Well, this is it. We have reached the last full BiggerPockets podcast episode of 2024. So let me just take one quick second and thank you all so much for watching and listening and being a part of the BiggerPockets community in 2024. It means the world to me and the entire BiggerPockets team that you all come enjoy our content and apply it to your own lives and help pursue your financial goals.
As we wrap up the year, we are republishing some of our favorite episodes from podcasts across the whole BiggerPockets network. The show we're playing for you today comes from the Money podcast where hosts Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench talk all about optimizing your personal finances to reach goals like financial freedom and early retirement.
And in the specific episode that we're sharing today, which was originally published back in June, it features Mindy and Scott interviewing Bill Yount and Jackie Cummings Koski from the Catching Up to Five podcast. And this episode is a great primer for how to get started on the road to financial independence, especially if you're already in your 40s or 50s or even older, and we're realizing that you might need to make some changes in your spending or your savings and investing habits to achieve the retirement that you're dreaming of.
But even if you're not at that stage of life, I think the advice that the hosts and the guests give in this episode, like creating a budget and giving yourself some grace can help anyone at almost any stage of life. So I really think you're going to enjoy this episode. And if you do, make sure to give BiggerPockets money a subscribe on YouTube. We on this podcast will be back next week with more new episodes. But for now, here's Mindy and Scott.
The financial independence community is filled with stories of young people who have reached financial independence and retired early. But what about boomers? We're Gen X. Today, we are going to arm you with the four steps you need to know when you're getting a later start.
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me, as always, is my young-at-heart co-host, Scott Church. BiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you're starting, even if you're getting a lighter start on your financial independence journey.
Today, we're joined by later-start experts, Jackie Cummings-Koski and Bill Yount, hosts of the podcast, Catching Up to Five. We'll be talking about everything from backwards budgeting to social security. This episode is the 101 level, talking about the foundations you need to support your later start when your runway is a little bit shorter.
Jackie and Bill have so much to share that we're bringing them back on episodes 538 to share 201 level, the tactics to help you reach your financial goals. Jackie Cummings-Coskey and Bill Yount from the podcast Catching Up to Fi. Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I am so excited to talk to you guys today. Oh, it's great, Mindy. Thanks for having us on the show.
Yeah, we're glad to be here. You know, catching up to five is like been, uh, build developed it. We're making it even better because there's so many late starters. So we are thrilled to come and chat with you guys today.
Gen X is behind on retirement. The average Gen X or has something like $40,000 saved for retirement. So it seems like most people in that generation are getting a very late start. There's a lot of reasons for this, but Jackie, can you give us your thoughts on that stat? What is going on here? Why are so many people getting started late? Yeah, I think that stat is right on. And it's not just, you know, the Gen Xers, that is the biggest chunk, but things like, uh,
If someone immigrated to this country, that could get them a late start. Sometimes divorce, even kids sometimes can cause people to get a late start. But we tend to end up in this, you know,
late 30s, 40s and 50s when we're just waking up. Like for me, I just woke up at 38 and some people might not consider that late, but I knew I was way behind. So when you're finally waking up because you didn't get this stuff early on, that gives us a late start. And then for me, especially, I was running really, really hard to try to catch up and I ended up getting, you know, having a late start, but finishing a little bit early,
So there's a whole lot of people in this bucket of late starters. Jackie, one of the things that we see in bigger pockets when we're talking to people about their money story to early financial freedom is this concept of the aha moment. Oh, I discovered that I could retire earlier and build wealth and then a very dramatic behavioral change that incorporates saving, investing, building one's financial position. Is that what you mean by wake up in the context of moving towards retirement?
Yeah, I do because for a big chunk, you are just sort of floating through and doing what you've heard other people say or maybe having the wrong role models around you. But when finally you get curious, you start digging, you start educating yourself and things start clicking, you're like off to the races. And I know for me, once I found one nugget that was helpful to me, I wanted to keep digging and digging and digging and finding so many other things.
that helped me and and i tell you what there's a unique type of motivation that you have once you get going and so i tell people all the time you will surprise yourself and how fast you move once you wake up and you start seeing that some of the things that you're doing different after you wake up looking at the movement that is so much motivation for you to keep going to go faster and before you know it your way
further along than you thought you ever could be, even if you got a late starter. Absolutely. I could not agree more with you, Jackie. And what I think a lot of late starters maybe don't know or don't really focus on is there are some advantages to being a late starter. There are some opportunities that they have that their younger counterparts don't. And we're going to get into that a little bit later. But Bill, I've heard you say
The average American is a late starter. And I love that because it's so inclusive. You see these articles that are written about the 25-year-old that got to financial independence in two minutes. Yay for him, but that's not the average person. That is absolutely the outlier. But when you see so many of these comments,
over and over again, you start thinking, oh, maybe something's wrong with me because I'm 50 and I'm not retired. So I love that phrase, the average American is a late starter.
