Losing $150K, Starting Over, and STILL Retiring Early | Life After FIRE

Think you’ve blown your chances of achieving FIREToday we are talking with Nik Johnson, a man who built an empire, lost it all and then built it back again. Hello, hello, hello my dear listeners, as you may or may not know, my husband Carl and I have a new YouTube series on the BiggerPockets money YouTube channel called Life After Fire. And as a very special bonus, we’re going to be airing episodes here on the podcast on Wednesdays. Without further ado, let’s get into it. Hi there. My name is Mindy Jensen.And I’m Carl Jensen.And this is the MindyAnd CarlOn Life After Fire, where we talk about what happens after you reach financial independence.Why do we call the show Life After Fire? LAF? Laugh.Laugh because we’re laughing. No, because we’re talking about and talking to people who are living their best life after reaching financial independence. Alright, we are so excited to get into the show. Nick, thank you so much for joining us today.Thank you for having me. I’m extremely excited to be here and thank you all for the time.Yeah, I’m super excited to have Nick on. So the backstory to this show is I met Nick at FinCon, which is a conference for creators, and he started telling me this story of how he built up his financial situation and then he made a move that did not go well, lost it all, and then built it back up again. He said, if I can get it once, I can get it twice. And I thought that was so cool. No victim attitude, no pity party, just, okay, I did this, I can do it again. So that’s what we are going to be talking about today.Nick, let’s jump into how you had built it up the first time.Alright, act one. Right. So what happened is that I originally was a computer programmer, so I was application developer. And so whenever I hear Carl say hello world, it makes me giggle a little bit on the inside because if you’re in that world, you understand the backstory to the Hello world. I did that. My wife was a college professor, she taught psychology. That’s how we started off. So everything was good. We were being responsible, living below our means. We were contributing to those 4 0 1 Ks. So we were doing that had started a Roth. So we were like, we understood the basics, the fundamentals, trying to live below our means and investor difference. But what happened is that one day I realized where I was at, I was like, I just didn’t really feel like the life that we wanted we would achieve through just the traditional kind of nine to five that we’re doing by W2 means. So I thought about what could we do to expedite that or even do a complete pivot as far as when it comes to what we were doing in our careers. And so we decided to open up our own business.I was going to say, what kind of business was this?A little more context here. We live in Jacksonville, Florida and in Jacksonville, Florida, it is spread out. I mean, it is large. For those of you who may not know as far as when it comes to landmass, Jacksonville, Florida is the biggest content as far as contiguous us 840 square miles. It is huge. And so there was two businesses that we thought about. We thought about either doing real estate or we thought about opening a car dealership. And being that we were in Jacksonville and everything is so spread out and kind of giving it a kind of time check on this, this was 2003. So it really wasn’t things like your Uber, your Lyft, your ride shares and things like that. So we say, you know what? We know people who would, if they had to choose between having their own place and having their own car, they would choose having their own car.
And so we decided to go in and start a car dealership. And so some of the challenges that go in with a car dealership, it’s pretty interesting, especially when you’re a kind of small mom and pop kind of dealership. What we were weren’t one of the big names like a Lincoln or a Toyota or anything like that. We’re a mom and pop. And so what happened is that you literally have to wear all the hats. It was a challenge to do that. And first of all, it was just coming up with the initial capital to do that. And so we were like, okay, SBA loans. This again for context, I’m 27, 28 years old, so I know a little bit, but I don’t know everything. So I’m like, Hey, I know we got some money, we got these retirement accounts. Let’s just go ahead and empty those out.
We can use those, we’ll make the money back. And so that was kind of the seed money that we decided to use to start this car dealership. So that is how we decided to get in there. Some of the things that, the challenges that we had was, as I said before, when you’re a smaller dealership, you have to do everything yourself. When you have your own dealership, you have to first of all sell, correct. Most people go to look for cars on the weekends and after work. And so that particular part, you have to be there at the dealership to do that, but then you have to get cars. And so you have to go and get them. And so typically you have to go get them from auctions. And the cars that you get are auctions are typically the cars that, the car that you barely got on the lot to trade in because it was smoking and it would run hot and all this other stuff.
