How to Build Financial Freedom Through Strategic Real Estate Investing | Zach Lemaster

Yeah, I'll talk about the timeline with that because there's like different kind of levels of financial independence is the way that I view it.

And just to be clear, this was never our goal.

I never had the intention that I wanted to own this large portfolio of real estate, run this active business in real estate.

You know, we just liked investing in real estate and we just always were trying to be better investors and find better opportunity.

And we just never stopped.

And so it kind of fell into this just through consistently investing.

I never had the plan to retire myself.

That was that was not the goal.

I did have an initial goal like, hey, it'd be cool if I had X amount of dollars of cash flow to cover my expenses, which at the time, like pre kids is probably like three thousand dollars a month, you know, and that that took us.

I think we accomplished that within about four years of investing.

And it was pretty slow.

And I think this is true for a lot of people.

It's pretty slow investing starting out because you're kind of learning, you only have so much capital, you don't have momentum from your actual properties yet.

But once you build equity in your properties and you go through like your first 1031 exchange where you're selling one property and turning that into possibly like three or four properties because you're trading up that equity without having to inject any more capital into your portfolio, that's where you get this hockey stick growth.

So it was probably between year three to four where we covered our expensive and passive income.

And then I think it was around year five or six when we actually surpassed our active income, which was six figures.

We had professional careers.

But what we did, what we found is we've gone through, we bought in good areas that were appreciating and they cash flow very well.

We probably had a little bit of immediate equity coming in there, buying below market value.

So we had good buys on these properties that were really good rental properties.

And those went up in value over, you know, two, three, four years.

And so we had a significant amount of equity that we built.

We've saved our cash flow.

We didn't spend it.

We wanted to reinvest it.