Well, I don't know how I came up with that, but it seems to ring true. In our audience, in our show, in our podcast, they all wonder what happened. You get caught up in life. You get caught up in the funnel of life. You come out of school. You come out of residence. You have big debt. You start a family. You buy a house. You buy a car. And then you get into this paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle.
all of a sudden you're fifty and you've lived life but you wake up and you go wait a minute nobody's taking care of me i have to take care of myself and i better get started and getting started is really the hardest part is jackie says once you dive in it's amazing how fast you can turn your mindset around and turn your money around.
So we haven't even gotten to the steps here to actually address going towards catching up to retirement and beginning to move our financial position forward. But I think these are two critical precursors here. We can call them 1A and 1B on this journey. One is wake up and acknowledge, hey, this is an important part of life and nothing's going to come and save me. I got to go and go after this and get this done. And two,
You know, rationalize or understand or empathize that you're not going through this alone. This is most people are kind of in the same boat as you when you're maybe getting a late start and trying to catch up to retirement. How am I doing there? Would you agree with that as like step one A and one B here before we even get into the actual work of moving our financial position forward?
Yeah, for sure. I think you hit the nail on the head. You know, it's just kind of, you know, waking up, acknowledging, you know, you didn't know these things and just moving on. The acknowledgement part is really important because, you know, if the mind isn't there, it's hard for you to get your feet moving. And then when you wake up, you feel like you're alone. I mean, you think you're the only person in the world that has done this. And, you know, that's why I call it the silent majority because
We live in a consumption society. We live in a society that is not, you know, promote savings. It promotes consumption and spending. It's almost an afterthought in our society. Yeah. You are not alone. We are here with you. We need to tell Mindy not to give up her day job. Is that right? You're such a great podcaster. That's a new intro music for bigger pockets money. We're putting that right in there.
Bigger Pockets music, yeah, not high school musical, bigger pockets musical, but you aren't alone. And these headlines that you see, these sensational headlines absolutely make you feel like you're alone, which is why I love the catching up to five podcasts so much because you're sharing stories of people who are doing it, who have done it with a later start.
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Yeah, to me, the first step, we talk about the psychological part. I like to say, give yourself a little grace is probably a lot of the reason why you're getting late start probably is not your fault. We're not taught about these things. It's a taboo topic.
And even schools don't teach it. A lot of us didn't have good role models at home. So just give yourself a little grace, okay? Once you do that, you have to know where you're starting. Like, how can you even decide, okay, should I start kicking out my investing first? Should I pay off my debt first? You don't know which piece is really more critical until you start laying out your finances and determining what your numbers are. Things like, you know, your net worth,
You know, maybe your fine number, which is 25 times your expenses. You know, what's your true income? You know, what taxes are you paying? So all those things are important to see where you're starting. I know there's that inclination to let's just do it all at once at the same time and just get it get going so quickly. But just figure out where you're at and lay things out so that you have a very clear picture
of where you're starting because as you see progress, it's going to be really, really valuable to you to see where you started, even if your first net worth is in the red. If you start to see it moving in the right direction.
if it's motivating and you can see that you're making progress. So that's how I would get it started. Yeah, even if your net worth is in the red, you need to acknowledge that. That is what I call a fact. It is not judgmental. It is. I have brown hair. Jackie has black hair. Those are facts. I have X number of dollars. I have negative X number of dollars. Those are facts. So once you have an idea of where you're starting, that's so, I love that because
then you can move forward. I don't know how much mine that worth is. Well, then how much are you spending? How much are you budgeting? I mean, you don't even know how much you're budgeting until you start tracking your expenses and see where it's going. So Jackie, this is awesome. I've given myself some grace. I want to diagnose my starting point. How do I do that?
