How to Build Your 2026 Plan (Retire with Rentals Faster)

By the time you finish this episode, you’ll have your exact plan for financial freedom through real estate, starting in 2026. See if you can answer these questions right now: How much money do you want to make every month? When do you (realistically) want to retire? How much real estate will it take to get there? And which strategy will actually get you to the finish line? If you can’t answer all four of those questions, you’re like 99% of real estate investors—buying properties just to “build wealth.” While “building wealth” is worth striving for, it’s not actually a true goal. It's what keeps investors working longer, unsure of when or if they’ve “made it” or how much farther they have to go. If you do one thing before 2026, do this: define your financial goals. Today, Dave shows you exactly how to do that. You’ll learn the formula to calculate your financial freedom number, how much real estate you’ll need, how long it will take, the one- and three-year goals you should set now, and the best real estate strategies for your situation. You could be retired in under 10 years if you start in 2026. What are you waiting for? In This Episode We Cover How to actually retire with rental properties in 10 years (or less) with a personalized strategy The best real estate investments for those with low money or little time How long it will take you to replace your income with real estate 2026 goal-planning that is achievable and gets you closer to early retirement How it’s possible to double your money in a matter of years by reverse engineering your investments And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1209 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dave Meyer?

  You're probably ignoring the single most important part of your investing strategy. It's fun to talk about door count and markets and strategies, but what are your goals? Why are you putting your time and money into real estate in the first place? If you can't answer that question with a clear vision of where you want to go, nothing else really matters. So today, I'm going to help you set your financial goals for 2026, so you can find better deals, see better returns, and accelerate your path to financial freedom.

• 0:39Dave Meyer?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer. Thank you all so much for being here. I want to ask you all a question to start this episode, and I want you to be honest. How many of you actually have a specific financial goal? And I'm not just talking about, oh, I want to be financial free. I'm talking specifically, like, I want $10,000 a month in cash flow by 2035. Like, how many of you have that level of goal? I think if we're all being honest with each other, it's like, basically, none of us. Maybe 2% of you have actually gone out and done this. And that's okay. It took me probably eight years of investing in real estate and being really into personal finance

• 1:24Dave Meyer?

  before I figured out that I really mattered, whether or not I had a financial goal. And that might be okay at the beginning of your investing career, to be perfectly honest. But if you want to build a portfolio of low-risk, high-upside investments over a sustained period of time, you need to have a plan, you need to have a strategy. And in order to have that, you need to have good goals. So today, what we're going to do is talk about goal-setting and how to do it the right way. I'm going to break this down into three really actionable parts and you all should just follow along. I'm actually going to break out the whiteboard and show you some really simple tools, like actual things that you could do either as you're listening or later today when you go home, go and actually do this so that you have these financial goals,

• 2:09Dave Meyer?

  especially as we head into a new year, you can have these specific goals and build a plan backwards from those goals. The three parts we're going to go over are first, the long-term goal, and this is the most important. We're going to spend most of our time here, figuring out why you're doing this in the first place. Where do you want to be 10 years from now, 15 years, 20 years? I know everyone has this vague notion of being wealthier, having more time. That's not good enough. What you need is a specific goal, and I'm going to help you get that today. The second part is defining a one-year goal, because once you've figured out the long-term vision, then you need to sort of back into more achievable,

• 2:50Dave Meyer?

  more actionable things that you could do in the next year. And then part three is a three-year vision. So we're going to do long-term, big picture, then one year, then three years. And as you'll see, even though very few people have actually done this, it's really not hard. By the end of this podcast episode, you're going to have these three numbers, and I promise you, it will help you a ton as you formulate your strategy as an investor. So let's get into it. First up, we're going to be talking about our long-term financial goals. And there's basically two different questions that I want you all to answer by the end of this section here. Number one, how much money do you want? And number two, this is the one that people miss, is when do you want it back? The key to doing

• 3:35Dave Meyer?

  this the right way is finding something that is tough. Like, you want to be a little bit uncomfortable. You don't want to be, oh, for sure, I'm going to be able to hit that number. But you want to feel like if I execute my plan well, if I am diligent, if I work hard, I'm going to be able to hit that number. That's sort of the magic balance that you're looking for here. So these are the first concepts. The first question is, how much do you want to have? And the second question that we want to answer here is how long? Right? Those were the two things I said. So let's start with how much. There's different ways that people can answer this. You could answer this through net worth. You can answer it through cash flow, through in your portfolio. For me, the way that I think about it is the after-tax money that I need to support my lifestyle.

