How to Save for Your First Rental Property in 2025 (Starting from Zero!)

Ready to take your first step toward building wealth through real estate? It all starts with mastering your personal finances. In today’s episode, we’re sharing the ultimate tips to take control of your money, cut through the noise and save for your first investment property without feeling overwhelmed. Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to level up your financial game, we’ve got actionable strategies to get you closer to your dream investment. Let’s turn that someday into today. This is the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. I’m Ashley Kerr and I’m here with Tony J. Robinson. And welcome to the podcast where every week, three times a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation and stories you need to hear to kickstart your investing journey. And look, Ricky’s, we couldn’t be talking about personal finance without the personal finance expert herself, Mindy Jensen. So if you guys don’t know Mindy, she is the host of the Bigger She’s also an expert live in Flipper and a real estate agent. And look, we were so excited to talk to her on the show today. So Mindy, welcome to the Real Estate Rookie podcast. Wow. I hope I could live up to all of that hype that you just gave me, Tony. I’m so honored. Thank you. I love being here. Well, Mindy, let’s start off with what is the first step that a rookie investor should take to get their first investment? You need money and all those people who say you can buy with no money down. You might not need any of your own money, but you definitely need money and you need some sort of backup plan in case your money fails or your first investment isn’t quite perfect. Have you guys ever invested in a property where you start like rehabbing or you get into the property like, oh, something’s broken and it’s really expensive? I like to say that as soon as you buy a house, something is going to break and the cost of that repair is inversely proportionate to how much money you have in the bank. So if you just spent every dollar on that property, you are gonna have a new roof or a new HVAC system or something giant that you’re gonna have to repair. If you have an emergency fund, if you have a reserve fund, if you are well-funded, then something’s gonna break. It’s gonna be a light switch or a switch plate cover. It’s gonna be something really, really small. But I have been buying and selling real estate forever and things break as soon as you buy it. I think that’s like the first law of real estate or something, so. Be prepared and be financially prepared. Be honest with your financial situation. Tony, you’re a betrillionaire and you have so much money, you can pay cash for every house. Great, that is a great position to be in. But if that’s not your position, then you need to know your exact position. So take stock of what you have and where you’re at. What is your income? What are your existing debts? What is your investment strategy currently? Do you have any other investments that you could maybe pull from, like a 401k that you could borrow for a down payment, which I don’t love unless you’re getting a smoking hot deal, but we’ll go into that in a bit. And finally, what are your expenses? I’m betting that every single person listening to this show right now has something they can cut out of their expenses that could help them save a little bit more for their investment strategy. When people come on my podcast and they want to talk about their financial situation, I look at those four things, income, expenses, debts, and investments. And I really look at their expenses because a lot of people think that they’re spending $4,000 a month, $3,000 a month, $10,000 a month, but they’re actually spending more. It’s these little one-offs or not so one-offs. It’s the things that you sign up for and you forget to cancel. It’s all of these little like nickel and diming things. that are taking away your ability to be able to invest in real estate. So first off, you need a really great emergency fund, but you also need to get a clear picture of your financial situation and be honest because when you’re lying, you’re only lying to yourself. Mindy, we’re talking a lot right now about the defense. And I want to talk a little bit about the offensive of personal finance and how you can kind of grow that side as well. But just one comment on the defense side. There’s an app that I discovered. a few years ago now and it’s a really cool tool. We all maybe are familiar with Dave Ramsey’s envelope system, very antiquated, doesn’t work as well I think in 2024, 2025 when most things are digital. There’s a company called Cube Money and Cube is spelled Q-U-B-E and Mindy’s waving her hands in the air. I think it’s one of the coolest personal finance tools that I’ve seen because it replicates envelope system, but it does so digitally. And before you spend on your debit card, you have to select which cube or which envelope you’re spending out of. So it replicates it in the same way, but it allows you to do it digitally. Midia, I’m assuming you’ve had some experience with this tool. I have