Financial Freedom with Just 4 Rentals? Why Small Portfolios Win

BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

BiggerPockets

Education, Business, Investing

4.8 • 16.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This investor quit her job for good, with just four rental properties. Not 40, not 400—four rentals. And she’s not looking to grow much beyond that. You’ve heard other investors talk about owning dozens, even hundreds of rental units, but you DON’T need to get to that scale to reach financial freedom. Antoinette Munroe is proof of that. After countless “I hate my job” Google searches, Antoinette found the FIRE movement (financial independence, retire early). This prompted her to start saving and investing at a far greater speed than before, hopefully giving her enough runway to quit. She had saved enough to buy her first house—but realized it could actually make her money. The accidental real estate investor was born! Fast forward around a decade later, Antoinette owns four rental properties with very high cash flow. She’s done flips, learned to renovate and rehab homes, added additions to increase value, split properties in two, and done whatever it takes to make more from one house. But does Antoinette want more rental units? Not really. She’s happy with her small and mighty real estate portfolio—unless an investment in one of her vacation destinations comes up for sale! In This Episode We Cover: Why you DON’T need a large rental property portfolio to quit your job The unique, high-cash flow rental properties Antoinette focuses on today Doubling your cash flow by “splitting” rentals with the right amount of space How to fight city code enforcement fines and reduce them by 90% Using a HELOC to buy rental properties (and get ALL your money back via BRRRR!) And So Much More! Links from the Show Join BiggerPockets for FREE Let Us Know What You Thought of the Show! Ask Your Question on the BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets YouTube Apply to Be a BiggerPockets Real Estate Guest BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Real Estate 710 - How to TRIPLE Your Rental Property Income with Group Home Investing w/Antoinette Munroe Baselane: Automate your real estate finances with banking and AI-powered bookkeeping. Claim your $100 bonus! Grab the Book, “The Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor” Sign Up for the BiggerPockets Real Estate Newsletter Find Investor-Friendly Lenders BiggerPockets Real Estate 710 - How to TRIPLE Your Rental Property Income with Group Home Investing w/Antoinette Munroe Connect with Antoinette Connect with Dave Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1120 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It only took four investment properties to change this investor's entire life.
0:05.4	She was sick of the corporate grind and looking for a more fulfilling lifestyle when she
0:09.7	accidentally discovered real estate investing.
0:12.5	Now, she's implemented strategies to maximize her monthly cash flow.
0:16.7	She's created systems to automate the parts of investing she just doesn't enjoy and is passionate about providing badly needed services for people in her community.
0:30.2	Hey, everyone, I'm Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing at Bigger Pockets, where we teach you how to achieve financial freedom through real estate investing.
0:38.8	Today's guest on the show is Antoinette Monroe, an investor operating in Florida and Georgia.
0:44.5	You may have heard her on the pod a couple of years ago back on episode 710, and we're bringing
0:49.6	Antoinette back because she's a great example of how you don't need some massive portfolio to change
0:55.3	your entire life. Like I said at the beginning, she only owns four properties, and she aspires to
1:01.0	stay small and mighty instead of growing to dozens or even hundreds of units. Antoinette and I are
1:06.7	going to talk about how she first dove into real estate after learning that there is another
1:11.4	path besides working that traditional career for 40 years. The strategy she's using today to
1:17.6	create multiple cash flow streams from each new property she buys and why her next investing
1:23.1	strategy is based all around the places she likes to vacation. Let's bring on Antoinette.
1:29.0	Antoinette, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Thanks for joining us again.
1:33.0	Thank you very much for inviting me back, Dave. Happy to be here. I want to start at the beginning
1:37.7	here. Tell me a little bit about where you were in your life when you started thinking about
1:42.7	investing in real estate for the first time?
1:44.6	Well, I wasn't thinking about it. This happened unintentionally. I was at a wedding, being introduced
1:50.5	to the wedding guest by one of my neighbors as a budding real estate investor. And then I remember
1:55.4	looking over to my boyfriend being like, I think I got to become a real estate investor.
	...

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