Scott and Virginia Trench Talk Goal Setting, Spending, Prenups, and Future Plans

Mindy:
Ever wonder what Scott’s duplex in his twenties was like or how frugal he really was? Well, today we are bringing on an expert and pivotal player in Scott’s life and Scott’s Fi journey, his wife, Virginia Trench. I am so excited to talk with both Virginia and Scott about how their money story has evolved over time. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my co-host Mr. Virginia Trench.

Scott:
That’s right, Mindy. Super excited to be on BiggerPockets money today with my lovely, wonderful wife Virginia here, and Virginia is actually going to take it from here. With the rest of the intro,

Virginia:
BiggerPockets has a goal of creating 1 million millionaires. You are in the right place if you want to get your financial house in order because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you are starting.

Mindy:
Virginia, I am so excited that you are joining us today. Welcome to the show.

Virginia:
Thanks, Mindy. It’s great to be here. I’ve been entrenched in this guy’s life for almost 10 years.

Scott:
She has better puns than me and many times the puns that we use on the show have actually originated from Virginia without due accreditation. Citation. Yeah, due citation.

Mindy:
We’ll let it slide. And hello to Fred, the cat behind you who is apparently going to horn in on your show today, Virginia. So Fred piped down.

Scott:
Our daughter is at school, but we have Fred, Virginia and our little one on the way here as well.

Mindy:
Almost everybody. Almost everybody is here. Well, that’s awesome. Okay. And quite frankly, the other one is what two now? So they’re not known for being quiet. No,

Scott:
She should be. This would be a short episode. Yeah.

Mindy:
Okay. So let’s go back to the beginning of your journey together. Scott was house hacking a duplex. What is your opinion of this? Because I saw that duplex that he was living in, so I know where you’re coming from. What was your thought when you first met this guy?

Virginia:
Well, I thought, well, first of all, what a sweet, wonderful man. And second of all, frugality takes on another level when you don’t heat your apartment in January in Denver, which is when we started dating, that was a red flag for me. But both Scott and Walker, it’s funny how getting serious girlfriends timed almost exactly with the decision of, hey, maybe we’ll spring for heat here.

Mindy:
So I also agree with you. That is a red flag. I would walk in and be like, dude, it’s way too cold in here. I’m out. But it’s that he chose not to as opposed to his, he got turned off.

Virginia:
Oh yeah. This was not all over twist situation. This was very much self-inflicted.

Mindy:
At what point when you guys were dating, did he bring up this concept of financial independence?

Virginia:
Gosh, I don’t, it’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment when you brought it up, but I think it was just when as we were getting to know each other and at the time you were creating a lot of content in the Phi Universe that you would tell me about articles that you were working on or ideas that you had. So gosh, probably third or fourth date, I dunno.

Scott:
Yeah, somewhere early on there.

Virginia:
Early on.

Mindy:
Yeah, it was really near the beginning. Good. I like that. I was married before we discovered financial independence, so he couldn’t bring it up on a date. He didn’t know what it was. Did you know anything about it before Scott shared it with you? Had you ever heard it?

Virginia:
No, I was so out of the whole world at the time, I was teaching middle school English, so that was kind of my entire universe. So I was a complete newbie, novice and still am in so many ways, but I was very impressed by Scott’s commitment to it and it intrigued when he started telling me about it.

Mindy:
Was it a difficult change to make to go from however you were handling your finances before to this kind? I don’t want to say extreme frugality. I don’t think Scott was ever extremely frugal, although I say this and then we just had that story about him not turning the heat on in January in Denver. Scott, you crazy, but did you make changes over time or was it kind of a, oh, well, I guess I’m just going to completely change the way that I handle my money.

Virginia:
Honestly, I was so frugal just by out of pure necessity just with my job and what I was trying to accomplish at the time. If anything, it opened up my horizon to think about, oh, are we being frugal to achieve a specific goal down the line as opposed to are we being frugal just to survive on a teacher’s salary and my summer side hustle and all that stuff. So I was very, very ready to be made a believer in Scott’s philosophy.

Mindy:
Did you have any big money, disagreements, let’s call them disagreements.

Scott:
It wasn’t a disagreement, but I remember one, maybe you could talk about how we were like, well, we don’t want to live in the basement of the duplex, which then had heat anymore after the second or third year dating.