never used this tool myself, but I saw it at a conference and the person who was explaining it is showing me how it works. He actually was a customer and he was showing me how it works. And I was like, This is the best thing ever. If you are having trouble with your spending at the beginning of the month, it’s like a digital cash envelope system. So you decide I’m gonna spend $75 in gasoline and $500 at the grocery store. And then when you’re at the grocery store, you look and you’re like, oh, my cube for groceries only has $100 left, but I just rang up $103 worth of stuff. So I either have to choose a different cube to borrow that $3 from. Or I have to put something back and it forces you in real time to be conscious of what you’re spending and what categories you’re spending in. And if spending is a problem for you, Cube is the answer. I love that product. Yeah, I used it before. It was called Proactive and they actually like wound down that version of the product. That’s why I stopped using it because they like they shut down the initial version. But I got an email recently that about like, hey, come back to Cube. So I was checking it out. So it’s top of mind for me right now. Yeah, it’s a really great product. I love it. Okay. So Mindy, let’s say a listener has gotten their financial foundation stabilized. They understand their budget, where they’re at financially. What’s the next step for saving for a down payment? How much reserves should they have? Where should they go or how should they figure out what’s the actual capital they’ll need to buy their investment? This is something you can do right now. Even if you have no money, no expenses, you couldn’t possibly buy a house. Connect with a real estate agent. in the area that you are thinking about buying. And if you’ve got a couple of different areas, connect with agents in a couple of different areas and start learning that market because I can’t tell you how much to save for until you have, or you won’t know how much to save for until you have an idea of what things cost. Tony’s area is a little bit more expensive than my area, which is a little bit more expensive than Ashley’s area. If I recall correctly, you’re in the New York state. So you’re not spending. minimum of $500,000 on some little two bedroom, one bath that needs a whole lot of work. Whereas I am and Tony’s like, that’s cute 500,000. If you’re going to do something called house hacking, which I’m sure you guys talk about a lot, when it’s your primary residence, you have a lower down payment requirement or a lower down payment threshold. 20% is the average that they throw out there so that you don’t have to pay PMI. But I have a friend who is very smart financially, very wealthy. And he said, I ran the numbers, PMI was going to be $17. So I didn’t sell the stock to put down 20%. I just put down 10% and now I pay an extra $17 to my PMI. So definitely don’t discount the fact that you could just pay PMI. His PMI is still low because he is so financially stable. He owns a lot of real estate. He’s a sure bet. and he’s, you know, he’s got a lot of money and a great credit score. If your credit score isn’t so great, you know, that’s another conversation we need to have. But when you’re saving up for a down payment, you want enough to put down comfortably. And 20% down, I say 20% down, let’s go with 3% down. 3% down is 3% of the purchase price. It’s not 3% and that’s it. That’s not the only cost that you’ll have. when you’re purchasing a house. You’ve got title insurance. And if you don’t think you need title insurance, you’re wrong. If you are buying your first property, you absolutely need title insurance. I’ve bought more than one property and I always get title insurance. I’ve never needed it. And I will continue to say you need title insurance forever. So you need title insurance. Depending on what state you’re in, you have either a title company handling your closing or an attorney handling your closing. They don’t work for free, so that’s gonna be a charge. You have a home inspection. I have a rule of thumb with home inspection. I think it goes something like, always, always get a home inspection unless you’re scraping it. And if it’s your first property, you need that home inspection. Your agent is not a home inspector. Your friend Bob, unless he actually is a home inspector, he’s not a home inspector. So unless you’re scraping it or going down to the studs, you need a home inspection because there’s a lot of things that pop up on a home inspection that might shock you. So that costs money. You’ve got an appraisal. If you’re getting a loan, your bank is absolutely gonna make you get an appraisal and that costs money. So there’s all these different fees involved in purchasing a property. It’s not just the down payment. Rookies, we want to hit 100,000 subscribers on YouTube and we need your help. While we take a quick ad break, you can go over to youtube.com slash at real estate rookie and make sure you’re subscribed to the channel. Stay tuned after a break for more from Mindy. Alright guys, welcome back to the show where we are joined by Mindy Jensen. Mindy too, funding your escrow