Dion McNeeley’s Inspiring Story: Achieve Life on Your Own Terms

Dylan Silver (00:01.22)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show we have Dion McNeeley. Dion is going to be the keynote speaker for BP Con, the bigger pockets conference. And he’s known as the lazy investor. Dion, welcome to the show.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (00:20.59)
Howdy, thanks for having me here. I’m excited to share some information with people that might make their financial future better.

Dylan Silver (00:27.458)
Absolutely. Man, at the top of the show, I always like to ask folks about how they got into the real estate space. I know how I got in, but I think no two stories are alike.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (00:38.798)
So I don’t scare people away. like to put the ending before the beginning. I invested for 12 years and retired in 2022 with a couple hundred thousand dollars in passive income from a small real estate portfolio that I’m learning how to spend. So the ending was good. The beginning wasn’t so good. I made it to 40 pretty much without ever having a thousand dollars in the bank.

Dylan Silver (00:43.692)
Okay.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (01:03.34)
I got laid off from law enforcement because of the 2008 recession, You know, municipalities don’t have taxes coming in, so they can’t staff their departments. I found myself as a single parent with three kids. I found out about $89,000 in bad debt in my name I didn’t know existed until the divorce. And I started teaching at a CDL school making $17 an hour. So I was in a pretty bad position. I had tried for a pension twice. I tried the Marine Corps, they downsized after Desert Storm. I tried law enforcement.

They downsized after 2008. So at 40, I decided to make my own pension and start buying rentals. And the way I did it was very slow, what I call lazy. It’s not sexy. I didn’t do the BRRRR method. I didn’t do any wholesaling or flipping, no creative financing. All my properties are from the MLS with conventional loans. It started really slow, saved for two years, had a bad debt to income ratio, so I couldn’t buy a property.

I had $89,000 in bad debt and slow income. But luckily a lender told me just kind of like casually in a conversation, the only way you’d ever really be able to buy a rental is if you had rental income on your tax returns. And that sent me down the rabbit hole of why would that matter? So I moved from my house into an apartment and rented the house out for two years. So for two years we downsized life. And at the two year point,

Dylan Silver (02:17.028)
Hmm.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (02:31.68)
After saving for two years, working in a new industry and working on my credit score, I saved up a whopping $28,000 and I put 5 % down on a duplex and started house hacking. I moved into one side and rented out the other and it took another two years before I got another property. So in the first four years, I acquired two whole properties and then it got a little bit faster because of the house being rented out.

my living expenses going from I was paying $1,500 a month in the apartment. When I moved into the duplex, I was only paying $300 a month. Tenant covered almost the whole mortgage. So I saving a lot more to invest. And then I acquired a fourplex and a triplex and I retired in 2022. I’m just transparent with my numbers. My portfolio is small enough to just share this stuff. I have eight properties with 18 rentals.

I’m house hacking a duplex now on the water in the Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. That’s how I’m retiring this way. My rental income is about $35,000 a month. I have $9,000 a month in mortgages. I set aside a little over $5,000 a month for future expenses, repairs, maintenance, and vacancy. So that’s about $60,000 a year. And that leaves me about $21,000 a month that I’m learning how to spend because it took a decade to do this.

And I’ve learned to live really frugally. spend somewhere around 4,000 a month. And it was when my cashflow passed 16,000 a month that I felt kind of silly going to work. I really liked the job. I liked teaching how to drive trucks. I got demoted all the way down to president of the company and really enjoyed it. But eventually time freedom won out and I retired in 2022. And now I just basically travel. I chase good scuba and good weather. So I’ve spent months in Columbia and Thailand and I just got back from Portugal.

headed to Scotland for the summer and then I’ll go back to Thailand for the winter. And I don’t think I can say with words how cool it is to reach financial freedom and walk away from a job I actually liked to realize there’s this thing I call the math of time. And it’s how I tripled the amount of life in my years. And I’ll just do it really quick. Let’s compare the last year I worked to the first year I was retired.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (04:49.634)
and this will work for almost anybody listening or watching. When you work a 40 hour a week, I was usually 50 or 60 hours a week, but if you work a 40 hour a week, you have to commute to work, you have a lunch break at work, you still have to clean the house and do laundry and all of that. The average person, if they’re lucky, gets about five hours a day that stares. Five hours a day where we’re wiped out and the most energy we have is to stare at a screen. So people go home and they game, or they go home and they watch Netflix.