Yeah, so as we, some of the numbers that I mentioned, you can't even get to until you do a budget. Now that scares a lot of people and a lot of people hate budgeting. I personally have to admit, I'm not one of those that love budgeting, but you have to know how much your expenses are. So what did I do? I did the backwards budget, which I kind of think is better. Bill may disagree with me because I think he does a much better job of the budgeting piece. I do it backwards because I think
that leaves less chance of something being left out. So here's how the backward budget will work. Basically, you take everything that you're saving and investing, and then you take everything to your pen and taxes and whatever's left, that's your expenses. Now, if you do it the other way, we're going to forget stuff. Like, did you include the dog grooming? Did you include fees for this and fees for that? And I think it's so much more room to forget
things in a budget, when you're doing it the front way, sort of doing line item by line item, inevitably you're going to forget something. By doing it backwards, you probably include it the most your budget can be once you subtract out the taxes and your investment and savings. So what do you think? You're pretty good with budgeting, way better than me.
Well, I actually do it the exact same way. I saved till it hurts, maximize my savings rate or the gap, and then everything else is spending, but I got to spend on a value-based method. You do have to track your expenses because there's a lot of little things and big things that you can get wrong, and you can have a lot of holes in the bucket that you've got to plug as well.
I just want to observe here that I've been tracking my finances and my net worth for 10 years here pretty regularly. This is not a fun task for me. I don't enjoy it. It is a large amount of work to tabulate my expenses on a regular basis plan for consumption, investments, taxes, those types of things. It doesn't take me 10 hours a month, but it takes me two.
And it took me a couple to get it set up and it was confusing and painful and those types of things. Is that what you guys found getting this started and how you find it going forward? Or is it much easier than that? I'm wondering, I think for someone listening, this sounds like a lot of work. It sounds very painful to acknowledge reality. And it sounds like something I have to keep up with for the next 10 years. Is it really worth it in your view?
No, it's absolutely worth it. And I made it easy for myself by using a couple of apps. And if I may plug them a little bit, I use Monarch Money and I use Empower. I use Empower to track my net worth and Monarch Money to track my expenses. It makes it easier. You got to want to plug your accounts in and you have to be comfortable with that.
But you get reports and you can find the holes in the bucket and, you know, find a way to maximize your savings and the reports are very helpful. And I look at them on a monthly basis and I go, oh my God, there's an unexpected expense that I may have been hacked.
And then there are ones that I'm like I don't use them anymore. So and then the net worth piece and power is really powerful. And it's fun to look at. I look at it more than I probably should. People talk about monthly quarterly or even annually. It's oftentimes you're better off stick once you get your plan together, sticking your head in the ground and not looking at it. And then 20 years later you have a massive amount of money.
That's what my sister did. And just for the record, Monarch is about $100 a year as a subscription. So that would be an expense that one would incur, but I also heavily recommend Monarch. Empower is another great tool. I don't use that one personally, but that one, I believe, is free for users. Is that correct, Bill?
That's correct. And you're correct on the Monarch expense as well. You get it back in space if you spend that on an app like that. And they do sponsor our show. So maybe I can help you out. Oh, yeah. Please give us a good job because I love Monarch. Yeah, that's free. That's me for Monarch. Yeah.
And another thing you guys like as far as like you know keeping up with your expenses we've got the app so technologies there in our favor but remember it doesn't have to be anything complex so you may use a yellow pad and paper I use a spreadsheet for a lot of tracking a lot of my not just my expenses but my other financial life and i've been i've been doing that for like.
You know, 15 or 20 years and I've customized it like crazy. So I would be totally spoiled and anything else that I use. I don't know if it would, you know, be satisfactory enough because I've customized it so much. So no matter how you do the expenses in the budget, but in particular, if you're just starting and you feel like you're going to have to make some adjustments, having that
uh, those expenses and the budget in place is going to be helpful for you to identify areas that, and I say adjustments and not cutting because you can save plenty just by making some tweaks here and there, you know, I didn't, like Bill was saying, you know, the value spending where you're like, you know what, why am I spending, you know, this much on my Netflix? I am, you know, busy with my business. I haven't watched it in six months. So little things like that, um, up to the big things, like,
you know, maybe not right now, but you know, back in the day refinancing your house, you know, made a big deal or maybe you're in a position to pay your car off when it has a high interest rate. So there's so many, you know, changing insurance companies. So just don't forget about the ability that you have to
make adjustments versus just cutting out things. You know, don't do things that are not going to make you happy. Don't do things that are going to make you miserable. That is huge because if it makes you miserable, you're not going to stick with it. Yeah, so Netflix just canceled their sponsorship.
