:
Yeah.

Mindy:
That’s a little different. So first of all, Scott and I are not big on the pay off your mortgage bandwagon that some people that you know might be on that.

Rahkim:
Right.

Mindy:
So we’re okay we debt. You paid $165 for how many units?

Rahkim:
Two.

Mindy:
Two units and-

Rahkim:
This is in Connecticut.

Mindy:
So I’m assuming that this has since appreciated in the five years in the crazy market and the pandemic that we’ve had.

Rahkim:
Correctly.

Mindy:
Yeah, okay. Well good job.

Rahkim:
Thank you.

Mindy:
Okay. So you bought a multifamily. You have a full-time job, you’re generating income. You have a rental unit where you’re living in one side and renting out the other?

Rahkim:
Yep.

Mindy:
Okay.

Scott:
What’s the rent? What’s the expenses? What’s the mortgage? How is the cash flowing? How does your financial position begin to accelerate following this [inaudible 00:11:49]

Rahkim:
When I bought the house I was at one level in banking and very shortly after that I pursued another level, a higher level because I didn’t think that I could pay the mortgage by myself and that was kind of part of the deal, I wanted to make sure that I had tenants in the unit. I was paying $300 a month towards my mortgage.
So when I got the promotion of course my income increased and I’m like, “Well, I don’t have to spend this much money.” It was the first time that I had lived on my own, so prior to that I was living with my mom, I never had an apartment or anything by myself. So really the rest of my disposable income I just invested in the market, was a very aggressive investor. Maybe two or three summers ago the tenant left, the tenant was my mom. So the tenant was my mom and her fiance, they left and I have not replaced the tenant because I’m doing renovations and what have you and I was kind of dragging my feet on it, but I had to learn that I could afford to pay the mortgage, so made some changes there.
I agree with you guys, I’m not somebody who’s going to rush to pay off the mortgage. I don’t have a problem with debt at all. So I just have been taking my time, paying down what consumer debt I have and focusing on again, the appreciation. So actually as we speak I have some renovations taking place in that unit, it’s got new siding, a new deck, a new roof and of course we’re in a very crazy market right now, so I have a ton of equity just based off of the forced equity with the improvements and certainly with the appreciation in the market.

Mindy:
Okay, so you just said that you didn’t think you could pay your mortgage by yourself and also you quit your job. Let’s look into this a little bit because you didn’t quit your job that long ago.

Rahkim:
Right.

Mindy:
How long ago did your mom move out and you started these renovations?

Rahkim:
This was probably about two years ago, maybe three… Yeah, two or three years ago. At that particular point in time I had to pay the full mortgage and so I had rearrange a few things, certainly couldn’t save and invest as much as I was, but over the course of that time I was receiving salary increases as well. So I certainly became very comfortable with paying the full mortgage and with that, because I learned that I could pay the full mortgage, the urgency that I had in getting a replacement tenant was lessened because I was like, “All right, I got this. I can handle this.”
My mortgage payment is about $1450, we’ll call it $1500 a month and that covers taxes, insurance, mortgage what have you, so my actual mortgage less all of those is actually probably somewhere around $700 or $800.

Scott:
So in year 2016 you buy this place. You said you bought in at one level of banking and pursued a higher level of banking. What does that mean? Is that a reference to your mortgage payment or your income at your profession?

Rahkim:
That’s a reference to my income. So when I bought my house I was probably still branch side. When I started in banking I was a part time teller and I really just did everything that you could do inside of branch environment, from teller up to a manager. At that particular point in time I was a manager and I was making a certain amount of money and I was just like, “I need to make more money.” I was just really concerned and I think that goes back to this concept of scarcity that we talked about earlier.
I grew up and I didn’t know that I could buy a house before 30, certainly did not expect to. So when I started having conversations with people who had done and they were telling me that, “Yeah, you can definitely do it. You can definitely afford it,” my biggest concern was getting to a place where I could not afford to pay the mortgage and I didn’t have the financial backing from friends or family or whatever to save me from that, from what could be foreclosure. So there was always this like “What if?” in my mind that stopped me from pulling the trigger until I actually did.
So then once I got the multifamily and that was part of the strategy, I was like, “Well, I’ll be able to offset the cost of the mortgage with income from a tenant,” that way I would not have to carry this burden on my own. Once my mom left then it was like, “All right,” the real world hits, but I didn’t realize that I was making enough money, I just had preferences with how I spent my money that said, “Okay, you can afford this.” So like I said, when I bought the house I was still on the branch side. As the years had moved on I changed companies, I changed roles, and certainly my salary increased that allowed for me to comfortably pay my mortgage.

Mindy:
I think it’s interesting that at the beginning of the show you said that you aspired to be poor. Your mom had Section 8 and food stamps and you aspire to have that as well, and in fairly short order you changed your whole mindset to not only want more than that, but also to actually take action. It’s one thing to want to have a house, it’s another thing to actually go and buy a house. How did you go from one position to the other, and I’d say fairly short order, it was probably, what, like eight years or something, but still that’s like my whole life changing everything that you know to get to this point and you bought a duplex. That’s an investment, that’s not just buying… Like my first house was a condo and it was all I could afford and I did it because you have to, once you’re an adult you have to buy a house. So I didn’t have forethought and understanding and I’m really impressed with how you were able to flip that switch. How did you get to that point?