account, prepaying your insurance a year in advance, your property taxes too. I mean, that’s a large chunk of money there. That exactly. And there’s like, I don’t have a, uh, Ulta in front of me right now to like go down all of the things, but yeah, there’s all these little things that add up. I actually just had a client. say, I’m sorry, I’m not going to be able to write this offer on this property because I wasn’t aware of all of these costs. And I felt really horrible that I hadn’t properly educated them on all of the little bitty costs that add up. It’s two to 4% of the purchase price when you buy a home that you will need in extra stuff. So that 3.5% down is now like 6% down. I’m going to link in the show notes to closing disclosure. So this will kind of highlight some of the things that Mindy is talking about and this is off a government website. It’s just an example, but it will give you an idea of what are some of the charges and the additional fees that you may see. It’s obviously not going to give you the exact cost of what it would be, but when you’re working with a loan officer, they’ll be able to give you an estimate of what this closing disclosure would be. so that you do know how much cash you actually need to bring to closing. So we’ll include that link in the show notes. That’s awesome. And that’s, you know, that brings up another great point. Working with a loan officer, I work, I’m an agent and I work with several different lenders because my client is in charge of which lender they work with, not me. But when my client doesn’t have somebody, I have somebody that I recommend all the time because I know he can close. I have built a relationship with him by sending him a lot of clients, I can ask him questions. I know he knows what he’s talking about based on the information that I’ve gleaned from him over the years of working with him. So if you’re wanting to be an investor, but you’re not quite sure where to start, or you don’t have money to purchase right now, call up a lender, a local lender, and ask them questions. You might have to go. through several people before you find somebody who is willing to talk to you, but the one that’s willing to talk to you is the one you wanna work with. You don’t wanna work with a guy who’s like, eh, I can’t talk to you right now, call me back when you have a property under contract. Well, they’re not in it for you then. And right now, lenders aren’t that busy. On that note, everyone who’s looking for a lender, head over to biggerpockets.com slash lenderfinder, and you’ll find some bigger pockets approved lenders there as well. And I really do think that a good lender… could be the difference between you getting started and you not getting started. I know Ash and I both have had some kind of creative deals we’ve been able to work out with lenders early in our investing careers that really gave us the confidence to keep moving forward. So I couldn’t agree with you more on that point, Mindy. But one thing I want to circle back to, because you talked about the defense of like, hey, buckling down, knowing your personal financial situation. You talked about some of the, I wouldn’t say hidden costs, but maybe some of the overlooked costs that rookies have when they’re buying that first deal. But the other side of that coin that I want to focus on just a little bit is maybe playing a little bit of offense when it comes to saving money for that down payment. So you guys have recorded tons of episodes at the Money Podcast. What have you seen folks do to not only control their expenses, but to also grow their income so they can more aggressively and maybe more quickly save for that down payment? The audience that I speak to is a little different than the audience that you speak to. And even- the audience that I speak to who is really focused on their finances aren’t always 100% aware of the entire financial picture. And people will call me and say, Hey, I would like to do this, this finance review. Here’s all of my numbers. And I look at their numbers and like, I don’t believe these numbers and I don’t know anything about your life, but I don’t believe these numbers. They’re all ending in zero. Are you guessing? Or are you estimating or did you just round up? And a lot of times they say, I’m guessing. Know your numbers, your numbers are your numbers. And until you have a clear picture of what’s going on, all you’re doing is guessing and that’s just hurting yourself. So once you have a clear picture, look at where your money’s going. Focus first on your expenses. Are you really, do these expenses align with your values? You want to be a real estate investor, but you’re spending all this money at the bar. You wanna be a real estate investor, but you’re spending all this money on clothing. Your real estate friends don’t care what you look like. And having the cutest pair of jeans and the latest iPhone and all these other things, isn’t gonna get you to the position where you can be a real estate investor. So be honest with your intentions. Don’t cut everything out, That’s a life that kind of sucks, but look at what you can cut out that you won’t miss or look at how you