Today’s guest post is from Scott Trench about building your first investable assets. I first met Scott a couple of years ago at a business conference and was immediately impressed. Despite his young age (mid 20s), he had already attained a leadership position at BiggerPockets, a crazy successful real estate investing site.
At that first meeting, Scott and I talked about what books we were reading. Thinking back, every time I see Scott, the conversation eventually turns to books. Any friend of books is a friend of mine.
And the love of books is a reflection of one’s personality. Scott likes books because he has a passion for learning and knowledge. Scott is going places.
And Scott recently wrote a book called Set for Life. While I haven’t completed it yet, Jim Collins reviewed it favorably. Let me tell you, Jim is a tough critic.
Enough yapping from me. Take it away Scott!
How to Accumulate your First $100,000 in Investable Assets
If you are reading 1500 days, you’ve been provided with a fine example of how a family can move from several hundred thousand dollars to early financial freedom over a moderate number of years. Mr. and Mrs. 1500 are legends, who exemplify hard work, a DIY mentality, an approach to investing that is fundamentally sound, and are just nice, wonderful people. Thank you so much for the honor and privilege to guest post on 1500 Days!
I hope to continue learning from Mr. and Mrs. 1500 as I continue to grow and build out my net worth to the targets I’ve set.
The focus of this article is to address the early stage of wealth creation. Specifically, I want to talk about how to as efficiently as possible go from a standing start with little or no assets to $100,000 or more in investable assets. This article is written for the person earning a solid living that is at least that of a median earner, and who is willing to make some major life changes to hasten early financial freedom.
What are Investable Assets?
But first, let’s define investable assets. This is the money you have available that could be used to purchase an investment nearly immediately. For most people, this is the available balance of your:
- Checking accounts
- Savings accounts
- Cash (your wallet or purse!)
- Money market accounts
- Stocks, bonds, and funds
- Trust, retirement accounts, and HSAs
The things you own that carry value but are hard to sell quickly to realize that value are considered illiquid. These are not investable assets. For most people that includes:
- Real estate property
- Jewelry
- Art
- Collectibles
- Vehicles
While these items may be included in your net worth (along with their debt), they’re not part of your investable assets.
Accumulating Investable Assets
I’ll tell you something, “investing,” as most people define it, isn’t very important in this stage of wealth building. If you earn $50,000 per year, and have $10,000 to invest, earning a 12% ($1,200) return isn’t much different from earning an 8% return ($800). You would be unwise to spend dozens of hours learning how to pick stocks, master Lending Club’s nuances, or otherwise attempt to eke out a few hundred dollars more per year in return on publicly available investments.
Instead, this stage of wealth accumulation involves a heavy focus on three areas:
- Frugality
- Housing + Transportation
- Income Production
Let’s Start with Frugality
Frugality is the starting point in wealth accumulation for the median earner with little to no wealth. There are three main reasons this is the case.
First, frugality enables one to build out financial runway far faster. Financial runway is the amount of time that one could survive without wage-paying work by spending their accumulated investable capital. So, if you spend $50,000 per year on your lifestyle, you’d need $50,000 in cash or equivalents in order to survive for one year without a paycheck. Halve your spending and two things happen. One, you keep more of your paycheck, enabling you to build more savings more quickly. Two, you reduce the amount of money you spend per year, lengthening your current financial runway immediately. If you spend $25,000 per year, then your $50,000 in cash has just doubled to two years of financial runway.
Second, and tied to our first point, frugality enables opportunity. As one’s financial runway lengthens, financial risk diminishes. You might be able to throw $10,000 at an investment, no problem, after a year or two of saving. That same $10,000 might be all, or more of your investable wealth today, and you can’t even imagine “risking it” in an investment. You might be able to quit your job and pursue one that pays less money in salary but offers the chance at bonuses, commission, or equity. You might be comfortable in starting a side business or launching full-time into entrepreneurship. Frugal living exponentially lessens financial risk and allows the saver to exploit opportunities unavailable to the spender.
Third, frugality is tax efficient. Ever heard the saying, “A penny saved is a penny earned” –not true, at least in America. A penny saved is better than a penny earned. If you are earning $50,000 per year as a single person, it’s possible that your marginal tax bracket is 33% between federal and state taxes. That means that when you earn a $5,000 raise, you only keep $3,350. On the other hand, if you can find a way to spend $5,000 less per year, you actually are $5,000 richer. It’s far more efficient, dollar for dollar, to save money than to earn more.
