This post may contain affiliate links (at no extra cost to you) which may earn us a commission, or miles and points, from the companies, sites, and products we recommend. We very much appreciate you clicking through our links, and for the continued support. Happy reading!
Do you ever listen to an investing or real estate podcast and scream at your phone “But HOW?! *HOW* DID YOU SAVE UP $50K TO BUY YOUR FIRST HOME?!”
“*WHERE* DID YOU GET THE MONEY TO REHAB YOUR PRIMARY HOME?!”
“*HOW MUCH* WERE YOU EARNING TO BE ABLE TO BUY FOUR PROPERTIES IN ONE YEAR?!”
Surely, it can’t just be me. I am a numbers gal. I want to know everyone’s income, savings rate, home value, purchase price, down payment, interest rates, rehab costs, etc. And I never mind sharing ours, in hopes they can educate and motivate others to supercharge their own finances.
So… here’s a breakdown of how *we* saved up enough to buy our first property, which was actually just a byproduct of saving and investing for financial independence, which I encourage everyone to do.
Quick backstory:
In the fall of 2016, we moved into my mom’s basement to help her take care of my stepdad, Tom, who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The time from his diagnosis to death was nine months. My mom had been retired less than a year when he died. I witness this stuff all the time working as a nurse in a cardiovascular intensive care unit. I call it The American Nightmare: Work Until You Die. Watching Tom fade away, my heart (still) so heavy thinking about all the things he hadn’t gotten to do yet, I told Greg WE WOULD NOT LIVE THAT NIGHTMARE OURSELVES.
I googled “How to retire early”
And went down a rabbit hole of financially-minded people and their podcasts, books, and blogs. I found the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement and declared it our new life plan. Greg was like, “Sounds good”, and away we went.
Very important caveat
We never had any debt. The ability to save and invest, and take so many vacations and mini-retirements, and now to buy houses, has always been possible because “we don’t have any debt, and we set aside some money for it.”
That is certainly not the case now, as we have mortgages on all our properties, plus some interest-free medical and home improvement debt.
We had always invested during our marriage
Anywhere from 18-26% of our pre-tax income in our early years together.
Investing = putting money aside for the future. Think stocks and bonds, retirement and brokerage accounts, real estate.
Saving = putting money aside for the present. Savings and money market accounts.
We really kicked up our investments from 26% in 2016, to 63% in 2017, to over 76% in 2018. We maxed out both our IRAs, Greg’s HSA, and my 401k every year from 2018-2021. On top of that, between 2017 and 2021, we put a total of $90,438.27 into our taxable brokerage account.
We were able to do this by my working travel or seasonal nursing contracts. By living in a travel trailer, or with family, or in furnished rentals. By spending so much less than we made, and investing the difference.
We were able to do this in spite of us both only having Associate’s Degrees. In spite of Greg working only part time then seasonally for an airline, and on the family farm during harvest. In spite of taking off at least four months every year to travel for fun. We were able to do this because we made stockpiling a priority.
Fast forward to 2021
Our net worth had grown to around $700k, with around $500k in retirement and investment accounts, with around $135k of that in our taxable brokerage account. Remember, we only put $90k into our brokerage, so the other $45k grew by itself just sitting in the market for four years. Woohoo! Money making money making money.
During covid, I wanted to retire from nursing *righthen*, and after years of denying it, buying rental houses felt like the quickest (but still slow) path to financial independence. Once again, I threw myself into books, blogs, and podcasts, and leaned hard on my oldest brother’s financial wisdom and landlording know-how to guide my path.
I waited until the S&P 500 was at an all time-high, and on Oct 30, 2021, cashed out all the long-term shares in our brokerage account (short term shares are taxed at a higher bracket, so I left those in to simmer some more). That came out to right at $103k, which I stuck in a high yield savings account set aside for real estate investing. Of course it was scary, and I did *not* like seeing our investments drop on our Empower dashboard, where I track our net worth. But… it was for a worthy cause.
I also took $70k from our personal savings (including our allowances!) to put into that real estate savings account. Again, our available cash was only from spending way less than we earned.
So how much were we earning to save up that kind of dough?
I went ahead and pulled our tax records to show you exactly what we earned, and how much we put into our investment accounts over the years. This is all per the IRS, and includes our W2 jobs and what Greg made as a hired farmhand. We’ve always taken the standard deduction.