Rahkim:
There’s a variety of factors I think that go into it. First and foremost I think environment played a big role. As I shared with you guys I grew up in New York, apartments were all that I had seen, all of my friends. I would say most of my friends either lived in apartment buildings or lived in houses that were owned by other people. Certainly there was the outlier situation where I had a friend whose parents actually owned their home, but it wasn’t something that we consciously thought about like, “Okay, I’m going to own a house one day.”
And because I was so intimately aware of what my family’s financial circumstances were with Section 8 and I actually carried over our payments to property management. I carried our food stamp card. So I just embraced, I guess, what were my circumstances and we didn’t talk about money in the house. My parents were young parents, they were 17 and 18 when I was born, so they were figuring things out as we were being raised, and of course in they’re figuring things out, they weren’t having those conversations with us because I don’t know what the because was.
So fast forward to moving from New York to Texas and then from Texas to Connecticut, I was very quickly surrounded by people who had just this mentality that said, “This is normal.” Having an 800 credit score, investing in your IRA, planning for retirement, life insurance, all of these things were concepts that I hadn’t really gotten familiar with, but I was surrounded by so many people who were doing this, it’s just kind of a reflex that I felt like I had to catch up. So part of that catching up was having conversations and so, like I said, the environment played a role.
Certainly you touched on something that I like to spend a lot of time on, and that is the difference between knowing and aspiring and in pulling the trigger. So I consumed as much as I could about financial education starting with Rich Dad Poor Dad, all of the different books, Think and Grow Rich, The Millionaire Next Door, The Richest Man in Babylon and started really understanding that it was a mindset thing. It was the difference between, “Okay, I don’t know this thing, now I know this thing, now I want this thing to happen for me, so what do I have to do to make that happen?”
So built a strong network, a supportive network that was able to point me in the direction of professionals that could help, whether that was a contractor or a lender or a real estate agent or a CPA and then having conversations with those individuals to say, “Okay, this is what my plan is, this is how much money I’m making. How do I make this thing happen?” So that was a big part of it, but really putting one foot in front of the other.
So I’ll definitely kind of call back to my childhood where I didn’t receive much by way of financial education. I certainly was poured into by way of confidence in myself. So there was always this belief that I could do anything that I wanted to do, it was just a matter of figuring out what that thing was and then applying myself.
So I figured out what, A plus B equals C looked like, then it was like, “All right, there’s no shortage of confidence that I have in saying, ‘All right, well somebody else did it, they’re within five year of my age, I can do this thing too.'” So that was an empowerment and financial empowerment is an area that I specifically focused on, coached on and talk about through the different platforms that I navigate.

Mindy:
I think that’s really, really powerful. “I can do this. I have confidence.” I’m taking notes as you’re talking and you said, “I built a strong network to help me out. I found people, lenders, agents, CPAs and I bounced ideas off them. I asked for help and guidance.” There’s a lot of help and guidance available if you want to do something and you’re just not sure how to do it. There are public forums and Facebook groups and individuals that you meet at local meetups and networking and, “Hey, Rahkim, I’m looking for CPA.” “Well, hey, I’ve got this really great CPA.” Talk to your friends and ask them for help and guidance. They want to help, people want to help other people. I love that.
So where do we come in from, “I bought a duplex,” to “I quit my job?’

Rahkim:
So I was kind of on cruise control at that point and that point being me quitting me job. So I had the house, I think I’m either coming up five or six years of owning and very conscious of the fact that I have this mortgage, very conscious of the fact that it needs to get paid and of course the renovations that come with that and also the things that you don’t expect. I had a flood occur in my… I live in the second unit and it’s a top and bottom unit. So I had flood occur in the bathroom of the unit that I’m in that leaked all the way down through the first floor into the basement and garage. So it was a lot of internal work that needed to be done with the mitigation for mold and replacing ceiling and floor and all of that.
So all that’s happening, we’re experiencing a pandemic, we just started the new year and it’s a lot of pressure, a lot of stress mentally that occurring because I’m like, “Man, how am I going to do this?” But I’m also not happy at my job and I shared earlier, 10 years, so a decade in the space I felt pretty accomplished and pretty credible. As I started to grow my network, my following, and I’ve been called a financial influencer, really just kind of sharing my journey, and saying, “Okay, this is what financial empowerment looks like. This is why financial literacy is important. These are the things that I’m going through, these are the things that I’m showing you as it relates to my path,” but I started to grow very quickly in establishing a personal brand.
So I did a Ted Talk in 2019, I wrote my second book in 2019, I started being featured in different publications, I started writing for different publications. I’ve wrote about a dozen articles for Entrepreneur, I write a couple of articles for the TheGrio, and then of course after this, me quitting my job and firing my boss, I wrote an article for Business Insider. So I’m leading up to these things, I would share these accomplishments on my social medias, and of course one of those social platforms was LinkedIn where all of my coworkers and my manager lived.
I would get these comments or these questions that kind of felt very condescending from my manager about the things that I was doing outside of work, and some of the questions that I would hear would be along the lines of, “Well, what is your commitment to the company?” or “What is the reason why you’re doing this thing?” This year I got my certified financial education instructor certification and I shared that she was like, “Well, what are you going to do with this?” and I’m like, “I spent my own money and my own time studying for this, getting this, I’m not getting congratulated, you’re not finding ways to utilize the credibility that I’m establishing outside of the corporate environment. Instead I’m being put in a situation where I have to justify why I’m doing the things that I’m doing on my own time and being questioned in terms of my performance on the day job based off of my ability to do these things.”
So it became very toxic. I was anxiety ridden, I was showing up to work and I would just like, “Ugh, I hate it here.” I was afraid to put certain things online because I didn’t want to have the conversation about it and really just the straw that broke the camel’s back for me was I was invited to speak at ThinkCon this year. I shared that because I was super excited. I had heard such great things about ThinkCon and it was going to be my first time attending, so first time attendee, first time speaker and so I shared this on LinkedIn and she was like, “I think we need to revisit the outside business interest form.”
They wanted me to document this stuff on a form, and I’m like, “Well, I’m not being paid to speak at ThinkCon. I’m not being paid to do any of the things that I’m showing you, but there’s this concern,” and the language the HR guidelines used is very ambiguous. The burden was not on the company to prove that there was a conflict of interest, the burden was on me to prove that there was not and the perception of a conflict of interest is what ultimately could put me on the chopping block.
So I’m just like, “Well, I can’t work in this gray space,” where I’m constantly worried about the thing that I say or do or represent on my own time being interpreted as a conflict of interest and then having to constantly reassure my leadership that I was there for the long haul or that I was engaged or that I was committed and I was not a problem employee. I was high performing. I got a raise every year, I got a bonus every year. So I was just confused where it was all coming from.
And while all of this was happening within the environment, I was being celebrated and approached by other people outside of the environment, founders of organizations wanting to talk to me, making great connections from the work that I was doing and I said, “You know what?” again, no shortage on confidence, “I could strike out on my own and do this thing by myself. Why do I need to take this and feel minimized?” So ultimately there was two weeks leading up to my decision where I actually wrote my resignation letter two weeks in advance and it was in response to something that had annoyed me or frustrated me and I said, “I’m just going to do this as an exercise,” and I left it in my drafts undated.
Then the day that I quit, the night before I was up all night thinking about it. The day that I quit, I woke up, I filled in the dates, I tweaked it a little bit, and then I sent that email in response to an email that was demanding that I fill out this form that I’m referring to relating to my business interest.

