929: Retired at Age 27 via Real Estate: How Rachel Richards Did It

September 14, 2020
Early retirement isn’t just for the lucky few. Author Rachel Richards retired at age 27, and she joins us today to discuss how anyone can retire early with the right strategy. Listen and learn how to get started as a real estate investor, ways to start saving a ton of money (even if you earn less than six figures per year), and more. Rachel also shares passive income tips from her best-selling books and offers advice to new landlords. Don’t miss it!
Listen to today’s show and learn:
  • How Rachel retired at age 27 [2:26]
  • Rachel’s first rental property [4:58]
  • What Rachel learned as a new landlord [9:14]
  • Why raising rent isn’t always a good idea [10:56]
  • What you need to scale with rentals [12:18]
  • Advice for new real estate investors [13:28]
  • Why income diversification is so important [18:32]
  • Reasons for geographic diversification [24:35]
  • Tricks for getting loans for investment properties [26:02]
  • Rachel’s tips on saving money [28:33]
  • Rachel’s final thoughts for listeners [31:14]
  • How to break through your goals.
  • Plus so much more.
Rachel Richards At age 27, former financial advisor Rachel Richards quit her job and retired. She now lives off $10,000+ per month in passive income. Rachel Richards is the bestselling author of “Money Honey: A Simple 7-Step Guide for Getting Your Financial $hit Together.” She is an entrepreneur, professional speaker, and investor. In November 2019, Rachel released her new (already bestselling) book, “Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement,” where she dives deep into the topic of passive income and financial independence. She explains why building self-sustaining income streams is so brilliant (and not to mention doable for anyone and everyone). She outlines 28 different passive income models and how to start creating them. Related Links and Resources: Thanks for Rocking Out Thank you for tuning in to Pat Hiban Interviews Real Estate Rockstars, we appreciate you! To get more Rockstar content sent directly to your device as it becomes available, subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher! Reviews on iTunes are extremely helpful and appreciated! We read each and every one of them, please feel free to leave your email so that we can personally reach out and say thanks! Have any questions? Tweet me, Facebook me and ask Pat anything. Don’t forget to head on over to Bare Naked Agent for Pat’s answers, and advice. Thank you Rockstar Nation, and keep rockin!

Aaron Amuchastegui: Real Estate Rockstars, this is Aaron Amuchastegui. Hey, today we have a really interesting unique interview for you. You guys know that we almost exclusively interview real estate agents, and I have a real estate agent that I’m interviewing today, but she doesn’t do a whole lot of real estate agent practice. She uses her real estate license for herself.

What she’s going to talk to us a lot about today is Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement is one of her books. This is Rachel Richards. She is a best-selling author of a couple of different books. We had some mutual friends introduce us recently, and I thought it would be a great time to have her come on to talk to everybody else because it’s such a unique time in the world to find out about kind of passive income lifestyle. Rachel, how are you?

Rachel: Hey, Aaron, I’m great. How are you?

Aaron: I’m doing well. You’re on Colorado Springs. I was supposed to be in Colorado Springs this week in my RV. I think a lot of people know we had a little bit of a setback when my daughter got hurt, but you said it’s snowing out there right now too?

Rachel: Yes, it’s probably a good thing you’re not here because it’s randomly snowing. It’s one of the earliest times it’s ever snowed here apparently.

Aaron: Yes, I’m very new at RV life RV driving. I know that the weather in Colorado is beautiful during the summer compared to in Austin, Texas, where I’m pulling from. It’s super hot and muggy. We were looking forward to that, but I’m not ready to drive a 30 foot RV through the snow yet.

Rachel: That sounds scary.

Aaron: A big part of your story is you’re young, you’re an aggressive entrepreneur. You’ve done really well with passive income. Tell us a bit, just tell me your story for a few minutes. How did you get into where you started investing using that and what are your strategies that you try to share with everybody?

Rachel: Yes, for sure. I am 28 now. I own almost 40 rental units. The first question I always get from people is, “Are you a trust fund baby?” The answer is, no, I’m not a trust fund baby. I’ve actually never made six figures in my life. My first job out of college, I was making 32 grand, but I was just saving a lot. I was being frugal, being responsible with my money. In 2017, I think I was about 24 at the time, my husband and I, we purchased our first duplex with money that we had saved.