I don’t have a copy of our tax return from 2013, but that’s the amount I recorded on my personal ‘2013 Total Income’ spreadsheet. What? You guys don’t have those?
| Year | Earned income | Taxable income | Invested |
| 2013 | ? | 24,757 | 4,531.81 |
| 2014 | 88,141 | 62,341 | 15,865.79 |
| 2015 | 48,716 | 21,116 | 10,142.96 |
| 2016 | 37,987 | 10,287 | 9,910.55 |
| 2017 | 64,003 | 33,203 | 40,621.03 |
| 2018 | 67,070 | 16,620 | 51,369.64 |
| 2019 | 51,632 | 8,232 | 41,234.37 |
| 2020 | 107,539 | 58,401 | 67,345.83 |
| 2021 | 155,522 | 124,543 | 64,631.31 |
| 2022 | 129,995 | 79,789 | 27,083.50 |
| 2023 | 136,759 | 90,438 | 16,755.87 |
What a fun exercise!
I love to see how our income has fluctuated over the years, and to look back and think about what we were doing those years, instead of working. Spoiler alert! Having a lot of fun.
As seasonal employees, when we don’t work, we don’t get paid. But when we do work, we work a lot in order to not work at all later. During covid I was making over $20,000 some months. But as of Dec 10, 2024, I’ve made just over $40,000 for the entire year.
Our goal is never to make more and more and more. Our goal is to make enough to live our dream life, and that goal for me is $10,000 a month in passive income.
So how, exactly, did you invest and save that money?
I always work from a budget. Say the word “budget” to some people and their eyes glass over and they immediately check out from the conversation. But I love knowing exactly where my money is going, and I wrote a whole post about why I think they’re necessary. You know what I always say: “If you don’t know where your money is going, you might as well be lighting it on fire”. All our dollars have a home.
How I made our budgets
First, I listed out all our expenses. If you don’t know what your expenses are, go over your bank and/or credit card statements from the last three months (or entire year) to see where your money *actually* went. If that’s too daunting, you could track everything for the next three months going forward.
You can keep it basic like I do, or split it up even more into groceries, household, and restaurants, instead of just ‘food’, for example. I still track every one of our expenses on personal Google sheets. If you know of or use a great expense tracking app, please let me know about it. I’ve never found one I love.
Now, check out the adorable monthly budget from the year we got married (yes, I still have it):
| Expense | Amount |
| Rent | 500 |
| Food | 400 |
| Gasoline | 200 |
| Utilities | 120 |
| Phones | 100 |
| Auto insurance | 77 |
| Life insurance | 87 |
| Internet | 36 |
| 1520 |
Now those were our *monthly* bills, but I always budget on a *biweekly* basis, because most jobs pay every two weeks. If yours is different, budget accordingly.
$1520/month expenses x 12 months = $18,240/year we needed to pay our bills.
Now divide that by 26 (how many paychecks we got every year). $18,240 / 26 = $702/paycheck.
I rounded that $702 up to $720 I needed to set aside from every paycheck, then I made a table allocating the rest of the funds. Our combined biweekly paychecks back then averaged around $1700 after contributing to our 401ks, so I took that amount and subtracted our bills, our allowances, and our Roth IRA contributions, and split what was leftover between our regular savings and our travel savings. The amount that was leftover every paycheck obviously depended on the actual paycheck.
| Account | Amount |
|---|---|
| Checking | 720.00 |
| Jamie allowance | 100.00 |
| Greg allowance | 100.00 |
| Jamie Roth IRA | 211.53 |
| Greg Roth IRA | 211.53 |
| Capital One savings | 178.47 |
| AmEx travel savings | 178.47 |
Voila! Every dollar has a home! Geeeeez things were simpler back then.
After discovering FIRE, I started budgeting differently
MUCH more money went into our investment vehicles: our 401ks, our IRAs, Greg’s HSA, and our personal brokerage. 2018 was the year I started maxing out my 401k. Since we have inconsistent seasonal jobs, my goal was to max everything out as quickly as possible at the start of the year, and in this order:
- Max out my 401k (based on his airline income, Greg will most likely never hit the federal max).
- Max out both our traditional IRAs.
- Max out Greg’s HSA.
- Split remaining income between regular savings and our brokerage account.