can reduce the cost of that item so you can still keep it in your budget or in your, I’m sorry, I said the B word, in your life without having to give up all these things that you enjoy, but also look at what you can cut out that isn’t gonna matter. You go out with the guys every Friday night, maybe you invite them over to your house on Friday night and you have a barbecue. and it’s like a potluck barbecue and everybody brings their own thing and that costs you way less money. And you do this over time, you’re saving money that way. There’s lots of other things that you can do to save money. And we have a ton of episodes about cutting your expenses to be able to save for whatever it is that you’re saving for. But on the flip side of cutting expenses is increasing your income. And this was quite… a great timing this morning, I was flipping through the news and it said, this woman makes $30,000 a month on her side hustle. And I was like, well, I got to figure out what that is. So I opened it up and it was, she runs like a social media marketing company. Okay. That’s not something I’m going to be able to do, but maybe somebody listening, that’s their job in real life. Well, go do it on the side. That’s a very low cost of entry to starting a business. I think you just need a computer. FBP con there is actually a vendor there and I can’t remember the name of her business but she would go and create templates and it was a private Instagram account and she was selling a subscription to join her private Instagram account so you could follow it and she would create templates for real estate investors to use to post onto their own social media. So she had to create this template once. She’s charging a fee for people to get access to it. And it’s kind of like a scalable model because once you create one, everybody can use it. That’s paying for it. So like that just reminded me of that. And she was there to, you know, build this business out of something that, you know, is generating more income for her. Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be related to real estate. The social media marketing is like you’re marketing, whatever it is you’re marketing. Another one of these stories, These people were working on TaskRabbit, which is a site that you can go and hire people to do tasks for you. They’re working on TaskRabbit and they’re making, one guy was putting together IKEA furniture. Have you ever put together IKEA furniture? I am the IKEA putter together in my house. So I’m really, really good at it. If I didn’t have this job, I could go put together IKEA furniture for people because there are people who are like, I can’t read these directions, I don’t understand. Like once you do it a few times, you’ll figure it out. But the one guy was making $4,000 a month, putting together IKEA furniture on his own time, working as much or as little as he wanted to. So there’s the amount of money that you can make and the ways you can make this money is only limited to your creativity, but you don’t even have to be creative. You can go on CNBC’s Make It series and look at what other people are doing. There was, and both of those jobs, are very low cost of entry jobs. There was one person who said that she started a handbag line and she took $30,000 and I was like, well, I’m gonna not recommend that one at all. Don’t start a handbag line because you have to have product. And if you make what you think is great, but somebody else thinks it’s ugly, they’re not gonna buy it. And then you’re stuck with $30,000 worth of unsellable handbags. So start small on these easy to do low cost of entry jobs and see what sticks. I know every single person listening has it in them to go out and make extra money. Mindy, you would be so proud because my eight year old is actually designing and making handbags and taking them to school. So he, a word that I don’t know if we’ve ever used in our house before is Gucci, but somehow he learned what Gucci was. And I asked him to explain and he said, well, it’s a brand and it’s expensive and they make bags. And I said, okay. He said him and his friends were making Gucci bags. And he takes a piece of paper, folds it, staples three sides of it, writes Gucci on it, and then attaches another piece of paper as like a little handle for you to put it on your wrist. He has probably made 100 of them. And he put them together in a lunchbox and took them to school. He wore his sport coat blazer because that was his business attire. and went to school and he made three sales yesterday. So I’m just waiting for the phone call from the school. We had to see if you know, we’re like, just so you know, Gucci has a trademark on it. We want you to be fully aware of all liability of what you’re doing. But yeah, that’s funny you said the handbag thing because that’s what he’s doing. And he wore another sport coat to school again today to make some more sales. All right, Ricky, so we have to take one final ad break, but we’ll be right back after this. Okay, let’s jump back in with Mindy. I love the entrepreneurial spirit that we’re seeing at such a young age there. But yeah, Mindy, I couldn’t agree with you