How to Retire with Rentals in Just 10 Years (It’s Still Possible!)

Dave:
This investor needed only five rental properties to put himself on the path to early retirement. Even after accumulating huge debts in his twenties, he was able to start buying real estate using a repeatable, kind of boring strategy that almost anyone else can follow. Now he’s cash flowing thousands per month and will have the option to leave his job in his mid forties if he wants instead of working another 20 years. Keep listening to find out how he did it. Hey everyone. I’m Dave Meyer. I’m the head of real estate investing at BiggerPockets. I’ve been buying rental properties for 15 years now. Today’s show is an investor story with Paul Novak from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and this one’s going to be a lot of fun. Paul started investing in dividend stocks in his mid thirties, but soon realized he’d need millions of dollars in principle to ever actually replace his W2 income.

Dave:
So that led him to discover real estate and he wound up buying his first rental property in 2021. Now, fast forward a couple of years, he has seven rental units and a clear path to more than $10,000 in monthly cashflow in less than 10 years after he first started investing. In this episode, we’re going to hear from Paul how he found a creative way to fund his deals and pay the interest to himself instead of a bank. Why he doesn’t aspire to accumulate hundreds or even really dozens of rental units, and why he found that his corporate career prepared him for all the ups and downs of property management. This is a great conversation. It’s a lot of fun. Let’s get into it. Here’s me and Paul Novak. Paul, welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Thanks for being here.

Paul:
Yeah, super pumped about it. I literally watch every episode when it comes out and now to actually be on telling my stories. Really cool.

Dave:
I’m glad we got you on the show. So maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found yourself in the world of real estate investing.

Paul:
For a very long time, I’ve been into personal finance, how to do more with my money. If I think about my start was kind of in the stock market, that’s where I started investing. Once we paid off all the debt and things like that, originally it was let’s live off dividends. The dividend payments were not that big, and when I looked at how much I needed to have total in that portfolio to live off dividends, it seemed like an unattainable number.

Dave:
Do you remember what the cash on cash return is essentially on a dividend when you started doing this?

Paul:
Sure. So I was putting money in VOO. The dividend yield was like 1.51%. So I started working the math and I thought, well, if I want a hundred thousand, I did like eight and a half million dollars in the market. Right, exactly. That seems crazy.

Dave:
Yeah, it’s just like that’s not very motivating to think about, oh, just somehow manage to get $8.5 million and you can live off it. That just doesn’t feel like something worth spending any time on.

Paul:
And I think about myself too, right? I know how crazy that number sounds, and if it actually got that big, I know I could draw from the principle, right, because it’d be growing faster than I’d need it, but my goal was kind of build up this nest egg that I didn’t need to do that, and in essence, I could live off the cashflow. And that’s when at that same time I also read the book Rich Dad, poor Dad, which a lot of people talk about on here, and the one thing the dividends didn’t have was all the tax benefits that you could get from going into real estate. So I thought, you know what? Let’s give it a shot. And we got lucky. We bought our house timing, just worked out that way in 2009. So what we paid for this house versus what it was worth when we started in real estate in 2021, we had a ton of equity built up. I was able to refinance my loan, go from a 15 year to a 30 year, nice, pull out 112,000 in equity, and my mortgage remained the same and locked back in at 2.38%. Oh. So that kind of gave me the cash that I needed to get started on the real estate journey.

Dave:
What were you doing full time?

Paul:
Yeah, so I’ve worked for my employer in, well, next month it’ll be 20 years.

Dave:
Wow, you don’t hear that a lot anymore.

Paul:
Yeah, so work in manufacturing, phenomenal company, great people. They really helped me build my career. They helped put me through school and paid for my schooling. So a lot of stability there. And then that W2 income is what we’ve invested. My wife’s had kind of a similar career and similar journey. She worked where I did for 13 years and then switched to another company and has been there for eight. So we’ve really just gotten disciplined at whittling down our expenses, and I think our savings right now is somewhere around 55%. So when we’re saving like that, we can invest a lot of that money.

Dave:
So let’s talk about real estate. Tell us about your first deal. Was that on the heels of refinancing your primary residence? You made your first rental investment, I assume it was.