So those vehicles are the cars that typically you get at the auctions. I mean, sometimes you get cars that are off lease and stuff like that. So typically they are in horrible condition. So you go there and you get those cars, and if you are fortunate enough, you might have a team that can go and fix these cars for you, but if not, you got to be able to rent it yourself. So you got to get cars, you got to sell cars, you also have to deal with financing. There’s a lot of paperwork that goes on because it’s facilitated by the state. And then also it’s done funn stuff. Like you have to repo cars. I mean, so it’s a lot of stuff that you have to do. And then literally when you’re a mom and pop operation, I mean I was doing days, it would be nothing for me to do a 16 hour day, five, six days a week just from doing that.Nick, you seem like too nice of a guy to do this business. I can’t picture me walking in there and you’re like, Hey, what can I do to get you into this car today?Carl? Part of the issue that I had is that I found out I was a little too honest for the business. I mean, literally, I’m extremely compassionate. And so when people would come to me and they’d say, Hey, you know what? I’m going through a challenge or whatever, I’d be like, Hey, you know what, I’m big on accountability. So someone would come to me and they’d say, Hey, you know what? I’m having this issue or that issue. And I’d be like, okay. I was like, can you make me whole next time? Or someone would say, Hey, I had a mechanical issue with the car and I had to get it fixed so I couldn’t make it work, dah. So I was very considerate to the plight that people had. But ultimately it kind of made some challenges because the same kind of understanding that I had, the finance companies didn’t have that same level of understanding for me.
And so I realized that I think when it came to personality type, I think the opportunity was good. But a couple of things. First of all, I think I just don’t think my personality fit for the business. Second thing was that when it came to work-life balance, there was very little because I worked so much there. And then also there were some costing mistakes that were made. I didn’t know the business, I didn’t know anybody who was in the car business. So the original model for opening a car dealership going back many, many years ago was that you would buy a car and the hope was that you bought a car where if you got someone to make a down payment, it almost covered the entire cost of the vehicle. So at that particular point, if they never came back again, you were pretty much whole. But as time went on, it was getting harder and harder to find vehicles that someone could come down and make a down payment that would basically cover the initial price of that car. And so you always find yourself being in more and more of a deficit because people couldn’t make those larger down payments. So it was kind of challenging there.So if you didn’t have a lot of car dealership experience, why did you choose car dealership to open as a business to open?Because literally as I sat down and kind of looked at everything that I felt like was almost a necessity where I was as far as I felt like having a car was a necessity. Number two, I went through, I did do, there was actually some courses that I took prior to doing it and I went through some of the courses. I was like, okay, I feel like I understand this pretty good. And so at that particular point, I feel as though I had a reasonable amount of understanding of the business to get into it. So I went ahead and did that. There were some other things I looked at. I feel as though that the margins were a little too thin. I didn’t want to do something like opening a car wash and some of the other stuff like that. So I was like, you know what? I want something where I had residual income. And really the car dealership is what really interests me about the residual income along with, that’s why I contemplated real estate also.That’s funny that you say you didn’t want to open a car wash. Carl and I drive past a car wash near us and every bay is filled with people behind it waiting to get in. It’s like the spray it yourself. Stick your credit card in there. I’m like, maybe we should open up a car wash.Yes, those are good. I would take one of those, the kind of manual, Hey, pull up me with the bucket and the sponge. No, I can’t do that. But yeah, with the bays, absolutely. Those are a good model.My dear listeners. I am so excited to announce that we now have a BiggerPockets newsletter. If you would like to subscribe, go to biggerpockets.com/money newsletter. Alright, we’ll be right back after this. Welcome back to the show. So how long did you own this dealership?My wife and I, we had this dealership for red at a year.Oh.So I got into it and we were feverishly going at it and me being financially minded, I did keep up with the books and I kind of noticed how things started to go in the wrong direction. And so things kept going and things kept going in around a year. We had literally gotten to the point where we were almost at zero and I went to my, yeah, yeah, Carl, we were almost at zero. And I remember I was getting ready to pin a check to the mortgage company. I was like, well, I was like, well, I know I got this month and I wrote it and I said it. And I went back to my wife and I told my wife, I was like, baby. I was like, I know if this is going to continue to work out, my wife being the person that she is, she was like, okay.