more, right? There’s so many little side hustle ideas that people tend to overlook that could be an easy way to bring in one, two, three, four, five extra thousand dollars per month to help you fuel that first deal. But I think another area that a lot of people overlook when it comes to increasing your income is leaving your current job. Now, I’m not encouraging everyone to jump ship, but there’s a lot of studies that have been done that people who skip jobs more regularly over the course of their career tend to earn more money. And for me, I know when I first graduated from college, I think I was making like, I don’t know, 40 grand a year as a new college grad, which for me at the time was fantastic. I was like, 40,000 bucks a year, like heck yeah. And I ended up getting another job offer in a completely different industry. I was working in marketing when I first graduated. I got a job managing a warehouse, completely different. None of those skills translated, right? I don’t even know why they offered me the job. But I went from $40,000 to $68,000, right? And the same exact person, nothing was different about Tony, just a different job. I worked that job at 68K for two years. Then I got another job offer from another company at $100,000 a year. And it just kind of started to scale up from there. So within, I don’t know, three years of me graduating from college, I’m more than 2X my income. And it was just because I was willing to take the jump to go to some other company. So I don’t know, Mindy, what are your thoughts on people maybe job skipping? We have had several episodes where we have interviewed people who actually did that exact same thing on purpose. They’re like, I’m gonna get this job because it’s gonna give me this. this company name on my resume or this type of experience that I don’t have, which will then propel me to the next job, which will get me this company name or this experience on my resume. And they absolutely hop around and crank up their income because the retention bonus, the retention budget is less than the new hire budget in almost every company. So, which is so sad because having a great employee. versus, oh, they left and now I have to find somebody else. I hope they’ll work, is, you know, it’s short-sighted on the company’s part. But yeah, absolutely. I know we interviewed somebody called A Purple Life on our show. I wanna say it was episode 111 or 110. She absolutely did that. And Financial Mechanic was episode 98. And she also did that. She just, they both just job hopped to Tony’s riches. I do, that’s right. So, Mindy, even though we are the real estate rookie show here and we mostly advocate for investing in real estate, let’s say somebody listening has got their financial house in order, they’ve got their savings and they’re ready to deploy it into real estate. Coming from you as a personal finance expert, are there other investment avenues they should into real estate investment that you would recommend? Oh, this is a loaded question. I have always been real estate and stocks. I love the stock market. It has been very good to me, but the stock market is also kind of fickle. I am investing for the long term. So when it goes up, yay. But then the next day when it goes down, well, that’s okay, because I’m not selling today. It can be difficult for somebody who has not experienced the ups and downs of the stock market to be in the stock market. One of the things that we are advocating for on our show is to contribute to your companies 401k to get the full match. If your company matches your contribution. So frequently a company will match, um, say I will match your contributions up to 2%. of your salary. So you want to make sure that you are putting in there to get that full match and then afterwards, if you’re looking at investing in real estate, maybe your 401k isn’t the right place for you right now. There’s an investment vehicle called the Roth IRA and you’re paying taxes now and then putting money in it grows tax free and when you are any point in time, you can withdraw whatever you’ve put in. So we have a contribution limit of $7,000 this year. If you have been putting in up to the contribution limit, let’s say you have $50,000 in your Roth IRA in contributions and then it has grown to 150,000, you can always withdraw the 50 that you put in, but the 150 that’s grown, you can’t withdraw until you’re 59 and a half. I like the Roth IRA, especially for younger people, because when you’re younger, you typically are making less than you will be making when you’re older. Putting the money in now, when you’re at a lower tax bracket, you’re paying 12%, 15% taxes on this money and letting it grow. If you’re 20 years old and you’re putting that money in the Roth IRA, by the time you’re 40, you’re gonna have just this giant bank account. So, I really like the Roth IRA for people who are well-funded, who are younger, who are thinking about the future, and everybody should be thinking about the future, but I’d like the Roth IRA. Another really amazing account is the HSA, the health savings account. You can only have this if you have a high deductible insurance plan, health insurance