Mindy:
Is there any possibility that there would be a compliance issue with your banking job and your speaking job? That’s the only thing that I can think of… I could go down the corporate is evil rabbit hole, but from a company perspective I’m thinking maybe there’s a compliance issue because you’re in banking. Is that the thing or were they really just… I’ve also worked for the evil corporation where they just wanted to control everything about you.

Rahkim:
I think that’s a really good question and certainly that was something that I was very concerned about when I was customer facing, but my role when I quite, my role for the last four years was not a customer facing role. So from a compliance perspective, first of all, I wasn’t representing the bank in any way, so I wasn’t giving misinformation. We had to take yearly compliance training that says for instance, fear lending, what does that look like or electronic disclosures or anything like that. So I was very up to speed with what compliance looked like, what we could do, what we couldn’t do as a bank, but again I wasn’t representing the bank.
The only area and I recently had a conversation actually with a financial firm, the only area that could have potentially been a problem if I was doing it was if I was going on social media and telling people like what stocks to buy because I’m not licensed as an advisor, but I wasn’t doing that either. In fact, most of the posts that I share relating to stocks or investing I usually include a disclosure that says, “This is not financial advice. I’m not a licensed financial advisor. I can’t give you this advice,” and it really is a point of frustration for a lot of my audience because they want to know, “Well, what are you invested in? What should I buy? How should I spend my money?” And I’m like, “I can’t tell you that.”
So I’ve really built a brand away from giving specific financial advice because my belief is that personal finance is personal. I can’t tell you what you should be doing or that you should be doing the same thing that I’m doing, if I don’t know what your circumstances are and I certainly can’t advise you on the buying or selling of securities without being licensed. So I don’t think there was even an active enough interest to find out the extent of what I was talking about. It was just like, “Oh, he’s doing these things. Why is he doing these things? Why is he not falling in line and focusing on his job here.” I think that was the culture and that is the culture of corporate America, that me telling my story is aimed towards how dare you say what I can and can’t do on my own time and more than that, why does all of my time or my exposure of my brand need to be tied into this identity that is the corporate one?

Scott:
How is your financial position around this time? What are the other aspects that are going on there and how does that contribute to your confidence in confronting this issue?

Rahkim:
Good question. So I’m positioned well financially at this time, close to 800 credit score. I have disgusting access to credit. I have across maybe nine or 10 credit card, probably close to $200,000 in limits and then I have a six figure investment portfolio that I’ve been building aggressively since I started learning about investing. So I subscribe to the pay yourself first methodology, so I was very aggressive about that. There was a non negotiable discipline, every single time I got paid a portion of my money went towards investments.
So when I got to this point of realization, I really had to take stock what did I own? And that was some of the conversations that I had leading up to my decision. People reminded me like, “Okay, well what do you have? Worse case scenario, what does this look like for you?” I have a ton of equity in my house, my investment portfolio that I really didn’t want to touch and then access to credit, but if all else failed I would be okay and I would be okay for a little while. If I had to have-

Scott:
Did you have an emergency reserve in cash?

Rahkim:
I did not. I actually did not believe prior to the pandemic in having an emergency reserve I cash and that was just my own personal view on my money situation. Because I had so much credit available to me, if there was an emergency I could likely cover it with credit, likely at 0% interest for a time before I had to pay it off and if I needed to liquidate a portion of my portfolio I could to cover that, so I invested everything.

Mindy:
You said before the pandemic.

Rahkim:
Yes.

Mindy:
Do you have a different opinion now?

