How This Game-Changing FIRE Strategy Using Rentals Could Make You Richer Than Traditional Investing Ever Will

Dave:
There’s a new FIRE movement, and this time it includes real estate. You’ve probably heard of FIRE before. It stands for Financial Independence: Retire Early. And it’s a strategy for frugal living, saving as much money as possible, investing every extra dollar, and finally, somewhere along the way, retiring early. But here’s the thing, that doesn’t actually sound like fun. I don’t

Paula:
Want

Dave:
To live on nothing. I don’t want to never go out to eat. I don’t want to not go on vacation for years, and I don’t want to only invest in index funds, checking my stock portfolio to give me the green light on financial freedom. I want to decide my financial freedom, and I’m guessing you do too. Paula Pant, host of the Afford Anything podcast, was on that fire track, but she did things a little differently. She bought a handful of rental properties, paid them off early, even though she had low mortgage rates. She took a risk, worked for herself, and now is 100% in control of her own time, traveling the world while working. From her own experience, she created a new type of fire movement, F-I-I-R-E. It fixes your financial psychology, gets you to earn more income as you invest beyond stocks with real estate, and finally gives you the choice to build something bigger than yourself, all while achieving financial independence.
If you use Paula’s framework, you can afford anything. What’s up, everyone? I’m Dave Meyer, chief investment officer of BiggerPockets. Our guest today is Paula Pant from the

Paula:
Afford

Dave:
Anything Podcast. Let’s bring her on. Paula Pant, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Paula:
Thank you for welcoming me back on.

Dave:
I don’t know, Henry, if we’ve talked to anyone this OG of a guest on BiggerPockets before. You were episode 35. We’re on like 1,400 now. You were on the show in 2013.

Paula:
Yes.

Dave:
I hadn’t even heard of BiggerPockets back then. That is awesome.

Paula:
I have a distinct memory of recording episode 35. I was house hacking at the time, so I was house hacking in this triplex and I was in this room that had formerly been an outdoor… It had been a porch and we’d built some exterior walls, but not that well. And it was on a noisy street. And as the cars drove by, the whole place kind of shook a little bit. And I remember it was Josh and Brandon who were interviewing me, and I remember multiple points during that interview. They were like, “I’m sorry, are you in the middle of an airport runway? Are you on

Dave:
A

Paula:
Highway? Do you need help? Should we call AAA?”

Dave:
Well, that’s what being a real estate investor is. Sometimes you’re in a noisy, shaky house hack and that’s just how it goes.

Paula:
Exactly. Exactly.

Dave:
Tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do, how you’re involved in real estate.

Paula:
Sure. So my name is Paula Pant. I host a podcast called Afford Anything, and the podcast was really inspired by my early adventures into real estate investing. It started with that house hack on a shaky house hack and grew from there. And rental property investing for me became the genesis of what turned into a nuanced philosophy that’s more broadly about money and life. So the idea of affording anything is that you can afford anything but not everything, which means that every choice you make is a trade-off. And so the core question is what are the trade-offs that you are willing to make? What are the trade-offs that you want to make? Which is just another way of asking what’s the most important thing to you? What do you value? What do you prioritize? And that’s different from… There’s some people who are hyper-focused on tactics or they’re hyper-focused on returns.
I think that it’s asking the wrong question. When you’re solving for what before you solve for why, then you might spend years climbing the wrong ladder.

Dave:
That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, we hear this in real estate all the time, people who start going into deals and trying different portfolio strategies without really considering where they’re trying to get to. And it’s exciting to jump into real estate, but you can get lost easily that way. I think you can find yourself either exposing yourself to too much risk or just doing deals that you just straight up don’t like, which is not fun either. So I think it’s a great philosophy and we’re going to dive into the philosophy a lot on today’s episode. But before we do, I just kind of wanted to hear a little more. What was your real estate journey?

Paula:
Today I have seven rental units, residential rental units, all free and clear, 100% free and clear.

Dave:
Amazing. Wow.

Paula:
The philosophy that I came to where I was like, I don’t want to grow to 25 or 30 or 40 properties. I want enough properties that if they were all paid off free and clear, that money could cover my baseline cost of living. Nothing fancy or extravagant, but just I want enough money that work becomes optional and once I have that, then I’m good. And so that was what I grew with my rental property portfolio.