plan. But if you do, you’re putting money into the HSA. The way that I handle my HSA is I put money in, I max it out every year, and then I cashflow my expenses. I don’t have a lot of healthcare expenses. It’s usually like my kid will get strapped throat, so I go to the doctor and I have to pay like, I don’t know, $80 out of pocket or $150 out of pocket. I don’t use my HSA money for that. I just put it on a credit card and pay that credit card off at the end of every month. And the HSA is growing. It goes in tax-free. it grows tax free and you can pull money out of there at any time to cover bills. So I keep receipts for all of my expenses and my healthcare expenses, and then I can withdraw it if I need money. I haven’t needed any money right now, so it just keeps growing and growing. So if you have the ability to contribute to an HSA, I would do that too. But I say all of this, Scott Trench, the CEO of BiggerPockets, started off wanting to be a real estate investor. So he didn’t put any money into his 401k. He saved it for his down payment. He bought a duplex, lived in one side, rented out the other. In his side, he rented out half of it to a roommate. And then after a year of living there, he did it again and bought another house. So he is saving his money for his down payments instead of putting it into his 401k. And that worked out really well for him because now he has, I don’t know, eight units in Denver. And he bought them a few years ago when Denver real estate was way cheaper. So again, it goes back to what are your intentions? Be honest with yourself, but also, you know, don’t let the tax tail wag the dog, but be aware of what the tax consequences are for not saving for your retirement, not saving in some of these tax advantaged accounts. And we go into this ad nauseam on my podcast. If anybody is interested in more information about that, I’m happy to chat with them. You can always email me, mindy at biggerpockets.com. But I think the HSA and the Roth IRA are great accounts to be putting money into while you’re saving for your down payment. And then once you have invested into these accounts, what’s the best way to leverage the retirement accounts or even non-retirement stock accounts that you may have? with the Roth IRA, you can always withdraw the contributions that you have put in. That could be a great way to fund a smoking hot deal, but you can’t put them back. So if you withdraw those contributions, they’re not there. That chunk of your Roth IRA is gone. The growth is still there to keep growing. That could be a great way to jumpstart your Roth IRA, but know that you’re not gonna have all that tax-free growth anymore. I am self-employed through my real estate agent business, so I have access to an account called a self-directed Solo 401k. I can buy rental properties through that account. I can’t manage them, I can’t do anything with them, I have to be completely hands-off, but I can. So if I was gonna buy something in like Florida, like a vacation rental in Florida, that’d be a great account to do that from, because all the money is right there. I’m old, so I’ve been investing for a while. But if you had the opportunity to put money into that kind of account, you have to be self-employed. But you can buy properties within that, you can borrow money from that account. for down payments, for expenses. I’d like to have a plan to pay it all back within five years if you’re borrowing from your retirement accounts, just so you’re not taking the money out forever. You can borrow from your traditional 401ks. You cannot invest in real estate in your traditional 401ks. But like a company sponsored 401k, you can borrow against the balance. if your plan allows for it. And I believe it’s up to 50% of the balance or $50,000, whichever is less. But that’s another way to find, but I mean, have you guys ever had a, just a smoking hot deal and you’re like, okay, now where do I get this money from? There’s not that many smoking hot deals popping up right now, at least not in my area, but when they’re there, you have to act really fast. So having different. accounts to pull from is a great, or just having this account and be like, okay, I’m going to borrow this because I know I’m going to be able to pay it back down the road. You talked a little bit about self-directed, Mindy, and you talked about the self-directed Solo 401k. There’s some other types of self-directed accounts. Can you just quickly touch on if you’ve used any of those other types before? Ah, so there’s a self-directed IRA, and that is available to anybody. The self-directed Solo 401k is only available to people who are self-employed. So the self-directed IRA is you putting your money into an IRA, it’s a tax advantaged account, and then you can also use that to invest in real estate. But that gets into, I don’t wanna get into the weeds too much, but your self-directed IRA growth can be subjected to UBIT, which is unrelated business income tax. So you need to. Talk to a tax pro, because I am not one, but before you’re investing in a self-directed IRA, definitely talk to somebody who knows about real estate through a self-directed IRA. Mindy, I think