But the bottom line is there's all these tools. Spreadsheets, great. Pen and paper is great. Monarchs, great. Empowers, great. There's always a new one popping up that's got a new experiment. Just do the work, which is not fun work at first and will be very painful for someone who's starting out late to see bad numbers maybe on the page. But you've got to stare them down, do the work.
Get this thing, get it, get it over with, and then continue to do it and come back to it every month, every quarter, whatever the cadence is that's helpful for you because it's so critical to understand where your numbers are and where you're at, where you're going at the highest level in order to get started here. All right, step one A, wake up. Step one B, give yourself some grace. Step two is diagnose. When we come back, we're going to talk about how to analyze those numbers and make decisions based on them.
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Welcome back to the show. Let's talk buckets and goals and how you can incorporate them into your journey.
You know, first we pause, and as I say, then we plan, and this is the planning phase. And after the plan, only after the planning phase do we pivot and take action. And as far as the planning phase, you got to look at your cash flow is one of the first things, I think. You've got to know what's coming in, what's going out, all the categories, and you've got to.
Start creating your cash flow waterfall. But to take a step back first, I think everybody should make an investor policy statement. They have to go through, because your financial life isn't just the numbers up front, your budget and whatnot. You've got a plan for insurance. You've got a plan for an estate plan. You've got a plan for several things in your financial life, and there are formats out there where you can go through this. You've got to think.
And you don't know where you're going unless you have a map and you won't reach your goal without a map. So I think the investor policy statement is important and then I went in to cash flow. Okay, so step three here is make a plan, map out a plan.
And it makes sense why this is coming after the previous step because we need to know where you're at. You are here before you can make a plan to get somewhere else, right? And so I love this. You said an investor policy statement. You said a will. What are some other components of this plan that you think are critical, Bill and Jackie?
Oh gosh, and I don't want to say there's too much and the whole key is that you don't have to do it all at once. You don't have to do it all in one day. I like to be able to sort of take a moment to dream, to think about what you want your life to look like. Sometimes we are in the terrible job where we just want to get out of it or whatever. And then maybe that's our reason for wanting to do something different. But you could think about things like, hey, I just want peace of mind.
I don't want to punch someone's clock every day. I've always had a dream that I wanted to, you know, educate people on their finances or whatever that is because in your head, if you have some idea of what you want to move towards and the stuff that you're like, no more, that could be a lot of fuel for you wanting to make these changes. And sometimes it does help to write down these goals, not just the tangible goals, but the intangible goals.
And that makes a difference as well. So I would definitely keep something like that. You know, some people call it a vision board or something like that, but kind of, you know, have your little dreams and the things that you want to move towards.
So Scott said something that I thought was really important for people to hear. If you're on this later start journey, this is not a five minute exercise. Scott said this might be a couple of weeks or a couple of months that you have taken to start off looking at your starting point, diagnosing your starting point. This dream and plan and goal section is also not a five minute exercise.
You want to take the time to really think about it. And this is all of this is a fluid document. This is not, well, I said I was going to do this, so I guess that's all I get to do. If your goals change, if your dreams change, change your document too. But I love that you're writing this down. I love that investor policy statement. That's so important. And your dream statement, all of these need to be
need to be written down so you can come back and revisit them because I don't know about you, but I'm over 50 and things fall out of my head. I actually just brought up my written financial plan for Karen and Bill and the components of it are fairly straightforward. You know, we outline our present nest egg and our present net worth. And then as far as the gold go, just like Jackie,
You have to have your personal goals first and then as far as things like your financial goals. We said our investments will provide an income of $160,000 while still growing at the rate of inflation providing us with financial independence by July 4th.
2028. I mean, you've got to be very specific. And we'll reach a net worth of X. And then we talk about our savings goals and then all the insurances that need to be in place to protect you. You got to play defense before you play offense. Most people want to play offense.
I love this and just to share how a line name with this, every quarter starting on our honeymoon. My wife and I have a little vision document. It's just a piece of paper. There's nothing fancy to this. This isn't part of my $500 goal setting retreat summit program or whatever. This is just like a word document, right? And we write down 10 things we're grateful for after a cup of coffee and a workout.
Within we write out what our life looks like at the end of 2025, and this one, and 2028, just two and five years, and we say, we live here. This is what our day looks like on the weekdays. This is what our day looks like on the weekends. This is what our physical health looks like. This is what our family life looks like. This is what we do for fun here.
This is what our career outcomes have been, those types of things. And we just write that down and we've edited it every quarter for the last eight years, or many years, basically, on this thing. And it moves a little bit. That's okay. But we know where we're going and it stopped moving quite as much in the last couple of years as we kind of really glocked in like, yeah, that's what we want. That's what we're going to work towards.