Dave:
I think it’s the best goal out there. If you can have no debt and that income on those properties pay for your lifestyle, that’s freedom. I think that’s the ultimate good feeling that people want from real estate. They think they want a thousand doors, but I think, I don’t know, Henry and I were just at BP Con. I think everyone really wants what you’re describing right now as actually the goal that most people want.

Paula:
Well, and what’s tricky about that is that when it comes to the question of your lifestyle, there’s never any ceiling to it. You could, if you wanted to, infinitely inflate your lifestyle. And I certainly live much better today than I did in 2013 in the middle of an airport hanger. But that was, for me, why I anchored my real estate goals around how do my parents live? Because they actually do a really good job of finding a status quo and staying there. How do they live? What is their baseline? They are not fancy designer cars, designer handbags people. They’re not even really restaurants people. They’re like, “We want a home that’s safe and clean and we want a life that’s respectable and modest and comfortable.” So to me, that was what I sought to build with specifically residential rental properties.

Henry:
That is the dream, and that is essentially what a lot of people get into real estate for. But what happens, there just becomes this aspect of growth and scaling and more, and people often go beyond those goals and end up building substantially more. I think part of it is because real estate is fun.

Paula:
Fun, yeah.

Henry:
Finding a good deal is exciting. You get that dopamine rush when you sign the contract on a good deal, you get that dopamine rush when you finish the renovation and you get it rented out or you get it sold. But a lot of investors end up not having the discipline to stop when they hit that goal because they see the potential in the money that could be made if I continue. So what gave you the discipline or the peace of mind to say, “You know what? This is enough. I hit my goal and I’m going to chill out here.”

Paula:
Well, I think it is a very human drive to build, to build, to create, to aspire, to strive, to do better, to at least set the goal that each year you build more, make more, do more than you did the year before. I haven’t shed that. I simply don’t use real estate as my path to that.

Dave:
It sounds to me like what your advice is, or maybe the way you did it is you’re not quitting to do nothing. You’re just being content with what you have and then taking your energy and finding something else to do. I’ve tried to do this, I’ll just be honest, it’s hard for me because you spend so much time as an investor getting good at it. Sometimes your hobbies, other hobbies fade away and it takes a little bit of work to try and figure out what else do I want to do?

Henry:
All your friends are investing and growing.

Dave:
Yeah, it’s tough.

Henry:
Very hard.

Paula:
I’ve got to say, so the reason that I stuck to residential is frankly because that was the first thing I learned, the financing, the insurance, just when you’re brand new, doing your first deal as a house hack is one of the simplest ways to get in. And it was after I started that, that I looked around and all my friends were like, “We’re buying mobile home parks.”

Dave:
Right? Yeah.

Paula:
And I thought about it because doing four or fewer units, I was like, “Well, the next obvious step would be to do five or more units. Do I want to do small apartment complexes? And then from there, do I want to go into mobile home parks or storage units or all of these things that my friends were all doing?” And again, you can learn anything but not everything. So is the skill that you want to learn how to invest in a different category of real estate because investing in storage units is very different than investing in triplexes. So do you want to learn how to invest in a different category of real estate or do you want to just stick with the category that you’re in, even if it may not provide the best returns, but it’s the category that you know, it’s where you’ve already developed your expertise, so you’re just going to continue doing that because swim in the waters where you’re already warm.

Dave:
Totally. I have this debate with people at events all the time. People always say, “I have this portfolio of X number of units and it’s doing great. What should I do next?” I’m like, “The same thing you were doing before? If it’s working, why do you have to do anything different?” I’m curious for Paula, what has having these seven paid off units done for you? What other avenues have you been able to explore and grow in?

Paula:
A few things. I host a podcast, so I spend a lot of my time doing that, trying to get better at YouTube. We recently went from an audio podcast to a video podcast, and YouTube is a very different skillset than just audio podcasting. So growing the audio podcast as well as growing the YouTube presence, trying to crack all of the various social media algorithms. And then outside of that, I love to travel. So this year I went to Singapore, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, London. I guess it was a lot of Europe this year.

Dave:
Amazing.

Paula:
Plus Singapore. Next year I’m heading to New Zealand, going to Egypt next year.

Dave:
Nice.

Paula:
Yeah.