Rahkim:
I do. So when the pandemic hit there was a couple of things. First off, I like to look at the stock market as going on sale or off sale. So there was a lot of panic due to the increase in cases of the coronavirus and concerns around the vaccines. A lot of industries from a stock market perspective suffered and it was a huge opportunity to buy because we know those industries were going to come back or at least we can make a reasonable assumption that it would and I didn’t have anything sitting there that I can execute on.
But in addition to that, during the pandemic I had several instances where I needed access to cash relatively quickly, I needed to get a new roof and that was thankfully covered by insurance, but I needed to pay the deductible for that. I had a flood in my house, like I shared earlier and of course I needed to pay the deductible for that. Then there was some projects that kind of went along with the projects that was being covered by insurance that I wanted to cover as well.
So just thinking about how am I going to access this credit? How soon can I access this credit? Even if that is taking one of those convenience checks and depositing it into your account, you still got to wait for that money to clear or to become available. And then looking at it from an investment perspective, selling off a portion of my portfolio, I still have to wait for that money to settle in my account. So I just realized there’s always a need to have some cash on hand, whether that is in the safe or liquid in some account that you can access relatively quickly. I just don’t think that large portions of cash need to be kept liquid because it’s not doing anything for you, inflation is outpacing what you might be earning in interest. So I believe your money should be working, give it a job.

Mindy:
I like that comment, but I also feel that you should have easy access to cash. I also don’t keep an enormous emergency reserve and I do have access to credit, but I also have “high yield savings accounts” and I put that in air quotes because they’re not really yielding anything, what is it, like 0.02 or I don’t know, it’s not negative yet, so it’s still high yield.

Scott:
I just want to say I think that’s an interesting opinion with that. I have a completely different personal philosophy where I have six to 12 months emergency reserve in cash, I’ve got the same for each of my business assets, especially with the real estate portfolio that are unique and specific to those businesses and yeah it’s a drag on my overall returns and inflation hurts it, but I think that the overall weighting of that will help me in the few times that I need it with it.

Rahkim:
Yeah, I like-

Mindy:
Yeah, well I wasn’t done, Scott.

Scott:
Sorry. Yeah, sorry, Mindy.

Mindy:
I also believe that I am in a different position than you are, Scott, and you are Rahkim, and I handle my finances the way that I do because of my experience, but I also sit here and recommend that you have an emergency fund that you can easily tap into because you never know when you’re going to need a new roof and I have funds that are easier to access and I have funds that are a little more difficult to access, but I do have access to funds in an emergency and that’s the bottom line.
What is your opinion on emergency fund amounts in terms of monthly spending?

Rahkim:
You’re asking me, right?

Mindy:
Yeah, you personally, do you have one month, nine months?

Rahkim:
My emergency fund, if you will, is invested. I have a brokerage account that is my emergency fund. I still to this day don’t have a very large one. I kept anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 liquid in like a bank account for some kind of emergency and that was really coming off of the statistic that most Americans can’t meet, I think it was $1,000 expense. I think the beauty of personal finance is that again, personal finance is personal and you said something that I really want to go back to, and that’s we’re all at different positions.
I don’t have an obligation financially to anybody but myself and my dog. If I had children, if I had a spouse, I think my views would be a little bit different because the likelihood of an emergency situation occurring would probably be greater… would definitely be greater, but because it’s just me I find that I can make really agile decisions around spending in whatever form that looks like, whether that’s me buying a luxury item or me covering an emergency expense, by having the access to credit that I do or by having the access to my portfolio that I do. So there is a very specific account to your point, Scott, that I have this non retirement that I invest in with the intentions of covering an emergency. The problem is you don’t ever want to touch that money because you see it growing and you’re like, “I don’t want to interrupt what this looks like.”
I will say from a mindset perspective and this is literally something that just occurred to me. Having grown up without money and understanding what scarcity looks like and how that can impact either saving or overspending, I think out of sight, out of mind for me has worked in saying, “I’m going to invest it all so that I don’t accidentally splurge on this nice thing.” Inversely, I’m going to invest it all so that I do have money that is very disciplined and separate and difficult for me to access in the event an emergency occurs because many people in my immediate family that I can tap and say, “Hey, I need $5,000. Hey, I need $10,000.” Like I’m that guy for people. So for a true emergency I would able to take action relatively quickly, but if I needed to cover a short span of time my credit cards are definitely going to serve me much quicker than liquidating my portfolio, but that’s just my personal view at this stage in my life.

Mindy:
Yeah, when the pandemic first started on BiggerPockets people were panicking. As soon as we closed down, which was like March 13th or something, “How am I going to pay April’s mortgage?” I’m like, “Well, you should have a way to pay that already. You should have a way to pay May’s mortgage right now as well. From the context of your providing housing for other people you have a financial obligation to other people to pay the mortgage on the place that are paying rent for.”
So coming from that point I am always recommending that you have an emergency fund. Scott has a solid financial position and still has an emergency fund that he doesn’t touch and I think that’s a good place to be in, but to your point, the circumstances of his childhood were very different than the circumstances of your childhood and you don’t want the temptation, you don’t want to even see it there and that I think is, like you said, personal finances is personal. I say that all the time, the reason it is, is because you have to go by what your experiences and how you know you’re going to handle things.

Scott:
What percentage of your income do you save each month?

