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Hey, give me, like, 29 minutes, and I'm gonna help you retire, like, 29 years early. So let me help you cut 29 years off your retirement. And I'm gonna start with a quick story that's maybe a little bit hard to hear. This guy did everything right. He started saving in his early 20s. Cause that's what responsible people do. He took the safe job instead of the one he actually wanted. He skipped vacations year after year. He drove the same car long after it stopped feeling reliable. He told himself, hey, I'll enjoy life later. And later became his favorite word. Later when the kids are older, later when the mortgage is smaller, later when the portfolio is. I mean, every single raise he got, it went into retirement. Every bonus got tucked away. He watched the numbers grow year after year. And he told himself that the sacrifice would be worth it. No, he wasn't miserable. He was just tired. Always tired. And on his 63rd birthday, his wife surprised him with a cake. It said, two more years. And they laughed about it. And they talked about all the trips that they were going to finally take. Going to Italy and Alaska and that cabin by the lake they had always talked about getting. And six months later, he didn't come home from work. A sudden heart attack. No warning, no goodbye. And at the funeral, people talked about how disciplined this guy was, how responsible he was, how proud he would be of the legacy he left behind. His wife received all the financial statements in the mail. You know, a few weeks later, the accounts were full. The plan had worked. She just wished that he had been there to enjoy it with her. Now, look, I'm sure you've seen those posts floating around, all the interwebs from people like Dave Ramsey or Susie Orman who are like, hey, if you just set aside $200 a month starting at age 22, and you do that consistently until you're 72, congratulations. You will have millions of dollars. And every single time I see one of those, I think, cool. So the big dream is to work for 50 years straight so you can finally relax. Right about the time that my knees stop working and my doctor starts using phra, like, at your age. Like, who actually wants that? I mean, congratulations. You played the game perfectly. And your reward is a really nice casket. Because quick reminder, the average life expectancy in America is only in the late 70s, like, 74. So best case scenario, you get a couple good years at the very end of your life, assuming your health holds up and life doesn't throw a few curveballs your way. Now, let me Be very clear before anyone clips this out of context and gets mad at me on the Internet, I'm not anti savings, I'm not anti Dave Ramsey. You absolutely should save money like an emergency fund. Yeah. Long term investing. Yes. Responsibility, obviously. What I'm against is this idea that freedom is something you're only allowed to earn after decades of waiting. That the best years of your life are supposed to be traded away in exchange for comfort later on. Maybe because here's the uncomfortable truth that most people don't want to hear but need to. Like, you don't need to be rich at 72. You need to be free earlier, way earlier. You need margin. You need options. You need time while your kids are still small and want to hang out with you while people still have energy, while life is actually happening. Now, my name is Brandon Turner and I use real estate to become financially free by the age of 27, I was a millionaire by 30. But here's the thing. I still work quite a bit, actually, like all the time. I just have the freedom to work on what I want to work on when I want to work on it, and take vacations when I want, sleep in when I want to, and take long lunches. Now, I rarely sleep in or take long lunches because I genuinely love what I do. That's freedom. That's early retirement. And if you give me the next 20 minutes or so, I want to show you a completely different way to think about early retirement. Financial freedom. Not as an age, not as a finish line, but as a condition where work becomes optional and time comes back under your control. And no, it doesn't require winning the lottery or inventing some fancy app or grinding 18 hours a day for a decade or two. It requires aiming at the right targets early and then using the right levers to compress time. This is going to go deep. So if you find this helpful, please drop me a follow here. Smash that heart button right now if you think this is going to be helpful, because that helps me out a ton on the Internet. Let's get to it. How to retire 30 years earlier than you were told was possible. Now, if you're taking notes, and you should be, this is important, right? Then take some notes. You could call this section like Reframing Retirement. After that we are going to talk about like Uncomfortable ownership, it's called. Then I'll introduce the idea of the freedom number and how that thinking can kind of turn normal retirement advice upside down. And then we'll go real tactical and I'll share like the three levers and that make it possible to shave decades off your retirement. And then I'm going to end with a real uncomfortable question that could fundamentally change your life, starting like today in like 18 minutes. Okay, let's first reframe retirement. The biggest problem with how most people think about retirement isn't that they're lazy or is irresponsible or bad with money. It's that they've been handed a definition of retirement that quietly just sabotages them from the start. Because retirement, as most people understand it, isn't actually a goal. It's a date. 65 or 70 something. And when you turn retirement into a date on a calendar, instead of a condition of how you live your life, you create like you just give up all urgency, all agency, and most importantly, you give up all the creativity. You stop asking how fast? And start asking how long? You stop asking like, what would free me up? And start asking what can I tolerate? And what's that one shift that changes everything? You know, most people