Dave:
Well, I want to talk more about your big picture philosophy, Paul, because I think there’s a lot that our audience can learn from, but we have to take a quick break, so stick with us. We’ll be right back. Before we go to break, if you’re someone who’s bought a couple of deals and you’re looking to scale up your portfolio into something bigger, I have a really exciting announcement for you. BiggerPockets is hosting its first ever conference focused just on scaling up. It’s this December, it’s coming up soon, this December, 5th through 7th in Phoenix, Arizona. We’re going to have a full day of programming with speakers like myself, James Daynard, Kathy Fecke, and Devon Kinard talking about how to scale up and build a sustainable business. Tickets are on sale now, but there are only 100 tickets, so go to biggerpockets.com/conferences now and get your ticket today.
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Henry and I are here with podcast host Paula Pant talking about all things from real estate investing to exploring your passions outside of real estate. But Paula, you have a philosophy about personal finance that you’ve cultivated over many, many years. Can you tell us what it is?

Paula:
Sure. So first, I think of personal finance in terms of five pillars. I have this acronym, it’s the word fire with two I’s, F-I-I-R-E. And of course, you’re familiar with the FIRE movement, the financial independence retire early. With the FIRE movement, the FI, the financial independence part is critical. That’s the piece where your work optional. The retire early part is like take it or leave it. And so I’ve tracked along that same philosophy in double IFIRE, F-I-I-R-E, where the FII is critical, but the RI is optional. And so here’s the philosophy. I’ll explain FII and then we’ll go into each one. So financial psychology, increasing your income because you can’t shrink your way to wealth, and investing, FII. And that is the foundational framework of personal finance that I think everyone needs. You need to be aware of your money mindset and really work on your money mindset and work on your relationship with money.
That’s financial psychology. You need to increase your income, particularly if you are a low income earner, as I used to be. My first job out of college was in today’s dollars, I made around 45,000 a year speaking in today’s dollars. So if you are a low earner, frugality is not the answer for you. You need to make more. So financial psychology, increasing your income and investing, those are the foundational elements. And then the RE part in double I fire, the RE is optional, R, real estate, and E, entrepreneurship. And what I actually love about that framework also is that the R for real estate, it’s sandwiched in between the I of investing and the E of entrepreneurship because I really view real estate as a hybrid between – It

Henry:
Is.

Paula:
Investing in entrepreneurship. So those I believe are the five pillars of personal finance.

Dave:
All right, so let’s break them down because what do you think the big challenge with people’s financial psychology is?

Paula:
So there’s a few things going on. Number one, there are lessons that we learn about money from early childhood that we’re not even necessarily conscious of. So for example, if mom and dad always argued about money, then as a kid, you pick up the lesson that money is a source of conflict, and that might make you money avoidant because if money’s a source of conflict, of course you want to avoid this thing that causes conflict, and you may not even consciously be aware that that’s the idea that you’ve carried, but if you grew up knowing mom and dad are always fighting about money, then that has imprinted on you and that’s something that you have to actively unlearn. Similarly, we receive all of these social messages in media, in movies, around money. So if you think about almost any movie or TV show that you watch, the villain, the bad guy, is the rich guy.

Henry:
Always.

Paula:
When you see piece after piece after piece that has that character set up, what I think unconsciously you learn is rich people are evil. If you have internalized that message, then there’s going to be a part of you that thinks, “I don’t want to be rich because I don’t want to be evil.” And that won’t necessarily come out consciously, but you might start to self-sabotage as you watch your net worth grow. And the other piece of it is that your net worth doesn’t have to objectively be large by somebody else’s measure. If your net worth feels large relative to what you always thought your own net worth would be, then as you approach a bigger number than you ever thought possible, as you approach the number that creates a sense of imposter syndrome inside of yourself, you might start to self-sabotage in these small unconscious ways.
Maybe you’re a little sloppier at your renovations, maybe you’re a little sloppier at your flips, maybe you’re slower at getting back to your property manager. Maybe you’re kind of an absent landlord. In all of these little ways, you might start to subconsciously sabotage the wealth that you’ve built because you don’t feel like you’ve earned it, you don’t feel like you deserve it, you associate success with being bad or being evil, and those are all of the things that you need to work through in order to heal yourself of some of these lessons.

Dave:
It’s super interesting what you’re saying and sort of contrasting that to what we were talking about before where having enough because I think a lot of people, you’re totally right, Paula, see success as bad or money as bad, but then also in some pockets of our culture, we just glorify wealth at all costs. And so you’re like, “Oh, I got to keep going. I got to keep going. I got to get more.” Where the middle ground is what most people are really looking for, but it’s a hard place to get mentally. All right, so that’s the F in your acronym. All right, so the next I was increasing income. Tell us about that.

Paula:
Right, so increasing income, the reason that I include it is because I think that one of the big mistakes that you see in the personal finance community is an overemphasis on frugality.

