Early Retirement at 36 by Doing What EVERY Entrepreneur Should

Mindy:
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me, as always, is my wearing-his-CEO-hat-today co-host Scott Trench.

Scott:
Thanks, Mindy, great to be here, and I always appreciate you bringing such a positive attitude. We’re here to make financial independence less scary, less just-for-somebody-else, to introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting.

Mindy:
Scott, on today’s episode, we are speaking with Jeremy Schneider from Personal Finance Club about how he was able to retire early at the age of 36.

Scott:
We usually talk to W-2 income earners, and the traditional story is spend less, earn more, invest, create, and gradually move toward financial independence. But Jeremy’s story of entrepreneurship is a story of attaining entrepreneurship all at once in one big moment. And very different, very fun, very interesting look into the different dynamics of it. And I hope that as you listen to this episode, you’re going to think about the parallel journey that happens from a W-2 path versus a entrepreneurial one. So stay listening because we’re going to dive deep into the sale of his company, the emotive experience around it, and peel back the onion and peel back the curtain into the process behind selling a business after a 10-year entrepreneurial journey.

Mindy:
Today we are talking with Jeremy Schneider from Personal Finance Club. Jeremy, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today.

Jeremy:
Thank you. Hi, Mindy. Nice to see you guys.

Mindy:
Jeremy, you’re an unemployed bum at the age of 36. Let’s talk about that.

Jeremy:
I was an unemployed bum at 36. Now I’m an unemployed bum at 43.

Mindy:
Oh, so let’s talk about how you became unemployed at 36, or as we like to say here, financially independent.

Jeremy:
Sure. My story is I was offered a job at Microsoft as I was graduating college. I had a degree in computer science, and I turned it down. And yeah, I know, it was more money than I ever had seen in my life. Of course, I was a broke college student. Instead, I decided to start a company. I had no idea what I was doing. I literally was Googling “how to start company.” I didn’t even know, do you fill out a form? Do you just shout out your window that you’re starting a company? I literally had no clue even the semantics of it, much less the difficult stuff like getting clients and growing revenue and things like that.
But the first few years were rough. I think my first full year in business I made $14,000 in top line revenue, and then take away expenses. It wasn’t enough to even afford to eat, and so I was living on credit cards for a couple of years. I racked up about $12,000 in credit card debt, living extremely frugally, pinching pennies at the grocery store just to make ends meet. But it kept going better. Eventually I was able to pay off the credit card debt, started hiring people. I had a team of seven, and then I sold the company at the age of 34 for just over $5 million.

Mindy:
Oh, so that was a better bet. I was going to ask you, was there any time during that first year that you were like, wow, I should have gone and worked for Bill?

Jeremy:
Constantly. I think anyone who’s an entrepreneur, if you are and you don’t know that everyone else feels this way, then I’ll tell you right now, I think everyone who’s an entrepreneur feels the emotional roller coaster constant, what’s it called? Imposter syndrome. There’s definitely days and weeks and months where I just was like, all right, this is a massive mistake. I’m a failure. I’m bad at life. But then the phone rings, and someone’s interested, and you start multiplying numbers together in your head. You’re like, oh, wait a minute. I might be a billionaire here. So it’s both. But there’s definitely times where I regretted going off on my own.

Scott:
So are you comfortable sharing revenue and profitability of the company as it grew and at the time of exit?

Jeremy:
Absolutely. I think that there’s too much shame and secrecy around money, and so one of my own personal traits is I’m just super transparent. I love sharing all the stuff. But we were a tech company, strangely it’s actually in the rental housing advertising space. I know in the BiggerPockets forum, there’s lots of mention of my company. The company is called RentLinx, which is a apartment advertising syndication service where you can post an apartment for rent on one website and have it automatically syndicate to 50 different websites.
That said, I recently got an email that they’re shutting it down now eight years after they acquired it. Is that eight years ago? So if you’re hoping to use RentLinx and listening to this, you’re out of luck. But that’s what it was. It was a software company. And the year that we sold, our top line revenue was just under a million dollars. I think it was $975,000, and our profit of that 975 was about 25,000. So we basically were spending all of our money. We’d never taken any funding, we were bootstrapped, and so we were basically just hiring as we could afford.

Scott:
So there’s a number that’s really important when you talk about businesses and valuing them in understanding profitability, and it’s called seller discretionary earnings, which includes the profit plus the pay of the owner and operator of it. Could you share maybe what your estimate of that number would be for that final year?