are told implicitly or explicitly that that path looks like this. You work hard, you grind, you save a little, you invest slowly. And if you behave yourself for 40 or 50 years, someday you get your freedom handed back to you like a gold watch at retirement party. Now that's not a plan. That is a delay tactic. Because here's what nobody says out loud. If freedom is only allowed at the end, then the suffering becomes normalized in the middle. We call it just how life is. You hate Mondays. That's just how life is. You're exhausted all the time. That's just how life is. You feel trapped by your job or your bills. That's just how life is. And the advice you get is almost always emotional anesthesia. It's not a solution. Hey, hang in there. It'll be worth it someday. At least you've got job security. What about all those people who don't have it now? Let me ask you something uncomfortable. What if the goal isn't to endure life, but to design it? Because the people who retire early, and I don't just mean financially, I mean like mentally, don't think of retirement as an age. They think of it as a state, a condition. That condition is simple. Work is optional. That's it. Not you stop working. Not you move to the beach. Not you never do anything productive ever again. And you watch TikTok all day, just this. You no longer have to trade hours for survival. That's real retirement. And once you understand that, everything else just changes. Because now the question isn't how do I survive until I'm 70? The question becomes what would it take to make my income optional? And that question is dangerous. Again, a good way, because it forces clarity, it forces math, it forces you to look at your life through the lens of not someday, but through the lens of leverage. So here's the truth most people never hear. The vast majority of Americans don't actually need millions and millions of dollars to retire early like they just think they do. Because net worth is what gets talked about all the time. But net worth is a really terrible measure of freedom. Like you can have a million dollar net worth and still be completely trapped. I mean, just ask almost any doctor out there working 70 hours a week. Or the business owner who can't step away to go to their kids ballet recital. Or the person whose money's all locked up in places that don't pay them until they sell a property or a business. Like net worth is impressive on paper, but it doesn't pay your bills. Cash flow does. Freedom doesn't come from a number on a statement. It comes from income that shows up whether you work this week or not. That's the shift. Once you see that shift, the retirement no longer is about accumulation of some multimillion dollar number. It starts being about replacing your income, replacing your expenses, then replacing your paycheck, replacing obligations with choice. Now let me make this really practical. It's been a lot of theory. Most people don't wake up dreaming about Lamborghinis or private jets. They dream about small, quieter things. Like they dream about not needing an alarm clock. Or they dream about picking their kids up from school without asking permission. They dream about saying no to things that drain them. And they dream about just saying yes without checking their bank account first. Like that kind of freedom that doesn't require winning capitalism, it requires converting your life. Now there's another really important mental shift that has to happen if you actually want to retire early. And it is also kind of uncomfortable, but it's necessary and that's taking full ownership of your future instead of outsourcing it. Because look, for a long time in this country, retirement was something you could just hand off to somebody else, like the government and the government would just take care of it. Or your pension, your employer would take care of it. The 401k that you just set aside every month, they would take care of your future. If you work hard, you stay loyal. At the end, somebody somewhere is going to hand you a check every month and say, thanks for playing and guess what? For A while that worked for my parents, it worked. But that world is gone and it's dying quickly. Pensions are disappearing. Social Security was never designed to be a full retirement plan for everybody, and that's going away. Companies don't reward loyalty the way they used to. They reward efficiency. And yet a huge number of people are still mentally operating as if somebody else is responsible for their freedom. They say things like, well, if Social Security is still around, or, I'll be fine once my 401k grows, or my pension should cover it, like, or I'm sure the government will figure something out. I've heard that. And I don't say this to be dramatic, but that mindset is one of the most dangerous places you can live financially. Because the moment you believe someone else is responsible for your retirement, you give up control over the timeline. You give up leverage. You give up the right to be upset if it doesn't work out the way you hoped. Responsibility. It's heavy, but it's also empowering, because the second you say, this is on me, everything changes. You stop waiting. You stop blaming. You start, you know, working. You stop hoping. You start building. And here's the key distinction that I want to make sure that people understand and where I know they're going to defensive. Taking responsibility doesn't mean rejecting help. It doesn't mean you don't invest in a 401k. It doesn't mean you ignore Tax Advantage accounts. It doesn't mean you pretend Social Security doesn't exist. It means you stop treating those as a plan and start treating them as gravy, as bonuses, because bonuses don't determine your freedom, systems do. And when your entire retirement strategy is essentially, well, I hope this works out. You're not planning. You're just gambling with decades of your life. The reality is, no one cares more about your future than you do. Not your employer. Not a politician, not a fund manager, not some algorithm. You are the only person who wakes up every day