Scott Trench’s $1,000,000 Bet on Real Estate (Update)

Should you invest in real estate or pour your money into the stock market? It's a question you're probably asking yourself right now as you create your financial plans for the year and work on building wealth. So today we're digging into it. Should you put a down payment on that local property or buy more into the S and P five hundred? Hey, everyone. I'm Dave Meyer. Welcome to the BiggerPockets podcast. Today's episode is a follow-up to one of our most popular shows from a year ago. We've got former Bigger Pockets CEO, Scott Trench. A year ago on this show, he proclaimed himself a big bear on the stock market, and he announced he was selling $1,000,000 from his stock portfolio to reposition that capital into real estate in Denver. Now, a year later, S and P is up. It's up 15% from that conversation, and Scott is back. And I'll get an update on his life since stepping away as CEO of BiggerPockets, his recent work hosting the BiggerPockets Money podcast, and then I'll ask him if he has any regrets about that big financial decision he made last year. But more importantly, I'm also gonna get his take on the markets, stock and real estate and more, for the rest of 2026. I wanna find out, is Scott doubling down on real estate and continuing to sell off equities? Or maybe he's changed his outlook and he's back to stockpiling ETFs for the next twelve months. And I'm curious what he recommends for other investors striving towards the same level of financial freedom that he's achieved himself. So let's find out. Scott Trench, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast. It's so good to see you. Thanks for being here. Good to see you as well, Dave. It is it's been a while, and I'm sure the audience is eager to hear. For those of you who don't know, Scott graduated successfully financially free now and stepped away as BiggerPockets CEO a couple months ago. So what tell us what you've been up to. Yeah. I've been doing a lot of a lot of lifting weights, a lot of hiking. I got a ski pass for the first time in since 2017. Dude, that is way too long, actually, living in Colorado. That's Yeah. But this year, the goal is to go 10 times. So I got a ski trip planned, for two week, three weeks from now. And, yeah, just been hanging out, enjoying, enjoying life, and been doing the Bigger Pockets Money podcast and having a blast doing that. It's been really fun. Nice. What what's been going on over at Money? What are you guys focusing on these days? Yeah. We're we're basically the goal is to build a DIY financial planning toolkit. So I think it's very frustrating that you can't even find, like, a basic spreadsheet to put in your financial position if you are somewhat sophisticated investor with some …