Retiring 15 Years Early by Buying Rentals on Repeat (HELOCs!)

BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

BiggerPockets

Education, Business, Investing

4.8 • 16.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if you could shave 15 years off your working career? Whether you love your job or hate it, having the option to retire early on a schedule you choose is something we are all working toward. Thankfully, you don’t need 100 properties to do it. Today’s guest did it with 15, slowly building a rental property portfolio and recycling his home equity so he could scale faster and reach financial freedom sooner. Tony DeGiacomo lived with his parents for years while buying rentals. Every single dollar he made was designated for a new rental property. He knew his goal: long-term wealth through real estate, even if it took some time. Some twenty years later, he’s got 15 properties, 30 or so units, and could comfortably live off the cash flow of his first property purchases. How’d he scale his respectable portfolio? Using HELOCs (home equity lines of credit) to turn one rental into multiple. Today, he talks about the even bigger deals he’s doing, how to make money before, during, and after a crash, and the reason he’s switched from buying to building properties for better returns. Tony can comfortably retire at 50, but will he when he’s having so much fun with real estate? No matter what he chooses, you can follow his “formula” to retire over a decade earlier. In This Episode We Cover How to retire 15 years earlier with a small (but scalable) rental portfolio How to use HELOCs (home equity lines of credit) to invest in rentals faster Why it’s crucial to have active income to buy real estate (DON’T quit your day job!) Building and converting commercial properties into rentals Why real estate is the best “get rich slow” scheme for regular people And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1153 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 found a formula that works in his market,
0:03.0	and he's stuck with it for almost two decades.
0:06.0	Now, he has almost 30 rental units,
0:09.0	which will give him the option to retire from his day job by age 50
0:13.0	without compromising his lifestyle in retirement.
0:16.0	That's the power of real estate.
0:18.0	You choose the strategy, you control the investments, and over
0:21.2	time, they'll start putting life-changing money into your pocket. Let's hear how we...
0:25.6	Hey everyone, I'm Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing here at Bigger Pockets.
0:35.6	I've been buying rental properties for 15 years now,
0:38.6	and on this podcast, we teach you how to achieve financial freedom through real estate investing.
0:44.1	Today, we're bringing you the story of an investor named Tony Di Giacomo. Tony lives in Rhode Island,
0:49.7	and he's invested through almost every era of the last couple decades, starting before 2008,
0:55.7	then continuing after the crash and buying properties consistently through the pandemic and
1:00.9	up to today. And what I think Tony's career shows is that it's possible to buy real estate
1:06.8	at almost any time. You just need to focus on a strategy, understand what a good deal looks like
1:12.3	in your market, build the necessary relationships, and be willing to act when the right
1:16.9	opportunity arises. Tony is doing all this and has been for a long time. He now has 12 different
1:24.2	properties that are going to fund his retirement long before the traditional
1:27.8	retirement age. And he's not doing any crazy direct-to-seller, time-consuming marketing or
1:33.6	risky financing strategies. He's just following the principles we preach on this show every
1:39.0	single week. So if you're not sure how to get started buying properties or even if real
	...

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