Housing + Transportation
As your two largest expenses, Housing and Transportation should be the areas that you spend the most time optimizing in the early stages of wealth building. Combined, these two expenses make up over 50% of the typical American household spending.
I’ve largely eliminated both of these expenses from my life, and the decision to do so was a primary factor that helped me to accumulate over $100,000 in investable assets in less than three years out of college, and go on to accumulate much more in the few years since.
I solved this problem by house-hacking close to my workplace. I bought a duplex that was less than five miles from my work, rented out the other unit and part of my unit to a roommate, used that money to cover the mortgage, and lived rent-free. In addition, this duplex was an easy bike ride from work, so I bought a $250 bicycle and used that as my primary commuting vehicle. Between these two decisions, I easily saved $1,000 or more over my peers living in the same city at similarly paying jobs.
I was able to buy this duplex because I had saved up $20,000 in the prior year on my $48,000 per year salary. I took lunch to work, behaved responsibly, and enjoyed cost-effective fun like skiing (I bought a season pass and live in Denver), rugby, and time in parks and outdoors. I used that $20,000 to purchase the duplex by putting 5% down with an FHA loan. Between principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and MIP (a special type of mortgage insurance on loans with low down payments), my payment came to $1,550. Rent from the other side was $1150 and rent from my roommate was $550, for a total of $1,700 in rent. This allowed me to effectively live for free.
Biking to work is one of the best parts of my day now. I did, however, recently decide to move a little farther from work (about a 6.5-mile ride). To solve that I built myself the very eBike that Mr. 1500 describes at length in this blog post on Mr. Money Mustache. I have to tell you that this is the most fun object I have ever owned, and it does not get old riding to work on this thing. Think about always getting wherever you want to go at full speed, and never having trouble finding a parking spot.
Income Production
Living in a house-hack close to work, and behaving otherwise responsibly and frugally does not preclude one from earning a high income. In fact, I’d argue that they assist in that department. As I intentionally designed a highly efficient, convenient, healthy lifestyle, I found that my mental capacity increased, and my ability to focus continued to develop.
Unlike frugality, there are no guarantees in the income department. While not spending $10 guarantees that you will be $10 richer, income production is all about playing the odds.
Now, one thing to clear up is the situation with your current job. If you are earning $50,000 per year as a “marketing specialist 1” then you know that the best-case scenario in your current career is that you will be promoted to “marketing specialist 2” at $55,000 – $57,000 over the next 12-18 months. Again, that’s if things go well.
That is too slow if you aspire to early financial freedom and want to make good time. Luckily, because you’ve adopted the frugal lifestyle we discussed earlier, and pay little to nothing for your home and commute, you have accumulated at least 1-2 years of financial runway, and are able to afford your happy lifestyle on less than 50% of your current take-home pay.
This enables you to take risks and increase your odds of earning a truly meaningful salary. This enables you to take a chance on a sales job where top performers earn $100,000, $250,000, or more per year. This enables you to join a startup with just a few employees at $35,000 per year, but with some equity that could be worth six or seven figures in a few years. This enables you to get paid for performance.
When you are paid for performance, one of two things will happen—you’ll either perform, or you won’t. If you can cut it, you’ll make far more than you would at a salaried gig. If you can’t, you’ll make less. Guess who can’t afford to make less? That’s right, the guy who isn’t frugal. Guess who can afford that worst-case scenario and go back to salaried work if things really don’t work out? That’s right, you.
Now, if you decide to go down the income-producing route, you’ll need to work harder and smarter than you might be currently. You’ll need to begin self-educating as much as possible. That means reading books, blogs, and listening to podcasts related to your field with regularity. It means meeting with star performers and building out your network, regardless of whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. It means planning out, setting, and reviewing written goals, and tracking your progress painstakingly.
While none of this will ensure success, it will definitely increase your odds over time, and that’s all this income game is—repeated intelligent action that is intelligently taken so as increase the odds of a positive outcome as much as possible.