That was the beginning of our income journey. Before that I didn’t have any passive income. To me, the way I define passive income is that it’s money that is earned with little to no ongoing effort. Is anything truly passive? Maybe portfolio income. I always say that with real estate investing, you have to have a property manager to really make it passive because chances are none of us want to quit our jobs to become a full-time landlord. That’s how I view passive income.

Then later in 2017, I wrote and launched my first bestselling book Money Honey. We had these two passive income streams, rental income and royalty income. We focused on growing those as much as we possibly could over the next few years. Fast forward to today. Again, I have almost 40 rental units, 40 doors. I now have two best-selling books. Last year I was able to quit my job and retire. I’m now living off over $15,000 per month in passive income. That is my high level story.

Aaron: That is the way everybody’s got to listen to you. You never made more than $100,000 a year. You never made six figures when you had a job. During that time you were still able to grow and launch these other things, which is great for our real estate listeners out there because a lot of our agents probably don’t average six figures. A lot of them have not gotten to six figures a year. They have good solid businesses.

You’re saying when you started at $32,000 a year you were able to start on this path. What I’ve been talking to everybody about the last six months is you need to diversify. What COVID has taught us– What this whole crazy lock-down experience has taught us is that you never know which business is 100% protected or not. So being able to have other options out there.

I’ve really been trying to encourage so much of our listeners, so many of our agents to start investing in themselves, invest in other businesses, invest in other outcomes. You have this. You guys bought your first duplex, at the time, your husband and you both had jobs, normal jobs. What were the specifics on that? How much did you pay for that duplex? How much did you put down in savings? How much of a loan and do you still have that duplex today?

Rachel: Yes, we were both working full time when we bought the property and we did that for the first two years. We self-managed all of our properties at first. That first duplex, we had a couple of things going for us that helped make it a really great investment. First, we were investing in Louisville, Kentucky. That’s where we own all of our rental properties. It’s a great place to invest. I really think anywhere in the Midwest is a great market because housing prices are reasonable, the rental market is strong.

Our duplex only cost $100,000. Even in Louisville, that’s a really good price. My husband and I took the savings we accumulated by then. We each put $10,000 into buying this duplex to get to our $20,000 down payment. Right off the bat, it was cash flowing, $500 a month in profit. It was a really, really good deal. Really high cash on cash ROI. Now it’s cash flowing something like $800 or $900 because over the past few years we’ve renovated it, we fixed it up, we’ve been able to raise the rent prices and everything. It’s doing even better and we do still own it today. I always say this is like the best investment we’ll have ever done. It is still true.

Aaron: Yes. What a cool option there. When you’re talking about that cash on cash investments, at the beginning you guys invested $20,000 out of pocket, and then you got a loan on it, and then you would net $500 a month. Every year you would make $6,000 profit after all expenses. When you had invested $20,000, so you take $6,000 divided by $20,000 and that’s the return that you guys were getting. You’re getting a 30% return on your money?

is the highest that we’ve gotten from any of our rentals. A lot of them are still really high because Louisville, again, it’s a great place to invest. A lot of our cash on cash ROIs are around 15%, 20%, 25%, but this duplex is definitely the highest.

Aaron: Yes. You guys did that first duplex. What was the first things you learned about being a landlord? What surprised you like, “Hey, this was easier than I thought,” and “This was harder than I thought?”

Rachel: So many things. First, what surprised me before I even became a landlord was how long it can take to find the right deal. This is where I think a lot of new investors get discouraged because it can take months and months to find the right deal. As agents know the MLS, it’s very competitive. It’s very saturated. It can be difficult to find deals on the MLS. I just had to stay patient. We made several offers on properties.

We had several contracts on properties that fell through because of the inspection or something else didn’t work out. it took us nine months to actually find that first deal. I always say, “Be persistent, be patient. Don’t settle for something. You will find the right deal. It’s just a matter of time.” Something else that was surprising to us is I would say that when we started out, I think that the tenant management was a little bit easier than I expected.