• 4:20Dave Meyer?

  So I recommend that people think about it this way. After-tax income. Because all of us are going to be taxed differently. Real estate has a lot of tax advantages. So if you're using real estate for a lot of your income, you might not need to earn as much as you would in a normal job because you're going to have those tax advantages, which is why I prefer this after-tax income thought. Now, for those of you who don't have a budget or don't really understand what your spending is right now, that's probably a good place to start. I would recommend you have a budget or go onto your banking app. Like, it doesn't need to be super complicated. Most people, if you have online banking,

• 5:02Dave Meyer?

  go and look at your online banking and figure out what your average spend is per month. Right? And this is a great place to start when you're figuring out what you want your income to be. And I want to be clear that you can't just make this number up. Like, you could, but I don't recommend it. Like, it would be easy to just say, again, I want $30,000 a month in after-tax income. That's a ton of money. And maybe you do aspire to that. And if you've thought about this hard and come up to that number, that is okay. But there is risk in overshooting here. Because if you say $30,000 and all you need is $20,000, that means you might work in a job or build your portfolio longer than you actually need to.

• 5:45Dave Meyer?

  We want to find the balance of getting what we want out of our lifestyle and making the most time for ourselves. And so if you're working unnecessarily to achieve an income that you don't actually need, that kind of goes against the purpose, right? And so I really recommend just starting rooted in what you're actually doing today. Now, I expect for some people who are listening and watching the podcast right now, they might be okay with their current income. You know, if you are established, you like your lifestyle, that's really all you have to do is figure out your budget and average spend if you're comfortable staying at this level. If you're not and you want to expand your lifestyle in some way, I would just say try and be specific about that.

• 6:29Dave Meyer?

  So if your budget right now is $5,000 a month, I wouldn't just randomly say $10,000. I would just spend 20 minutes thinking about the things that you would want, that you don't have now, and how much more that costs. It's really not that hard. I actually have, as part of my book, Start with Strategy, there's an Excel file that goes through this, and that actually helps you calculate these numbers. So you can do that, or you could just do it on a piece of paper. Honestly, it's not that hard. So I'm going to assume that our budget and what we want is $7,500 per month. But there is one more advanced move that we need to do, right? Like, we want $7,500 a month in today's dollars. And I know this is going to get a little bit nerdy, but this is, I think, truly the number one mistake people make

• 7:14Dave Meyer?

  in setting their financial goals is not accounting for inflation. This is a big picture stat, but the value of your dollar, on average, gets cut in half every 30 years. Just think about that for a second. So if you are near my age, I'm 38 years old. I probably will be retired at 68, hopefully. In 30 years, if I was making $10,000 a month, it would be the equivalent of having $5,000 a month today. Now, this is a big problem that a lot of people face in retirement, and I don't want all of you to face that problem. So I want you to adjust upward your goal to account for inflation. For us, in our example here that we're following along with,

• 7:59Dave Meyer?

  our goal is going to be $10,000 per month. We're going to adjust up for inflation from 7,500 because we want to make sure that our spending power stays at that $7,500 level well into the future. And in the future, you're likely to need at least $10,000 to be able to do that. I'm not doing this in a very precise way. I'm doing $10,000 because that's a nice round number. But adjust upward your goal to account for inflation. That's the main thing here. So that's step one in figuring out how much you need is what actually you need to fund your lifestyle. Step two is going to come where we figure out what our equity goal is in our real estate. So we need a real estate equity goal because even though the way that you're going to replace

• 8:43Dave Meyer?

  your income long-term is through cash flow, I personally believe that it's easier to think about this by thinking about how much equity you actually need. Now, I'm not one of those people who doesn't think cash flow is important. I only buy deals that cash flow, but I am not focused on cash flow early in my career because what I believe and what I know based on all of the analysis I do is that the best way to have cash flow later in your investing career is to have a lot of equity. Once you have equity, once you have money, cash flow is super easy. So I'm going to extrapolate our goal out from, we had $10,000 a month, but for this calculation, we need to do annual.

• 9:24Dave Meyer?