Well, she was like, well, what are we going to do next? And literally I told her, I was like, Hey, I told you Carl, we got it once. We can get it twice. But the thing is that now we have experience and knowledge based on what we did. And so we know what things don’t work. And even if you don’t know everything that will work, you’re ahead when you know what won’t work. And so we just literally went and said, okay, well what do we want to do? I did realize that the type of business was important, who you in the business with? Cause you want to make sure that the team that you have around you has the same drive that you have. So it’s a lot of things that we learned in that experience that we could use moving forward. And from that particular day, I said, okay, let’s get it.
This is the truth. I remember we stopped. We had vehicles that were out, and I literally, I just told the people, I was like, Hey. And literally I told ’em to keep ’em. I was so over it. I was like, keep ’em. Me and my wife actually went back and we ran the numbers at one point to figure out just how much we felt like we ate during that business. And we ate about probably $150,000 in our business. But I was back in 2003, 2004. I mean, we did it, but we had to keep moving forward. So we just had to keep marching. So that’s what we did.Just to be clear, you lost about 150,000 on the business, but you also lost money because you weren’t working your W2. And was your wife working at the time or did she quit as well?Yeah, fortunately, my wife of Flex in between doing the dealership, and she was an adjunct professor, so she would still do some teaching online and in the afternoons sometime. But I was doing the dealership, so I wasn’t getting W2. Also, I lost from the money that we pulled out the market, we cashed out on our 401k. So the opportunity growth on that money was gone and everything else that we had. So yeah, I don’t want to do it. I’m pulling up a calculator right now. Oh man. It was 2004, so pretty much the entire year. 2004. Okay.2004 for 150,000. I’m going to go for it. I won’t say the number. If you don’t want to hear it,It’s all right. You can do it and IWon’t go on suicide watch. It’s okay. Okay. It’s taken a long time to think about it, so it must be a pretty big number with all the zeros, I’m sure.Remember you would’ve lost a lot in 2008.Yeah, I would have. That’s one thing, the solace, and that’s when I think about real estate piece, I even if I would’ve did real estate, I probably would’ve lost my shirt then too. Cause when the market crashed in oh eight, so I’m like, either way, I probably would’ve got servedDepending on how you structured that business. But okay, okay, you shuttered the dealership, what’s your next step?I often tell people, the quickest 10 years you’ll ever see is from 20 to 30. At that point, I was at the backside of 30 and I was like, okay. I was like, I got to ramp it up. So first thing I was like, I need to start getting some money coming in the quickest way for me to get money coming in. At that point, I had my bachelor’s in computer science, so I was like, I can go be a substitute teacher. They always need substitute teachers. So literally I went and I started being a substitute teacher. I know it was like no lines, no waiting. So I went there and I started doing that as I was looking for employment back into the computer field. So I did that for, I probably did that for around six months, six, seven months until I was able to get full-time employment.
Being a computer programmer again, one thing I did, I always appreciated teachers, but I got an even better and greater appreciation for them once I subbed for a while. So I did that, I did that. I got W2 employment again. And then when I got my W2 employment again, I was thinking about, okay, how can I generate more revenue? At this particular point, the coffers were empty, we were sustaining, but I was like, okay. I was like, how can I go back, try to make ourselves whole, and how can we get to the point where we can go ahead and start trying to get to where we’re just not making it, that we’re actually able to start back investing in doing things like that. And so my wife was an adjunct professor. So what happened is that they had a program at the university where that a spouse could get 50% off tuition.
So I was like, okay. I was interested in teaching and being an adjunct professor as well, but I didn’t have a graduates degree, but I was like, you know what? This would be a good opportunity for me to be able to be an adjunct professor as well if I can go get my graduate’s degree. So I went and I using the program that they had along with the tuition reimbursement that my employer had, it really allowed me to really get my graduate’s degree at no cost, because the way they had it structured is that they didn’t do a lot of, it wasn’t a lot as far as reimbursement. I think it was around six or $7,000 a year, but it was based on calendar year. So in my head I knew it was like, okay, it’s about two years for me to get my graduates degree.