Your First $100,000 of Investable Assets
If you can live on less than $25,000 per year (a TON of money if you don’t pay for your housing or commute), house-hack, and are able to become even modestly successful ($80,000+ per year) with performance-based work, you will have a good shot at accumulating over $100,000 in investable assets in less than three years. No, it isn’t guaranteed, but it’s an effective approach that will give you a great shot at making a dent in your goal toward early financial freedom.
And, once you have that first $100,000, opportunities begin to multiply in front of you exponentially. Investments, jobs, business opportunities, partnerships, and more will all begin to materialize before you as you continue to save, work hard, live intentionally, network, and self-educate.
Just ask Mr. and Mrs. 1500.
Good luck!
If you want to learn how to go from a standing start with little to no assets to several hundred thousand dollars in net worth and several thousand dollars per month in passive income, check out my book, Set for Life. This is a straight up guide that includes both a thorough financial philosophy and concrete, actionable steps for median, full-time employees looking to rapidly move toward early financial freedom!
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This is really great advice – get the big expenses right, build up some wealth reserve, and then you can have at least some appetite for career risk.
I’m at a different stage than you – older and FIREd – but I wish I’d had this advice when I was younger. Fortunately my parents taught me to be frugal and the other stuff you describe I gradually figured out.
Mr. Freaky Frugal recently posted…Freaky Frugal or Stupid Frugal?
Thanks so much! I’d be interested to discuss freaky frugal vs stupid frugal with you as well. I spend an extremely small amount of money, but I believe that my budget on the fun stuff (beers, movies, vacation, and recreation) is pretty reasonable, if not above average, while my living expenses are close to zero.
I that’s the key Scott. If you do it right, you can practically live for free as a middle class American. If you know what you’re doing with RE investing, you can grow your RE to generate monthly income. Eventually you can offset the majority of your living expenses and dedicate your entire 9-5 paycheck to investing.
Wow, good on you for having your act together at such a young age!! I hope continued success for you!
I’m a bit older, 45, and had just discovered the FI path within the last few years. I am proud of the gains we have made but it is a bit tougher once you’ve been a consumer sucka for years and years, and now have a family. I do wish I had discovered this lifestyle some years ago. Anyhow, I am doing all I can to make my children aware of this path so they can be successful and happy at a young age, which is difficult when constantly bombarded with the spend spend spend, debt debt debt message!
Thanks Matthew! I definitely agree that it is easier for me with no ingrained lifestyle preferences or habits. I think that the folks that are the experts in moving toward FIRE from that situation are Mr. and Mrs. 1500!
Hah! Sorry, I think it’s cute that Housing and Transportation are the two biggest expenses.
Someone must not have kids. 🙂 We spend ~2500 on house (totaled everything including repairs and a major upgrade) and the same on kids (daycare + clothes for them). This is ignoring all of their food stuff and family events.
For Car, we spend ~900 if you include our car purchase from last year, under $400 if you ignore it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that kids are expensive if you want to have dual income. We are way in the positive when it comes to this, but who knows what our future holds… Maybe one of us will end up staying at home!
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“We spend ~2500 on house (totaled everything including repairs and a major upgrade) and the same on kids (daycare + clothes for them). This is ignoring all of their food stuff and family events.”
Are those monthly expenses? I suspect much of that is daycare which will be a temporary expense. It still sucks, but this is yet another reason to strive for financial independence. And if you can’t reach FI, live frugal enough so that at least one parent can stay home or go part-time.
Yes, monthly expenses and about to go up in the fall with baby #3 in daycare. It’s ridiculous, but we make a butt-ton of money compared to the average family. We’re at the tail end of a kitchen upgrade which definitely increased everything as well.
When I look at our expenses, I hate how much is going out but you’re right, the daycare is “short term”… except for the third kid in the fall. My wife and I can easily quit either of our jobs to cover the family expenses with wiggle room. But daycare for 3 kids next year will be a doozy, (~41k for the year), and then in the fall of 2018 it’ll be down to 2 kids again when the oldest is off to kindergarten.
But when we’re making our current salaries and my wife’s benefits, it’s a bit easier to swallow that pill.
So yes, we could quickly drop to 3k in total monthly expenses if required, maybe even 2.5k if we had to cut out every extra thing. When I total everything and ignore upgrades, we’re closer to 1.8k house-related expenses.