inside your life feeling the pressure of your bills, your stress, your energy, your family, your kids, your time. So when I say retirement is your responsibility, I'm not saying that as a burden. I'm saying it as an invitation. Because ownership creates urgency, but it also creates possibility. And the moment you internalize that no one is coming to save you, you also unlock. Which means I get to save myself. And that is when people start moving differently. They stop asking permission. They stop waiting for raises. They stop assuming the default path is the only path. And they start asking better questions, like if this is my responsibility? What decisions would I make differently? Would I still stay in a job I hate with no upside? Would I still buy things that lock me into higher expenses for the next 30 years? Would I still delay learning how money actually works? Would I still avoid risk? Or. Or would I start avoiding stagnation? Because here's the truth most people don't want to hear. Depending on systems you don't control feels safe, but it's actually fragile. Like true security doesn't come from guarantees. It comes from adaptability, from skills, from ownership, from having multiple levers that you can pull when life changes. Because life always changes. Markets change, laws change, companies change, health changes. AI is going to change everything. But when you build income streams, you understand assets you control and skills you can deploy. You're not at the mercy of just one system. And that's what early retirement really requires. Not perfection, but responsibility, not certainty. Ownership. Not just blind faith in institutions, but confidence in your ability to figure things out. And the empowering part here is that you don't need to know everything to take responsibility. You just need to stop pretending that you don't have it. You don't need to be a finance expert or a real estate expert or a stock expert. You don't need to predict the economy. You don't need to outsmart Wall Street. You just need to decide that your future matters enough today to be intentional about it. Because the people who retire early, they're smarter than everyone else. They're just unwilling to outsource the most important decades of their life. They don't assume that things are just going to naturally work out. They make them work out. And once you make that shift, once you stop saying, well, they'll take care of it and start saying, this is on me. Everything accelerates. Your learning accelerates, your decisions sharpen, your tolerance for excuses just disappears. Suddenly retiring early stops sounding like some fantasy or a sales pitch, and it starts sounding like a responsibility you're actually excited to own. Because when it's your responsibility is also your timeline. It's your rules. It's your life. Which brings us to the concept I wish somebody would have drilled into my head way earlier. And that is your freedom number. So your freedom number is not some arbitrary millionaire status. It's simply this. What does it cost for you to live your life per month at a level that feels good, not extravagant, but aligned? Like your mortgage or your rent is covered, your food's covered, insurance, travel, fun giving, margin. Add all that up and that number matters more than your net worth. Ever will. Because once you know that number, you can reverse engineer freedom instead of daydreaming about it. Like, if your life costs 5,000amonth, you don't need $5 million. You need $5,000 a month without punching a clock. And then, all of a sudden, retirement doesn't feel like some distant fantasy. It feels like a math problem. A solvable one. Now, we'll get to the details on how you might do that, but here's where most people get tripped up. They hear that, and they immediately their brain jumps to optimization, like roi. Get some spreadsheets out, they start asking, what's the best roi? It's the wrong question. The better question is, how fast does this move me toward freedom? Because a 7% return over 40 years might look responsible, but it's also an incredibly slow time if your goal is time. And time, especially when you're younger, is the most valuable asset you have. The tragedy isn't that people don't retire rich. The tragedy is that they spend their best decades of their life waiting for permission to really live. Waiting until the kids are all grown up. Waiting until the mortgage is all paid off. Waiting until the market feels safer. Waiting until they feel ready. And that waiting has a cost. It costs energy and health and relationships. It costs presence. And the cruel irony is that by the time many people finally reach retirement age, the version of life they were saving for, it's no longer available to them. So, look, when I say that retirement is framed backwards, this is what I mean. We've been taught to sacrifice now for a hypothetical later, instead of designing a life today where freedom increases every single year. We've been taught that patience, when we actually don't need patience. We need precision. We've been taught endurance, when what we actually need is leverage. The goal is not to quit work. The goal is to stop being trapped by it. And the moment you internalize that, the entire conversation shifts. Because now you're not asking, how much can I save? You're asking, what can I build? What can I create? What can I do? How do I provide value? You're not asking, how long is this going to take? You're asking, what is going to accelerate this? What skills do I need to make it go faster? And that's where things get really fun and interesting. Because when retirement is a condition instead of a date, the path forward becomes clearer and shorter than most people could ever imagine. Now, once you accept that retirement is a condition, not an age, and once you accept that your future is your responsibility, the natural next question Becomes okay, so what actually moves the needle? Because most people are overwhelmed not by a lack of motivation, but a lack of clarity. So they're doing a lot of things, but not the right