We had really great tenants from the get-go, and I think that’s something we did right. Whereas that might be a common mistake for others, is really screening our tenants very, very thoroughly. Running a thorough credit report and a thorough background check. We use the platform called Cozy and it does everything for us. It automates everything. It’s really easy. Even following up with the references that they put. A lot of people will put down the references, but then the landlord might not even call them, but that’s something we did well. We got the right people into our units, which saved us a lot of time and hassle, and money later on.

Aaron: I believe we use Cozy for a lot of our stuff too. I know that there’s a lot of new companies coming out for that, but they’re really are set for mom-and-pop, people that are just first getting started to be able to collect rents and screen things and get the automatic payments where it’s there. You also talked about raising rents and now you make $800 to $900 a month. On our rentals, in general, we look every year, we’re raising about 8% a year. On an annual increase, we take whatever they paid last year and the rent goes up about 8% a year. That’s happening the last couple of years. Different market conditions affect that. Do you have set amounts that when you raise the rent every year that you go to?

Rachel: It really depends on the tenants. Sometimes we’ll do a 3% raise, but if we have a tenant that we can tell might be looking for another place to live, and they’re a really great tenant, we’ll say, “Listen, we won’t raise your rent if you want to stay for another year.” Because to me having that good tenant, that’s paying on time, that’s really low maintenance. It’s worth more to me than that little increase in rent, but for other tenants, I will we’ll go ahead and increase the rent 3%, 5%. It just depends.

Aaron: We’ve talked a lot about risk and reward. That’s one of the benefits as you first get started. You know each property that you have, you’re screening the tenants yourself, you know the experiences, a little bit tougher when you get to 30 or 40 units to be able to remember each tenant going, “Hey, this is a great one, this isn’t,” I guess the best ones you never hear from. You’re like, “Wait, I haven’t heard from this tenant. Maybe I’ll just keep the rent the same and keep it going.” Any tricks with that, that you’ve done to keep track of people as you’ve grown your portfolio bigger?

Rachel: Yes. That’s a great point. It’s hard to keep track and you’re right, the best tenants are the ones that I never hear from. I love them, but my husband and I, we use Google-like shared docs for almost everything. We just maintain a tenant spreadsheet with the unit that they’re living in, the rent, some notes about them. That’s how we keep track. I will say for us, I think when we got to about 26 units, we were both still working full time. We were managing the properties on the weekends and I was writing my books in the evenings. We just got to the point where we were working 80 hour weeks and we couldn’t take on anymore.

At that point, is when we hired our first property manager. I think you do have to understand that if you’re going to continue to scale a real estate business, you’re not going to be able to always do it on your own. I’m a control freak. I’m a type-A perfectionist. It’s hard for me to delegate, but this is one of those things where A, I didn’t have the time. B, I wanted to make this passive. The goal of this for me was to create passive income. We hired our first property manager. We’ve definitely made some big mistakes there that I can share, but once you get to that point, you don’t have to worry so much about memorizing all of your tenants’ names.

Aaron: Yes. If you’re going to give some advice to people that want to go buy their first one, so somebody is starting to listen this before we get into some of your books and some of the other ideas, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give somebody that they’re about to go buy their first one? You already said, “Hey, take your time. Make sure you buy a good one.” Anything else that you’re thinking that people should think about as they’re looking for that first deal?

Rachel: Oh, for sure. There’s a couple of things. I would say my biggest advice for new investors is, do not underestimate your expenses. This is where most people go wrong when they get into a rental property because it’s easy to just think, “Oh, my rental income minus my mortgage payment equals my profit.” That could not be further from the truth because you have all these other expenses you have to account for like utilities. “Who’s going to pay utilities. Are you going to pay it or is the tenant going to pay it? What about lawn care and pest control? Who’s going to pay for that? What about maintenance, HOA fees, vacancy, property manager, and then just a miscellaneous bucket?”