Virginia:
Oh, these weren’t disagreements, it was just sometimes it’s remarkable the blind spots that Scott can have sometimes it’s like, well, we’re looking to upgrade our living situation slightly and the lease in the upstairs unit is coming due in a couple of months. And I went ahead and connected those dots and when we moved into another townhouse after that, but then we were thinking, okay, we could use a little more space. We’re looking to grow our family, but we’re not ready to commit to our forever home yet. What do we do? I was like, well, the lease is coming due on the four bedroom apartment.

Scott:
I do this for a living. And I just couldn’t process like, oh, money going into my business is more advantageous than money going out to somebody else as a renter there, I was like, I’m paying rent anyways. Why not go to this other? And Virginia was like, Scott, you’re a moron with this.

Virginia:
I protest the use of the word moron. I just gently pointed out that we had options. But to answer your question, Mindy, I think one point of shared frustration we have is now that we track our spending using Monarch

Speaker 4:
Is

Virginia:
We have really had to come to terms with the amount of Amazon spending, DoorDash spending things that we, I think were we not monitoring it would just balloon and be completely out of control. And so I think about what, a year or two ago we decided we need to be really meticulous in tracking every dollar and it was very eyeopening. And I sometimes have to do a breathing exercise before I sit down to categorize our Amazon spends.

Scott:
Yeah, that’s been a problem I think for me in the last two, three years specifically as well because as the job with BiggerPockets, BiggerPockets ballooned over this time period, so when Virginia and I started dating, my title was director of operations as an early employee at BiggerPockets and then I became VP at bp. I was super proud of that at that point, but BiggerPockets ballooned so much over the course of the following six, seven years after we started dating. And if there’s anything that I can get from a convenience standpoint, I’m going to spend it right now because if I’m not doing that, then I am either not having time with Virginia and Katie or I’m taking away from the job at BiggerPockets. And that got a little out of control probably the last two years ago, a year or two ago, and it’s gotten much more under control now.

Mindy:
I think Amazon Prime is the worst best invention ever because it’s so easy to click and I already paid for shipping so I don’t have to pay for shipping. I have a huge disconnect between buying something online and then it’s like, Hey, by the way, you have to pay for shipping. I’m like, I don’t need that.

Virginia:
The in dignity, what is this, 2002?

Mindy:
Yeah, exactly. And it’s always expensive shipping too, like three or $4. I’m like, no thank you. I’ll just go over to Amazon and get that for free. In fact, I have shared a couple of times, at least on the show, when somebody is having a hard time getting a handle and they’re spending, I’m like, cancel Amazon Prime. See what happens.

Virginia:
Convenience is a really slippery slope.

Mindy:
It really is. And DoorDash is not something I’ve ever done just because I am so cheap that I can’t pay somebody to pick up my food. I would rather just go there.

Scott:
We don’t have that problem. Mindy,

Virginia:
Not good for you. It’s hard to go back once you’ve, again, the convenience slippery slope, just beware.

Mindy:
So have you two combined your finances? I know you’ve been married for five years.

Scott:
Yeah, we’ll come up on five. I forgot four and a half years. Yeah,

Virginia:
That sounds right. Sure we’ll say that. That’s right. Yeah, we signed a premarital agreement. I want to say we were talking about this the other day, about six months before our actual wedding and at that point is when we combined finances.

Mindy:
Okay, so you combined before the wedding. That’s interesting. And the prenup, was that your idea or was that Scott’s idea?

Scott:
I think it was both around there. Yeah,

Mindy:
I love that. So Carl floated the idea when we were getting married a thousand years ago. He’s like, Hey, we should get a prenup. And I was like, no, if you ask me again, we’re not getting married at all. I was so offended that he would say that in my defense we didn’t have anything at all. We had, I dunno, a $0 net worth and in fact, it turned out I had more money than he did, so I should have signed that prenup. But I think that we had an interview with Aaron Thomas from the Prenup Prescription. He wrote a book about prenups that changed my entire view on prenuptial agreements and I think it’s episode 3 0 1. I thought it was such a great episode. I love that you both are young and understanding that a prenup helps you in your marriage in protecting both of your positions even before you get married. You guys are way more mature than I am,

Virginia:
And I think that there’s an undue cultural stigma attached to prenuptial agreements. And of course we want to be married for one. We joke one lifetime, please, one lifetime. But it was from mostly how do we be transparent? How do we make things, I don’t know, as equitable as possible? And I dunno, it just seemed like a no brainer.