Since we saved so aggressively, and had the money sitting in our regular savings already, I used our savings to max out our accounts at the start of the year, then put enough from every paycheck into that same savings to max out the following year right away. Does that make sense? We front-loaded all our investment accounts, then spent the rest of the year saving up to front-load the following year again.
Our monthly budget and biweekly paycheck allocations for 2018:
| Expense | Amount |
| Rent + utilities | 535 |
| Groceries | 425 |
| Misc | 300 |
| Gasoline | 265 |
| Gift/give | 200 |
| Phones | 81 |
| Auto insurance | 72 |
| Jamie allowance | 50 |
| Greg allowance | 50 |
| Car/truck/camper maintenance | 10 |
| Jamie life insurance | 7 |
| 1995 |
OMG these budgets are so cute and simple! Now our primary mortgage alone is just over $3000/mo!
Back to 2018. Let’s round up to $2000/month x 12 months= $24,000 / 26 paychecks a year = $923/paycheck I needed to pay our bills. Our average combined biweekly paychecks in 2018 were $4000 *after* contributing to our 401ks, so here’s how I allocated the remaining money every paycheck:
| Account | Amount |
| Checking | 923.00 |
| IRAs (max $6k/pp) | 3077.00 |
Once our savings had enough to max out our IRAs the *following year* (federal max was $6k in 2019, so we saved $12k total for both of us to max out), then we saved to max out Greg’s HSA:
| Account | Amount |
| Checking | 923.00 |
| HSA (max $3.5k/pp) | 3077.00 |
Once our savings had that $3.5k set aside for the following year, then I started dividing our extra income every paycheck between our personal savings and our personal brokerage accounts.
| Account | Amount |
| Checking | 923.00 |
| Personal savings | 1538.50 |
| Brokerage | 1538.50 |
See? The extra $3077/paycheck I divided evenly into our personal savings and brokerage account. Mind you, this is just the average. Some weeks we would crush the overtime and bring home anywhere from $5k-$8k on a paycheck, again, *after* contributing to our 401ks. And this was just from our W2 jobs. Greg’s farming money all went into our travel savings. Oh, to be young and dumb again.
As you can imagine, our savings and investment accounts grew and grew and grew.
I was intentional with every dollar
I tracked what we spent, and budgeted for every dollar based on those expenses. I put every extra dollar into a savings or investment vehicle, and optimized those accounts with high yield savings accounts, and by investing in the cheapest funds available; in our case split about evenly between 500 and total stock market index funds. To this day, we are 100% invested in stocks; no bonds yet. We automatically reinvest all our capital gains and dividends. We don’t use a financial advisor; I manage all of this myself.
If you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, check out my post Investing in Layman’s Terms. Or text me or call me, or slide into my DM.
I am an incredibly lazy investor, and love taking the path of least resistance, and it has worked beautifully for us.
Our budget is never set in stone
Since 2022, when we started buying houses, I focus more on saving cash, so we can maintain our current rentals, and hopefully buy more.
I stopped front-loading our individual retirement accounts and instead wait until the end of the tax year to decide how much money needs to go where.
I still invest in my 401k, but just enough to get the full employer match (I contribute 6%, they match 3%). Greg’s airline contributes 3% to his 401k regardless, so he doesn’t contribute anything extra.
We still put $2k/yr into both girl’s brokerage accounts, to use for college, or a startup, or for a down payment on their first rental, whatever, as long as it’s not fentanyl. We have built sweat equity into all our houses, and our tenants pay down the principal on our rentals a little more each month.
It really was as simple as spending less than we made, sprinkled in with some unconventional elements like choosing not to work for months at a time, or living in an RV park, or at my in-laws light pole, or in my mom’s basement. Means to an end, baby.
Greg and I met as seasonal employees, and as “real adults”, have still been able to maintain our seasonal lifestyle. Our dream is to be able to live entirely off of farm and rental house income, and only work for fun money.
If you or someone you know needs help figuring all this stuff out and/or creating a life plan, let me know! I love to help people reach for their dreams by getting their financial lives in order! While I don’t know everything, I am very resourceful.
Stay tuned to read about how we started the actual process of buying rental houses, and for a breakdown post on each house we’ve purchased so far. Spoiler alert! We’re up to seven houses on five properties.