From Starting Over at 30 to 17 Rentals (and Financial Freedom) 5 Years Later

BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

BiggerPockets

Education, Business, Investing

4.8 • 16.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At 30, Sarah King was forced to liquidate all her assets after a messy divorce. She had to start over and rebuild any wealth she had acquired, all while being a single mom to her one-year-old. Now, just five years later, she has 17 rental properties and is on track to retire early as a multimillionaire over a decade before traditional retirement age. She did it all with very little money and creatively found ways to invest without having a huge bank account. And she’s done it all while working full-time. After building up a small rental portfolio with her now ex-husband, Sarah already had some of the skillset to invest in real estate. The problem? Those properties were sold to pay for divorce fees, leaving her with little money, but a basic plan. Her next step? Find a duplex, renovate it to increase the equity, rent out one side, and live in the other, and…repeat. She did a house hack BRRRR (buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat)! With proof of concept, Sarah went on to repeat this renovation and refinance process, allowing her to scale, with little money, into a sizable rental property portfolio that will pay for her early retirement. Now, she’s got a plan to retire with $6M (yes, you read that right) in assets, and is giving you the framework she’s using to get there so that you can repeat it! In This Episode We Cover How to build a rental property portfolio with little money but a need for financial freedom The best first investment property to start building wealth with (you can do it with kids!) Why you do not need to use your own money to invest in real estate (private money 101) Better than long-term rentals? Why Sarah pivoted to this high-cash-flow strategy Buying homes for $200,000 (or less) and still raking in serious rental income And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1174 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	Today, we'll hear how one investor finds single-family homes and duplexes for $200,000 or less
0:07.3	that can gross more than $30,000 per year in a small Midwest market.
0:12.2	She now has 17 properties and is right on pace to retire from a demanding W-2 job
0:17.3	a full decade before traditional retirement age.
0:21.1	And that's even after an extremely challenging divorce forced her to liquidate almost
0:26.1	all of her assets and restart her investing from scratch.
0:34.4	Hey, everyone.
0:35.4	I'm Dave Meyer, a real estate analyst and also a rental property investor myself
0:39.6	for the last 15 years. Today on the show, we have Sarah King, who's an investor from Fort Wayne,
0:45.8	Indiana, who has grown from house hacking a single property as a single mom in 2020
0:51.7	to an impressive portfolio of 17 deals just five years later.
0:56.0	You may have heard Sarah on episode 698 of the show, that was about three years ago, but so much has changed since then that we wanted to bring her back on to provide an update.
1:07.0	So today, Sarah will tell us how she had originally set an early retirement goal at the
1:13.2	beginning of her investing career, but has already exceeded that decades before she'll turn 65.
1:19.5	We'll hear how she pivoted part of her portfolio in recent years as prices and interest rates rose,
1:25.7	and we'll also hear how she balances self-managing her
1:29.3	properties, even with a family and a demanding W-2 job. Let's welcome Sarah back to the show.
1:35.7	Sarah, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. It's great to have you.
1:39.2	Thank you so much for having me. It's exciting to be here.
1:41.6	Yeah, it's a great opportunity to catch up what you've been up to.
1:45.3	And I'd like to start our conversation today around 2020 because for those of our audience who
1:50.7	didn't listen to your previous appearance here on the Bigger Pockets podcast, you did some early
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