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Same here, day care for our daughter is about a third of our total expenses for the month. And this is after receiving government benefits! It’s expensive, glad that she will be going to school later this year 🙂 Is going to save us a small fortune!
Team CF recently posted…Real Estate Investing – a Dutch Case Study
Glad it’s not just us. I think that the hard part is in general, daycare costs float with income levels. Live in a good neighborhood with high incomes? You’re going to pay for the daycare!
The question we have is how worth it is it. Is work worth the time off. I can’t say definitively “YES”, which is making me feel a bit of regret/guilt. But then again, I think parenting is 90% guilt anyways.
In our case, where Miss CF is going to remain an only child, the daycare is critical in our opinion. She needs to learn to play with other kids and learn to share. Daycare is great for that. She also loves going, which make us feel a little less guilty.
If she did not like it so much, we would have started to work fewer hours and be home with her more. Now we are just able to speed up the road to FI and really be there for her in a few years when she comes home from school. Pretty good trade off 🙂
Team CF recently posted…Real Estate Investing – a Dutch Case Study
I’m obviously unqualified to make too much of a call on the childcare expense, but I do have to wonder how childcare expenses tend to be so large only for a specific segment of the population — namely the upper middle class family with dual income earners, and possibly the top 1%.
Median household income in this country is ~$52,000. So, someone spending $30,000 per year on kids ($2,500 per month) at that level of income has $20,000 left over to pay for EVERYTHING else, including taxes, rent/mortgage, transportation, and food). This is clearly absurd, yet, around half of the children in this country grow up just fine. So somewhere, the math must be off on how much it costs to raise children, or else income must be so large that the path to early financial freedom is extremely rapid because of the explosion of dollars coming in from the household’s offense in the form of income production.
While I am neither married nor expecting children at this time, I hope to raise 7 future, unborn, unconceived “Trenchlings” at some point in the future. I understand that I have a warped view of the world. I have already amassed significant assets and a skillset that I believe will allow me to easily produce significant income with or without a traditional job during my parenting years. Thus, I will have the fortune of hopefully never truly knowing these expenses, because of the actions I am taking ahead of time financially and otherwise.
Hah! You’re right on a lot of your points.
Sorry if I came out as a negative nancy. 🙂 I think that deep down, I’m just jealous.
Yes, we will be paying 41k next year on child care for 3 kids. Our house expenses will be way less than that, but it’s also one year.
So we will have one year where we’re not able to spend like we do now, but we’ll also be maxing out our pre-tax retirement accounts.
We make a lot more than the median income though.
I think in the long run, you’re doing a great thing. All of our lives are some portion of risk mitigation, and having different options to go to in the tough times never hurt.
I agree that if a household is making the median and have both parents working full time (kids in daycare), they’re probably making a mistake. Maybe it’s one they can weather for a few years?
The worst part about all of that is considering how people take time off for when their kid is born. Since the US is so terrible in the maternity leave space, parents are forced to either put the kid into daycare just to keep the lights on or take unpaid leave and go further into debt. Not everyone is as lucky as my wife and I and are able to save ahead for some unpaid leave, let alone get paid time off.
Then again, not everyone goes without like we do in other areas so who knows!
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The difference is the amount of aid families receive under a certain yearly income (I think its $50k). The daycare we just left, we were paying $339 a week (my 4 y/o full time and my 6 y/o before and after school). Most of the families there were receiving the govt. assistance rate, which meant they barely paid anything out of pocket for daycare. There were many families there that reported they were divorced so they only had to claim one income in order to cheat the system. I think we may have been one of the only families to pay full price. It sucked. The kids there were pretty awful.
Even when they start school, you have to have them in before and after care depending on your work schedule. (We do.) Another consideration is that we have no family nearby to watch the kids. Many families I know have grandma care in effect, so they also don’t pay squat for child care. We don’t have that luxury.
Can’t disagree with the assistance for daycare. I’ve seen military families that don’t pay much at all.
As to the last point, you can always move! We definitely get stuck in our locations for certain reasons and it’s hard for us to adjust around those once we’re set.
We are a military family! Since we had kids late in life, we were already pretty established financially, so we never got any of those nice daycare discounts that the lower ranks receive (especially on base daycare) We were always in the top tier. (sad face.) Funny thing is we don’t get any better care for our kids even though we pay more. Just the way it works out.