Paul:
Yeah, so it was, oh man. Still every day going to that closing table and signing, it’s like all the fields, right? It’s exciting, nerve wracking. It is really exciting because I don’t know, as an adult, it’s hard to get that rush anymore, but I always get it when I close. So we ended up finding, our first deal was a multifamily, a side-by-side townhouse, and it was actually an off market deal that I learned about kind of through family. So it was nice because once we got to the point of that house, we got it for ask. We knew who the landlord was or the owner, and we agreed on what the price was, and that’s kind of where we got started on our first house.

Dave:
Was there something about the 2021 market that appealed to you, or is it just like, oh, I have this cash now now’s the time to do it? I think in retrospect it makes a lot of sense, but I remember 2021 and everyone was like, it’s going too crazy. You can’t find a deal. It’s too competitive. So what gave you the confidence to jump in that?

Paul:
The thing is, if I get an idea, I don’t really care what all the noise is. I got to experience it for myself and for me, the big thing that tipped the scale, again, if you remember we were talking dividend investing on that property. We put 49,000 down or $50,000 down. The property was 1 99 9, so pretty much 200,000. Our cash flow on that was almost a thousand dollars out of the gates.

Dave:
What really? So

Paul:
You start doing the math, and now to be fair, Dave, right, this is like straight line cashflow, not the real cashflow of takeout CapEx and all the other things you preach all the time, right? Just straight line. But I started running the numbers and I thought, wait a minute, if I had 50,000 in VOO, what I’d be getting in dividends, it’s nowhere near that

Dave:
500, 750 bucks a year based on the yield, you said. Yeah,

Paul:
Right. So all of a sudden it was like, well, this is a no-brainer, so I don’t care if it’s tough to find a deal or any of those things when you look at the juice is worth the squeeze in this, and I’m also going to get appreciation. I’m going to get the tax benefits the tenants are paying down the mortgage. To me, it was a no-brainer and I didn’t know any better. That’s what I knew. That was the first deal.

Dave:
Yeah, the funny part about real estate is you just need to find the sweet spot between education and just complete naivete. You just don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know, but you know enough that it kind of makes sense. That’s sort of how I got started. I was like, I didn’t know all the formulas or anything, but I was like, I could rent it for way more than my mortgage rate, so I’m going for it. It worked out. Now you need a little bit more nuance, but I really like what you’re saying here, Paul, because I think as investors the key to really being successful, it’s always just thinking about resource allocation and where you can put your money and where makes the most sense to put your money at any given time. And I’ve been trying to encourage a lot of folks in today’s day and age in the housing market to not really think about, oh, I should have bought in 2021 or 2022 or 2015 or whatever, but think about is real estate a better option than what else I could do with my money?

Dave:
And it sounds like for you, I think that’s probably still true even in today’s day and age, real estate buys better cashflow. It’s better upsides than dividend investing or putting your money in a savings account or buying bonds, those types of things. And I really just recommend to people to sort of think about your own money, your own risk tolerance in the same context that Paul is, where it’s like, what else are you going to do with your money ultimately matters. Not whether the deal today is as good as it was during this perfect magical time that we used to have, but whether it’s going to move you closer to your goals in the most efficient way possible. And for me at least, real estate’s still that number. This was 2021. You bought this single family,

Paul:
Right? Multifamily.

Dave:
It was multifamily,

Paul:
Yep.

Dave:
And were you managing it yourself?

Paul:
Yeah.

Dave:
Okay. And how was that?

Paul:
I don’t know. I love it.

Dave:
Really? Okay. I like

Paul:
It. I really like dealing with people, which a lot of people are going to say they don’t like. But again, if I go back to my career, my job has set me up for all of this stuff. I’ve managed people forever. I’ve done KPIs and managed metrics at work and difficult conversations, and I don’t know, this is just so much based on people I feel like more than anything else. So for me, I still honestly really enjoy it and we self-manage all our properties.

Dave:
Wow, that’s great. I love hearing that because so many people complain about it. And honestly, I never found it that bad. I house hacked and managed it, and I never found it that bad people. Different people have different personalities. You definitely need to have comfort with difficult conversations to be organized, you need to be a good project manager. But I think people sort of dramatize how hard it is. I don’t know if you experienced that, but it’s not crazy. It’s not rocket science. It’s just responding to some phone calls. It’s really not that big a deal. So I’m glad Paul to hear that you liked being a landlord. You had this inclination to go for it and you enjoyed it. I want to hear about what comes next, but we do need to take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Ignite funding is transforming how investors generate passive income from real estate.