Jeremy:
Very little because my take-home salary was $36,000 a year. I was the lowest paid employee at my company. And so when you talk about that type of business valuation, it’s generally not used in the tech world as much, because the acquiring company was more interested in growth potential and strategic advantage and the value of the technology. They weren’t really looking for just a business they could collect profits from. The $25,000 of profit plus my $36,000 salary, whatever that equals, $61,000 or something. Not very much money.

Scott:
Well, the reason I’m asking is because I think what’s so fascinating about your story is that a parallel universe, you go and join Microsoft, and you probably earn big bucks after 10 years. And I think that’s one of the things I’d love to learn as we dive into this journey is, how much farther ahead did you get from starting a company here? Surely far ahead from it. And what was the experience like around that? Because I think that’s an interest that at least I have in stories like yours is just a parallel world where you could have got that career at Microsoft, probably come out at 34 or 35 with two to $3 million in net worth potentially if you’d invested and saved up, but not quite here. And I don’t know, what’s your reaction to that thesis?

Jeremy:
No, I’ve done that thought experiment many times, and I think my initial offer back in 2003 was $90,000 or something like that. But you project climbing the corporate ladder at Microsoft and RSU stock options, whatever it is. There’s so many unknowns. Would I have moved to Redmond and bought a million-dollar house and started buying speed boats or something because I hated my life, or could I have lived dramatically below my means and saved 80% of my salary? And when I did the back napkin math, I was better off starting my own company and selling it, but also I exited as a founder and sold it for millions of dollars. And so that’s not typical, but also it was a relatively small acquisition as far as tech companies go, $5 million, obviously a massive amount of money to me, but it’s not like a billion or something.

Mindy:
Up next is a break, but when we’re back, Jeremy will tell us about what he did with the millions of dollars he received from selling his company.

Scott:
And we’re back. Before the break, we spoke to Jeremy about starting and selling his business and retiring at the age of 36. Next, we’ll be hearing from Jeremy if early retirement is all it’s cracked up to be. Well, so if you earn $61,000, I assume, in the peak profitability year, were you able to accumulate and save money from a personal financial perspective during the time you were building your company? Or what did that look like from a personal financial standpoint, pre-exit?

Jeremy:
I always personally didn’t really count the business’s money towards my personal life. I was trying to do what everyone else was, like live below my means and invest. And so I was always the lowest paid employee at my company. I was using the company’s revenue to hire employees to grow the business, not to basically enrich myself, looking for a bigger exit one day. And so I took home $36,000 a year and I spent about 30 or 31,000 a year. And with the other 5,000 or so, I put it into a Roth IRA. The first couple of years, that wasn’t true. I was living on a credit card. The third year I was basically break even, and then years four through 12 or whatever, that’s what I was doing.
And so my net worth at age 34, 10 seconds before a wire hit my bank account, was about $100,000 or so. So I had no debt. I bought a Ford Explorer Sport for $3,000 in cash, a ’99 Ford Explorer that I drove. When I was negotiating this multimillion dollar acquisition, I was driving my ’99 Ford Explorer that I had been driving for the last six or seven years or whatever. And I was just trying to build wealth the old-fashioned way by living below my means and buying and holding index funds.

Scott:
Awesome. This is so fascinating to me. So we’ve built this business, we’ve sold it, we have a wire for 5 million bucks. Let’s talk taxes here. How do taxes work on the sale of a company in terms of setting somebody up for financial freedom?

Jeremy:
So an important piece of information. A few years into the business actually, my mom joined the company. She bought 30% of the company for what we called the book value, which was basically just replacing the cash in the checking account. And so she gave me $1,500 and got 30% of the company. And so the day we sold, my mom and I together owned 100% of the company, me, 70%, she 30%. And we basically had a phantom stock deal with our five employees that they would get a payday too. So my share was about $3 million. My mom’s share was about $1.5 million, and then the other 500,000 was employees and then a little bit in legal fees and stuff. So my 3 million bucks, I live in the great state of California, which doesn’t distinguish between income and capital gains tax, which frankly I think politically is the right thing to do, but when it affects you poorly, it’s not so great.
And so I wrote a big honking check to the government, about a million bucks that year. So 300-some thousand to the State of California and 600,000-some to the federal government. And if you’re listening to this podcast and these numbers are mind-boggling to you, they were to me, too. Literally, a week earlier I was pacing the aisles of the grocery store trying to look for something that’s 10% less money. But then on that day, I wrote a $650,000 check to the federal government and mailed it in, literally a check that I mailed it in. And then they wrote me a letter back, a very sternly worded letter that said, “What are you doing? You can’t send us a check this big. You have to go through the EFTPS system. You have to send it electronically,” yada, yada yada. And they’re like, “We cashed it, but next time.” And I was like, “I didn’t know. I’d always just written a check. That’s what I thought. You’re the government, you deal with checks,” or so I thought. So they cashed the check, by the way, but they were still sending me a sternly worded letter.