one of the big debates here, and we see this a lot in the RICCI community, is should I pay off all of my personal debt before I start investing in real estate? So maybe someone’s got student loans, they’ve got car loans, whatever it may be. Should they pay off that debt before they try and buy their first real estate deal? Maybe. Would you like me to elaborate? That’s not what Dave Ramsey would say, Mindy. Very concise answer. I love it. I am not Dave Ramsey. I’m a little nicer. We actually had the author of the House Hacking Book, Craig Kurlup, on our podcast, episode 35. I will remember this episode forever because it was such an eye-opening experience for me. He talked about how he graduated from college. He had. $80,000 in student loan debt. So instead of paying that off, he saved up for a purchase, bought his first house. It was a duplex. It was an up-down duplex. He rented out one long-term and he rented out his unit short-term. And how he did this, it was a one-bedroom, one-bath property. So he advertised this as a one-bedroom with a shared bath and he put up a privacy screen and slept on a futon in the front room while he rented out the bedroom. And I will quote Dave, live like no one else now, so you can live like no one else later. He, I didn’t know a single soul that was living like Craig did at the time. He wasn’t married, didn’t have any kids. He was living on the futon, renting out the other half of his property and renting out the basement. His housing costs were zero. and he was taking all the money that he would have been paying for housing and putting it into a bank account so that he could save for his next property. He bought the next one, I wanna say it was a five bedroom, two bathroom house. Five bedrooms are weird houses, so that’s not as popular as a four bedroom or a three bedroom. I think he added a bathroom, so it’s now five bedrooms and three bathrooms, and he rented it out, he lived in one and rented out four other rooms. because he was an owner occupant, he could do that. Definitely check your occupancy laws in your city and in your state, but he was continuing to make the minimum payments on his student loans while he is saving and investing in his real estate properties. And then all of a sudden, I wanna say it was three years later, he paid off all of his student loans. So should you focus on paying off debt before saving for your first property? Only if you are not going to be diligent about saving for your first property. But if you, like for somebody who is not good with money, who, oh, I’ve got a dollar, I’m gonna spend it. No, then absolutely pay off your debt first. But if you can, if you can focus on the minimum payment to your debt and everything else with your first property into your savings account, just so you can get started, do that. It is possible to do both. And I think it depends on why you’re investing in real estate too. Like if you’re not really investing for cash flow and you’re just going for appreciation, then you’re not going to have that cash flow to really snowball into your debt payments too. So you got to think about what your strategy is that you’re going into investing for too. Tony, did you have student loan debt when you graduated college? Yeah, yeah I did. And our focus was, hey, getting our primary residence, you know, laying the foundation for, for our debt. When I, at the time, I think the interest rate on the student loan debt, it was all like federal debt was like, I don’t know, 1.9% or something crazy like that. Right? So it’s like, why is there a strong motivation to pay that off? Yeah, I had student loan debt too, but I did what Craig did. I pretty much paid the minimum until I started investing in real estate. And then I would take my cashflow and put it towards the payments to pay it off faster. What I’m hearing is intentionality with both of your stories. And that’s the most important thing. Have a plan. and stick to it as much as possible. Of course, life is gonna come and slap you in the face a couple of times, but have a plan. So I plan on paying off my student loan debt after I get my first property. I’m going to save for my first property. That doesn’t mean, well, I’m gonna save for my first property, but these jeans are so cute, or oh, they came out with a new iPhone. They always come out with a new iPhone. You can get by with your old one. I have a super old phone. I think I have a six. It’s okay. It still works. I’ve dropped mine a couple of times. It’s all cracked and broken on the back. Doesn’t even have a case on it anymore. That’s called custom. Did you say you have an iPhone 6? I actually have a pixel, but yeah, it still works. That’s more because I don’t want to learn a new technology. They change it all the time, but yes, yes. I have old phones and I don’t care. It works. I need Google maps. I need texting and I need… music and that’s it and it’s got it and it works. So why would I buy another phone when I could be saving my money for something fantastic? And I think too, if you are motivated enough to really want something, these life changes won’t be hard. Like I remember when I was paying off my student loan