If I start in June of one year and have it roll over the calendar year to the next calendar year, I can kind of get two years in one year. So that’s literally what I did. And so I got my graduate’s degree. I think I have paid maybe three, $4,000 out of pocket for my graduates degree at that point. And when I got my graduates degree, Carl, you probably know this, there aren’t a lot of people in the IT field that have graduate degrees in it. Some don’t have any degree. Yeah, some don’t at all. So it was fertile ground for me to be able to get a lot of teaching assignments. I mean, at one point I had five universities that brought me on as an adjunct professor at that time, and I was literally cycling in and out, different terms. Sometime I was working my full-time W2 and I was doing maybe adjunct, being adjunct for maybe one or two universities a semester at the same time. Just trying to get that money up to make up for some of the time that we had lost.I’ll back up a second. Nick, have you ever read that book? Rich Dad, poor Dad? Oh, yes sir. Yes sir. It kind of annoyed me in a little bit. He makes, and funny enough, I didn’t even realize you were a professor before I started to have this thought, but he kind of makes fun of his supposed dad who was a college professor because that guy was a loser. He’d never become financially independent. So you have to own a business, you have to do this thing. And I don’t like that attitude. You can become PHI just fine by having a normal job. It might not be quite as sexy. It might not be quite as exciting. It might take you a little bit longer, but it’s certainly attainable, man. You were the poor dad for Richard Kiyosaki. Is that the guy’s name? Richard Kiyosaki, Robert Kiyosaki. I always mess that up. So you could stick it Robert.Robert definitely can. And my thing is that there wasn’t as many, it wasn’t like the gig economy it is now. And so I was like, okay. I was like, how can I kind of sit there? And it allowed me the opportunity. Cause all those, most of the universities I taught at were remote online. So it allowed me the opportunity to work into the wee hours of the morning. And so literally, I did this for a series of years. I probably did this around maybe between my W2 and adjuncting. I probably did that for around three, four years and I had to stop. Cause one of the things other than burnout, I know the cause of tuition for college. And if I ever, I said this to myself, if I ever got to the point where I felt like I couldn’t give my students 100%, I would stop.
And so it really got to the point where I was like, you know what? I was like, I’m getting tired. I’m getting burned out. We’re getting to a point where our finances are kind of beyond where we were before we had a situation with the dealership. So let’s go ahead and pull back. Let’s try to enjoy some of our time together and stop grinding so hard. What are you doing right now? What am I doing right here now? Well, my life after fire, we fired in, we hit FI in 2022, so that’s when we hit. So as far as I found out about the fire community in 2020 and somehow or another I, I don’t know exactly how I ended up crossing it. I just remember seeing a podcast, they talked about how you can invest in your HSA. I was like, you can invest in your HSA.
I was like, I didn’t know that. And then it sent me down this rabbit hole and I like binged on just by every episode of Choose Fi. And then they talked about the local groups and all this other stuff, and I met a local group and I got connected with them. So that’s what happened in 2020. And I was talking with my wife and I was like, man, I was like, all that we’ve been doing, I was like, it’s a name for it and I think we’re almost there. And I kind of explained to her some of the stuff and whatever. And my wife has always been extremely supportive to me. And so she’s like, okay, well let’s kind go over the numbers, let’s talk about it. And I talked about, I think in a couple years if everything kind of keeps going the right way, we’ll get there.
So in 2022, we hit our FI number In 2023, my wife came to me and she said, Hey, you know what? I think it would be kind of cool if I know you want to stop working, but she’s like, I think I want to stop too. And so I was like, that’s fine. So in 2023, my wife completely stepped away from being a professor at the university. And in 2024, I stepped away from my W2 job right Now, as far as what life looks like for me, life is good. I can’t lie if someone would’ve told me back when I was flipping a sign over at that dealership that some 19 years later I would have kind of the life where I can do what I want to and go how I want to. I don’t know if I would’ve believed ’em. But at the same time, there is something to be said when it comes to consistency and just really trusting the process.
