Welcome to everyone to the real estate and financial independence podcast.

My name is Chad Carson.

You can always call me Coach Carson as well.

And we have another interview episode.

I'm so excited to interview Craig Curlop.

And we're going to talk about house hacking.

We're going to go deep and take a deep dive about house hacking. We're going to talk about how that can help you achieve financial freedom through house hacking. We're going to talk about Craig's book, House hacking strategy, which is just coming out soon. And I'm just excited to have you here, Craig. Thanks for being on the podcast with me. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me here. Really appreciate it. No problem. So I want to give a little background to our audience about you. I'll let you tell more of your own story. But as I mentioned before, Craig is the author of the brand new Bigger Pockets book, the House Hacking Strategy. He also works at Bigger Pockets. So I want to ask you about that a little bit. He's a financial analyst. Is that right at bigger pockets? Not anymore technically. I just switched roles. Yeah. So that's a little. Okay. Well, yeah. I'll let you explain that one in a second. All I know is he was the guy when I finally got a royalty check for my book. I was like, Craig was the guy who signed my check or sent it to me.

So that was pretty cool.

And so he got a finance degree from Northeastern University in Boston in 2015.

And his first step, my understanding, was he pursued this dream to go out to Silicon Valley,

working a startup, and hated it.

And said, this is not for me. I'm not going to do this and he

pivoted and realized started reading and kind of like a lot of us read the rich dad poor dad and some

other information and got got the bug for financial independence for improving himself and for

real estate investing a job opportunity to work for bigger pockets and I'm going to start there I want to ask you about that because we have a lot of people on my show who listen to bigger pockets and love bigger pockets as well like I do. What's it like working on the inside, working on the inside of bigger pockets. How's that done? Yeah. It's amazing, man. Everyone in the bigger pockets is super cool, super fun to hang out with. But also, you know, we get our stuff done. That's the most important thing. One of our values is have fun and get it done. And I think that's kind of like really what sums it up here in the workplace. I got to visit one time, kind of behind the scenes story. And I went to headquarters. We were out in Colorado visiting. And I went there for a day and got to meet everybody in person and got to meet Craig as well. And I got destroyed at a game of ping pong. I was like, you guys, you do work hard, but you obviously play some ping pong during the day at some point. I just got like run off, I got run off the court there. Yeah, and an average ping pong player will probably lose here for sure. Yeah, but you have the game up there. All right. So I want to go, I want to talk about your story, Sam. I want to talk about the book. And we talk about kind of take an even deeper dive in house hacking because I love house hacking. People who listen to the show know we've had episodes on it. And I talk about it a lot. And I was so excited that you wrote this book because I just think

this story needs to be told more and I think you're a perfect person to tell it.

So I want to tell everybody about your story and let's start with that new move that you

made from California and what motivated you to start making some of these, you know, what some

people would consider crazy lifestyle choices, finance choices and tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, so it really all started with, you know, that job that I really hated out in Silicon Valley, right? And with the straw that brought the Campbell's back was it was, it was like a nice summer weekend. It was me and my girlfriend at the Times last weekend together because we were both moving away. And like, she was moving to Paris and I was moving back to Boston. So like not at all close to each other. And on the last night, it was that Sunday night. We were coming back from Big Sur is where we were. I get an email for my boss saying that saying, hey, you have to get this memo out by 8 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, which is 5 a.m. Pacific time on Monday. So I was just like, what? So my night was completely destroyed, right? And so my last night with my girlfriend at the time, completely destroyed. And we were both very unhappy about it. And I was like, man, is this what the rest of my life is going to be like? I probably won't marry this girl, but like this is like a precursor to what I'm doing for later on. Like, no way. Screw this. And so I started doing research, trying to figure out how I could retire early, all this kind of stuff. I read Tim Ferriss's four-hour work week and realized I need a past stream of recurring income. And so I was thinking of dumb things in Silicon Valley. I was thinking of startup ideas that I could try and apps that I could make, but nothing was coming to me. So I stumbled upon real estate, some of upon bigger pockets and, you know, went very, very, very far down the rabbit hole. And here we are today. So you got that, so you got that opportunity to work there using your skill set.

And from my understanding, the culture there is a workplace.

It's also one that you work hard, you enjoy your family life, you travel.

And so it's one of those, it's a little bit different style than maybe you had it at the Silicon Valley place.

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