Dave:
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Paul:
Yeah, so then 2022, we kind of took the year off. It was just okay learning. And while I was all gung-ho, I’ve got a partner in this, so making sure my wife was on board was another part of that. And we got to the end of 2022, and we had an interesting conversation here actually at my house at Christmas, we had a family member, their rental was going to go on the market, so they reached out and asked if we wanted to get the property. It was another property that was off market. Again, I thought it was undervalued. We ended up walking in and buying that property off market, and that was the second property that we had. So that was another duplex upper and lower, and that was, I think we closed on it February of 2023. So really right away to start 2023. That was our second property.

Dave:
That sounds like a great deal, but I need to ask, you mentioned your wife was sort of hesitant or at least wanted to pump the brakes and think about it. What was she experiencing? What was she thinking about?

Paul:
Yeah, so we haven’t walked into a property yet that she isn’t hesitant on and wants to pump the brakes. It’s just right. Every property you add, it adds a little bit more complexity to the portfolio and just to life in general, especially when we self-manage and it’s a lot of money when we’re constantly sticking these into these properties. So I think one thing that I’ve shared with her to help get her over the hurdle a little bit is that the money’s never gone. It’s just kind of locked away in a more secure savings account. So at the end of the day, if things didn’t work out or it wasn’t something we wanted to do, you’re never boxed into a corner. You could always sell the property, get the cash back out, and we could do something else. Now it’s worked out really well, so we haven’t done that and we don’t plan on it. But letting her know that we had flexibility was something that was important to her.

Dave:
I mean, that makes sense. A lot of times in the real estate investing ecosystem, people glaze over these things and don’t talk about that. These are legitimate concerns. There is less liquidity in real estate than there is in other asset classes, and it’s something to think about. And I personally believe it’s important to have a little bit of healthy fear and skepticism for every deal you do. If you just go in and you’re like, this is going to work out, everything’s going to be great, you might run into some trouble. I think it’s really nice, whether it’s you, your partner, just your agent, your lender, whatever it is, to have someone who’s just like, are you really sure about this for each one? And sometimes you’re right and you keep going and it’s a great deal. And sometimes you think, yeah, maybe we wait and go on to the next one. But it sounds like this deal that you found was just so compelling that your wife was comfortable making the second purchase.

Paul:
And I think another thing that’s helpful, and I’ve always been this way, I’m super conservative when I run my numbers. So I go into a deal assuming that the interest rate’s going to be higher than generally what it ends up being. And I always take the property taxes and round them up and I go high on insurance costs and all these things. And then a lot of times it’s kind of nice because when I get to closing, I’m pleasantly surprised like, oh, our cashflow that I thought was going to be X is now a hundred dollars more a month. But I never ever put myself into a situation where I’m coming up on a deal where it’s time to sign the papers and I end up coming out where shoot the numbers go backwards. I’m not so conservative that I think it takes me out of deals, but I always got that little buffer that helps us. So I think whenever I go into, I feel good about the numbers that we ran and we’re not going to do the deal. If it’s really teetering, we’ll make sure that we’re comfortable with it.

Dave:
Is that something you learned in real estate or is that you do in your job or just kind of your personality?

Paul:
Yeah, I’d say personality and honestly, I’ve learned it from budgeting prior to real estate. So let’s say we’re going to go on vacation. I don’t want to run that budget that I plan for vacation so tight that all of a sudden we’re there and we have to scale back. We don’t have enough. I always want to be heavy and then all of a sudden, once we get to the point that that’s done, so I budgeted X for vacation, I have this much leftover, throw that into the next vacation to get started already or for Christmas gifts or any of those

Dave:
Things,

Paul:
I just always like to air on the side of caution.

Dave:
That’s so smart. The vacation example is so true. It just had a real guttural reaction. You’ve been there where you plan a vacation and you’re having fun and you get to the place that you wanted to go and you’re like, oh, I can’t even afford to eat here. And it’s kind of disappointing. Whereas if you plan it backwards, then you make sure that you’re allowed to do, you can do everything that you want. The same thing goes with the property. I love that example. So you did two deals in two-ish years, two and a half years. And so were you then at that point just ready to scale?