Mindy:
People who send me checks for $600,000 do not get a sternly worded letter from me. I will say thank you.

Jeremy:
Exactly.

Mindy:
Try it, Jeremy. Send me a check for 600,000. I’ll send you a big thank you.

Scott:
And Jeremy, I just want to call out here how special it is that you’re answering all these questions that are so blunt, so direct, and so big, and with such a massive financial situation. This is going to help a lot of people, I think, open a window into the realities of this world. One of my reactions and maybe other people listening are feeling the same thing is, oh, you sold a company for $5 million and you walked away with $2 million. That’s actually way less than I would’ve anticipated in there. And there’s a whole bunch of things. It’s a huge outcome. It’s awesome with all that. But there’s so many things that I think are running through people’s minds that are transitioning about entrepreneurship because of your story.
And I think you’re the real deal with what an entrepreneur goes through and a huge success story in this. And I think there’s tons of misconceptions around this. One of those that I think you just highlighted that I’d really like to dive into is the day before close or the week before, I’m looking at the grocery store and trying to save 10 cents on a can of beans over here. What was the process like to sell the company? How long did that take? And what was your mindset in the weeks leading up to going from 100,000 in 10 years to millions of dollars in the bank? What was that like emotively?

Jeremy:
Well, Scott, I would like to actually compliment you because very few people ask me these questions, and I love talking about it. And I think that just there’s so much secrecy around money, for whatever reason, people are afraid to even ask the questions. And I love talking about it, just for the exact reason you said. Everyone has this whatever they saw on TV or in pulp culture, the ideas of what companies like or private jets and champagne. And that’s not real, that’s Instagram fiction or whatever. And so I love that you’re asking pointed questions, and someone listening to this might be able to hear one real true experience. It started with a negotiation. I drove up to their office in Santa Barbara. We sold to a company called Appfolio, which I’m sure you guys have heard of, is a property management software company who’s doing extremely well these days.
And on the agenda was they basically introduced me to all the different departments at their company. And then at the end of the day, they had this agenda item, which is negotiate sale of the company or negotiate price. And I’d gotten advice from other people. I had called a few friends who I knew who had been through something like this, and they said, “Don’t negotiate in person. Have a business broker.” I chose to ignore that advice and negotiate in person because I thought that these people were operating in good faith, and I still think so.
To make it a longer story short, he put up a PowerPoint on the screen that basically was going through what they liked and didn’t like about our company, trying to lower our expectations, I think. And when I say ours, me and my mom and the CEO of the company in the conference room, and then on the screen, he basically said, “We were prepared to offer you $3 million.”
And when we drove up to Santa Barbara, we basically had a discussion, what’s our number? And we decided 2 million was our number, a dollar less than 199,909 we would walk away and be happy, but 6 million was the number that we thought would be a good price we’d be really happy with. And offers weren’t exactly flowing in. And like I said, I was pretty broke. And so even turning down 199,999 seems crazy. But we basically in the next five minutes, we went back and forth and landed on 5 million. And I was like, all right.
And then what came after that was I think almost four months of due diligence. That was in November and the deal didn’t close until April 1st of 2015, and they pushed it off for some accounting financial reasons or whatever. But during that time, I was losing sleep, literally, because we were basically now preparing to be sold, putting the company on hold. We’re still doing business, but certainly my focus and my team’s focus was on selling the company, and if it fell through, we would have spent a lot of money on lawyers, and it would be rough. So I was losing sleep.
But then one day there’s an Excel sheet, an XLS file that had everyone’s name on it and their bank account numbers, and Jeremy, 3 million, Amanda, my mom, 1.5 million, each of our employees 150,000 or whatever they were getting each. And then our law firm, and that was the wire. There’s a million legal documents. This is the one that mattered to me. This is where the money’s going to actually go. And so then on that day, I actually have a video of myself videoing my checking account and clicking refresh. Because I had done a wire a week earlier to clear some of the cash out of that account because there’s supposed to be a cash-free deal. And so I learned they send you an email when you get a wire.
And so I knew I was going to get this email, so in anticipation, I opened up my bank account around the hour they’re supposed to do it and just had the screen up waiting for that email. The email came through. I started the video camera. I literally clicked refresh. And so I have the moment where, and I’ve actually shared it, it’s public at this point, where it went from 100,000, my lifetime net worth with that Roth IRA, to 2.1 million.

