In 2018, I started over with nothing. By 2025, I’m in spitting distance of the Two-Comma Club.
When I first started investing in real estate in my mid-20s, I made some bad investments in rental properties. I never got a mentor—I learned every lesson the hard way.
By my late 30s, I couldn’t afford to keep subsidizing those early investments with my income each month. I unloaded every property I owned.
Every good investment I’d ever made got wiped out by the bad ones. I turned 38 with nothing to show for 16 years of working adulthood. It was like falling on the wrong square in a board game and being sent back to “Start.”
So how did my wife and I go from $0 to nearly $1 million in less than seven years?
The Two-Pronged Attack to Build Wealth Fast
To build wealth fast, you need to save a huge percentage of your income, and you need to invest it for high returns.
It helps to have a high income, of course, but my wife and I have never had that. Katie’s a school counselor (teacher salary), and my company SparkRental has always been more labor of love than cash cow. In most months, I earned more as a financial writer than as an entrepreneur organizing an investment club of peers.
That didn’t stop us.
Aggressive Savings Plan Part 1: Expat Life
For most of the last seven years, we lived overseas. That enabled us to live a comfortable life on my wife’s income and benefits alone, and save and invest all of my income.
The international schools where my wife worked provided us with free furnished housing. We paid reduced U.S. income taxes due to the foreign earned income exclusion. For the last six years,…