  So what I'm going to do is say that we want $120,000 per year in cash flow. And then the next thing I need to look at is what cash on cash return do I realistically believe that I can get 20 years from now? And I know that's hard to project, but it's got to be somewhere between 5 and 8%. I'll tell you that. That's the number you should be picking. I like 6%. I think we'll be able to do better than 5%. 8% is a little bit higher. This is not deals that you've held on to for a long time saying you can go out and buy off the MLS, you can buy an apartment building and get this number. This is equivalent to what anyone who's familiar with commercial real estate would call a cap rate. And so I believe 20 years from now, I'm still going to be able to buy six caps and that's a 6% cash on cash return.

• 10:09Dave Meyer?

  So all I'm going to do is divide my annual goal of $120,000 by 6% cash on cash return. And what I know from that is that I will need $2 million in equity to be sure, pretty much 100% sure that I could get the cash flow I need at the end of the day. So for me, this becomes my goal as a real estate investor. I'm sitting here in 2025 thinking, how do I get $2 million in equity by the time I want to retire? This is obviously just one example. If you said you wanted, I don't know, $150,000 a year in income, but you're a little bit

• 10:50Dave Meyer?

  more conservative and you think that you could only get a 5% cash on cash return, then you're going to need $3 million, for example, in equity. Or if you only need $100,000 and you're more confident that you're going to be able to get an 8% cash on cash return, what does that come out to be? That's $1.25 million. So whatever these numbers are for you, this is the financial goal I want you all to come up with. How much equity does your portfolio need to be worth? And I'm not saying the value of your properties. That is not what I'm saying. It's the equity you actually own in those properties. That's what you need to be calculating.

• 11:29Dave Meyer?

  So if it's $2 million, $3 million, $1 million, doesn't matter, figure this out for yourself. Okay, so now we have answered question number one. Remember, we started by saying, how much do you need and how long? We now know how much. We're going to use $2 million as our example, and we're going to get to how long now, which is what we call your time horizon. And this is super important thing that not a lot of people think about, but your time horizon is really going to dictate your investing strategy. I'm going to explain that more right after this quick break. Summer bookings sound great until someone slips by the pool, gets hurt on your dock, or damages your property during a long holiday weekend.

• 12:11Dave Meyer?

  A lot of short-term rental investors don't realize their standard policy may leave gaps when it comes to short-term rental activity. That's why investors use Steadily. They offer landlord insurance built for real estate investors, including short-term rentals. And if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, you'll also get 5% off your landlord insurance premiums. Visit biggerpockets.com/landlordinsurance to learn more.

• 12:35Henry Washington?

  Here's a strategy that most W2 employees have never heard of. Normally, if you want to write off a rental property against your regular income, you need real estate professional status. That means tracking hundreds of hours a year. Rent to Retirement just launched a program that skips all of that. It's called the STR loophole tenant placement program. Here's how it works. You buy one of Rent to Retirement's Class A new construction investment properties. You set up an Airbnb listing and self-manage it for the remainder of the year. Rent to Retirement then rents the home as a short-term rental to establish it as an STR for the year, no furnishing required, making this the easy button to save five or six figures in taxes this year.

• 13:17Henry Washington?

  And because you're the sole manager, there's no hourly minimum to meet. That lets you use a cost segregation study to accelerate the depreciation and potentially write off over $100,000 against your income, even on your first rental. Add in cash back up to 13% of the home price, which exceeds $60,000 on some properties. With this massive cash back incentives, investors are seeing total returns up to 126%. New construction, A-class properties, and inventory is limited. Learn more at biggerpockets.com/retirement or text REI to 33777. Again, text REI to 33777. Quick word about a new pro perk you'll want to know about. Aven.

• 14:02Henry Washington?

  If you're a homeowner, there's a good chance you're sitting on equity that you're not using. The problem is tapping into that usually means a cash-out refi, a traditional second mortgage, or weeks of paperwork just to get approved. Aven built something different. It's a credit card, but it's backed by your home equity. So you get a lot of the rate benefits of a HELOC with the flexibility of a card you can use anywhere. Rates are typically well below a standard credit card. Approval is fast and mostly online, and you can use it for anything. A renovation, paying down high-interest debt, or just have more breathing room in your budget. And if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, there's an extra reason to check it out. Get approved for the Aven card and you'll get a $400 statement credit after spending $400 on your Aven card.

• 14:45Henry Washington?

  Enough to cover your entire annual Pro membership. Head over to aven.com/biggerpockets to see if you qualify. Aven Financial, NMLS #2042345. Cards issued per 202 license from Visa USA, Inc. by Coastal Community Bank, NMLS #462289. Member FDIC, equal housing lender, subject to approval, terms apply. Visit aven.com for details.