Paul:
I’m hooked.

Dave:
What time? I can see it in your face. You’re excited.

Paul:
So the first one went well. It was nice getting the cash flow, but it was limited as to how much that was growing. So I’m not going to lie, after we did the first one, did the second one. Now that refinance money we pulled out, that’s pretty much depleted. So I got two problems. I’m ready to go, but my bank account is not.

Dave:
This is a familiar problem. Yes. All right, Paul. Well, I want to hear how this problem that is very familiar to many of us sort of evolved your strategy, but we got to take another break, so we’ll be right back. Welcome back to the podcast here with investor Paul Novak talking about how he scaled his portfolio over the last couple of years. Paul, where we left off, you were describing what I think happens to all of us to go out of cash. How did you move beyond that and get your third deal?

Paul:
So we had to find ways to get capital and watching a lot of videos, kind of learning different things. 401k loan was something that I never ever would’ve considered before. My 401k was my golden goose for retirement. But now that real estate has become kind of a helper in that, and I think what’ll end up being our primary driving force for retirement, I decided to take a loan out against my 401k and almost use that as the bank. So I researched into it and at least through my 401k, I could take out half the principal or $50,000, whatever was less. So I pulled out the full $50,000 and I only have to pay in fees $10 a quarter while that money is borrowed.

Dave:
What?

Paul:
So $40 a year to have it out and all the interest that I pay, which is 8.25%, goes back into the account to me and it comes out of my paycheck every two weeks.

Dave:
Are you serious?

Paul:
Yeah. So I found a really good deal and I thought, well, okay, at the end of the day, if I’m saving this money, I’m saving it for a rental anyways. I could just buy the rental using this 401k loan and just pay myself back the money instead of waiting to save it up and then deploy the capital. So we used that for our third property.

Dave:
And what kind of deal was it similar to the small multifamilies that you had done previously?

Paul:
Yeah, this was a single family home. The list price was one 50. We bought it for one 70 and then this one we stuck probably another 20,000 into fixing it up. It was a similar situation, really good house in our neighborhood, good bones, but the person that lived there had lived there for, I don’t know, I think 50 years and didn’t do much updates on the inside. So it was dated and needed work. We gutted the kitchen, we replaced all the flooring, but other than that, it was a lot of cosmetic.

Dave:
And are you able to use the 401k to finance the renovations as well, or is it kind of like a line of credit kind of thing? You can spend it on what you want.

Paul:
Sure. Yep.

Dave:
Oh, amazing. Catch us up to today. What have you been doing ever since? Where are you at, I guess four-ish years after you began?

Paul:
Yeah, so since then we’ve acquired two more single family homes. Nice. We’ve got a HELOC now. We’ve leveraged that for the last one. We also have a 401k loan out on my wife’s 401k right now. So the max we can pull is a hundred

Dave:
Thousand. That’s pretty good, especially buying $200,000 property.

Paul:
Yeah,

Dave:
Pretty great.

Paul:
We sit down quarterly and we actually go through your real estate strategy. We go through each element of it and kind of talk about, okay, what are our plans over the next quarter, the next six months, and for this year, kind of the battle cry has been, let’s just pay everything back off, right? Let’s pay the HELOC off. Let’s pay the 401k loans back. You can also pay ’em back early. So it was like, let’s just get back to zero and kind of arm ourselves so we can go into 2026 and buy our next property. Well, today we walked through a property and might put in an offer. So I get yourself if I see a good deal,

Dave:
You just can’t help yourself there.

Paul:
Yeah,

Dave:
I

Paul:
Get it. So game plan is not to get a property until maybe late this year, early next year, but if a good deal comes by, I’m not going to just decide you’ve got to do it.

Dave:
Sometimes you got to do it. Yeah, absolutely. So what’s the deal that got you so excited?

Paul:
Well, the property’s like, I don’t know, three blocks from our house. It’s right by the park in the river. It’s within our buy box as far as price goes, and I’m kind of the Coach Carson approach, right? Small and mighty. I don’t plan on getting 50 doors. I really believe that if we bought one more property and then paid all of these off, we’d have enough to retire and we could probably get there in the next six years.

Dave:
That’s amazing.