Scott:
Yeah, I think it wasn’t approached from the standpoint of this is going, these are the things here, this is how it’s going to be. It was more just like, let’s make sure we understand what the rules are in the event that this ever happens. What’s Scott’s property? What’s Virginia’s property? What’s marital property there? And then hopefully we never need to review or look at the document again and

Virginia:
We will, because

Scott:
We’re married for one lifetime. I haven’t looked at it since. It’s somewhere maybe in our

Virginia:
Safe and I’ll add that this was also in line with, we did estate planning. We did our legal contingency plans for the care of our daughter. Just a lot of things that I think are nitpicky things that people don’t like to think about. We just thought, why don’t we knock this all out at once so we can go on with our lives?

Mindy:
I love that. Knock it all out at once. It needs to be planned. If you don’t plan, then your who is it? Aaron Lowery says you already have a prenup agreement. It is the divorce laws of your state. If you want to direct them yourself, then you need to have this in place.

Scott:
Alright, now we got to take a quick ad break, but listeners, I am super excited to announce that you can now buy your ticket for BP Con 2025, which is going to be October 5th through seventh in Las Vegas Nevada. Score the early bird pricing for 100 bucks off. And go to biggerpockets.com/conference while we’re away.

Mindy:
Welcome back to the show joined by Virginia Trench. So Virginia Scott has shared multiple times on this show that you two have an annual financial planning retreat that you do. What is your take on this?

Virginia:
Oh, I don’t know. This doesn’t sound corny. It’s one of my favorite things about our relationship and it’s such a nice way to connect on a regular basis to make sure we’re on track for living the life that we want to live. I think we did the first one on our honeymoon and we update it. Yeah,

Scott:
We update it every quarter

Virginia:
Ish

Scott:
With few exceptions. A handful of times we’ve missed it in a quarter, done it in the middle of it or whatever.

Virginia:
And occasionally Scott will bring up, oh, I got another question from a BiggerPockets community member. How do I get my spouse on board with phi? How do I get my girlfriend to get on board with all these seemingly nutty ideas? And I really think that sitting down and making a vision together, it’s a great way to get on the same page and have a why behind the choices that you’re making. And it has been eerie how it has worked out. I remember sitting down to do our vision and saying, okay, well sure, I’m going to try to write a book and maybe have some intellectual property to my name, and that all seemed like a pipe dream and my first novel is coming out this summer. It was just wild the other day to finally be able to hold the book in my hands for the first time.
Getting back to your question, Mindy, the vision is great, but the habits and the goals are better. There’s so much more important. It’s a great, we try to hold each other accountable and it is noticeable when we’re off track on our habits. Does this habit support what we ultimately want out of life? No. Do we need to be exercising more? Do we need to be checking or spending more? Am I happy at my job? Do I need to change up my approach to my day to day at work and so on and so forth. I could ramble on this just as much as has Scott.

Mindy:
Well, no, I love that. I love that because we have frequently spoken to guests where he will say, oh, she’s not on board. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She says, just handle it all. Or she will say, I would love to get him on board. He’s not interested. He won’t even listen. He won’t have these conversations. And having the money conversations I think is so important because you just said the vision is great, but it’s the habits and the goals that are even better and and I said annual, it’s a quarterly financial check-in. How frequently are you checking in on your habits and goals?

Virginia:
Weekly. I’d say sometimes biweekly.

Scott:
Weekly is the goal is what we try to do. I would say this year in the last couple of months we’ve been a little less diligent about that, but we’ve gone through stretches where I’d say we would’ve gone 20 weeks in a row

Virginia:
And it is noticeable doing anything. If we were to look back at those times like, oh wow, that’s when we got,

Scott:
Yeah,

Virginia:
This is in this done.

Mindy:
And

Virginia:
That’s when we were really happy and thriving and stuff.

Mindy:
Oh wait, so you’re saying frequent check-ins with your partner to help you stay on track to meet your goals is a good thing? What a novel concept.

Virginia:
Yeah, it has to be mutual though. My advice to anybody who’s hesitant to talk about this or maybe you were raised in a culture where money is a taboo subject, once you rip the bandaid off, it becomes more, it will stay scary and unapproachable if you let it stay scary and unapproachable. But if you have honest conversations with your partner, it gets easier and easier and better and better with time.