• 15:02Speaker 02

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• 15:32Dave Meyer?

  This week's bigger news is brought to you by the Fundrise flagship fund. Invest in private market real estate with the Fundrise flagship fund. Check out fundrise.com/pockets to learn more.

• 15:48Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer going through how to set good, quality financial goals that will help you formulate a great investing strategy heading into 2026 and honestly, for the rest of your investing career. Before the break, we talked about just needing to know how much you want, and I recommend thinking about that in terms of equity. There's a couple of steps to that as a reminder. Figure out the after-tax income that you want, adjust it for inflation, divide it by the cap rate you think you can get, and that's going to get you that equity number that you want. We're going to be using $2 million as an example. Now, the question then becomes how long?

• 16:29Dave Meyer?

  And this one is a little bit more of an art than a science because most people will just say ASAP, right? You want to be retired in three years, or five years, or seven years. And for some people, that might be realistic. If you were just trying to replace your income without any additional lifestyle enhancements, I would say that the average there is eight to 12 years. You could probably replace your income, assuming that you have enough capital to buy your first property today. So I think a lot of people are in that situation. So eight to 12 years could be a good timeframe. That's for doing pretty plain vanilla kinds of deals. If you're willing to be a little more active, maybe take on a little bit more risk, which we're going to talk about in a little bit,

• 17:13Dave Meyer?

  you can speed up that timeline. But for most people, I think we're going to be talking about something around eight, 10, 15 years. And that might feel like a long time, but I have been doing this for 15 years and I promise you it is really not that bad and it is so worth it. Taking 15 years to achieve financial freedom is amazing. I am sorry that people on the internet lie and say that they do this in three to five years. Maybe some of them do, but I promise you the average person, it takes 10 to 15 years. Unless you want to take on a lot of risk or you're pouring 60 hours a week into this business, 10 to 15 years, totally doable. You can probably do it in eight to seven if you're going to be even a little bit active in your portfolio. So just think about that for yourself,

• 17:56Dave Meyer?

  where you're starting out and where you want to get to. I'm going to just assume for the purposes of our example that we're going to start with, let's call it $75,000 in savings that we can invest today and that we want to retire within 15 years. Now, I understand that some people want to do it faster and that is definitely possible and this is the time to dictate that. If you want to go faster, you need one of a few things to happen. One, you need to be starting with a lot of money. I know that sounds really silly, but it's true. Like if you have a million dollars, you're probably going to be able to do it pretty fast, right? Like that's a lot of money to start with. The second thing you could do is try and increase your income. I did this by deciding to go to a state school

• 18:40Dave Meyer?

  and go back to college for a master's degree and try and increase my income to accelerate my financial freedom through real estate by making more in my day job. Some people might want to do that. The third option is to do it through real estate. And I know this is a very common question on here, but it's not required. But if you think that you could go and flip houses and make a ton of money, that might be something to consider. If you think you can wholesale in addition to your job or you can wholesale and make more money than you do today, also a decent option. If you think that you would be a great real estate agent and would be able to make more money than your current job, that's another way that you can do it too. And then the fourth option is to do value add real estate investing.

• 19:23Dave Meyer?

  And so that would be, I think, for the majority of people listening to this podcast, probably doing something like the BRRRR method. Because that's going to allow you to invest in relatively safe rental properties, but also build equity at the same time. And so just think about which, if any, of those things you want to do. If you don't want to do renovations, you don't want to change your job, and you're kind of just, you know, want to coast, that's totally fine, but it's going to take you probably 10 to 15 years. If you want to shorten that to, let's call it, 7 to 10 years, think about which of those things you can realistically do. Can you get more income? Or are you willing to put in the time and effort into doing things like the BRRRR method to grow your equity faster?

• 20:04Dave Meyer?

  For the purposes of our example, I'm going to say that we have $75,000 to invest today, and that we're going to shoot for, let's call it, a 12-year time horizon. So that's what we got. That is step one of our long-term goal. That's all it takes. I'm blabbing about and explaining this, and we did this in like 15 minutes, right? So you can do this in your own time. Take 10, 15, 20 minutes and figure this out. We know now that our goal, as a real estate investor, the thing we need to be focusing on when we set our tactics, when we pick what deals to do, what markets to invest in, our goal is to have $2 million in equity in 12 years. That's the goal that you need to set. And if you have this, I promise you, everything is going to get so much easier.