I could go on and on, but you have to make sure you estimate the expenses and be really conservative in your estimates so that you’re not getting into a bad deal. That’s one thing to take very seriously. Another thing is, and I think this applies for so many situations, is just get started. I even held myself back from investing in real estate because A, I didn’t feel like I had the knowledge. I was not confident in my knowledge. B, I didn’t think I had enough money. I waited until I was 24, 25 to buy our first property, which, yes, that’s still young and that’s still great, but in hindsight, I could have done it sooner. There are strategies like house hacking and wholesaling, where even if you don’t have a ton of money, you can still get started right now.

Aaron: Yes. I love some of those different strategies that are out there. Tell us about your book. Your first book was Money Honey. What was that about? What did you focus on?

Rachel: I wrote Money Money because I used to be a financial advisor, and even all throughout high school and college, all of my family and friends would come to me for financial advice, which was great because I love to help people. At the same time, I began to wonder, “Well, why aren’t these people reading books or learning on their own?” Then I realized, “Oh yes, personal finance is boring. It’s overwhelming. It’s intimidating. It’s complex,” no wonder people don’t like to learn about it.

I thought to myself, “Well, how can I make this topic just fun and entertaining and simple?” That’s where the idea for Money Honey came from. It was a lot of fun to write. It’s just about the basics of money management; budgeting, savings, debt payoff, and investing. It’s really struck a nerve with female millennials. It’s really done more successful than I ever would have imagined.

Aaron: It’s like cliff notes in financial management?

Rachel: Yes, it’s like money for fun.

Aaron: Money for fun, and taking all those things that you learned and really simplifying it to make it. That has actually become something– You’re making money on that book. Now a lot of us have written books and there isn’t a huge margin in books. I think people are shocked to hear that for a lot of authors, every time they sell a book for $15, their profit is $2 or $3 if someone who’s thinking about writing a book and using that– What did you use as methods that really helped you make it profitable?

Was it just that you sold way more copies than you thought? Or is there different agreements that you made to make sure you buy the books ahead of time and then distributing yourself? You do it through Amazon? What were some of your secrets?

Rachel: The first decision I had to make was do I want to go the traditional publishing route or self-publishing? At first, I thought traditional publishing sounded sexy because you think that you’re going to get this huge book deal, that they’re going to have this huge launch and promotion and marketing plan for you. That sounded great to me because I didn’t want to do any of that. Then I did some research. I asked around other authors that I know, and a lot of those authors told me– Well, actually with a traditional publishing deal, they don’t actually do a lot of marketing for you.

They still expect you the author to do 99% of the promotion promoting for your book. I was like, “Well, that’s weird.” “Here I was thinking, I can make 10% to 15% royalty with a traditional publishing deal or I can make a 35% to 70% royalty by self-publishing on Amazon. If I’m going to have to do all the marketing anyways, I might as well make a lot more money while I’m doing it and retain complete creative control over my work.” That’s what I recommend for any new author, any first-time author that doesn’t have any platform because I didn’t either.

I went with self-publishing and I think the biggest thing because you’re right, publishing a book it’s so competitive. Most self-published authors only sell 250 to 300 copies. Yes, you’re not going to make a lot of money. The question you have to ask yourself is why would someone buy my book over the thousands of books that are already out there. There are thousands of books written about personal finance. If you can’t articulate that, you’re going to have a hard time selling it. You have to really articulate the benefits to the reader and articulate the unique problem that you’re solving in the marketplace.

Aaron: Yes. It’s really cool that you’ve been able to actually bet on yourself and take that to make the book super successful. That was your first book. You bought your first rental, you started making some passive income that way. Then you got the book and that surprisingly started to create some passive income for you. What are some of the other strategies you’ve done to grow your passive income to be able to, like you said, retire at 28?

Rachel: Yes. Now I have four or five passive income streams, but the two biggest ones are their rentals and their royalties. I don’t think you necessarily have to have 10 different passive income streams. You can focus on one or two and grow them as much as possible. The great thing about the passive income you touched on earlier, Aaron, is this idea of income diversification because a lot of us think that having a sales-based job or a full-time salary job that, that will provide us some type of income security or job stability but in reality, if you’re 100% dependent on a single source of income there’s nothing secure about that.