Mindy:
And you briefly showed us the book and then you put it back down again. What is the name of this book?

Virginia:
It’s called Our Secrets. Were Safe. It’s a sort of a juicy summer thriller comes out July 15th. It’s about a group of friends who thought they got away with something, but were very, very wrong about that. If you love sort of gone girl type books. It’s very much in that vein. And yeah, I really credit in large part our super dorky goal setting process to getting this done and getting another book in the pipeline for 2026.

Scott:
The book will be published by Penguin Random House as well with that. So as part of a two book deal, Virginia will have another book coming out in summer 2026 as well. So that was super exciting.

Mindy:
Okay. I am very excited about that. I have published two books. They were both with BiggerPockets Publishing. I turned them both in late, way late. One of them was written with Scott and his crazy schedule. My Amazing Ability, unparalleled ability to procrastinate, led both of those books to be published late. So this goal setting and regular checking in is really, really helpful. What are some of the things that you talk about in goal setting? It sounds like there’s money. It sounds like there’s life stuff too, but what sort of things you talking about?

Virginia:
Do you want to pull up? We can consult our latest draft.

Mindy:
Oh, do you have a document written down, Scott?

Virginia:
We sure do.

Scott:
Mindy. We save each version of it.

Virginia:
Oh, and it’s so much fun. It’s like a little memory book looking back at previous iterations of this, but usually we start by describing our home environment, what we want that to look like, what we like our day to day to look like.

Scott:
Well, we start off with gratitudes. That’s good. And we’ll list 20 things that were just like, so I always push for this, but we have to do this work when we’re both in a really good mood, which typically involves a morning, kind of like late mid-morning weekend or vacation day where we’ve both worked out and then are on our first or approaching our second cup of coffee at that

Virginia:
100.0%.

Scott:
And there’s got to be a view in the background that feels really important to us. It can be mountains, it can be a picnic. It doesn’t have to be an expensive lavish thing, but it just has to be something that gets our juices going.

Virginia:
If you’re trying to get your spouse or your significant other on board, think about when they would feel relaxed. If you have young children, maybe it’s after the kids are in bed or when you can give your undivided attention to something. I’ve been campaigning for years now to do this with a cocktail, but we’ve compromised with coffee, but basically a time where clear-minded, you remove distractions and potential sources of stress and sit down with your partner.

Mindy:
Well, I would also encourage one cocktail.

Virginia:
Yes. Yes.

Mindy:
One, not two. Or get a bottle of wine and split it over the course of several hours. Well, okay, that’s another question. How long do you spend on your weekly check-in and how long do you spend on your quarterly?

Scott:
About the same, probably

Virginia:
No way.

Scott:
Weekly

Virginia:
Check-in takes 10 minutes. The quarterly check-in takes half an hour

Scott:
Minimum. Yeah. Yeah, that’s fair.

Mindy:
I would love to see this document, not your actual document, but erase it all the stuff and just see the way that you’ve set it up.

Scott:
I think I did create a template version of it that was with some of a lot of the things that were personal to us removed or whatever. But yeah, there’s no secret sauce to this. This is not, this is a piece of paper, this is a Word document that we fill out with gratitudes and then we start, we say here’s our, and for the example, the most recent one, here’s our December 31st, 2030 vision and here’s our December 31st, 2027 vision. So we start with the longer term one and then kind of bridge that to what, so here’s what perfect looks like in five years and then here’s what perfect looks like in three years.

Virginia:
If we’re trying to do a step-by-step, step one gratitude list, that’s always really fun to do and a great way to center the conversation. Step two, sort of begin with the end in mind, which is a great habit forming framework. Think, I don’t know, you could do 10 years, you could do seven years, five years into the future and be as descriptive as possible.

Scott:
And it’s always a draft, so none of this is permanent and we actually update it every quarter. That’s the ritual. So it probably took us maybe an hour the first time and now it’s 30 minutes. But then we always make a slight change, a tweak here or there. Hey, we want to travel a bunch and that kind of urge is smaller now let’s revise that component of this and do something and replace it with something else. That’s awesome. Instead like a toy that we have. That’s

Virginia:
So true.