• 20:49Dave Meyer?

  It sounds so simple, and it is, but everything will get easier if you start to think about your portfolio in this way. Now, before we move on to the one-year goal, which we're going to do in a minute, just do a gut check and make sure that this sounds reasonable. Like, if you, like, if you want to do the math, you could do that, because I would recommend that. But if your goal is like, I need $5 million in five years and I'm starting with 50 grand, I'm sorry, that's just not going to work. If you're a rental property investor, you can expect your money to compound at somewhere between 10% and 25%, depending on how involved you want to be. If you're just buying regular deals, 10% is probably, 12% is probably where you're going to be. If you're going to do the BRRRR, you could probably do 20, 25, maybe 30%.

• 21:31Dave Meyer?

  And so think about that and see if you're within that realm of possibility. If your goal is way bigger and you're going to need to compound at 50% or 60% or 70%... Honestly, you can do that, but you're gonna have to flip houses. It's the only way you can earn those kinds of returns in real estate. And that comes with risk and a lot of time. That doesn't make it wrong, but that's how you're gonna have to do that. So think to yourself, is it worth it to me to do flipping and take on more risk and commit more time? Or should I just back out my goal a couple of years and take on less risky, less time intensive kinds of strategies? That's totally up to you, but just think about that before we move on to our one year goal. So that's step one of your financial goal. And then we're gonna move on to our one year goal.

• 22:16Dave Meyer?

  Because obviously, having that sort of 12 year vision isn't good enough. You need to start now backing into what you have to achieve this year to make sure that you're on track for year two, for year three, for year four, and so on, right? So the place that you need to start for your one year goal is by doing something what I would call a resource audit. And this sounds fancy and corporate, but it's not. It's just a question of how much time do you have to commit to real estate in the coming year and how much money, right? Everything comes down to these two questions, right? Our first year goal was what amount do you want in what timeframe? Our one year goal is gonna come down to those same sort of variables that we're dealing with.

• 23:00Dave Meyer?

  Now, we already answered the question for our example, which was $75,000. But for all of you out there, I really, really encourage you, if you haven't done this yet, think about what are your investable assets right now, right? Investable assets are not your total net worth. It's how much money you can responsibly put into real estate today. So let's just use an example and say, you have $50,000 saved up. You shouldn't invest all of that. You can't invest all of that because, you know, budgeting experts say you need three to six months of emergency funds to weather a storm. You know, we're going into a difficult economic period, I believe. And so you probably want six months of emergency funds. And if you have kids, that might be even longer.

• 23:44Dave Meyer?

  That's up to you, but you need to set aside some money. And so it's not just the number in your bank account. That's not your investable assets. What you need to figure out is how much money you can responsibly put into real estate. So figure that out for yourself. But for our example here today, we're going to use $75,000 as an example.

• 24:04Dave Meyer?

  Now, time is another really important variable here because again, if I wanted to grow as quickly as possible, I would flip houses. That is the best way to earn a lot of money quickly in real estate. But I don't have that time. And I, in the example that we're going to use is going to say, we don't have that time. We though, are willing to put in, let's call it 10 hours per week for real estate. To me, 10 hours a week, you're going to be able to do a lot in real estate investing. You're going to be able to find great deals. You're going to be able to do value add. You're going to be able to self-manage. You're going to be able to do a lot of things that you might want to do to maximize the early years of your investing, or whatever, the next years of your investing,

• 24:49Dave Meyer?

  if you put in 10 hours a week. And so, figure that out honestly for yourself though. If you don't have 10 hours a week, be honest about that. Because if you buy a deal that requires 10 hours a week of a commitment and you only have five, you're not going to operate that deal well. And this is exactly why you have to go through this process. Because I see so many investors going out there and just buying whatever deal. They buy a short-term rental and they don't have a lot of time to furnish it. And then it just winds up being kind of a crappy short-term rental and it doesn't perform. And then what's the point of doing that in the first place? So be honest with yourself about how much time you're going to be able to commit. Because that's how we're going to pick what deals that you should be doing in the next couple of years. So for me, if I'm trying to take a medium aggressive approach,

• 25:35Dave Meyer?

  which is what I recommend to most people. It's like, you don't need to be really passive and really conservative. You don't need to be super aggressive. But if you want to do things like a burr or cosmetic rehabs on rental properties, those are fantastic ways to pursue financial independence. If you have 10 hours a week, you're going to be able to do that. So, think about this for yourself. Once you have an answer to that, I think sort of paths kind of start to diverge here. Because what your answers are are going to really depend on what you're going to do in 2026. So, I'm going to draw up actually a little quadrant here about the two different variables that we're talking about. So on one axis, if you're listening on the podcast, I'm drawing a quadrant. On the horizontal axis, I'm drawing time.