Rahkim:
Well right now there’s no income, but previous to that… So I had a layered kind of approach, so I was investing in the employee stock purchase program. I think I was putting in 10%, I was maxing out on my HSA contribution. I was investing in my 401K, I think at about 5% and then by the time I got to my take home pay, I was taking probably around 10% of my take home pay and putting that into a brokerage.

Mindy:
Okay, so you had a pretty good system of multiple paying yourself first.

Rahkim:
Oh yeah, for sure.

Scott:
I think that the higher your savings rate and all the things that you’re paying yourself with, the paradox is that the faster you can accumulate emergency fund and the less that you need it to a certain extent because theoretically you can just go out and get another job and even if it’s lower paying, it’s still going to be plenty to cover your expenses with a lot of those things. So I do think that that’s an important, like that’s the number one… That and the emergency reserve are the two components of a conservative financial position with that. The first and foremost thing is that savings rate with that, that’s how you accumulate wealth, bringing in more than you spend and applying it to investments on a regular basis with that.
So the less that you spend and the more conservative you are with your overall cash flow, the less emergency fund you need. Paradoxically though, a lot of people who are in that conservation position actually have even more of an emergency fund. They’re conservative on both fronts, at least that we’ve talked to and how I’ve conducted my personal finances with that. So I just think it’s an interesting discussion here and I think you’re doing one part of that super conservatively and the other part really aggressively, which I think is unique and interesting, something I haven’t come across too much.

Rahkim:
I definitely appreciate the dialogue here because I haven’t had as detailed a discussion about what other people do with their emergency funds or even the need for an emergency fund. I’m usually an advocate to say definitely pay yourself first and I won’t tell somebody to invest as aggressively as I have, but certainly put money away and then it’s just like, “Well, what are you putting money away for?” So I think going back to my childhood, it was always impressed upon me to save, but it was like, “Okay, well what are you saving for?” I would save, I was great at the discipline of saving, but then I would be saving towards whatever that thing was, whether it’s a new TV or the PlayStation or an outfit or a vacation and it’s just like, “Okay, well once you get to that point in the savings and then you deplete that savings, now you have to start all over.”
So for me it was figuring out how to get out of that cycle so that at the end of saving you still had and I guess a traditionalist view would be, “Well, put money away for retirement. Like at the Roth IRA or the traditional IRA,” and it’s just like, “Okay, well beyond that, what are you putting money away for and why?”
So again, going back to this idea of scarcity, I am somebody who like I reject scarcity more than I am not even embracing scarcity, I reject scarcity and so I’m like, “Yeah, put myself out there. Let the money circulate, let the money do what money does, invest,” and more than that I used to say I hide money from myself, when it really wasn’t being hidden, but I certainly was operating, going back to that idea of I can’t pay my mortgage or I don’t think that I can pay my mortgage, well why is that? Because I’m investing so much, right, I’m paying myself so much that my actual take home pay looks insignificant to what it is that I’m actually making. That has been what works for me for all these years, is that I was making money but I certainly was living well below my means.

Scott:
So what is your plan and position now? What are you going to do? What’s next for you?

Rahkim:
Good question. I get that question all the time and I have a different answer every time somebody asks me. The reason why I left and some of the reason why I felt so confident in leaving my job was because I had started building this brand, this personal brand that really details my journey and talks about my experiences from maybe a consultative perspective and I wouldn’t even use the word maybe, certainly a consultative perspective.
So I want to build on that. I’ve been building on that. So I have two books out, I’m working on a third. Actually, I’m working on a third and fourth or at least I have concept for it. I write freelance for several different publications. So my focus right now is getting into corporate training and consulting. One of the verticals that I’m looking at is the intersection between diversity, equity and inclusion and financial empowerment. So an underserved community needs financial empowerment to combat the very issues that we discussed my overcoming throughout this episode.
So you have a lot of well paid potentially or maybe not so well paid employees who are showing up to work every day and they’re worried about their financial positioning and because they’re worried about their financial positioning they’re putting themselves in an environment that is causing them anxiety, guilt or fear frequently, but they have to do it to make ends meet, because they don’t know that they can aspire big or they don’t know what are the steps that they need to take in order to create an emergency fund and invest wherever they want to invest or not just save money for their vacation and then start all over on the hamster wheel.
So it’s a little bit of integration of this entrepreneurship mindset and that’s to say not everybody needs to become an entrepreneur, but everybody needs to become the boss of their own financial circumstances, so really impressing upon those audiences through a corporate space how to do these things, but figuring out how to do it in a nonthreatening way has been my undertaking likely because certainly a corporation is not going to hire me to come teach all their employees how to quit their job, right? But I do also believe that a financially empowered staff is going to be a more engaged staff. They’re going to want to advance, they’re going to want to take advantage of development opportunities.
There are people who literally show up and their attitude is, “I’m here to get paid. This is my job, that’s it.” So they’re very happy hanging on the lower rungs of what the ladder looks like, they’re not interested in playing the game, they’re not interested in the politics and as a result they’re not interested in the increase in salary. But then there’s also other people on the other side of that, the higher rungs of corporate environment that say, “I’m very comfortable where I am, I’m making good money. I enjoy that, but they’re still very financial irresponsible or they’re not really empowered, so they’re relying on that income to stay on the hamster wheel.
So if there’s one thing that we’ve learned throughout the pandemic it’s once that income stops then everything else stops. So you have people who were making a lot of money who are no long making money because they got laid off or they got fired or whatever and now they’re panicking and they have all of these really big ticket items, whether it’s a car or a house or whatever and they have to figure out how they’re going to pay for it.

