We Achieved Financial Freedom in 5 Years with Rentals (Doing These 5 Things)

These investors reached financial freedom in less than five years of real estate investing. Today, they're sharing the five most important lessons they've learned along the way. Grace Guttenkopf and Amelia Magee started investing less than a decade ago. By 2021, they both left stable jobs to go all in on real estate. In the early years, it felt like the cash would never roll in. They were grinding, grabbing any deal they could get, wondering if they'd made the right choice by leaving their jobs. Then the shift happened. By year three, they started seeing real results, real cash flow. They could start being selective about what properties they bought and which partners they worked with. Now five years in, they both have stable portfolios and financial freedom. They're optimizing to achieve the simple, stress free real estate businesses they envisioned from the beginning. With these five lessons, you can follow the same path and soon have your own life changing passive income streams. Hello again, friends. I'm Dave Meyer. He is Henry Washington. Our guests today on the show are Grace Gudenkopf and Amelia Magee. You may know them as the founders of the wire community. They've spoken at BP Con and wrote the BiggerPockets book, The Self Managing Landlord. Grace and Amelia have each accomplished so much in this industry that it's hard to believe they've only been investing in real estate for about five years. But it's true. They both started separately right around 2019, and we wanted to have them back on today because I think their journeys have been very typical of what most investors experience. At the beginning, it's a grind. There are strategic pivots. And then if you hang on long enough, you achieve financial freedom. Grace and Amelia have learned a lot of lessons even during their relatively short investing career. And today, they're sharing the five most important lessons that will help you get to that financial freedom even faster. So let's bring them on. Grace and Amelia, welcome back to the show. We're excited to have you here. Thank you. Thank you. So we're gonna get into these five most important lessons you've learned from five years of investing. I actually wanna start at the end so people can hear what's on the other side of all the hard work that you've done. So maybe each of you can just summarize your investing careers and where your portfolio stand today. Amelia, let's start with you. Absolutely. So I've been investing since 2019, and I would say I'm your self proclaimed bestie girl, big sister, real estate investor here to share the lessons we learned over the last five, six, seven years. I invest in Des Moines, Iowa, and I currently have a portfolio of around 40 doors. I've dabbled in a little bit of everything, long term, mid term, and short term rentals. Grace and I are also the co authors of the Bigger Pockets book, The Self Managing …