debt, I had a spreadsheet with my tracker and what I would input the payment that I made and it would automatically tell me what my new balance is. And then I’d get to highlight it when I completely paid it off and that. just was so rewarding to me. You know, people will make the poster boards to track it or they’ll fill in the thermometer of how much they’ve saved, things like that. And there’s tons of free worksheets that you can download off the internet and print out if that will help you and motivate you, giving you that excitement of being able to, you know, color in that you’ve saved another $2,000 or something like that. Turning it into a game can really be like, Like then you’re playing against yourself and it’s a lot more fun when it’s, when you’re the one who’s putting the restrictions on you and not some outside force. I think the game piece is one element, but I think putting it on autopilot as much as possible. Like if you can reduce the amount of willpower you have to exert to follow the plan, it becomes so much easier to stick with the plan. Like again, when I was, when I was a W2 employee and I’ve talked about this in the podcast before, I think I even talked about it on money, but I had, a bunch of different bank accounts that were kind of, you know, replicating the envelope system. And when I got paid, I literally had a direct deposit set up for every single account. So there was a certain amount of my paycheck that went into the mortgage account. There was a certain amount of my paycheck that went into, into utilities. There’s a certain amount that went into, you know, just fund money for Tony and his wife. There was money that went into groceries, it went into gas. So every single month I had zero brain power that went into quote unquote budgeting. Then I just had to make sure that I was spending from the right account. And it made it so much easier for me to say discipline because I did not have to think about it. So the more you can do that with your personal finances, the easier it is to really work the plan. Yeah, absolutely. I think that goes along with spending habits too, the easier it is for you to spend. So I saw this reel the other day of this girl sitting in bed on her computer and she’s like, oh, I’m going to buy this. And then it says like input your credit card and she like falls out of the bed, closes her computer. And I think that is the same exact way for me. If I go to buy something and my credit card information isn’t already saved in there and I just have to hit buy now, I am not gonna get up and go find my credit card, get it out of my car, wherever it is, come back and input it. I’ll just be like, you know what, nevermind, I’m not gonna buy it. And like that right there is just such a simple thing of like the convenience to purchase things is so easy, having your information saved. There’s… You know, you go to check out some places and there’s like five different options of how to pay for this. Venmo, PayPal, you square, like all these different things where you could have credit cards saved in and makes it so easy that delete your credit card from everywhere if you are having that problem of making those online purchases because it is, and lock your credit card in your vehicle. Or… put it somewhere in the safe where you physically have to go or, you know, you’ve seen the people that put it in the block of ice. So it’s like an emergency. You have to chisel out your credit card if you really want to buy something. Think about Amazon. Like it’s literally one button when you’re on Amazon to buy. It’s like one click to buy. There’s literally no friction there, which is insane. It’s a good point. I have advocated for a long time. If you’re having trouble with your online purchases and your Amazon purchases, cancel prime. I’m on Amazon. And I look, now there’s a button, sort by prime. If it’s not on prime, I’m not buying it. But if I had a problem with buying stuff on Amazon all the time, cancel prime. Because when I see, oh, shipping is $5, nope. I’m not paying $5 for shipping. I’m like that with Instacart. That’s what I need to cancel my subscription to because it’s like, oh, you know what? This would be really good for dinner. Let me Instacart this and I’ll make this or whatever. Now it’s going to be like, you know what, kids? I’m sorry. No milk for your cereal. I didn’t have time to go to the store. Well, Mindy, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Real Estate Rookie. Where can people find you and reach out to you for more information? I am all over everything at mindy at BP is my, uh, my handle. However, I am really terrible at Instagram. So email me mindy at bigger pockets.com for questions about finances. You can listen to my show, bigger pockets, money. We talk about money all the time. And I Love talking about money and real estate and the intersection between the two. So please, please reach out. I love to talk about this stuff. Well, Mindy, thank you again for coming on and sharing your experience with all of our listeners today. Thank you for having me. I’m Ashley and he’s Tony, and we’ll see you guys on the next episode of Real Estate Rookie.