things. And when you strip away the noise, early retirement comes down to just three levers. Not ten, not a hundred, three. And the people who retire early don't magically have access to different tools. They just pull these levers intentionally and they pull them sooner. So let's get into the three levers. The first lever to pull, you need scalable cash flow. Now that's profit every month. That comes like with very minimal work. And it's not tied directly to the hours you work because you don't retire early by owning things that only look good on paper. Someday you retire early by buying assets that pay you every single month. Now this could be done in a few different ways. Like you could start a small plumbing company. Let's say you're a plumber or just an entrepreneur. You start a small plumbing company. Or you could build an app that you could sell. Or you could invent a product or one of a million other ideas. Now for me and for a lot of people that I watched this successfully, the answer has been real estate. And not because real estate is magic, not because it's easy though it's not super complex, but because it's proven by like millions and millions of people over centuries of time. Like your app might not take off, your dog walking business might get knock at traction. Maybe the plumbing just isn't needed because AI robots take over. But people always need somewhere to live. Plus real estate is so simple compared to most businesses. And the tax benefits in the US at least are just stupid good. But hey, you do you. But I'm going to use real estate as an example in this video because the same concepts apply to real estate and entrepreneurship in general. So how do you get scalable income in this case through real estate? Well, let's start by making this point clear. Not all real estate works the same way. Buying a random rental house and hoping that it cash flows is not a strategy. That's a guess. I don't recommend just going on Zillow, finding a cheap house buy with 20% down and assume that you're going to make some cash flow. What you actually need is a modern cash flow strategy. That means being intentional about how the property makes money and doing things a little bit differently than just like traditional rental house. So I'm talking about these fringe ideas. They're still real estate, but they're on the fringe, like buying midterm rentals for traveling nurses or short term rentals for vacationers. Or small mobile home parks. I love those. Or RV parks or co living where you like, rent by the room. Like these strategies are designed to produce income now, not just appreciation later. They're built to replace your paycheck, not just decorate your net worth. And if you want to go deeper on this, I actually made a free tool where you can like answer a few questions and suggest what strategy is right for you. Just go to cashflowisn't dead.com and you can grab that again, cash flow isn't. There's no apostrophe in that dead dot com. But let me go deeper on just one of these ideas. Let's just take like, I don't know, rent by the room, because that's one that I'm doing a fair bit with right now. Now with that strategy, you find the right house in the right area and you add a few bedrooms. So maybe it's a five bedroom house becomes an eight bedroom house because you turn the bonus family room into two new rooms. And maybe you take out the formal dining room and you make that a room as well. So now that house normally traditionally would get $2,500 a month in cash flow, but you rent out every room separately for, let's say 800 bucks a month for a room fully furnished, all utilities included. What a deal. Now anyone making less than 50k a year at their job needs housing like that. There's a massive, massive shortage right now of affordable housing in the US and worldwide. But 800 bucks a month times eight units, $6,400 in rent every month. Now your bills, including the mortgage payment, taxes, insurance, repairs, utilities, management, all that, let's say it comes to five grand a month. That's $1,400 in pure extra cash flow from that one rental house. Now how many of those do you need to hit your freedom number? Look, now I'm sure your brain is firing off a ton of like, yeah, buts right now. Yeah, but what if I don't have the money? Or yeah, but that sounds really hard to. Oh, really, really hard to manage. Yeah, but what about the zoning rules around how many unoccupied or unrelated people can be in a house? Look, those might be good questions, but as my dad always said growing up Brandon, the yeah, butts live in the woods with all the yahoos questions. I don't even know what that means, but I love it. Questions are good, but if you assume that something won't work because you have questions, because you don't understand it. You're nothing but a Yahoo. So whatever a Yahoo is, or as my friend Jay Papasan says, a lot better in the One thing, which is a phenomenal book by the way, when you argue for your limitations, you'll win every time. Ooh, look, I promise you, thousands of people are doing this strategy and other strategies all the time. I see it inside of my communities. I have some educational communities like First Deal or Freedom Accelerator. Like our students are buying deals like this all the time, even without money or without previous deals or experience or connections. They just had the mental fortitude and willingness to learn and figure it out because you will encounter problems, or as I call them, bottlenecks. The question is, will you break through them? Now, this video isn't meant to be a masterclass on how to do real estate investing. If you want more help, just follow me here on YouTube or Instagram or whatever. Or check out firstdeal.com 12month educational mastermind where we help you land your first earn next cash flow and rental property guaranteed. But again, this is not a masterclass on real estate. So let's move on to the second lever. We're gonna go a bit quicker here. Lever two Lifestyle Design. See, this is a silent killer of early retirement if you ignore it. Because the moment your