Dave:
Agreed.

Paula:
Yeah. So fundamentally, what you care about is that delta between what you earn and what you spend. And I don’t want to use the word savings because savings has a connotation of frugality, so that’s why I’m intentionally using the word delta or difference between what you earn and what you spend, and I call that the gap, the gap between earning and spending. And there are only two ways that you can increase the size of that gap. You can earn more or you can spend less or you can do some combination of the two, but you can’t shrink your way to greatness. Once you frugal down to a certain extent, you really can’t go any further. So assuming that you’re not a crazy spender, assuming that you are living a reasonable life, the lever that you really pull is on the earning side of the equation, and that might come from negotiating a raise, it might come from working, making a career change.
These are the things that people… When you talk about a career change, these are things that people don’t often like to talk about because people like to focus on low friction, easy to implement advice, even if that’s the peas and not the stake. And so what I mean by that is, okay, when you talk about saving money, people will rush to stop going out to dinner because it’s a discretionary expense that happens frequently, and so not going out to dinner is extremely low friction versus if you’re a renter, sublet your current three bedroom apartment, find a subletter who will take over that and move downsize to a one bedroom, right? That’s a really high friction ask, but it’s the type of thing that in one fell swoop, you might save about $1,500 a month in the difference between those two, and that 1,500 a month over the span of a year is $18,000 and boom, now you do that for two years, you’ve got 36,000, now you’ve got a down payment on your first rental property, but it’s such a high friction ask that you don’t hear people talk about it very much.

Henry:
I like this concept of increasing your income because I think you’re right, when people think about personal finance and saving and paying off debt, they immediately think about shrinking. But I think there’s value in both, which is kind of what Dave was saying. You can save some money by shrinking and you can help yourself by making more money. So how does someone who’s listening to this who’s like, “I want to get my finances in order,” how do they know if they have a I need to make more money problem or if they have a I need to spend less problem?

Paula:
I’d say the majority of people have an I need to make more money problem, because if you really are an excessive spender, I think you already know it. I think if you’re asking that question like, “Do I spend excessively?” You know that you do, and the cuts that you need to make in your life are obvious.

Dave:
All right, so make more money. I know that sounds like ideal, but we’ve had other guests recently, we had Scott Galloway on here the other day was talking about that as well. It’s just like it’s gotten lost to just get good at your career, I think. Or if you want to go into real estate investing, get really good at flipping, get really good at wholesaling or whatever the active ways of being a real estate investor are. But man, it gets a lot easier if you can increase your income. So we’ve done F, we’ve done I. We have IRE to go. We got to take one more quick break though. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Henry and I are here with Paula Pant talking about her philosophy and framework for financial independence, which is her own acronym, F-I-I-R-E, two Is. We’ve already done F, we’ve done I.
What’s our second I?

Paula:
So the second I is investing. And in this context, and again, I sandwich R for real estate in between investing and entrepreneurship because I really see it as a hybrid between the two. So in this context, I’m referring to investing as primarily index fund investing, market investing, public markets investing. I do think if you’re a little bit more advanced and you can deal with a loss of liquidity, some private investments, maybe you become a hard money lender, maybe you invest in a small handful of private businesses. I do think that that can be interesting and that’s also kind of under the investing umbrella, but for most people, this is going to be index funds. It’s going to be stocks and bonds.

Dave:
All right, so just be in the market is basically this part of it. Just be in the market in some way.

Paula:
I think that with real estate investors in particular, when I started talking about rental property investing, a few things struck me right away. One was that particularly when you’re first starting out, there’s so much to learn as a real estate investor that you are reading about it, talking about it, thinking about it, listening to podcasts about it. You’re absorbed in this rental property investing world or real estate investing world. And because of that, it can be easy to assume that people are not also investing in a total stock market index fund. I had a number of people ask me like, “Hey, does it ever worry you that all your money’s in real estate?” I’m like, “Only 50% of my net worth is in real estate.” And people are shocked when I say that because if you think about it, it’s a little bit bananas and I spend all my time talking about 50% of my net worth and I spend almost 0% of my time talking about the other 50% of my net worth.
And that’s the thing about index fund investing because no one really talks about it because what is there to say?

Dave:
It’s just like a box to check almost.

Paula:
Yeah, to the auto enrollment box in my 401k. There’s nothing to talk about. There’s nothing to say. And so because no one talks about it, a lot of people have the mistaken impression that real estate investors are not doing it. I want to really correct that because if you actually talk to people like you and me, again, 50% of my portfolio is index funds and the other 50% of my portfolio is paid off rental properties.