• 26:19Dave Meyer?

  And on the vertical axis, money. And where you fall in which quadrant, which box you fall in is going to really dictate what you should be doing in your first year. So if you're low on time, but you have lots of money. So you're in this first quadrant here. What I would invest in here is I would think about rental properties, right? Cause you don't have a lot of time. You're not going to be able to flip. So I would think about rental properties, low leverage, because you have money. And so you're not going to need to put five or 10% down. So I'd say, put 25% down. And then if you have time, I do cosmetic rehabs. Cause you're not going to have time to do a big rehab, because again,

• 27:01Dave Meyer?

  you're falling into this low time bucket. That's what I would look for. If you're just asking me and you fall into this bucket, you have money to invest, not a lot of time, buy rental properties, put 25% down, do a cosmetic rehab. Don't think that hard about it. This is going to work. Next quadrant that you go into is a lot of time and a lot of money. This is obviously a good place to be in, but what I would do is heavy into burrs. If I had both time and money, that makes a lot of sense to me because that's going to grow my equity as quickly as possible. But if I did a heavy burr, heavy value add burr, that is going to take up a lot of time. But if you have time and money, I would go heavy into these burrs. The next one is high on time and low on money. The things that

• 27:46Dave Meyer?

  I would look to do are things like potentially wholesaling. I don't have a lot of experience in that, but if you wanted to, this is a good way to make money. I would try and partner on flips and see if you can use sweat equity, or I know this is going to be controversial, make more money. I know that sounds silly, but if you don't have a lot of money, but you have a lot of time, go make more money. Whether that's doing a side hustle, investing in your education. So you can increase your income, becoming an agent on the side. I don't know. But if you can make more money with that extra time that you have, that's probably going to be the best way to help your investing career at this point. So think about that.

• 28:29Dave Meyer?

  Then we go into the last bucket, which is low money and low time. This is a tough place to be, right? If you don't have time and you don't have money, real estate investing is going to be very difficult for you. And I just want to be clear about that. I know there are tons of people on the internet who like to say, you can get into this industry with no time, no money. I'm sorry, but that is not true. Or it is very, very rare. And I don't want to discourage you if you fall into this bucket because you can get from where you are today to becoming a real estate investor. But making a real estate investment is probably not the next step in your journey. What you need to focus on is one, either freeing up time so that you can do those other things I just talked about, or earning more money, spending time saving money.

• 29:14Dave Meyer?

  You can still educate yourself as an investor. You can save money and then invest maybe in a year or two. Your goal is to get your foot in the door. And so if you're in that fourth quadrant, figure out a way, your year one goal is find a way to get your foot in the door. And when we get to our three year goal in a little bit, you're going to be able to have a little bit more exciting goal. Don't worry about that. But year one is going to be just getting your foot in the door. If you're in these other quadrants, the way I would think about it is try and figure out, one, how many deals you can realistically do and at what point? So if you're in quadrant one, you're doing these rental properties with low leverage, putting 25% down for cosmetic jobs. I would say maybe you could do one of those, right? Is a realistic goal.

• 29:58Dave Meyer?

  One deal at, I'm going to target a 15% annualized return. I do deals like that all the time. If I don't have a lot of time right now and I find a decent deal, 15% annualized return, that's fantastic. The stock market averages eight to 9%. It's having a good year this year, but eight to 9%. If I can make 15% on a low effort deal, I'm pretty happy about that. That's just an example. That would be one, one goal, I would say. If you're going to do BRRRRs, I would say maybe try and do two deals and try and get maybe a 40% annualized return because you're going to be able to hopefully do a BRRRR. Maybe you do two of them. They take six months each. Maybe they take nine months each. So let's just say you get into two deals at an annualized rate. You might not realize

• 30:43Dave Meyer?

  all of that in one year, but just say an annualized rate of 40%. Or if I'm wholesaling and you know, I'm in this third quadrant, remember that one is with low money, but high time, I would try and figure out how much more money you can make. How much can you save would be my year one goal, not necessarily how many deals I can do. But if I'm in quadrant three and I have 20 grand, my goal would be something like $50,000 to invest next year. I know that doesn't sound as exciting as going out and buying a deal, but I promise you, if you save 50 grand, next year, you're going to be able to do a great deal and it's going to accelerate your career, probably faster than it is than