Mindy:
So what did you do with that $2 million? It was 3 million because you had the taxes or whatever. And then did you invest any of that? Were you working for the company? Did you have to stay on for a year afterwards type of clause in the contract?

Jeremy:
Yeah, not all 3 million came to me on that day. I think more like 2 million did and then, or maybe two-point something, and then I say point-something like whatever, a few hundred thousand dollars between friends. And then I think there was an $800,000 retention bonus that came six months later that they were also trying to do for accounting reasons, trying to move some of the expense to a different quarter or whatever. Other than that retention bonus, I had no employment contract. Usually with small businesses like mine that get acquired, they basically require that the founder stay on, or the key executives or whatever stay on for usually three years is pretty typical from my understanding. With me, I think they had a previous acquisition. This is getting into not my transparency, but their transparency, but they thought they would better leave with a carrot than a stick, basically based on a bad experience, I think.
And so they’re like, “If he wants to leave, let him leave. Otherwise, we’ll just treat him well as long as he wants to be there.” So I ended up working for the company for two more years and then left on really good terms. Still love AppFolio. I really appreciate that they gave us a bunch of money. Now eight years later, my brother used to work for me. He was an engineer, software engineer worked for me. He still works for AppFolio as well as probably my two best employees. So AppFolio has still treated my team really well. And then with my money, I spent that interim period where we had shaken hands on this $5 million number, but the wire hadn’t come through yet.

Scott:
You were paying yourself $36,000 a year pre-acquisition. Did that base salary continue post-acquisition?

Jeremy:
It did not continue. Actually, I got a really healthy raise. I think my post-acquisition salary was 150,000, so it wasn’t giving me half a million dollars, but definitely was like, it was crazy money to me. Ignoring the $2 million in my bank account now, the paychecks I was getting every two weeks were wild. I was spending a quarter of them or something.

Scott:
So that’s the next piece. You go from having 100,000 and a $3,000 car and all this stuff, and now all of a sudden you have a huge pile of money in the bank. What do you do spending-wise? Do you immediately buy a house? How does that work? What’s the thought process, and what did you end up doing?

Jeremy:
To answer Mindy’s question that I didn’t quite get to is did I invest any of it, during that due diligence period where I knew that we had shaken hands on the purchase price but we hadn’t yet gotten the wire, I basically was doing all these thought experiments about what I was going to do with the money, how I was going to spend it. I was like, should I go buy a Lamborghini or something? And then I was like, where would I park it? I would look like a douche bag driving around to Lamborghini. It would feel so stupid. It’s so inauthentic to me. And so some of the itch to spend it got out of my system, but I also was reading about investing. I started reading every book on personal finance and investing I could find, and I realized like, ooh, all these books actually say the same thing.
It’s all pretty simple. It’s like spend less than you make, invest early and often, buy index funds, minimize fees. And so a couple of days after the acquisition, I sat down at my Fidelity account and I bought $2 million worth of index funds on a single day. It was another very wild experience where I was trying to save 10 cents at a grocery store a week ago, and now I’m clicking bought purchase on a million dollars worth of total stock market index fund. And to this day, spoiler alert, my net worth at that moment was like 2 million or so, and today I just actually this past month with our nice stock market lately just crossed 5 million. And so broad strokes, that’s been my financial journey since then is I’ve just basically held those index funds, and now I have 5 million.

Scott:
That’s unbelievable. You did exactly what you’re supposed to do, what all the math says you’re supposed to do. And you just did it and didn’t even sounds like think twice about it, didn’t touch it for 10 years. I wonder how many entrepreneurs actually follow through with following the textbook there, and you’ve been really well rewarded from that. It’s remarkable despite that that’s like, oh yeah, that’s technically what should happen. So congratulations. That’s awesome.

Jeremy:
There’s a few more mistakes in there. For sure, the lion’s share of my money, that’s true. But I also made a few more mistakes in there, but I definitely have avoided the pitfalls of burning all my money or making really big dangerous gambles or timing the market or changing strategies, things like that.

Scott:
So we previewed the conversation here by calling you an unemployed bum. When do we get to unemployed bum? And what happens from there?

Mindy:
Well, now he’s working there for two years. Before we go to there, I want to know about the dollar cost averaging that he didn’t do, it sounds like, when he bought $2 million worth of index funds. Because the internet, the personal finance community says that you need to dollar cost average, and you just dumped all 2 million into the index funds?