Scott:
Can I just comment on this? I think that there’s a little bit of corporate policy there that doesn’t make sense to me. I’m a CEO, I have to deal with this reality and this problem as well. We run a company that teaches people how to become financially independent and you have a chronic problem where people come to BiggerPockets, advance their career, become very wealthy and the go on to make a bajillion dollars as an agent or as a whatever after joining BP and get poached by a San Francisco company at a rate we just can’t possibly pay with a lot of those things with that. That’s a good problem. That’s a problem you want as a CEO or as a company with that, where people come into your business and three, four, five years later become very wealthy and have a tremendous amount of options and go on there. That’s a recruiting benefit. That helps you attract and get talent and the people who stay are the ones who want to be there for the intrinsic work long term, which is great.
So I think that that’s a great thing. I think more and more employers are going to adopt that mentality with this because you know who’s probably not as good an employee is somebody who is on the hamster wheel, who’s stuck for 10 years because they have no access to credit, emergency reserve or whatever else it is and are dependent on that next paycheck to sustain their lifestyle, who feel optimized on the income front with those types of things and are attached to vesting benefits and that kind of stuff.
We offer effectively no vesting at BiggerPockets. We have an annual bonus, that’s the only thing that accrues on an annual basis and I would do it in a quarterly basis if I could get away with it from an accounting perspective, it’s just too cumbersome to actually compute the specific to the penny profits for the business on a quarterly or six month basis with this. So sorry I’m going on a rant here, but I think the work is really powerful there and I think it’s a mismatch in terms of what we should be thinking.
So, for example, like our 401k, we don’t vest. We just give a 3% contribution that’s 100% vested immediately with that. If you don’t want to be at BiggerPockets, you leave tomorrow, there’s nothing to do. We pay you the final check and go on there with that and I think that that’s a mindset shift that I think corporate America is going to take with a lot of this stuff and I think bodes well for your business.

Rahkim:
Yeah, I appreciate you saying that because I don’t think there’s a lot of corporate consciousness we’ll call it, and that was my situation. I felt minimized because I was trying to spread my wings. I lost my train of thought, I’m going to catch it back really quickly.
Okay, so additionally-

Scott:
Now, if you’re not doing a good job and it’s impacting your work, that’s a different story and we’re going to deal with that on that front. So I think of like, “No, we want you to go invest in real estate and do all this stuff,” but if you’re automating your workload so you’re doing four hours of work a week with that, that’s not what we’re paying a salary for with some of this stuff, we want you to be full-time.
Anyways, I think there’s a balance with that. Do you feel like you might have been crossing into that threshold where it was impacting your work or do you feel it was all separate and it wasn’t doing any of that?

Rahkim:
It was definitely separate. I had regular connects with my manager and made sure that my performance was where it needed to be. My last performance review, my manager was very clear with me. She said, “Rahkim, you do the job and you do the job well. The difference between you at meets versus you being at an exceeds is you coming to me and seeking more work,” and I’m paraphrasing here now, but basically the expectation was that I would find capacity in my day to ask for more and that would differentiate me as an employee that was meeting expectations versus exceeding expectations and she said, “If you’re not looking for that, then okay.”
So the “and okay,” part for me was I’m doing my job. For me there was no opportunity for advancement in my particular role. I either had to take on a different role within that same kind of organizational structure or look outside of that and I have so much going for myself outside of this space, I was very comfortable being what I refer to as a hybrid entrepreneur. Very comfortable like high performing in the corporate space, I took pride in my work, I took pride in being high performing and doing my side thing.
So going back to your question, the side thing was talking to people about not only their personal finances and where they either lacked in education or had an education, but also focusing on their mindset, that empowerment piece, sharing my story in doing so. So beyond focusing on a corporate consulting, corporate training space, I focus on speaking, taking speaking engagements, paid speaking engagements. I focus on promoting my book, selling my book. I did a lot of community service work speaking to young people or schools or what have you and then one-on-one coaching. So, “Let’s sit down, lets have a conversation. We’re going to put you on an eight week or a 12 week plan and each week we’re going to meet and talk about what your goals are and how do we uncover the mental barrier and the roadblocks to making those things happen.”
So that’s where my focus is today, getting more people to know who I am, what my mission is and then of course, turning those who are interested into paying customers who want to work with me, pushing my book or the series of books that I have and focusing on corporations that say, “Look, this is a need that you might have. Let’s do this thing.” I also write freelance, so that brings in some money and again, I’ve shared, I’m very much invested, so investing in the market is something that I plan continuing to do.
You can only cut own expenses so much, but your earning potential is unlimited, so I like to focus on increasing my income and certainly not touching what it is that I have put away and that’s kind of the space that I’m now getting in and figuring out, “Well, I have this money for this reason, do I want to touch this money or can I go out and find a way to replace my income very quickly, so I don’t have to touch this money?”

Mindy:
That’s interesting that you say that. As you were talking you said several times, “I have a six figure investment portfolio,” which I am interpreting as in some form of the stock market.

Rahkim:
Yes.

