Retire Early with Less Than 10 Rentals? She Did It, Starting in 2022

**Henry Washington** (0:00)
You do not need a big, expensive, stressful rental portfolio to retire early. Today's guest retired in her late 30s, all with a small, manageable rental portfolio that she built after 2022 That's right, high rates, high home prices, she dealt with it all, and was still able to retire completely on her own terms just a few years later. She used an often overlooked source for her down payment that many Americans have access to, and quickly bought her first three rentals in just three months, as a complete beginner. But she never wanted to scale to a dozen doors. In fact, it took her only half that many to retire from her W-2. She's sharing exactly how she bought the rentals, how much they make in monthly cash flow, her yearly income with real estate, and why knowing you're enough can get you to early retirement decades faster.
What's going on everybody? I am Henry Washington. Welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Today, we are bringing you an inspiring investor story featuring Lucy Hinds from Cincinnati, Ohio. Let's bring her on.
Lucy Hinds, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast.

**Lucy Hinds** (1:13)
Thanks for having me, Henry.

**Henry Washington** (1:14)
So glad to have you. As always, as we get started, I want to know what your background was like before you got into real estate investing, especially since you have a little bit of a history with personal finance.

**Lucy Hinds** (1:25)
Yes. Thank you so much. So I am actually a veteran of the United States Army.

**Henry Washington** (1:30)
Thank you for your service.

**Lucy Hinds** (1:31)
Thank you. A fun fact about me is I used to jump out of perfectly good airplanes and helicopters. So that's always my good icebreaker question.

**Henry Washington** (1:40)
Yeah. I have a hard and fast rule about that.

**Lucy Hinds** (1:42)
To not do it?

**Henry Washington** (1:43)
Yeah. If the plane's going to land, then I'm going to not jump out of it. That's my pretty hard and fast rule, but that's awesome.

**Lucy Hinds** (1:50)
I do live by that now.

**Henry Washington** (1:51)
Paratrooper? Is that what they call that?

**Lucy Hinds** (1:53)
Paratrooper, yes. I was a big Dave Ramsey girl, so I read the Total Money Makeover and drank the Kool-Aid big time about staying out of debt and eliminating debt. So I lived that life for years and years, I'd say until I happened upon Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad, and that really changed my mindset about debt.

**Henry Washington** (2:17)
Yeah, it absolutely does open your mind to how money works. I think people, I mean, everyone can credit their start in real estate to reading that book, but it's not a real estate book. It really just teaches you about how money works and how to think about money differently. That's what I remember most about me reading that book.

**Lucy Hinds** (2:37)
Yeah.

**Henry Washington** (2:38)
All right. So what made you become interested in real estate? Because that's a big shift.

**Lucy Hinds** (2:43)
I think just analyzing my portfolio, giving me an idea of that I wanted to build some passive income and how could I do that? So I realized that after the COVID spike in real estate, that I had quite a bit of equity in my home. After reading Rich Dad Poor Dad, I thought to myself, well, how can I leverage this as debt potentially to make myself more money?
I went down different rabbit holes of buying a business or starting a vending machines, and then real estate was one of the options as well. And then I dove deep into that rabbit hole, and that was it for me. I'm like, okay, we're doing real estate. I had a home equity line of credit for up to $176,000 that I could use to get started. And you know what I did with that $176,000?

**Henry Washington** (3:35)
I'm guessing you used it to buy some property.

**Lucy Hinds** (3:37)
I bought three in 90 days.

**Henry Washington** (3:40)
Wait, wait, hold on. Okay, okay. So hardcore Dave Ramsey, read Rich Dad Poor Dad, start to change your mindset, and then you take out a home equity line of credit. So for those who don't know, you can tap into the equity in a property. It doesn't have to be a personal residence, but that's what's most commonly used. And typically when you do that, they'll give you access to about 75% of the equity. So it sounds like you had a good bit of equity in your property. You applied for a home equity line of credit. And then you didn't just go buy one house.
You bought three in 90 days?