And that dreaming exercise for us works really well. There's so many different variations of that that you can do, but it's just a piece of paper. I would encourage you if you're gonna do this exercise to do it when you're feeling good. This is not an activity to do, you know, after a really hard week on Friday after four glasses of wine when you're really beating yourself up. This is an activity to do on Saturday morning after you've had a nice workout and a cup of coffee and the weather is nice and the sun is shining and you're feeling good and your spirits are high.
But I don't know. I don't know if you guys have any reactions to that. Yeah, no, I love all of that, Scott. I mean, all of that is so amazing. And you and Bill are making me realize I need to do more writing things down. But the whole key is it's not written in pen, right? It's in pencil where you can make changes. You can make adjustments. You can tweak it. We weren't taught how to put this stuff together. So give yourself a little bit of grace, a little bit of a buffer to be able to work and massage these to make sure that it makes
And I feel like the trial and error is really valuable as well because you're going to learn something about yourself every time you make a change. Absolutely. And a quick tip here, if you have a significant other, it is always a good idea and you come to them with this. It's good idea to label it draft for the first time on there. That will help a lot of things in that first conversation.
Yeah, and just to be clear, so everybody here has partnered up and married. I'm the only single person here, okay? I got divorced, you know, and most of my fire journey has been since I got divorced, I have one daughter. So situations a little bit different, but there's plenty of single people that are late starters, and part of the reason is they might be divorced, or they went through some relationship issues, or there's so many different reasons, but whether you are married, partnered up,
or single, a parent, or someone with no kids, these same things apply.
I mean, in our community, and we have a large Facebook community, 75% of them are women. And a lot of them seem to be divorced, you know, financial catastrophe. And they're very engaged, very motivated. There is a large female component to this. Maybe men are more ashamed and maybe the women are more able to embrace their mistakes or challenges and move forward positively. I don't know. What do you think, Mindy?
You know what? I see a lot of women now taking control of their finances. And this has been a man's game. Oh, men take care of the finances. My husband does all the work. My husband, like I hear that a lot. And I see a lot of women either through divorce or just simply
wanting to do it, being empowered to do it and say, I want to learn about this. I am going to fix my finances so that I'm not going to fall under that other headline that we see so much. Oh, you'll never be able to retire ever. And I think that ties back into step one B, which we kind of glossed over. And I'd like to focus on that for a minute. Give yourself some grace. I'm looking for tips for people to
help themselves come to terms with the fact that they weren't perfect before. That is also a fact. We'll just put it over here. You weren't perfect before. Now we're going to fix that. How do you give yourself some grace? Awesome. So we've got to wake up. We've got to give yourself some grace. We've got diagnosed your starting point and we've got a dream. So we know our endpoint. We know where we're starting now. Well, what comes next, Jackie and Bill? Yeah, I think, um,
Two powerful things are curiosity and willing to shift and make some changes. So I say curiosity because it really
When I think about a lot of the mistakes that I made, some of them was either because of curiosity or I solved those mistakes because of how curious I was about things. So just use that to your advantage. Like for instance, if you are so confused about how Roth IRAs work, what part is contribution? Do I have to wait five years? What are the nuances? Be curious about things.
And then start digging. It's a powerful thing. And then fear is another really powerful thing for me. I had a big fear. I grew up in poverty. I had this big fear about being thrust back into poverty. So a big part of my wake up call was when I got divorced. And I realized there was a huge disparity between what I had in my retirement account.
and what my husband had in his retirement account. And that was a huge mistake that I didn't even know that I was making. We didn't talk about the money. We didn't talk about investments. But finally, when the divorce was said and done, I said, you know what? I don't want to ever feel this financially ignorant again. And the main thought was in my head was that I didn't ever want to be back in poverty again. And I never wanted my daughter to know poverty the way that I did.