Mindy:
Okay, so I went over to the Dave Ramsy investment calculator because that’s the one that I know works and I typed in your current age of 30, the age you plan to retire of 65. How much have you saved for retirement? $100,000. How much will you contribute monthly? Zero. What do you think your annual return will be? I put in a very conservative 8% and if you never put another dollar into your current portfolio you will have $1,629,255.00 at age 65. I don’t think you’re going to put in zero more dollars into your investments and I think that 8% is an incredibly conservative number.
So as you’re telling your story and you fired your boss, we didn’t even read your amazing viral tweet, but as you’re telling your story I’m like, “It sounds like he’s Coast Five,” and Coast Five for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term means you don’t have to do anything else and you will coast into financial independence and that is assuming that you have a lower spend. I know $40,000 a year is a million dollars, so 1.6, you could probably spend like $50 or $55 a year. If you’re going to stay in Connecticut maybe your expenses will be a little bit more, but also I don’t think you’re going to contribute zero more dollars, but you have set yourself up in a very comfortable position to allow yourself to quit your job.
“I just quit my job y’all and honestly I needed that for my mental health.” 39,000 likes. 3400 retweets and then there’s a thread going on, we’ll link to this in our show notes, but “I’m scared, my heart is pounding, I’m nervous. I’ve always done everything right and responsible, but I’m betting on me. I have always thought about leaving corporate, but I’ve never planned for it.” I love this thread because it’s so honest and raw and you didn’t have a huge liquid cash cushion, but you set yourself up really, really and well and what is it, all the way back on Episode 11 we interviewed Joel from FI180 and he said, “I quit my job. I wasn’t financial independent, but I quit anyway and what’s the worst case scenario? I go back and get another job.

Rahkim:
That’s right.

Mindy:
My worst case scenario is everybody else’s every day life.” And right now companies can’t hire enough people. There is a lack of workers. If you need to earn some income, here’s 17 jobs right now and they might not all be $100,000 jobs, but you can earn income right now doing work that… How do I say this without being offensive? I don’t mean to be offensive, but it’s not super skilled labor. You don’t have to have a college degree to do these jobs, you can go in and get a job. So if you need money, it’s available to you

Rahkim:
100%

Mindy:
I think you’ve set yourself up in a really, really great way and I see lots of amazing things in your future.

Rahkim:
I appreciate that and I just want to add too because I think it’s so important, the idea of establishing a personal brand and this is what I’m learning as I’m unpacking from being in corporate America. The idea of establishing a personal brand allows for you take those accomplishments with you. So when I go and talk about my resume, if you will, it’s not going to look like that traditional CV where it’s like, “From this time to this time I was in this role and I accomplished these things.” My brand now says, “I did a Ted Talk. I write for Entrepreneur. I was a guest on BiggerPockets and people hear those names, they hear those brands and they’re like, “Oh wow, you must be a rock star.” So then it becomes less about what can I actually do… I’m not saying that those things are not important, but it becomes less about what I actually do and more about, “How can I improve their positioning as an organization based off of all that I am affiliated with.”
So interviews don’t look like an audition anymore, they look like a conversation, “I’m coming to the table with these things, you’re coming to the table with those things. How do we reconcile what our individual needs are to the benefit of everybody?” And that’s what empowerment is to me, the ability to have a choice and not say, “Uh, I have to get up and go to this job that I don’t like so that I can collect the salary because I need to pay these bills, but let’s have a conversation and figure out how we can mutually benefit each other?” And I think that’s going to create a more lasting relationship in those organizations, but also it’s going to create an environment that says, “Listen, you need to treat me right. Don’t treat me like the bottom of the barrel because somebody else is going to see my value and they’re going to want to scoop me up just as well.”

Mindy:
Rahkim, this has been a super fun episode. I love where you came from and where you’re going. I do see huge things in your future because you are… what did you say, not lacking in confidence, and that goes a really, really long way. I love it. It is now time for our famous four questions. Are you ready?

Rahkim:
I’m ready.

Mindy:
Okay, number one, what is your favorite financial book?

Rahkim:
Definitely Think and Grow Rich.

Mindy:
Napoleon Hill?

Rahkim:
Yes.

Mindy:
Right.

Rahkim:
Because it focuses on mindset and I feel like in financial education that’s the aspect that’s not often talked about. It’s an intangible, it’s not sexy, it’s not fun. It forces people to hold the mirror up and look at themselves in deeper way than just, “What’s in my bank account?” but it’s so necessary and really kind of a testament to what my success looks like.

Scott:
What was your biggest money mistake?

Rahkim:
Biggest money mistake, I don’t know that I would consider any of the things that I’ve done financially a mistake, but certainly accumulating consumer debt that I didn’t need to. So as I was learning how to navigate the credit world and I was increasing my credit limits, I certainly took advantage of some of those limits and in instances that maybe I could have not done.

Mindy:
That is not the only time we have heard that. What is your best piece of advice for people who are just starting out?

Rahkim:
Invest in yourself. I can’t tell you how that is a muscle that needs exercising frequently. Forcing myself to invest in myself and I mean like literally financially has made me face fear, made me face anxiety, made me examine guilt and even if that investment didn’t pan out the way that I expected it to, it was learning experience that has paid dividends over and over and over again. I think kind of combining this question and the last question we’ll call it, I invested $12,000 in the Rich Dad training program years ago. I went to the free seminar, then the paid three day seminar and I got sucked up into the Rich Dad training and I did nothing with it, partially because I didn’t have the time and I didn’t have all of the resources, but also because I just didn’t know what to do with it.
It was just kind of like, “All right, here, I thought this was going to be a life changing event, within 30 days I was going to make back my money plus.” It derailed me from what it is that I was intending to use that money for and that was putting a down payment on a house, but it also taught me that I didn’t need to put that much money down to buy a house. It taught me a lot about credit, it taught me a lot about how to increase my credit, improve my credit, how to network. So it was a very embarrassing time in my life in that moment, but now I look back on that experience fondly and $12,000 is nothing to sneeze at, but I’ve invested probably multiples of that in personal development, coaching, master classes, networking events, books. You name it, I’ve done it and that has really kind of reaffirmed and solidified my position mentally in taking on the risk that I’ve taken, up to and including firing my boss.

