A lot of people think building wealth and reaching financial independence requires complicated

investing strategies, perfect market timing, or even an extremely high income.

But for most people, building wealth is actually driven by a few simple principles repeated

consistently over a long period of time.

In this episode, we break down the six steps to building wealth and achieving

financial independence. Hello, hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money

podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my loves to build wealth co-host, Scott Trench.

Thanks, Mindy. Great to be here. It's net worth it to me to come up with a really big pun for this particular intro. I think that many people make building wealth out to be much more complicated than it has to be. It's not extremely simple, but we can distill it into, I think, six fundamental building blocks, which are going to talk about today, and I'm looking forward to it. So with that, do you want to kick us off with step one?

Yes. So step one is tackle the big expenses. I don't want to throw a little, duh, after this,

but that is number one. Tackling your expenses because less money out for things can be more money

into investment accounts. So let's start with the big

three. Housing, transportation, and food. Housing isn't just your rent payment or your mortgage payment.

There's a lot more to it. In many cases, as a tenant, you're also responsible for utilities.

You have renters insurance. If you're a homeowner,

you've got even more expenses, taxes, insurance, your HOA dues, if applicable, repairs.

There's a lot that goes into your housing expense. And if you can keep this low, this is going to be

one of your biggest expenses ever. If you can, the lower you

can keep that, that's the less money going to housing and more money available for your investing.

Transportation, just like housing, it's not just the car payment. It's your gas, it's insurance,

it's maintenance and repairs. I think it's the repairs that a lot of people don't remember to factor in or

budget for. Food is restaurants and grocery stores, but it's also coffee out, drinks at the bar,

vitamins and supplements if you're taking those and not tracking them as a separate expense.

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