We’re already as close to ‘home’ and family as we can get. It’s just an expense we live with until my wife retires from the military and then our daycare expenses will end. Looking forward to that!
As a father of two (9 and 5 years old) I can tell you that childcare/after school expenses are huge. Yes! But at the same time there’s a good new – these expenses are not permanent. And they are great motivators for FIRE.
4 years ago, when we came to the States, our childcare expenses were $1800/month ($800 for after school + $1000 for a daycare) .
4 years later these expenses are down to $650 (after school). As I told you, they are not permanent
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But I want them to be cheaper now!
Someone told me that first $100K are the hardest one to save. And after hitting this milestone I would agree with this saying.
I like your point of view on transportation. We decided that we can’t afford spending more than 30 min on transportation to and from work. And it made “Yuuuge” change.
– We started riding bicycles to work
– sometimes I walk or run (as a part of my exercise).
Just by doing this we not only saved more money, but also got more time, which is the most valuable and non-renewable resource.
Thanks for this post!
Thanks! You will be accelerating toward financial freedom very quickly if you do the things you mention.
I agree, living simply in the beginning is key, but not everyone can “house hack” at such a young age, especially if they have kids or student loan debt. If you were single in the beginning of your journey (or had a partner who was on board), it does make it easier to get the spending down to bare bones. However, even if someone can’t do what you did, working to getting their spending down as much as possible will get them closer. Just because a person can’t retire in 10 years at their salary and spending level doesn’t mean they should give up on FI life! For my husband and I, it’ll more likely take us 20 years due to a late start (and the fact that we can not afford to go into a different career like sales due to having family), but we’ll definitely be much better off by being on the path now than if we lived a free-spending way for the next 20 years.
Thanks Tara! And, don’t give up on the speedy dream just yet! You may find that as you accumulate financial runway and your financial position improves over time, that you are quite comfortable moving one of your careers into sales or performance based pay, or even entrepreneurship. You may find that your improving financial position opens up new opportuntities to accelerate that you can’t quite see yet!
Great post. I heard the interview on BP and really found that informative as well. Living in a high cost area such as NYC makes it extremely difficult to house hack. A duplex? Close to a million dollars in a decent neighborhood. A single family house and renting out some rooms…still over half a million dollars. When you’re young in NYC, you can “rent hack” by splitting an apartment with a roommate to cut down on housing costs. I definitely agree with the advice, though it is much more difficult to apply it in some locations.
To make house hacking work, I had to go well beyond the city limits into a less desirable area and take on a much longer commute. But a good portion of that commute is spent on a train, so I can work during the majority of my commute.
And remember, your house hack isn’t your family’s forever home. You only have to live there a year. But the capacity for long-term wealth building as a result of getting into income-producing property in your 20s lasts a lifetime.
What do you want? Comfort or wealth? Because early on in life, you can’t have both. I’d bet that there are affordable 3- and 4-unit househackable properties within an hour or two of your work. If your spouse has the same financial goals as you, she should be on board with that.
Remember, it’s only a year, and using FHA, you can put a measly 3.5% down, which shouldn’t put you back very much from saving to buy a long-term residence! And it’s best to do it early before where the kids go to school matters.
Andrew – absolutely. Those in NYC, SFO, and LA will have a tough time house-hacking because of their location. Where you live is a huge determinant in how long it will take you to reach early financial freedom. The key is to understand that tradeoff, keep working hard, living frugally, and enjoy the lifestyle during the journey. It only makes sense to work more years in a large city if you like both the work and the location and are willing to trade a few years of early retirement to continue with your current situation.
Inspiring story with some very useful advices. I’m also very close to cross the 100k threshold, but I was “enlightened” at a later stage of my life. Huge respect that you realized the right financial steps at such an early stage!
Awesome post, Scott! I’m sharing with my readers 🙂
I have done or am doing all the things listed above and I can say it works! I lived close to work with roommates, biked to work when I could, kept my car from college, lived frugally (but well!), and now I’m house hacking. I wish I had started house hacking earlier as I wouldn’t have ‘wasted’ $25k on housing! It would’ve gone in my pocket and straight into more opportunities. Keep up the great work! I’m sad to hear you’re at first week CMSE – I’ll be at the second week!