Scott:
Having

Virginia:
A introducing young children into our lives. We’ll get back to the travel one in a few years

Scott:
And so probably it’s moved a lot. If we were to start with our first one four and a half years ago, we got married on our honeymoon. That one is very different than the one we have now, but it hasn’t moved much in probably the last two years, two and a half years. They’re pretty remarkably consistent now and we just keep trying to move closer and closer towards ’em.

Mindy:
My dear listeners, we would love to hit a hundred thousand subscribers on our YouTube channel and we need your help. While we take a quick break, if you could do me a favor and hop on over to youtube.com/biggerpockets money to make sure you are subscribed to our channel. Stay tuned for more after the break.

Scott:
Thanks for sticking with us.

Mindy:
So you’ve got the setting, you’ve got your, I’m assuming that you revisit the most recent one that you did. You’re checking in on your quarterly. Walk me through how this works.

Virginia:
Sure. So after we go through the five year, 10 year vision, we hammer out a few more specifics, but we think about, okay, what are my personal top three goals, the three biggest things I should be focusing on in my life in order to be working towards that vision. So often, I mean I’d say 90% of the time that shakes out to a professional goal, a health related goal and one related to family community and that sort of thing. Would you say that that’s

Scott:
Right? Yes.

Virginia:
Yeah, so once you define the big three, you think about, okay, what does that look like on a weekly basis? On a daily basis, what should I be focusing on?

Scott:
Then we will usually branch off from there and we’ll each set our goal. Here’s the goals that we have jointly, but then we each set our goals in derivations of that. That’s where we start branching out a little bit. I use a journal that I’ve used for 10 years that’s kind like a cheesy self-help journal in Virginia, just switched over to one from Target for $12.

Mindy:
Those a

Virginia:
Great,

Scott:
Didn’t order it online because we’re not ordering as much stuff online anymore.

Mindy:
You’ve learned already, Carl and I, actually, this is kind of crazy that we’re having this conversation right now. Carl and I just decided we had been setting some goals like meeting every morning to have goal setting for the day and that is very easy to fall by the wayside because it’s so frequent, but also life just kind of jumps up in front of you. So we decided today that we were going to do this and I really like having the different goals. It’s right now it’s just how we going to get this house done. But professional goals, health goals, family and community goals. We are not really talking about those. So I like these different ideas.

Scott:
We pick three, or at least I do, I pick three big ones that are the most important for that because can’t, you can’t get all eight, all these self-help gurus have these eight wheel of life categories because that’s the right way to do it. It’s like how you do in each one of those. You can’t ever prioritize all eight at once. I feel there’s got to be three priorities, one to three,

Virginia:
And I will say that we are rarely if ever perfect when we do these check-ins. It is rare when we have a couple days in a row when we hit a hundred percent across the board. This is very much a try for it, but most days I’d say I average 75%, 80%, a hundred percent on a great really productive day when everything seems to be going well. But it’s very much we try, we’re not too hard on ourselves and I don’t want to sound like we’re super militant about this, but as long as you are trying, that’s when you start to see the results in my opinion.

Scott:
Yeah, most quarters, most weeks and most days of our marriage, we’ve been applying some version of this imperfectly and tending to move towards the life we want, I think, and it’s been wonderful.

Virginia:
Yeah, progress over perfection for sure.

Mindy:
Yeah, perfection is the enemy of progress. Okay, so Virginia, looking back on your financial journey with Scott, is there anything that you would’ve changed?

Virginia:
I think one thing that I’m working on now that I should have worked on sooner is just more self-education. I truly am. There are areas in our marriage where I’m the expert in areas where Scott is the expert, but I wish that I had taken more time to educate myself to be more of an active participant and there are certainly still times it’s tax season. Scott is handling that, where just the sheer lopsidedness of our expertise makes it so much more efficient for Scott to just drive and obviously we consult on everything but sort of be the decision maker. But yeah, I think that for so long I had a very fear driven relationship with money and if I could go back and talk to my younger self, I would say, look, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Just by avoiding something doesn’t mean that you’re going to magically get any sort of result. Avoiding things never gets you what you want. So I think that’d be the thing I would change.