Paul:
I don’t know that we would get necessarily the highest rents at this property, but just because of where it’s located, I think the appreciation long-term would be huge as a single family home. So I don’t know. I get excited to think that the day could come that we’d at least have all the properties that we need. Me knowing me, I’m never going to stop, but at least to know, Hey, I could get this. We could kind of pivot from, okay, we got to find the next deal to nope, let’s stick all the capital into paying all of these off and then get to a spot where our portfolio is steady enough that we don’t have to work. Now, we could still go and acquire other properties or do things from an investment perspective, but that risk is just not there.

Dave:
I think that’s so important, knowing what you want. Like you said, you don’t want to go out and buy 50 doors. It’s going to change your approach. For some people who want to scale, you’re not going to pay off your mortgages. That’s not going to become a priority to you. But you have spoken with your wife, your family, you figured out what you want, and you’re just going about it in a really methodic way. And that doesn’t mean you’re going to miss an obvious layup. You’re going to take a good deal when you can see it, but it sounds like this deal, even though it wasn’t your plan at the beginning of the year, it’s still aligned with your long-term strategy. This is still getting you. You’re not going outside your lane, you’re staying inside the plan that you have and just maybe trying to find a way to accelerate perhaps what your similar goal remains to be.

Paul:
Really, the approach that we’ve taken, and it just works for us, is I look for a property that I’m going to be proud to own, proud to put tenants in, and I would live there myself. I love that. I’m not looking at how much cashflow it’s going to generate, and then once it’s a property that I’m proud to add to my portfolio, then I work the numbers backwards. So I say, what do I think I could get for rents? What is the purchase price that we’re going to do and all these things? And then I actually start playing with the down payment. So even though I need to put for traditional financing 20% down, if the numbers don’t work at 20, let’s go to 25, let’s go to 30, let’s go to 35, and I’ll just keep upping that number until that number becomes what I’m deeming is ridiculous or way too high. I don’t want to put that much in

Dave:
For

Paul:
This house. Okay, well then I’ll walk away from the deal, but know that when I spout off some of these cashflow numbers, that’s not because I got in at 5% down some of these, I put 35% down on these properties, and now we’re in a really good place. And I also look at it as if I’m going to pay off this whole portfolio in the next five to six years anyways, who cares if I put more money down short term, I’m just speeding up where I’m going to go to anyways.

Dave:
Yeah, you’re going to pay less interest over the lifetime of that loan if you start with a higher line of principle.

Paul:
A hundred percent.

Dave:
It’s just smart. Yeah, I know. Yeah, and that’s why it really goes back to your goals, right? Paul has a clear goal. What’s the number? Like 10, 15 units or something like that you need?

Paul:
I think in all honesty, if we got anywhere between seven to 10 fully paid off units, at least here in this market, amazing. We’d be good. And you’re talking probably $11,000 a month cashflow, and we still have our 4 0 1 Ks and everything else that we’ve funded over the years.

Dave:
That’s the coolest thing. You think you could do it by 10, 12 years?

Paul:
Yeah.

Dave:
That’s unbelievable. It’s so great. I mean, that’s the thing is people talk about scaling quickly and optimizing, but you’re saying you’re taking a pretty conservative approach, not like crazy. You’re doing deals, you’re doing stuff, but you’re not leveraged to the max. You’re not pursuing cashflow at every cost. You’re just doing a pretty normal approach, what I think is a great, solid, smart strategy to real estate, and you’re going to replace all of your income in 10 years. That is so incredible. Yeah. Good for you, Paul. It’s a really cool story and I just love hearing it. I love your philosophy and your approach to each their own, but I just think you found a really cool way to make it work for you and your lifestyle. You have a career. You leverage the benefit of the career. You’ve been smart and built a 401k, you leverage the benefit of your 401k. You just finding ways to make it work and the result is coming. You’re going to be able to retire or have the option to retire at least 10 years into real estate. That’s unbelievable. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story, and congrats on all your success so far.

Paul:
Awesome. Thank you.

Dave:
And thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets podcast. If you think anyone you’re friends with or who’s doubting getting into real estate could benefit from hearing Paul’s story, please share this episode with them. I’m sure a lot of people can learn a lot from Paul’s approach to real estate. Thank you all so much for listening. We’ll see you next time on the BiggerPockets podcast.