Mindy:
I love it.

Scott:
Yeah, I think that’s great advice with that. A lot to think on there. What is your favorite joke to tell at parties? The most difficult question we’re famous for.

Rahkim:
It is definitely a difficult question because I don’t tell jokes, but I grandfather told me this riddle a long time ago and I don’t remember all of it, but I remember the end of it. It’s about this monkey in Africa swinging around, it has this really long tail and the lion comes and cuts off the monkey’s tail and then he says, “What does the monkey say when the lion cuts off his tail?” And we’re all sitting there like, “What?” And he goes, “It won’t be long now.” Well, I guess it was a good joke, you got it, you guys laughed. But he told us that story… it’s a fond memory actually, told us that story because it was in anticipation of something that was taking a while to pass and I reflect back on that frequently. When you’re doing the work, whether that’s financial work, whether that’s personal development work, whether that’s whatever, it’s this idea of it’s so long it’s going to take a long time and when we get to the point where he’s like, “It won’t be long now,” it’s like it’s right around the corner for you.
So just kind of celebrating a resource accomplishment. I recently hit 10,000 followers, recently like this morning, hit 10,000 followers on Instagram and I had been working so hard to get there, but I wanted to stick my principles. I didn’t want to buy followers, I didn’t want to do any of the shortcuts, I wanted to build that base organically, so I’m very proud of that, that people see value in the things that I posted, things that I share and want to follow me, but at 10,000 now you have unlocked features and of course it’s going to probably go up in multiples from there. But it was kind of like this idea of having patience until there’s no lead for you to have patience.

Mindy:
Well that is a perfect segue into our final question, where can people find out more about you?

Rahkim:
People can find out more about me anywhere at my name. So Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, my website, it’s all Rahkim Sabree or RahkimSabree.com and that’s spelled R-A-H-K-I-M-S-A-B-R-E-E and again that’s literally everywhere, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook Twitter, you name it, I’m there.

Mindy:
That’s one of the benefits of having a unique name.

Rahkim:
It definitely is.

Mindy:
Bob Jones doesn’t have his name on anything. Okay, Rahkim, this was super fun. Thank you so much for your time today and for sharing your story.

Rahkim:
Thank you for having me.

Scott:
Thank you.

Mindy:
Okay, that was Rahkim Sabree. Scott, my favorite part of his whole story is where he talks about overcoming the mindset that he had as a young kid and decided, “I am going to do this,” and his abundance of confidence is absolutely a huge benefit to him, but he bought a house, he… didn’t even go buy a house, he bought an investment property, a duplex. He’s making renovations to the duplex, he’s actively investing in the stock market in multiple ways. He is really setting himself up for success.

Scott:
Yeah, I think underlying a lot of this is a really aggressive approach to investing and to entrepreneurship in a lot of ways, but a really conservative approach to spending money, which underlies a lot of that, and I think enabled and empowered Rahkim to feel like he can go after some of these opportunities and seize that power and seize the moment with these types of things.

Mindy:
How many of your four levers did he pull? Spend less, save more-

Scott:
Earn more.

Mindy:
Earn more, invest aggressively and start a business. Wow, he’s got all four.

Scott:
Great, yep. Yeah, he’s doing all four and he’s doing it in a little bit different of a spin that’s conservative in some ways and aggressive in other ways and I thought it was again, I thought it was an interesting perspective with that, I think he’ll be very successful with that. He’s clearly very committed to a lot of the entrepreneurial pursuits and if you can have that bug to that extent it often can be a lot better long term than a full-time job.

Mindy:
Yeah, and he had a solid foundation to fall back on just in case this stuff doesn’t work out. Even though he didn’t have a super huge liquid emergency fund, he still has a six figure investment portfolio, he’s got equity in his home. He has a lot more options than just, “Uh, I hate my job, I’m quitting.” So I like his story a lot.

Scott:
Yeah, the risk he takes with his approach to cash and liquidity management is that in the event that he does have a problem with liquidity or begins having a large amount of losses that begin to pile up every year or a lack of income, he will have to liquidate his investments and if the timing of that is unfortunate, such as right after a crash or whatever, that can backfire. So that’s the big risk that he’s taking. Probably it’ll work out for him most likely, in most normal market conditions and that kind of stuff, but there’s always that chance that everything goes down together and the revenue stops, the investments are down, he has to pull out at that point or take on debt and those types of things.
So as long as he’s going in with his eyes wide open, which I think he is, I think that that a choice to make and I think he’s made it and like I said, odds are he’ll probably be very successful with that.

Mindy:
Yeah, and another thing going for him is he doesn’t have anybody who financially depends upon him. So that is a very different position than I find myself in with a husband and two kids and a very different position that you find yourself in.

Scott:
Great point.

Mindy:
So the time to take risks is really when you aren’t responsible for anybody else. Okay, Scott, this episode ran a little bit long today. Should we get out of here?

Scott:
Let’s do it.

Mindy:
From Episode 217 of the BiggerPockets Money podcast, he is Scott Trench and I am Mindy Jensen, saying got to go buffalo.