Mindy:
I’m right there with you. I do 0% of the taxes. If it was up to me to get the taxes done, I would gather up all of my stuff and take it to somebody to do them and Carl is taking it to somebody to do them, but then he’s got all of these records and all of everything that he’s double checking against everything before he submits it to the accountant and I’m perfectly happy to let him handle that because he’s good at it. I don’t know that enjoys is the right word to describe his feelings for it, but he doesn’t hate it and I would absolutely hate it and he’s done it for kind of our whole lives. So why would I want to deprive him of that joy? But also it would take me so much longer to figure it out. Plus one of us has a job and one of us doesn’t so he can take the time to do it as opposed to me sitting there taking all of the time to learn how to do it all when he’s already done it for so long.

Virginia:
For sure. This might seem like a silly example, but one thing I try to be loud about in my work is not devaluing the domestic work of women, but if I were to send you to a grocery store and say we need groceries for the week to feed our little family of three, keeping in mind our toddlers likes and dislikes and just like God, we’re just really trying to get her to eat a vegetable every once in a while, it would take twice as long. The result would be terrible and it’s just more efficient and easier for me to just do it.
Okay, one quick story. So Scott is so sweet, he said, Virginia, for your birthday, I’m going to make you a carrot cake, my favorite. And he goes to the store to get the necessary ingredients and he does not pick a beginner recipe. This is a New York Times hundreds of recipe comment very in depth, get out the standing mixer from scratch recipe with high altitude modifications, bless his heart. The recipe called for shredded coconut. Scott comes home with two whole coconuts and he’s like, yeah, these are really expensive. You don’t say that the coconut supply in Colorado. Hey, I’m amazed you didn’t get a good price. This is eggs first, coconuts next whatcha going to do. So he comes home with two whole coconuts and the recipe further called for shredded carrots. So he brought home unpeeled, the bag of whole carrots and I was just like, oh honey, you know, can buy these things pre shredded. So back to the store. And so all that is to say,

Scott:
Well, I hand shredded the carrots, but the coconuts, it was just untenable. You can’t do it, hammer it apart and then you have to grate the coconut.

Virginia:
I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. It was such a sweet labor of love making this cake, which was absolutely delicious. By the way, when you were done, I was very impressed. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but I was just kind of like, what’s your plan for these? We have a hammer in the garage, but what’s the next step? All of that is to say,

Scott:
I went out to the grocery store and got a bag of shredded coconuts and that solved the problem. I now know that you a shredded coconuts, shredded coconuts come in, bags you can find

Virginia:
In the baking aisle of almost any grocery store. But all of that is to say in a marriage, there are times I think Kevin Hart said, this is comedian, it’s so funny. So there are times when you’re singing lead and there are times when you’re playing the triangle and it’s okay to shift those back and forth as necessary as you build a life together. Do I wish and am I trying to make an effort to be more participatory in our finances and how we lever that to live the life we want? Yes. But does that mean I need to become, it’s worth my time to become a tax expert or for Scott to go on the Great British Baking Show? Probably not. So that’s where we are with that.

Mindy:
Okay. I think our husbands are very similar, Virginia, because I have that same story except it was when Carl was going to make me a key lime pie meringue on the top. I don’t know if you’ve ever made meringue. I would love to see scotch, try to make meringue. Carl just kind of, he put the egg whites in a bowl and gave him a bit of a stir and then poured it right on top of the cake and he’s like, does it just puff up in the oven?

Virginia:
I’ve never made meringue. It’s a whole thing.

Mindy:
You have to whip it with your blender for five minutes on high. It it not just, they don’t just puff up in the oven. It was very, very sweet.

Scott:
The important takeaway from all this is that the cake was awesome, the cake was awesome. I still need to work on icing. Icing is not my strength of mine right now.

Virginia:
I was so proud of you. It was absolutely wonderful.

Mindy:
So let’s get back into the money discussion. Scott recently sold a large percentage of the index funds that you hold. Did you guys discuss this ahead of time?

Virginia:
Yes. Scott is my favorite nerd on the planet and what made me buy in literally and figuratively to this idea was just his review of historical trends saying, gosh, if you look back for the past century, every time this ratio has been this lopsided, like a crash has been coming or it’s good to protect against the possibility of one. I know you’re very bullish about saying, I’m not saying that Mark’s going to crash, so that’s not necessarily the point here, but Scott does. He loves a deep dive and I love that about him. So when I know that when he’s really fired up about something and he starts bringing out all the graphs and statistics and stuff, it’s like, okay, here we go. Time to buckle down and listen to what he has to say. So yeah, we did talk about it

Scott:
And the other part was just the income that we think we can get from this property as Mindy helping us with the deal there. I mean, it just covers

Virginia:
Such thank ndi. We don’t dunno what we do without you.

