How to Retire with Rentals in Just 10 Years (It’s Still Possible!)

BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

BiggerPockets

Education, Business, Investing

4.8 • 16.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Want to retire early? You don’t need millions of dollars in stocks, retirement accounts, or cash to do it. You might just need a handful of rental properties. Today’s guest, Paul Novak, only started investing four years ago in 2021, but he’s already nearly at his early retirement goal through rental property investing. He may only need one or two more rentals to fully retire in his mid-40s. Want to trim twenty years off of your working career? Follow Paul’s plan! After realizing that stock investing could only get him to retirement so fast, Paul knew he needed a better path to early retirement. He thought real estate could be the answer. The problem? This was 2021, where every house was going over asking and competition was steep. He finally got a deal done after previous ones fell through and found he was already making 10 times more money than his stocks were giving him. It became a no-brainer to repeat the strategy. Fast forward to 2025, Paul has five rentals, with seven units in total, and he’s nearly at his cash flow goal to retire from his job. He did it all through some very creative rental financing. One more rental could unlock the holy grail: early retirement, time freedom, and plenty of passive income. And this is just four years into his investing journey! In This Episode We Cover How to retire early in just ten years with boring, repeatable rental deals 401(k) loans, HELOCs (home equity lines of credit), and other ways to fund your rentals Why interest rates don’t matter as much as you think they do How to run your numbers on rentals so you’re ALWAYS making money Why you don’t need a dozen or more rentals to reach financial freedom And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1123 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	This investor needed only five rental properties to put himself on the path to early retirement.
0:06.1	Even after accumulating huge debts in his 20s, he was able to start buying real estate using
0:11.7	a repeatable, kind of boring strategy that almost anyone else can follow.
0:16.5	Now he's cash flowing thousands per month and will have the option to leave his job in his
0:20.8	mid-40s
0:21.4	if he wants instead of working another 20 years.
0:25.0	Keep listening to find out how he did.
0:32.5	Hey everyone, I'm Dave Meyer.
0:34.3	I'm the head of real estate investing at Bigger Pockets.
0:36.5	And I've been buying rental properties for 15 years now. Today's show is an investor story with Paul Novak from
0:43.0	Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and this one's going to be a lot of fun. Paul started investing in
0:48.4	dividend stocks in his mid-30s, but soon realized he'd need millions of dollars in principle to ever
0:53.8	actually replace his W-2 income.
0:56.8	So that led him to discover real estate, and he wound up buying his first rental property in 2021.
1:03.7	Now, fast forward a couple of years. He has seven rental units and a clear path to more than $10,000 in monthly cash flow in less than 10 years after
1:12.6	he first started investing. In this episode, we're going to hear from Paul how he found a
1:18.1	creative way to fund his deals and pay the interest to himself instead of a bank, why he doesn't
1:23.8	aspire to accumulate hundreds or even really dozens of rental units and why he found
1:28.7	that his corporate career prepared him for all the ups and downs of property management.
1:33.5	This is a great conversation. It's a lot of fun. Let's get into it. Here's me and Paul Novak.
1:39.9	Paul, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Thanks for being here. Yeah, super pumped about it. I
1:44.8	literally watch every episode when it comes out and now to actually be on telling my stories,
	...

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