income goes up, the temptation is to let your lifestyle rise right along with it. You buy a bigger house, you get a nicer car, you get more stuff, nicer vacations. And none of that's wrong. Don't get me wrong here. None of it's wrong unless it delays your freedom. So income creep is dangerous because it feels deserved in the moment, it feels reasonable. But every permanent expense you add becomes a new paycheck you have to replace before you're free. So early retirees don't live small, they just live intentionally. They ask better questions. Not can I afford this monthly payment, but what does this cost me in terms of time? They build lives they actually enjoy, but they're ruthless about cutting expenses that don't meaningfully increase happiness. So they understand that luxury purchases don't just cost money, they cost years. Again, I'm not saying you can't have nice stuff, but let's make sure you are evaluating the true cost of that nice stuff and ensure it's worth the trade off. I mean, early in my career, my wife and I took a three week backpacking trip across Europe. We had very little money and the money we spent could have been Invested. But we knew we were going to have kids pretty soon. We knew we would never get to experience that solo trip together to Europe. And so we took that money and we built some phenomenal memories. But you know what? I also drove an old, crappy, paid off Toyota Camry I got in high school. I drove that till I was a millionaire. Eventually I bought a couple Teslas when my cash flow could pay for it. So you can get it just maybe not right away. So you got cash flow coming in from your real estate investing or your business, and you got your lifestyle designed intentionally to maximize enjoyment and minimize expenses while you build. The third lever is when things get really fun. I call this lever compounding leverage. This is where everything accelerates. Because once you have cash flow in real estate covering part or all of your lifestyle, something powerful happens. Your time opens up, you buy back your time. And when time opens up, your ability to learn and think and network and see better opportunities multiplies while your assets continue to grow even if you don't lift a finger. And that, like through real estate, will go up in appreciation and the loan gets paid down automatically while your knowledge and experience and connections, they grow because you finally have the margin to focus on those higher value decisions. This is how people scale wealth without scaling their hours. They don't just work more, they just think better. They don't hustle harder, they choose better deals. Every property that you own teaches you something. Every deal expands your network. Every year you're in the game, your risk decreases and your upside increases. That's the compounding effect that really nobody talks about, but exists. You're not just compounding money, you're compounding judgment. And that's why early retirement through real estate isn't about one big win. It's about building a system where cash flow buys you time and then time buys you clarity. And clarity buys you better opportunities. And better opportunities will just accelerate everything else. It's like this beautiful flywheel that makes you retire years earlier. So income through cash flow strategies and lifestyle design that protects freedom and then compounding leverage that allows your wealth and your life to grow without demanding more and more of your time. When those three levers are working together, retirement doesn't happen at the end of your life. It creeps forward year by year until one day you realize you're already living in it. So how long does all of this take? Well, if you're super intentional about it and you're super focused on it, it can happen significantly faster than you think. Now, of course, I'M not promising anything here, but I've seen people go from zero to financial freedom, hitting their freedom number in just a couple years. I mean, shaving off decades of work and sacrifice and misery at a job they don't love. And it's actually fun in the process. Now, before you click away, let me ask you one uncomfortable question, because this is the part nobody ever tells you, and it might be the most important thing you hear today. I'll ask that uncomfortable question in a second. But here's the thing. We spend a lot of time talking about the risk of doing something new, the risk of investing, the risk of making a move. But almost no one ever talks about the risk of waiting. And waiting has a cost. It's not obvious at first. The cost of waiting isn't just financial it's the years where your kids are still little and want to be around you. It's the energy you have right now that won't always be there. It's the freedom you could be building while life keeps moving. And that is the scary part. It's scary when waiting feels responsible because it feels safe. It feels like the mature thing to do. But a lot of people don't realize they waited too long until the window has already started to close. But here's the good news, because this is actually empowering. You don't need to have everything figured out in order to start moving in the right direction. You don't need perfect timing. You don't need perfect knowledge. You don't need a perfect plan. You just need to decide that your time matters enough to be intentional with it. Because money can be replaced. Time can't. And the goal isn't to be rich at the end of your life. It's to be free while life is still happening. So here's that uncomfortable question I want you to ponder today. What is that future version of you quietly begging you to act on right now? It's a good question. And hey, if this made you think differently about money, time, or retirement, do me a quick favor. Hit that like button below the video so more people see this and subscribe to me here. Beardy Brandon if you want more real world conversations about building wealth and real estate and financial freedom earlier, not later. I'm Brandon Turner. Beardy Brandon on YouTube and Instagram. Signing off.