What happens if you lose your job, your hours get cut, you don’t sell as many houses as you wanted to this month then you’re really struggling so it’s so important to diversify your income and make sure you are creating income from multiple different sources.

Aaron: Hey, Real Estate Rockstars listeners. I’m sorry to interrupt again, but I want to do a quick commercial break but this commercial break is different. This is the stuff that I think you need and this is me talking to you about some of the stuff that we had. Recently we had a lot of people reach out to us and say, “Hey, why don’t you do a real estate mastermind? Why don’t you do something where a lot of the listeners can get together and do some Zoom calls and ask each other questions and really just try to brainstorm and work together.”

There are a million masterminds out there. I don’t know if this is something that we really want to do or not. If we do, we’re going to limit it to maybe 20 or 30 people. We’re just trying to figure out if any of you guys are interested. If you have any interest at all in joining a mastermind with real estate agents around the country that are part of the Real Estate Rockstars network go to hibandigital.com/mastermind and just join the waitlist. It’s just an interest list for us to see is this something we want to be doing. That’s number one.

Number two, you go to hibandigital.com/foreclosures we have a two-day mark thing that we just finished recording. Now it’s also inside Rebus University. You go to www.rebusuniversity.com and look at it. If you’re already a member of Rebus, a lot of you guys are in the monthly fee where you get access to everything. We have a new course of 17 hours of content on how to buy foreclosures, on how to find deals, on how to do title, go to option, also turn that into clients for your real estate agents.

How you can turn somebody that’s in default behind on their mortgages into a client. Check out that course, you can buy the course now but again most of you guys already subscribed to all that. I just want you to know there’s another 17 hours of content. Great, great content that I just recorded on there that all you guys have access to now at Rebus University. Finally, we have software that we talk about on and off. It’s called Padhawk.

In Padhawk you can use that go find leads. Everyone is really, really busy right now and we’re so, so busy. People are selling and they’re saying there isn’t enough product on the market. They can’t find houses. Padhawk helps you find houses before they’re listed. Helps you find owners that should be listing their property or people that might want to get there. I recorded a quick video. It’s like six or seven minutes long for you guys to look at, real estate agent specific on how you can use the software in order to do it.

Go to hibandigital.com/leads. There’s a video in there, I talk about how you can use the software to do it. Check it out and if it’s something that you like, you may want to sign up for it. $99 a month. That’s nationwide, any city out there and it is a great way to find houses. Right now people are saying there’s a lot of buyers though we can’t find enough houses. Maybe you can use this software you’ll find something that hasn’t listed yet and make them an offer on their house. All right, back to your regular schedule program, thank you for letting me interrupt you with that break.

Rachel: Perfect example of this is my rental income right now. We’re in the middle of coronavirus, my rental income took a significant hit. In a normal month pre-covid, we were making anywhere from $8,000 to $12,000 per month in profit from our rentals. In April we only made $1,000 in profit. That’s an enormous loss. There are a lot of landlords that were doing better than me. There were a lot that were worse off than me, but the way I saw it is if I could just break even for a few months, I would be fine with that.

If that was my worst-case scenario, no big deal, I am not losing money. The only reason I wasn’t panicking and operating out of a place of desperation is because I had all these other passive income streams keeping me afloat. That’s why I think it’s so important for people like real estate agents or salespeople, anyone that’s commission-based to think about, “How can I generate multiple streams of income so that if I have a hard month one time I am not financially hurting.” I think that’s what we can focus on.

Aaron: Yes. One of the things that I more recently learned about  what diversification is, most of our rentals are in couple cities in Texas. Then we have some in Arizona and some in other states, in Ohio, and in California. Before I used to think, rentals was going to be one way to diversify and then our flipping business was another. Then these different businesses that we own as other businesses, a lot of ways to diversify. I learned too that people get into real estate investing and rentals, you kind of have to diversify based on city and state too. As you get bigger it’s harder, but some states have had very, very strict rent laws, non-eviction laws, things lately where others haven’t.