That’s the year before I retired. If I was lucky, I got five hours a day. was mine. Most days I didn’t get that. And then after I retired, I still have to clean the house, do laundry, work out that kind of stuff. But I don’t have eight plus hours a day working an hour a day commuting that hour of lunch locked at work. have about 15 hours a day. That’s mine every day. And I haven’t been exhausted in almost three years.

I could sleep whenever I want. wake up when I want not when an alarm clock tells me to. It is much better for your health and it’s funny. I hear people say all the time. I don’t know what I would do with my time if I didn’t have a job and that makes me really sad. People’s jobs aren’t filling their time. Their job is killing their time and there’s so much to do that once you get the job out of the way and you realize

that if you can do anything you want and compensation isn’t the key, like you’re not pursuing work so you can make more money, there’s volunteer work, there’s a job you can do because you love it, there’s traveling, there’s actually spending time with your family, you might find out you’ll like them. And so I recommend it to everybody, at least put in a decade so you can have the rest of your life for free.

Dylan Silver (06:35.948)
I couldn’t agree anymore. hear that you love travel. I love travel. I got a passport about two years ago and it totally changed my life. I’ve been to conferences. I’ve been all over the United States.

But when I traveled alone by myself to a country where English was not spoken, that’ll blow your mind like nothing else will possibly blow your mind. I mean, there’s very few circumstances that I could say even come close, because the reason why I was there even was not like strictly tourism. It was let me go and educate myself on another way of life, like another language, another culture, another food, Way people communicate. And when you see this,

changes the way you think about yourself and your people around you.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (07:26.54)
It really opens your eyes when you travel and you spend some time in other countries. You realize, depending on what part of the world you’re from, that most people rarely travel a few hundred miles from where they live. And if they do, it’s for a weekend or a week. But when you can go and fully immerse yourself. So I grew up in Southern California. I started working in the onion fields when I was eight, because my dad left and me and my mom would work in the onion fields. And I kind of thought I spoke Spanish. And then I went to Columbia and I realized I don’t speak Spanish at all.

that full immersion of a couple of months there. And yeah, if you’re in like Cartagena or one of the bigger cities where there’s a lot of tourism, most people speak English. But if you get out to Montesalas or Parada and if you don’t know how to communicate, you go out without a lot of stuff. And it really made me appreciate the differences of culture versus how much of the world are you going to experience if you spend 40 years of your life working more than 40 hours a week?

Dylan Silver (08:15.385)
Yeah.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (08:23.288)
to finally retire when you’re too old to go out and enjoy it and try to live on less than 40 % of what you made.

Dylan Silver (08:29.764)
Dion, what was the biggest takeaway that you had from your first time going to Columbia?

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (08:36.462)
So just before retiring, went to Columbia for, I took what you would call a mini retirement, like a month and a half, right? It wasn’t a full six months or a year. was like, okay, I’m gonna take this time. I’ve been living off my cashflow for about four years. I can handle this. So I went there and I realized the most important thing if you have time freedom is to plan one thing for every day. So when I got to Columbia, the first week we did everything we found online, right? Go to the salt mines, go to the…

Go to Cartagena, go to the hot springs that don’t smell like sulfur, like do all these cultural things and you have that week and it’s done. Now you realize you have all these, this time left and you don’t have a schedule and you don’t have a plan. The most important takeaway, and this is what helps me in retirement is have something, one thing that you’re going to do every day. Sometimes it’s nothing. Plan a day where you do nothing, but most days it’s I’m going to do this one thing tomorrow or one thing next Tuesday. And that made me really look at my job. And what I did is I.

built a life where work is in the way. I wanted to scuba dive when I feel like it. I wanted to paddle board when I feel like it. do defensive tactics training for law enforcement agencies because I still interact with some of the officers I used to work with. And I want to be able to do that when it fits their schedule, not when I actually have a little bit of time off. So planning one thing every day and getting that life where work is in the way. That the last year going to work, I felt silly.

because every day I thought, these are the things I could be doing today, but instead, I’m coming to a business for eight to 10 hours to build someone else’s dream.