Scott:
Yeah, I don’t know if I could do that. That’s a great question. I don’t think mentally I could have handled what you did, even though it’s the right thing to do. That’s why I’m in awe of how you handled everything.

Jeremy:
No, literally I think, now we haven’t really gone to, but now I basically do my passion project, which is teaching people about personal finance and investing, and I post all this stuff very transparently. And I found my receipts. I was like, yep, there it is. There’s a million dollars worth of index fund purchases in a day, 2 million a day, or whatever it was, because there’s a few different ETFs I bought. The answer is knowing what I know now, dollar cost averaging or lump sum, they’re pretty close. Statistically lump sum is better. 70% of the time, you’re more likely putting the money in as soon as you get it because the market’s usually going up. That’s what I read at the time. And I am a computer programmer and a math guy, and I understand numbers decently well. And I just did it because like you said, Scott, I just think it’s the mathematical correct thing to do.
And so that’s what I did. But admittedly now talking to a zillion people about personal finance, that’s not necessarily right for everyone. I think there’s a calmness to dollar cost averaging, where if you do put in your 2 million and then the market drops 30% the next day, you don’t have to spend the rest of your life asking how much money did I waste there. If you were just putting in 10% a month for 10 months or something or whatever it is, you’d have a little bit more peace about that, I think.

Scott:
And I’ll just chime in. Dollar cost averaging is the concept of instead of Jeremy putting $2 million in a lump sum, it would have been him putting in, let’s call it, 50 grand a month for two or three years into the market. And the reason someone might do that is because they’re terrified of putting all the money in at the top of the market and having it go down at that point. That would defray that risk. Statistically, it’s better to put it all in at once, but the dollar cost averaging might help people who come into situations like what Jeremy came into maybe sleep a little bit better at night about the approach they’re taking.

Mindy:
Well, I think that dollar cost averaging, in this specific situation, if he’s putting $50,000 in every month for two years, he’s not putting his money in the stock market, the whole thing, for two years. What if you have two years of growth? What is that statement, more money has been lost by people trying to time the market than by people who have been in the market and it’s going up and down?

Scott:
I think he did exactly the right thing. I just think you’re like, “Hey, that’s what’s supposed to happen.” That’s what he did. It’s so simple. It’s so obvious, but it’s also probably so rare.

Mindy:
And not only, Jeremy, are you correct to do it, but Michael Kitsis said that you should do it like that as well. Lump sum it all the way in there. Episode 120, you can hear Michael say this because he’s so smart too.

Jeremy:
I’ve actually since built a dollar cost averaging calculator looking at every single month of the stock market going back to as early as S&P 500 data goes back in the late 1800s and saying, “What would be the difference if you did it over 12 months or 24 months or whatever?” And basically the end result is if you dollar cost average, all you’re really doing is instead of getting today’s price of the market, you’re getting the average price of the market over that period of time. And generally the market goes up. So if you take the average price from now until two years from now, it’s going to be generally higher than the average price or than the price from today. And you’re not doing anything magical about really buying low and selling high or anything like that. You’re just getting the average price. So I’m like, well, I guess I’d rather have today’s price than two years from now price.

Scott:
Let’s talk about how you became an unemployed bum. You leave the company on good terms. What happens at that point? Do you just stop work and beach bum at that point? What is the day-to-day like when we hit-

Jeremy:
Essentially, yes. I put in my net worth over those two years had grown to, I think, around 3 million, just there’s a couple of good years in the stock market plus my salary and all that. And I was realizing that while the growth of my investments is making more than my salary, why do I need to be working anymore? And I think if you’d asked me back then, I didn’t even know what FIRE was, financial independence retire early. I was just more back of the napkinning my own situation. So after two years, I put in my notice. And I didn’t hate the job or anything, but I was like, I can probably do better at something else and someone else can better … Because I was no longer an entrepreneur, I was just a middle manager at this company, someone else can take over my job.
And so I quit my job, and then I think three days later I was on a plane to Venice. And I coached beach volleyball in Italy for two months, because I’m a beach volleyball player and there’s this beach volleyball camp out there that imports Southern California beach volleyball players. And I’ve had friends who’ve done this. And I’m like, “Well, I can even do that because I’m building a company and don’t have two months to go be a beach bum.” But then I literally did. So I went to Italy, and then I went to Australia for a month-and-a-half. Bored one day at home when I came back, I saw an advertisement for StarCraft II and how it was now free, and it used to be 50 bucks, and even though I had 3 million in the bank, I was like, “Oh, I can save 50 bucks.”
And so I installed StarCraft II and I got hopelessly addicted and played video games for a year, just StarCraft II. And I basically just did what I thought you were supposed to do, be on vacation, work out, travel, play video games, every day is a weekend. And for sure that’s fun for a while it was definitely like-

Scott:
You were 34 at this time?