In Texas, it’s very landlord-friendly and by May or June, they were able to have business as normal again. It was like, “Now if people aren’t paying rent you can actually send them notices.” There were other places where our rental in California we weren’t allowed to send a notice to pay. If somebody hadn’t paid for three or four months, we weren’t even allowed to reach out and say, “Hey you need to pay your rent.” They can still reach out and say, “My air conditioner is broken.”

That was something I hadn’t really thought about before Covid. I thought rental is one bucket, it’s nice and diversified. Our fix and flip company hasn’t done very well at all since March because we haven’t been able to buy foreclosures. Have you thought much about that now when you look at yours, you said– All of your stuff I think you said was in Louisville?

Rachel: Yes.

Aaron: Now you’ve been performing fine out there. As you grow more are you thinking about adding other cities or you’re thinking about staying where you’re at?

Rachel: Well, here’s the thing. You’re right. This has definitely been new for me as a real estate investor because I didn’t think about diversifying geographically before either. Now we’re seeing that there’s real reasons to do so because in Kentucky there’s an eviction moratorium I think until the end of the year so we can’t do anything. I actually think that’s one of the biggest problems with the real estate investing industry right now is this eviction moratorium and penalizing landlords for this.

I don’t know the answer. I am not an expert, but I don’t think that’s the right answer. We have thought about investing in new locations, but the thing is we haven’t acquired rental properties since 2018. I’ve never been so passionate about real estate investing that I wanted to create a huge empire. For me, it’s more a means to an end. I think that’s how it could be for most people. We created income from it so that we could spend our time doing what we wanted to do and creating that freedom and flexibility. At this point, we probably won’t acquire more. If anything we might start selling off to invest in something that’s even more passive.

Aaron: A lot of the stuff you did when you did get into the real estate was you guys were getting loans to do it as you had these other jobs. What advice would you give to people out there to make it easier for them to get these investment loans? Are there any tricks or secrets that you had when you went to your first duplex or as you went later that you think people need to hear?

Rachel: Yes, for sure. There’s a couple of tricks, especially with someone that’s self-employed because if you’re self-employed then you have to provide at least two years of self-employment income to prove that you have a consistent, stable income. It’s just something to keep in mind as you’re looking to get a real estate loan. The second thing to know is that most lenders require you to have at least 20% to 25% down on an investment property.

There’s normally no way around that. You can do house hacking, you can live in as a primary residence or you can buy a multi-family and live in one of the units and rent out the rest, that way you can qualify for a loan as a primary residence. Otherwise, if you’re just buying it as an investment property, you normally do have to have a lot of money. Here’s a tip I always tell real estate agents or anyone that’s commission-based. It really starts with your budget and being able to save a lot of money. A lot of people think that wealth has to do with income, but that can not be further from the truth.

Somebody making $300,000 a year in commissions and spending $300,000 a year is not wealthy, they’re broke. The same real estate agent making $30,000 in commissions and saving 50%, that person’s going to be able to start investing in real estate. It starts with really having command of your budget and of your spending. One mistake that commission-based people make is that when it comes to their budget they tend to look at their average income over the last 12 months and make a budget based on that. The problem with that is that sometimes you’re going to have more than that in income or sometimes you’re not going to make as much money.

What do you do in those months where you don’t make as much money? Then your budget is totally messed up. I always tell real estate agents, “Budget based off of your worst income month in the last 12 months. That way you’re always going to have all of your money accounted for and anything that you make over and above that you can save or treat it as a bonus or pay off debt or put it towards the down payment on the next rental property.” That’s what I would say for any commission-based person.

Aaron: Yes, I think that’s great advice. When Covid first hit a lot of people went in and looked at their credit card statements and said, “Hey, here’s all of the auto pays that I should be getting rid of.” People start canceling subscriptions and things like that. Any advice you’d have for people with their trying to adjust their budget? What are some things that you’ve seen as quick, easy ways for people to save that maybe they don’t always think about or maybe they think this is a necessity, there’s a way around it? Any tips for people just trying to save money?