• 31:25Dave Meyer?

  trying to like get a little piece of a random deal or doing a really risky flip. That's my honest advice. That's what I would do if I were in that situation. Now, going back to our example of having $75,000 to invest and 10 hours a week, I'm going for the BRRRR. That's what I would personally try and do. And so my goal, my one year goal would be two BRRRRs. And then on my first BRRRR, I think I'll only be able to sell that first one or refinance that first one in a year. Maybe I'll do my, start my second one within one year. But realistically, at 10 hours a week, I can only do one at a time. So I'm going to think about, that's probably a nine month project. And I'm going

• 32:04Dave Meyer?

  to say, I want to earn at least 40% on that deal. I want a 40% annualized return on that first deal. That's huge. 40% is awesome. That actually would come out to for $75,000. That's a $30,000 return, right? So already in year one, we've gone from $75,000 in equity that we need. We're trying to get to 2 million and we've already gone up to 105,000. That may not sound like a lot, but if you're able to do that, I promise you, you are going to be able to hit your goal. And I will do the math for that when we come back from this quick break. Stick with us. For my wife's birthday, I wanted to make her a new website for her landscape

• 32:47Dave Meyer?

  design business. So I researched a lot of different options. I tried out a couple, but honestly, it was really overwhelming. It was pretty time consuming and still, the site wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to. Then I tried Hostinger and everything was super simple. I asked Hostinger's AI to build a clean site for her business and it had a working version up in minutes. No coding or designer needed. Plus, its AI agent helps with SEO, website copy, and email marketing after launch. You get domain, website, email, all in one account. And right now, you can get Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing through December 14th. So snag Hostinger's services at their lowest

• 33:30Dave Meyer?

  prices before the sale ends. Create your website today for just $1.99. Go to hostinger.com/realestate and use code REALESTATE for an additional 10% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing. I just booked a ski trip to Park City and I've already got the whole thing planned out. Five days, first tracks every morning before the crowds show up, my knees reminding me I'm not 25 anymore by the second run, and an embarrassing number of overpriced burritos at the lodge. I don't even care. This is the trip I look forward to all year. But here's the part I actually appreciate. The practical side of my brain kicking in is that my place doesn't have to just sit there empty the whole time I'm away. I can

• 34:15Dave Meyer?

  list my space on Airbnb and bring in a little extra income while I'm out getting humbled on a mountain. And with the co-host network, I'm not the one handling all of it. You can partner with a vetted local co-host who can create your listing, manage reservations, message guests, and even handle the styling. So I get to fully focus on my trip and my place is still working for me the whole time. Find a co-host at Airbnb.com/host.

• 34:42Speaker 02

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• 35:41Speaker 04

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• 36:15Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Now that we've done our long-term goal and our year one goal, let's just extrapolate this out because you can basically do the strategies that I just said well into the future. And I know, like I said, you're going from $75,000 to $105,000 in your first year. I hope that sounds like a lot because it is. That's an amazing return. If you're making a 40% return, you should be super happy. But I just want to extrapolate this out a little bit because there's this kind of magical thing in math called the Rule of 72. And this says that if you take the number 72 and you divide it by your rate of return that you're earning, that's how many years it will take your money to double. If you take the number 72, you're earning on average an annualized return of 10%. It's going to take you 7.2 years to double your money.

• 37:01Dave Meyer?

  Now, if you're doing the BRRRR or cosmetic rehabs, which is what I think the majority of our audience should be doing, I think hitting 24% annualized returns is very practical. It's not going to take so much time. You're going to still need to be able to put in some work, find great deals, but if you can get, let's just round it to a 30% annualized return. That's going to take work, right? You're going to need to do cosmetic rehabs. You're going to need to do BRRRR to earn 30%. You can't just go buy a regular rental property and earn 30%. But I'm just going to show you, like, this is what I would do if I was starting with $75,000. I would just try and target this 30% annualized return every single year. Because I'm starting in year zero with $75,000, right? Then in year three, we'd have $150K.

• 37:45Dave Meyer?