Dave:
Not Henry.

Henry:
No, not me. Not me.

Dave:
Henry’s all real estate, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Particularly in this world we’re in right now. I study economics and talk about it all day and I have no idea what’s going to happen next. I mean, I have a good idea with the housing market, but with the broader economy, who knows? I think diversification at this point is the only logical path. So I’m talking to you, Henry.

Henry:
I hear you.

Dave:
I’m looking at you, man.

Henry:
I’m listening.

Dave:
Okay, so we’ve done three. Now we get to the big one for us, which is real estate.

Paula:
Yes, real estate. So as you know, I’ve got seven residential rental properties all paid off free and clear. They all had low interest rate mortgages, and it was a very controversial decision for me to decide to pay off mortgages that were at… The lowest one was at a three handle, the highest one was at a five handle. So the reason that I made the choice to pay off all of those mortgages is because… We’re jumping ahead a little bit, but because of that letter E, entrepreneurship, what I do, how I spend my time at a day-to-day level is I actively am an entrepreneur. I am self-employed. I’ve been self-employed since 2010. I don’t have the security of a regular paycheck. I don’t work for anybody else. I have employees who work for me, and so I’m responsible for their paychecks. Because of all of that, I sat and thought about risk, not confined to the domain of real estate, but risk across the entire spectrum of my life.
What is the risk that I carry, not just in my rental properties, but the risk that I carry in my day job? What’s the risk I carry in my company? What’s the risk I carry in my rental property portfolio? What’s the risk I carry in my other investments? What’s my stock bond allocation? What’s the risk I carry even in home and family life? The risk that you carry if you are a dual income couple with no kids is very different than the risk that you carry if you are either single or a single income couple and you have multiple dependents. And by the way, when I say dependents, it could be kids, it could be elderly parents or grandparents who depend on you. It could be a sibling who’s struggling with addiction who depends on you. So I don’t want to limit to just kids alone.
How many people rely on you? And all of that put together is the mosaic of how much risk a person can take on. And so when people come to me and they’re like, “Should I pay off my mortgage or should I borrow against my home equity in order to make the next down payment on the next rental property?” I’m like, “How’s your mom and dad’s retirement plan?”

Dave:
Totally. Yes, exactly.

Paula:
Yes. Because if your mom calls you and says, “Hey, I need money for groceries,” you’re not going to be like, “Well, sorry, moms. Screw you.”

Dave:
That’s why I wrote a whole book on this because I wanted to explain people the question when people are like, “Should I do this in real estate?” It is such a personal question. It is not like checking the box on your 401k. There are so many different ways to invest in real estate from high risk, high leverage to low risk, low return, and everything in between. And it’s not a lazy answer to be like, “It depends.” It really does depend. It really does depend in terms of risk, not just in terms of financial risk, but time. How much time are you willing to contribute to your portfolio if you have dependence is going to be very different. When I was 23 and single and started investing in real estate, I had nothing but time. I was useless. No one would pay me to do anything, so I could just go and do my portfolio.
Now I have a family. It’s a totally different situation. These are the things you have to consider and there is no right answer. I actually think I hear this a lot, Paula, from investors who are our age or older, that paying off debt is just what you want to do. I think it’s also as you age, your tolerance for risk tends to go down, especially if you’ve been somewhat successful. You only have to get rich once, so you just have to protect yourself a little bit. So I think paying off your rental properties is awesome. You probably sleep great, which is what everyone wants.

Paula:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Dave:
All right, let’s round it out with the last one. Entrepreneurship, which is the E.

Paula:
Yeah, the E for entrepreneurship. So first of all, I believe that all real estate investors are entrepreneurs.

Henry:
Whether they believe it or not. Yeah.

Paula:
Yeah. Whether you know it or not, if you’re a real estate investor, you are an entrepreneur. I want to break this down as well because there are different gradients of entrepreneurial work. So first of all, I think a lot of people conflate self-employment with entrepreneurship. Self-employment, like getting out of the W-2, not being beholden to a boss, it’s cool, but you are fundamentally cobbling together work, maybe contract-based work in order to pay yourself. And it’s great that a bunch of your meals can now be tax deductible, that’s a nice fringe benefit, but there is fundamentally a difference between being self-employed versus building something that is scalable. Either one is fine, but I think you should be conscious of which one you’re doing because the two can get conflated quickly. So the question that you want to ask yourself if you do decide to go down this road is, do I want to own my job or do I want to build something that will outlive me?
And building something that will outlive you, that is a very different type of undertaking. So that’s an early orienting question. When we are at the beginning, you don’t have to have the answer right away. It might be an answer that changes… Or evolves over time. But that is, I think, one of the fundamental orienting questions. Do you want to own a job or do you want to own an institution?