So I became so curious. I was curious about the stock market. I was curious about how did that big disparity exist? And I started figuring some of those things out. And in the process, I'm getting my finances together. I ended up joining an investment club to learn more about the stock market and investing. I started understanding how my 401k work, understanding compound growth, all these things.
because i was really really curious and i was very afraid of being in poverty again so i was doing something about it um you know one of the big mistakes you know i made was uh you know you guys are real estate guys so you made this come into my head again but um it was like around 2010 or whatever i ended up buying a um
a rental property. It was a condo near Charleston, a great area. You know, everybody had short sales and, you know, foreclosures and stuff like that. Well, I needed to get this, I wanted to get this property, try my hand at land learning, right? And it was a crazy time where they didn't even want to give me financing. So, you know what I ended up doing? I ended up taking a loan from my 401k, the maximum $40,000. Again, I wasn't using it as a piggy bank or anything. I was just sort of, in my mind, shifting the investment.
came up with $30,000. I ended up buying this condo for $80,000. And I was at landlord for two years, learned something about myself, wasn't too crazy about landlording. And I sold it about two years later. I made money off of it. It was totally fine. But I found out that I wasn't too crazy about being a landlord. But the funny thing was, a few years later, I'm like, I wish I would have held onto it.
Well, that $80,000 condo, I think I sold it for like maybe $1.40, $1.50, something like that. Well, right before I got at this podcast, I looked up that property to see what it's worth today. I got it back in 2010 and it's worth $345,000. And I'm like, oh my gosh, that's a big mistake, but I learned from it. But it was just kind of crazy.
I went and looked at it because honestly, if we ever had any kind of opportunity like we had in 2009, 2010, 2011, I would be willing to do it again. So just making those mistakes, I don't even really call them mistakes anymore. I like to call them lessons. So I'm not beating up on myself by looking at how much this condo is worth now. It's a lesson to remind me that if the same opportunity came along, I now will approach it different because my head is in a different place. I think that's a really great point to
acknowledge that you have made some mistakes. And then instead of calling the mistakes, call them lessons, because that's what they are, especially if you actually learn something from them, if you didn't learn anything from them, then it is just a great big mistake. But having the, giving yourself grace is letting go of these things. I've made mistakes too.
I also think just a couple of things, you know, for folks that are looking to learn from what you said, Jackie, I saw some tools in there that are really powerful for that folks can use to repeat that, right? Acknowledging and thinking through these mistakes, labeling emotions that you felt along that journey as well is really powerful. That's just a general psychological tip, right? If you ever feel like an emotion, label it, it helps you control it and react to it, write it down. And then using that emotion to inform the plan, right?
Part of moving towards a brighter financial future isn't just moving towards your vision. It's totally okay to be like, I don't want to feel that pit of fear in the corner of my stomach all the time, whenever I think about money and the next decade or whatever as well. Those are all absolute critical ingredients and being able to form a plan, hint, hint, one of the next steps coming up that we're going to talk about here. So just some tools there that I think are really powerful that I observed that you used.
I'd like to caution people a little bit because I made what I would call the trifecta of mistakes. Right around 2007-2008, we had renovated a house to the nines, basically rebuilt a house. Soon after 2000, we were upside down in our house. We had a very low savings rate, and our financial advisors that were not advisors at all allowed us to sell out at the bottom of the market and go to a
low risk and with our low savings rate, being house poor and having sold out at the bottom, we didn't get into much later and we missed out on two-thirds of the longest bull market ever. You've got to manage the big rocks and you've got to be intentional about these things. One of the first things we did after waking up was downsize.
which is a very painful thing for late starters, especially with regards to housing. But it made all the difference if you take care of these big rocks and get back to what's realistic, then you can increase your savings rate exponentially. We went from single digit to 10% savings rate to about 30, 35% savings rate within the first year of waking up. This is absolutely possible.
Awesome. Well, this has been a really fun discussion here. I think this is a great stopping point. Jackie Billaminde, thank you so much for the good discussion. We have our first four steps here. Wake up. One A, wake up, one B, give yourself some grace. Diagnose a step two, dream and reflect.
And this is all the soft stuff that absolutely has to be done before you can actually make a hard financial plan and start determining how you're going to allocate your capital that you have, if you have an investment portfolio or resources today, and how you're going to allocate the income streams that are going to come into your life, which is what we're going to really get into very prescriptively on the next show here, Bigger Pockets Money Podcast 538. So thank you so much. So we'll see you in a few days.
All right, this was part one. Make sure to listen to episode 538, where we'll be back with Jackie and Bill to talk strategy for later starters, and some of those five levers you can pull, especially if you are getting a later start. My name is Mindy Jensen. He is Scott Trench, saying, later start. Don't worry PopTart.
BiggerPockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. This episode was produced by Eric Knudson, copywriting by Calico Content, post-production by Exodus Media and Chris McKinn. Thanks for listening.
Thank you all for listening to the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer, the show is produced by Ian Kay, copywriting is by Calico Content, and editing is by Exodus Media.
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