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Some great advice here. Getting on the right path with a plan in your 20’s will certainly give you a big advantage. I think there are quite a few people in the FIRE community that didnt get started until their mid-30’s or later. And of coarse many of the great blogs werent around 10 or 20 years ago. I wish I knew more about things when I was in my 20’s but I did open my IRA and 401k (seemed like a good idea at the time). I mostly set it on automatic and 20+ years later my accounts are huge. (thanks stock market rally!) Things have turned out pretty good for me even though I never made that much. Cut out the junk and wasteful spending, live smart, have some discipline and invest regularly and everything should turn out great. With a little effort, you can still have and do all the things you want also.
House hacking’s a brilliant strategy. Kudos to you, Scott.
My first property was a 4-unit using FHA 3.5%-down financing in a suburb of Los Angeles. I lived in one unit and rented out the other three. I was single at the time, so it was a no-brainer. Why? Because of leverage. I put a hair over $15,000 down for 4 units an hour away from Downtown Los Angeles.
And because I only put 3.5% down, I had a decent chunk of money left over (+ cash flow from the tenants) to put into “real” real estate in the form of two private placements — a beachside development deal on the California coast + a buy, rehab, retenant, refi apartment syndication in Arizona — the returns on which have blown the stock market out of the water
The FHA fourplex strategy really is a no-brainer for single Millennials. If one does nothing else in real estate, they will have succeeded by getting into a fourplex as a young man or woman with only 3.5% down.
Assuming the rents cover their expenses, in 30 years when they’re in their 50s and the mortgage is paid off, and they’ve done the smart thing by raising the rents over the years, they will be sitting on a million-dollar asset that cash flows thousands of dollars per month at the cost of a measly $15k or so out-of-pocket when they were 20-something.
I can’t think of any better way for young people with limited resources to prepare for their future so early on in life with so little cash out-of-pocket.
If I had listened to all the noise and rented all those years rather than owned, my net worth would honestly be at least $50k less than it is today, and that’s not even including the appreciation on the property.
The was Great, Short and Sweet!
Great write up Scott. Clear, concise, and on point. Looking back, I definitely wish I went all out on the savings/reducing expenses when I was younger. You have listed areas that people have issues with (for various reasons/excuses) and cannot seem to make cuts or sacrifices. Thanks for sharing.
FIbythecommonguy recently posted…Dollars and cents behind the move
It almost sounds easy 😉
I think a lot of the points covered are really important to start with when you want to pursue FIRE. Especially if you are still rather young of age. We bought our current house right before we started investing and got on our way with financial independence. So we bought the house with a whole different mindset, and therefore still have a high monthly cost on this.
Luckily we earn pretty decent, commute to work by bike and live kind of modest. So we have a very decent savings rate, especially for living in the Netherlands. Due to the high tax burden, it’s more difficult here to start up in building wealth. Once you got something build up, it’s getting easier and easier.
Fantastic post Scott. This is a great summary of what it takes to accumulate wealth. Your comment about investing is spot on. Who cares about another 1-2% growth when you have $50,000 invested. There are usually easier ways to earn another $500-$1,000. Either through saving or earning (PS. Completely agree what a penny saved is BETTER than a penny earned).
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Interesting ideas! Oh man, I’m drooling over the $25k annual costs. I think we’re clocking in at $40k – $45k with a mortgage. Booo.
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Great job with the duplex and your saving rate. Your post is spot on. When you don’t have much money, it’s all about increasing your income and saving rate. The ROI doesn’t matter at all. Just concentrate on saving and investing as much as you can.
Luckily, I was always frugal and got rolling from the beginning. It’s too bad I didn’t know about house hacking when I was young. We’d be FI much sooner. Keep at it!
Thanks Scott. Great post! I wish I had been turned onto the idea of househacking in my 20’s (no BiggerPockets sadly). I lived within a 5 mile radius for 10 years renting the whole time. Prices were amazing back then and I do somewhat wonder “what if?” But I’ve tried my best to catch up since by living relatively frugally with a good income and by making real estate investing a priority. Biggerpockets equipped me to make the leap, so say thanks on my behalf. I’ll check out the book as well!
If I had known you before then I would not have wasted a lot of money for a long time, so far I have saved a little but not as much as $ 100,000 as the article, I built a website http://bebo.vn to business from which to save money made