Rachel: For sure. I ask this question in my workshops a lot, I’ll say, “Hey, what sorts of things do you do if you’re trying to save money quickly?” The go-to answer is always, “I’m going to eat out less.” “I’m going to make my coffee at home.” “I’m going to stop doing online shopping.” I obviously agree with all those things, those are all important, we should absolutely be keeping our spending in line. There’s a common theme there. We’re all focused on decreasing our expenses. That’s great, that’s important, but there’s also a limit.

We can’t stop buying groceries, we can’t stop paying our rent or mortgage payments. It’s a little bit limited. If you really want to make an impact with your budget and save a ton of money, you should focus on doing both, decreasing your expenses and increasing your income. The great thing about increasing your income is there’s no cap on how much money you can make in a year, there’s nothing stopping you from making more money.

For real estate agents, this is an easy thing to do because it’s just a matter of going out getting more listings, selling more houses, closing on more transactions, all right. There are other ways to increase your income, quick and easy ways, something that I always like to do twice a year is clean out my closet and sell my old clothes or clothes that don’t fit on Poshmark, I make several hundred bucks every time I do that.

Aaron: Yes. I think it’s a good point too there because with all of the self-working industries out there, there’s Uber, there’s Instacart, there’s ways that people can actually say, “Hey, this is my normal job, but once a week, I go do this other thing, I make an extra $100 or $200, and that’s what goes in the savings kitty. It’s not just cutting expenses. Having to cut my budget by a couple of $100 a month, and I’m going to make a couple $100 bucks a month extra.”

Those little small changes, if they save it in the right way all of a sudden becomes that savings. I think that’s great. If somebody buys your book, somebody buys Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement, I see it behind you. Your book, what are they going to learn? What did you teach them about in there?

Rachel: I wrote the book because in the year leading up to me quitting my job, as I was telling people, I was going to quit my job and retire, obviously, I was getting a lot of questions like, “How the heck are you doing this, you’re 27 years old?” That’s why I started writing the book. It’s not like it’s a memoir, I touch on my backgrounds, but most of the book is me outlining 28 different passive income models and how anyone can get started. Trust me, there is definitely something out there for everybody.

Aaron: I love that. So 28 options, they can go look at that, they can find one or two that fits them, and then they get there. What are some final thoughts for listeners out there?

Rachel: I would just encourage people, you can absolutely achieve financial independence. Anyone at any age, and on any income can create passive income and retire early. I’ll leave listeners with one of my favorite quotes by Zig Ziglar. He said, “You don’t have to be great to start, you have to start to be great.”

Aaron: I love that, “You don’t have to be great to start, you have to start to be great.” You’ve got a free gift for our listeners, what do you have for them to get started, and what are some ways they can reach out and find you if they want to learn more about–? Remind them your book names, they can go buy your book, where can they buy your book? Where can they find you? What do you have for them?

Rachel: Yes, for sure. Both of my books, Money Honey and Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement are available on Amazon and ebook audio and paperback. My Money Honey, I just released my second edition. I have a new that’s written by Paula Pant of Afford Anything, so I’m super excited. Also, Aaron, I’d love to give your listeners my free passive income starter kit, where I outline those 28 passive income models, give a ton of free resources and tools. There’s a worksheet that helps you figure out which passive income stream should I focus on creating first based on your time and your money constraints. If anyone wants to download that you can go to moneyhoneyrachel.com/bonus.

Aaron: All right, moneyhoneyrachel.com/bonus, they can get that. I’m sure on there, they can see your different books and different ways to kind of reach out and start building their passive income.

Rachel: Yes.

Aaron: Awesome. Well, Rachel, this was a great, great interview today. I think it was a great time to bring it in and it is super unique for– Like you said, even though you have your real estate license, you’ve only really used that to help get your investments, little different spin today, but at a great time for people to really realize it’s not just about saving money, it’s about increasing your income.

I think that’s something that right now when times are tough, people aren’t thinking about, “Oh, I’m going to be able to increase my income right now.” A lot of people think, “Save, save, save my income is falling.” I love the way that you’re reminding them, there’s a lot of extra ways to go make more money that isn’t necessarily passive, but then there’s also the passive ways by doing that, then it sets you up to do that passive stuff. Thanks again for being on here and we’ll have you on again in the future.

Rachel: Yes, thanks so much, Aaron.

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