And so now I’m able to sit here. We volunteer a lot in our kids’ schools. We go to the gym four or five times out the week now. We never thought we’d be gym rats, but we go to the gym a lot. Now we have the ability now we meet up with a lot of people who are in our five community and we’re fortunate. And literally this is how it looks this past Tuesday. It’s a group of us, a PHI group, and we are kind of like the lunch bunch and the happy hour crew. We don’t really play at full price for anything. And so we’re at Top Golf because top golf is always 50% off on Tuesdays. So we’re sitting there, we’re talking about how we’re going to leave from there and go get $3 tacos because it’s Taco Tuesday. And we’re discussing about how we have this ownership of our time and how grateful that we are that we have the community because we would be so alone if we didn’t have the comradery that we get in the community.
So we spend a lot of time in community doing that. And also right now we’re just trying to evangelize financial independence. And so right now I have a podcast that I do on, well, I have a show which is called Everyday Money Heroes, where I go out and the goal of that is to provide information and inspiration to people of all ages to take control of their financial journey. And that’s really what it is. And so literally we talk about kind of the fundamentals of phi, but also I try to spotlight people’s stories who might be a college professor, who might be a worker at a factory, but they stay disciplined. They’re living below their means and they’re just investing in a difference and they’re getting ownership of time back, and that’s really what it’s all about. So I’m thankful that I have the PHI community that I trust the process because I didn’t know anybody who did.
But at the same time, anybody can achieve that and you can just have a life well lived. People look at me and they just like, there’s no way. It’s like, you’re not 65, you can’t be retired. I was like, well, I was like, you don’t have to be 65 to retire. I was like, you can have time ownership at any point if you really have the ability to really stay disciplined. So hopefully I answered your question, Carl, but it really excites me because I know that I feel like if anybody can just understand just the concept that you can do it, I think they’ll be more empowered.We have to take one final ad break and we’ll be back with more after this. Thanks for sticking with us.Just one quick comment. So you hit on this real strongly. So I’ll just mention in passing the community part of it is so vitally important because like for us, it was kind of the exact same thing for us. Our FI story, we had all this money and we just thought we were saving, but we had no idea what we were going to do with it. Then I discovered Mr. Money mustache. I ran out to the kitchen, told Mindy about it. She’s like, yes, this sounds great. So side note, very thankful to have a spouse who understands and embraces us to what a gift we both have. That’s just incredible.Yes, what a gift you both have.Yes, yes.He who finds a wife finds a good thing,Yes. But if we didn’t have this community to build on all that, I think we’d feel a little bit lost. It’s nice to be able to, here we’re in Colorado, lots of hiking, lots of outdoorsy stuff, and we have a hiking group that goes out on Thursdays. We have a potluck that meets on Tuesdays, and many of the people in these groups are from the PHI community. So what’s the point of having all this money if you can’t have fun with it? And I think at the core of building a fun, fulfilling life is having good people. And I consider myself a pretty severe introvert. Most people scare me. So for that to come from me is pretty big.I want to underscore what Carl is saying. Having the community is so important. Nick, what you said about the Choose Fi local groups, Brad Barrett, that was the best thing you ever did besides the podcast and the main group and all the other things great that you have done, but the local groups are so fantastic. Carl and I travel and we’ll go to an area that has a local group and we’ll jump into the group and just say, Hey, we’re going to have a meetup. We’d love to meet local people here. But when you don’t have that community, when you are the only frugal weirdo in the neighborhood, you kind of start to feel like, oh, maybe this isn’t the right thing. Or you think, I know I want to do this, but I feel so out of place. And you do retire, you start reaching out to your friends and they’re all like, what do you mean? On Tuesday at noon, I got to work and having this PHI community, what did you call them? Your phi, your Lunch Bunch and your Happy Hour Heroes,Yes, it’s the lunch bunch. We’re Happy Hour Heroes and Lunch Bunch. That’s what we do. We do not believe in paying full price on food down here in Jacksonville. So if you got apps on your happy hour menu, we will find you. We,These local groups are everywhere, and if for some reason you live in a place that doesn’t have a local group yet, you can email [email protected] and he will set one up for you. He just wants to have these continue to grow and continue to be supportive of the community. So please, please reach out to Brad if you don’t have a local group. But first, go to choose fi.com/local and see if there’s a local group near you, because there probably is. There’s what is there, like 586 or something like that. They’re everywhere. They’re all across the world. They’re not just in America too. But yeah, I think that’s such an awesome part of your story is just having people to connect with that speak your same language. So Nick, I want to know, we kind of jumped from 2004 a little bit, and then all of a sudden 2022, what were you investing in to get yourself to financial independence, both the type of investment and the type of account that you were putting the money into?Okay, that’s a great segue, Mindy, because one thing I did want to do, I would be remiss if I did not give a shout out to BiggerPockets. Alright, and this is where it goes. So remember I kind of hit that fork in the road where I would go either car dealership or real estate. I did eventually put the car in reverse and go up the real estate lane. So what ended up happening is that the bubble happened. Real estate went down. We did have our home. We had gotten to a point where we were getting ready to build a new home. We had bought some land, we were going to build a new home, but we had our starter home or our first home, and we had lost so much equity. We were like, we’re not going to sell it now. I was like, so we might as well keep it.