Dave:
That makes a lot of sense. And I love the idea of ownership and it does really benefit you in so many different ways. Do you think entrepreneurship is right for everyone though?

Paula:
Well, again, if you are listening to this, then you are likely a real estate investor. And if you are a real estate investor, then you are already an entrepreneur. Because if you own real estate as an investment, as something outside of your primary residence, then you do own the upside. Now, real estate investing in general is not for everybody.

Dave:
Yeah, I think that’s true. Entrepreneurship, you have to be willing to take ultimate accountability for your own performance, your own life. I’ve talked to a lot of people who are new to investing and they’re frustrated that their agent didn’t do this or their contractor, their property manager. It doesn’t matter.You’re an entrepreneur, it’s your job. It’s always your job. And I think some people excel at that, and for some people it’s not right. And that’s okay. It’s not a judgment, but that’s why I was curious because I think for some people, they just don’t want that. They want to show up and just get a check and that’s okay. But I think there are huge benefits if you have a personality and a drive that will allow you to work through the real challenges that come with entrepreneurship. But the benefits, for me, have very much been worth it.
And I think for a lot of people are.

Paula:
And what you’re talking about is having a high degree of agency, a really strong locus of control. And to round it out back to the psychology piece of it, I think the beauty of real estate investing and entrepreneurship is that you learn to become a high agency, strong internal locus of control type of person. You learn to become somebody who radically accepts responsibility for everything that happens because anything that unfolds, you can always ask the question, “What could I have done?” Even if you have a misunderstanding with your property manager, “Okay, what could you have done to make that conversation go more smoothly?”

Dave:
All right. Well, Paul, thank you so much for being here. This has been a lot of fun. Any last thoughts or advice to our audience before we get out of here?

Paula:
I would say for anyone who’s listening, of everything that we’ve talked about today, so we’ve talked about the framework that I refer to as Double I Fire. We went through a lot of concepts, we went through a lot of tactics, but the most foundational piece and where it starts is with that letter F, that financial psychology. I think it’s often overlooked, but grounding yourself in what are my assumptions about money? What are my mental hangups about money? What are my emotional hangups about money? With the double I fire framework, take it one step at a time and really work through each of those one at a time because the financial psychology piece in particular, people often want to skip over that because it’s not quantifiable, but sometimes that is the foundation that you need in order to build the rest.

Henry:
Is there some books or references or someplace somebody could turn to if they want to dive into learning more about their psychology of money?

Paula:
Yeah, so there’s a few. So we have a free workbook. It’s at affordantything.com/filireF-I-I-R-E, totally free. In addition to that, because I don’t just want to plug my own stuff, I also want to make sure I highlight other people who have done great work in this field. Morgan Housel is one of the preeminent voices on the psychology of money. Dr. Brad Clontz is fantastic. So it is from him, he has this framework that people are either money avoidant, money anxious, or money vigilant. And it was from him that I really learned about that oscillation between avoidance and anxiety that many people go through when it comes to their money. And there’s also, I will say, there’s an entire association of financial therapists. Whoa. It’s really cool because historically in the field of therapy, most therapists are not cross-trained in how to talk about money. And if you think about that, it’s a little bit nuts because most people cite money as one of their top stressors and most couples cite money as one of the top things that they argue about.
And so despite the fact that both individuals and couples cite money as one of their number one problems, traditionally in the field of psychology, therapists are not trained to talk about money. And so what’s cool is this emerging field, it’s still a very, very new field of financial psychology. You have people who are classically trained as therapists and also then have a certified financial planning license. And so you get these people who are really heavily cross-trained in both domains and are well positioned to help you work through those mental and emotional hurdles that cause you to hold yourself back.

Dave:
Well, thanks again, Paul. It was great to have you back on the show. Thanks so much for sharing with our audience. It was great to have you.

Paula:
Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Henry.

Dave:
And you could check out her podcast. It is called Afford Anything. It is available on podcast and on YouTube as we found out today. Thanks to you all for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m Dave Meyer. He’s Henry Washington. We’ll see you guys next time.