What if you could reach financial independence without ever earning a six-figure salary?

Today's guest did exactly that, never making more than $40,000 a year, yet still achieving financial independence in his 30s.

History challenges everything we think we know about income, saving, and what it really takes to build wealth.

Let's get into it.

Thank you. saving, and what it really takes to build wealth. Let's get into it. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast.

My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always,

is my always loves a smoking hot deal co-host Scott Trench.

Thanks, Mindy, love netting great deals.

And today we're going to talk about how Kyle served up a bunch of them across his career.

Today we're going to talk with Kyle who really never earned a significantly large income, but still achieved FI in his 30s through a combination of really smart decisions here.

And I'm excited to hear about that story because I know that's a big knock on the fire community in a lot of cases is it's hard to find folks who consistently earn relatively low income and still achieve fire in their 30s or even their 40s without doing something crazy. And Kyle fits that mold. And so Kyle, thank you so much for coming on the show today to share your journey. Absolutely, Scott Manny. Thanks for having me here. So could you give us a little bit of a background and, you know, how did things set up for your journey to financial independence and where does it begin? Sure. Yeah. I would say it's like growing up, my parents ended up what I did not know were your typical millionaires next door. They worked hard, paid off all their debt, drove, paid off cars. So my mindset was

always kind of around that. And then kind of feeding into what we'll talk about later as far as

like my occupation. My parents instilled a passion for tennis in my life at an early age. That's how

they met. And then so I started playing. And then my first job in high school was actually teaching tennis and then stringing tennis rackets.

Kind of did that all the way through college. Graduated in 2012. And when I took my first big boy job, I found that I still missed teaching tennis. So I went right back to teaching tennis three months later.

And what was your first big boy job? Well, it was supposed to be sales, very, very small company, ended up being

more of construction. I was led to believe it was sales, ended up doing construction, and all I

wanted to do is be back on the tennis court. So it didn't take me long after three months of pouring

concrete to be like, you know what, I can just go teach tennis again. And what does tennis teacher

pay? I guess for the audience, depending on where they live, it can be significantly different.

I live in Columbus, Ohio, and teaching tennis indoors where we're doing that, usually seven

or eight months a year, is not very lucrative compared to what you might be able to do if

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