  In year six, we'd have $300K. In year nine, we'd have $600K. See how this thing starts to compound? And then in year 12, we'd have 1.2 million. And then in year 15, we'd have 2.4 million. So this is actually a really good example, right? I kind of set our goal arbitrarily earlier. I was kind of just coming up with this example as we go. And what I came up with is I said, I wanted $2 million in 12 years. Well, now I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, that's probably a little unrealistic. In 12 years, even if I earned a 30% return, which is good, I would be at just $1.2 million in equity. That's still a great place to be,

• 38:27Dave Meyer?

  but it looks like my time horizon is going to be closer to 14 to 15 years. That's still awesome, right? I'm talking about being able to replace my income and earn $120,000 in after-tax income. That's just 10 grand to spend every single month. In 14 to 15 years, I'm just starting with 75 grand, which takes time to build up, but it's not like you're starting with a millionaire's amount of money. And I'm only putting in 10 hours per week into these deals. If you want to accelerate this, you can find ways to make more money and put more investable assets, save more money. Remember, this, what I'm doing right here, 14 to 15 years, assumes I put no new money into my investments. I'm taking the 75K and I'm just...

• 39:11Dave Meyer?

  Extrapolating that, but for most people, you're going to be able to save money every month, put more money back in. That's going to help you get to 12 to 15 years. But that's what I want you to do at the end of this exercise is to be able to say, yeah, I gut checked this and I think that this is reasonable for me. I would say now at the end of this exercise, my long-term goal is $2 million. I'm actually going to say still in 12 years because I said 14 to 15 years would take it with no new money into it, but I think I'm going to be able to add some new money into it. So I actually do think 12 years is realistic. That is my long-term goal. My one-year goal is going to be, I'm going to round to 100K in equity and my three-year goal,

• 39:53Dave Meyer?

  remember, I think that I want my money to double in three years. My three-year goal is going to be $300,000. That's my example. This is what I want all of you to get to. Know these three numbers for yourself because once you do, you can already start to figure out what deals you should be doing, right? If these are my goals, I know that I can't just go buy on-market MLS deals. I am not going to be flipping. I probably don't want to do short-term rentals because although they can offer more cash flow, my goal is building equity. I know that my goal is building equity. And so that allows me to hone in on projects where I can do a BRRRR or a cosmetic rehab.

• 40:37Dave Meyer?

  See how this is already helping me set my strategy just by knowing these numbers? There are so many great ways to make money in real estate, but I know my goals. So I know I'm going to do BRRRRs and cosmetic rehabs and I'm going to look for a market where I can do that for my 75K because I have enough money to get into a deal. And so I'm specifically going to look for markets where I can put in $75,000. For me, that's probably going to be somewhere in the Midwest or Southeast. You know, if I put 25% down, I'm probably going to target a deal that is like $250,000 with a $50,000 rehab.

• 41:17Dave Meyer?

  Like that is something you can go out and achieve today. So I've basically backed into my buy box for next year. I know that if I want to hit my goal, I'm going to look in the Midwest for a burr cosmetic deal that is in the $200 to $250,000 range with a $50,000 cosmetic rehab. That's amazing. So many people spend so much time trying to figure out what their buy box is. All these different strategies. You know, I'm coming up with this example in real time, just using these numbers that I'm making up. I already was able to figure out my buy box just by backing into where I want to be 20 years from now. And this is why I say that knowing these financial goals is the number one key thing that investors need to do that most of them miss.

• 42:00Dave Meyer?

  Spend 30 minutes right now figuring out what these numbers are for yourself and I promise you, your plan for the rest of 2025 and 2026 and the rest of your investing career is going to become so much easier. Now, I think in this podcast episode, I have given you enough to be able to do this. But if you like this concept and you really want to get a crystal clear vision of where you want to go in your investing career, I'm going to be a little bit of a pusher and recommend my book, Start with Strategy. Literally, the whole book is kind of about this idea that if you set your long-term goals well, you can back into the right strategy. So if you want to go deep on this, you can check out my book on BiggerPockets. It's called Start with Strategy. It's also on Amazon, but hopefully this has been enough for you to just do this by yourself.

• 42:44Dave Meyer?

  The book is just for people who want to go a little bit deeper. That's what we got for you guys today. If you have questions about this, please let me know. Or if you want to hear more content about this kind of stuff, we always talk about tactics and strategy, but I think this stuff is so important, which is why I wanted to do this episode today. If you want more content like this, please let us know in the comments or hit me up on Instagram where I'm at the data deli. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer. I'll see you next time.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.