So we decided to be accidental landlords, and so we didn’t know a whole lot about the business, and I stumbled upon BiggerPockets. I started going through there and once again binged on that and started hanging out in the forums and stuff like that. Back in 2016, we actually started our first rental. Then in 2016 using some of the knowhow knowledge that we hear from BiggerPockets. From that particular point, we acquired a couple more rentals. We didn’t want a large portfolio at this point. We have four rentals, single family rentals. We do that. So that’s part of our portfolio as far as we do that. Then also we have just retirement accounts tax about brokerage accounts. So basically that’s how we did it. We started off, we got to the point where we were able to start maxing out those 4 0 1 Ks. Then we got to the point where we would max out the 4 0 1 Ks and we would max out the HSAs. We would max out the Roths, and we just kind of did that every year. Then we got to the point where we started maxing all those out. We started putting our money into just kind of VOO and VTI and all the other stuff and just continued to do that. So that was it. So right now at this particular point, we’re probably about 50 50 when it comes to value when it comes to our brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, and equity and real estate.I love that story so much because what I’m hearing you say is you’re not in the middle class trap, which is what Scott Trench and I call the scenario where you’ve done everything, right, you’re contributing to your retirement accounts, you are building up your home equity or paying down your mortgage, and then you get to retirement or early retirement age, you’re like, I’m a millionaire on paper. You can’t actually access those funds because they’re stuck in your home equity or they’re stuck in your retirement accounts and you can’t access them before age 59 and a half, or in some cases 55. So I love that you skipped that. I love that you’re not falling victim to this by contributing to after-tax accounts as well. So anybody watching who has not started contributing to their after tax accounts yet, now is the time to start doing that. Yes. It’s a balance between, oh, do I want the tax deduction versus do I want to be able to potentially retire early? So take into consideration how old you are, take into consideration what age you want to retire, but you don’t want to find yourself in this middle class trap and saying, oh, now what?Yeah, just to kind of piggyback what you were saying, Mindy, I had heard individuals before me say, Hey, you know what? I went really hard on my retirement accounts, but I didn’t do a whole lot to kind of bridge the gap in between. Even they started to do stuff like Roth conversions, all the other stuff. We still need some living funds someplace. And so that’s what really got me into, okay, let’s get this stuff inside of a brokerage account. Now, I don’t like having to pay the taxes on the stuff that’s outside of the retirement accounts, but it is what it is. So it allows me the opportunity to pull off that stuff if I need to as I’m kind of transitioning and working those other buckets.I love it. Whoever gave you that information, spot on. Very well done, sir.Could have been you all. I taken a lot of your content, so it could have been you all. I’ll take credit for it. Sure.Yeah,Absolutely. Mr 1500 gave me that sage advice.Nick, thank you so much for your time today. This was so much fun. Remind me again where people can find you online.Thank you all as well, Carla, Mindy, folks, I want to keep up with what I’m doing in my life. After five, I can be founded everyday Money Heroes on YouTube and all other platforms. I’m just excited to spread the good news that life after five is what you would think it is and more so absolutely. I look forward to seeing everybody there, and once again, thank you all for the opportunity to come here and share my story.Alright, thank you so much Nick. And if you’d like this video, please click the thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to this channel for more videos, just like Nicks.Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Life After Fire and with it, Mindy, and I say goodbye.