Scott:
Yeah, thank you. And it just covers so much of the day-to-day household expenses that we’d have. And I feel it’s important for us to make sure that we are living a lifestyle that is well as a conservatively fire, despite the fact that I of course still earn an income as CEO EO here at BiggerPockets with it. I just feel like that has to be congruent with what I do professionally and in my home life around there. Otherwise I’d feel like I’m not living practicing what I preach basically.

Virginia:
I think we’re at a stage now with our finances where we’re playing to keep what we have and that was part of that strategy.

Mindy:
Alright, we are talking about Scott selling his index funds. That was episode 6 0 7. We just recently released it at the end of February and Scott backs up his position, makes a really good case for why he’s making this choice. Carl and I did not choose to follow in Scott’s footsteps, which doesn’t make it a bad decision. It makes it a decision that we don’t want for us. I love what you said, Virginia. You said his review of historical data. Scott didn’t just look at the stock market and say, oh, the PE ratio is 31 I’m going to sell. He looked at all of everything, and you’re right, he loves a good deep dive. As anybody listening to this podcast knows, Scott loves to go down a rabbit hole, he went down a rabbit hole and came to a decision for him and well for you, not for everybody.
He is just encouraging people to look at different points of view, not just one, which includes don’t just listen to Scott, don’t just listen to me, do your own research. This is your money and if you leave all of your money in the index funds and something happens, you’re the only one that’s going to be having to deal with that with your position like that. Just like if I choose to leave mine in the index funds and it turns out that Scott was prescient, then I’m going to have to deal with that. But if I stay the course and Scott makes a change, he’s going to deal with that. And the reason he’s going to deal with that is because he went through and did all of the research in the first place. So yeah, I also think it helps that you got a smoking hot deal on a property. This Scott was happening to look at the market. He is like, Hey, that makes a lot of sense to me based on the information that I have about real estate in general, the market in particular, and that location specifically, I think this is a good bet. So he made an informed decision, not a fly by the city of your pants decision. And that’s what I love so much about that decision.

Scott:
Yeah, just a tip for folks listening here. You could take you five minutes to test this out, but just go look at Zillow or talk to an agent in your local market and just look at what’s for sale for investment properties and then look at what is actually sold. And my guess is that you’re going to look at the stuff that’s for sale and say, that’s absurd. It would never work. It’s ridiculous. It’s way overpriced, but when you look at what’s actually sold, you’re like, huh, I would’ve bought five or seven of those. Now this will not be true in every market, probably 75% of you will say, well, the stuff that’s sold is no better, but I bet you 25% of you listening will be like, huh, there are actually good deals moving. And that’s really what came down for me and Mindy, we talk about that at length in the book we wrote together. First time home buyer just for regular home buyers, not even investors. But that was really did it for me is I just looked up and did that exercise that I should have been doing more regularly for the last two years and I was like, wow, that is big difference.

Mindy:
Alright, Virginia, I am so delighted that you joined us on this show today. And Scott, you’re cool too.

Virginia:
This is so much fun. Thanks Mindy.

Mindy:
Thank you for

Virginia:
Having me. Thank you for going on

Scott:
Virginia.

Mindy:
I think you should come back again. So once we stop recording I will play you with compliments so that you will come back and join us again.

Virginia:
Maybe Carl and I can do a takeover. That would be fun.

Mindy:
Oh, that would be awesome. Alright. And of course make sure to bring Fred

Virginia:
Naturally.

Scott:
Yeah, Fred doesn’t need to be asked.

Mindy:
That’s so true. Do cats ever need to be asked? Alright, thank you so much for your time today, Virginia. This was so much fun. And the book is called Our Secrets. Were Safe. And it’s out in July of 2025.

Virginia:
Yes.

Scott:
Yes.

Mindy:
Awesome. Okay, thank you so much and we’ll talk to you soon.

Virginia:
Thank you.

Mindy:
Alright, that wraps up this fantastic episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. She is Virginia Trench. He is Mr. Virginia Trench, and I am Indy Jensen saying Goodbye. Cool, cat, that’s a wrap.