Jeremy:
I was 36 now. I sold the company at 34, retired at 36, or became unemployed at 36, whatever you want to call it. My unemployment bump period basically lasted about a year. And traveling, I went to Mexico in a camper van with no services. I was, I don’t know, just trying to be a bodybuilder and eat protein and work out twice a day, just all the stuff that you just suddenly have time for. But after a year of that, I don’t know, it got boring, and I didn’t really want my life story to be I had a big win when I was 34, and then I was a waste of life for the next 50 years or whatever. And my own enjoyment of life, I think, was less because there was no goal. I think a lot of joy in life comes from making progress towards something, working towards a goal, building something. I personally like building things.
And so they say the reward for financial independence is an existential crisis. The book Die With Zero makes some good points, which is the goal of money isn’t to be 80 and have the most money in your bank account as you roll into the grave. It’s to maximize your life value. And so for sure, at 36 I was still pretty young, but I tried to do the backpack around hostels thing, and I felt pretty old for that, to be honest. Even though I had a big win relatively young, I think we all need to be remembering to jump on these temporal opportunities to live life to the fullest when it happens. Because if you want to go skydiving, this is probably the year because it’s probably not going to be when you’re 80. So even though I had a young win, I still think living your life in your twenties and thirties, that’s a good idea.

Scott:
Well, Jeremy, can you tell us when people can find out more about you?

Jeremy:
My Instagram is where I do most of my personal finance education @personalfinanceclub.

Scott:
Thank you so much for sharing your story. This was truly fascinating, wonderful, unique, but probably there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who have gone through what you’ve done, even though it’s a smaller percentage of the population, and it’s a wonderful glimpse into another way to achieve financial independence. Thank you for sharing the ins and outs so transparently and the beach bum days, too. How good did you get in StarCraft, by the way?

Jeremy:
I think I was low platinum. Any 12-year-old in South Korea would annihilate me, but I could probably hang with the other 37-year-olds or whatever.

Scott:
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Really appreciate it and hope to chat again soon.

Jeremy:
Thanks so much, guys. This was a blast.

Mindy:
Scott, that was so much fun listening to Jeremy really dive deep into how you sell a company that you own. That was really fascinating, and I loved your questions that you were asking him, because you’ve got this business mind that I just don’t have. And that was really a lot of fun to hear Jeremy share those stories.

Scott:
As a CEO who has been through various investments with BiggerPockets, for example, I’ve had a glimpse into this window. I’ve never been the entrepreneur who founded a business, of course, with that. But it’s just fascinating to get a peek into what it’s like on the other side. I’m a W-2 guy, you’ve worked out long career, Carl worked a long career. It’s different. It’s not what you expected. It’s not like the riches pile up overnight and he’s earning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You earn very little, almost maybe below a living wage for what people consider maybe in California for many of those years. And then had a huge pile at the end of the rainbow, but not quite as big as the whole valuation of his business after taxes were there. And so it’s just so fascinating to get an insight into that huge outcome for him, of course, but maybe not quite as big as you would think, when you’re on the outside looking in at an entrepreneurial journey and think about a $5 million business sale.

Mindy:
That was quite eye-opening, and I was so thankful that he was able to share it. Sometimes there’s non-disclosure clauses attached to these sales, and sometimes the entrepreneur just doesn’t want to share. So I was really thankful for Jeremy to be open with us. That was a lot of fun.

Scott:
Rare treat to get an insight into this world here.

Mindy:
Should we get out of here, Scott?

Scott:
Yeah. Oh, and one more thing. It sounds like Jeremy probably should have moved out of California for a few weeks at that point. Just kidding. Follow the laws in wherever you’re living when you go through all these things. But yeah, let’s get out of here with that.

Mindy:
That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. He is Scott Trench, and I am Mindy Jensen shouting out the Morro Bay Skateboard Museum by saying, “Later skater.”

Scott:
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please give us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. And if you’re looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney.

Mindy:
BiggerPockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. Produced by Kailyn Bennett. Editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting by Nate Weintraub. Lastly, a big thank you to the BiggerPockets team for making this show possible.