Here's a simple rule for building wealth through real estate. Get your own financial house in order

before you go buy someone else's. Today's guest has bought dozens of properties and he reached

financial freedom in his 30s. And his secret isn't finding better deals. It's actually

having a rock solid financial foundation underneath his investing, saving money, using leverage,

managing risk. And he's created a system around these ideas that help him build millions of

dollars in equity. And today, he's sharing all 11 steps so you can do the same.

What's up, friends? Dave Meyer here, chief investment officer at Bigger Pockets. My guest today on the show is Andrew Giancola. He's the host of the Personal Finance podcast. Andrew has successfully bought, operated, and sold many different businesses, and that includes several years as a full-time real estate investor. And through those experiences, he's seen one skill set that separates the

investors who succeed from those who fail. It's a strong understanding of personal finance.

So Andrew actually built a system around it. He calls it the financial freedom stack, and it combines real estate investing strategies

with financial best practices, like emergency funds and market exposure, into one simple

and repeatable package.

Today on the show, he's breaking down this 11-step framework to show you exactly when

you should be saving, when you should be investing, when you should be paying down debt, and when it's time to scale your portfolio. If you want to build wealth in real estate without feeling financially stretched, this episode will show you exactly how. Let's bring on Andrew. Andrew, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Great to have you. Dave, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here. For people who don't know Andrew or his podcast yet, maybe you could just give us a brief introduction of who you are and how you're involved in the real estate and investing space. Sure. So my name is Andrew Jincola. I am the host of the personal finance podcast. And my entire goal with

that show is to actually create a million millionaires. That's the initial goals that I had when I set

out to create the personal finance podcast. And our entire goal is to kind of empower you with your money.

And that is the big thing that we do over there. And so I started investing in real estate back in the day where I

was a sweat equity partner. So I was a sweat equity partner with two cash partners and got into

real estate in 2015 and then exited and kind of sold my portfolio with those partners in 2018.

We've got a lot of cool stuff just within those last couple of years. It is something

that is one of my favorite ways to invest overall and something we talk about all the time in the

show and it is a huge, huge deal for the things that we talk about every day. Let's talk about

your wealth building journey a little bit though. So it sounds like you've done a lot of stuff,

...