Dylan Silver (10:16.278)
Absolutely. I resonate with that.

very deeply because when I think about my own path into real estate, I was working for a car dealership. I’d been in car sales for about five years and I was seeing that not all makes but a lot of makes were trying to phase out car salespeople and that this wasn’t like a maybe a long term career, an opportunity for me to for me be making good money when it used to be. And there were so many factors that went into it. And I was also seeing real estate prices go up and up and up and up. And I was living in San Antonio, Texas. So was a lot of like if I

can’t beat them, join them type of thing too. But I didn’t know how to get in. I had no clue. I didn’t know people in the business. My family wasn’t involved. When I was talking to my friends who are doing the same job that I was doing, they’re like cash for keys, buy homes with no money down type of thing. That’s not possible. And this idea of me building out this rental portfolio on the income that I had seemed like a tall tale. So I say all that to say I really attracted

to being a cornerstone for not just people who are already wealthy, but for people who want to have the type of time freedom that you talk about, Dionne, because whether you’re law enforcement, like you were military, or whether you are doing car sales like I was, or how many teachers have I spoken with, right? My perspective is the more people that can be fluent in the language of real estate and the more people that can get involved as a real estate investor, actually will have better police officers.

We’ll have better teachers. We’ll have, you know, better people doing their job because they will want to be there for the job itself, not just because of the paycheck.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (11:59.438)
When somebody asks me why I create YouTube content or why I go on podcasts or why I’m going to bigger pockets, BP con 2025 and speaking, it’s, and it sounds really weird to say this as a Marine because you’re not supposed to have feelings. Right. But I think imagine how much better the world would be if we get more people to financial freedom so that people have the jobs they want instead of the jobs they have to have for money. Like you said, imagine how many teachers you’ve met or police officers or truck drivers who are miserable because they don’t want to do that job, but they need the paycheck.

We call that the drug that kills your dreams, that paycheck every couple of weeks. But if you get more people to financial freedom, and then there are people who just love to teach or want to be a protector or want to do the job and are actually enjoying it. Yeah. You make the world a better place. The more people that reach financial freedom, the problem is we’re trained at a very young age not to do that. And this is, this is right out of, probably one of Robert Kiyosaki’s books, maybe not rich dad, poor dad, but one of the following ones where.

In the early 1900s, late 1800s, the Fords and the Rockefellers said, we’ll build the schools. That’s why there’s so many Ford centers and Ford middle schools and all across the country. But they said, as long as you structure it like a factory, I want it to go Monday to Friday. I want a bell to start the day. I want a bell to end the day. Basically training us from the age of five when we go to kindergarten that my life is supposed to be designed around the way a factory works. And then in factories, we have a thing. Most of us are kept.

Held down by a glass ceiling so a lot of times they’ll say it’s because of my gender or because of my education level Or because of whatever that I can only make so much per year There is no limit to your income when you invest in assets that benefit from inflation Right most of my life. I made less than fifty thousand dollars the last couple of years at the CDL school I started making a little bit more but as a cop as a truck driver as a CDL instructor

I was my 60,000 would probably be my best year in 2024. Just did my taxes about a month ago. Uh, I had a little over $242,000 in profit. That’s after all expenses, after citing repairs, maintenance and vacancy setting aside money and taxes. Cause I still haven’t paid a penny in rental income taxes. This the system we work in. I never made that much working and I couldn’t.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (14:21.944)
but I could buy a property every couple of years and the trick isn’t owning eight properties with 18 rental units. The trick is owning one for a little over a decade and the next one for eight years and the next one for six years and having all of these years for this, you know, the opportunity for rents to increase the opportunity to refinance at better rates for inflation to do its thing. And it’s funny in a probably too long for this podcast and we could do it in a future one. I can prove

that rents are the same they are today as they were in 1970 and I can prove that houses are cheaper today than they were in the year 2000. And when I say it like that, most people say, I don’t believe you, it’s not true. And when I lay out, can whiteboard it or I can explain it to where people will sit back and go, that makes total sense. It’s easier and cheaper to buy a house today than it was in 2000. Rents are exactly the same as they were in 1970. People think things cost more. They don’t understand that our,

Currency is losing value. They print more of it. It takes more currency to buy the same thing So rents have haven’t changed since 1970 and everybody that wants to buy a house now and says it’s much harder. I Bought a house in 2000 for about a hundred thousand dollars. This is one way before I was an investor I was just gonna have the kids and raise them there Now the house is worth four hundred thousand dollars. So 25 years. It’s it’s quadrupled in value People would say well the wages haven’t quadrupled in value either right? So so most people would say

It’s more expensive now, right?

So when I bought it in 2000, it was a 45 minute drive to the closest grocery store. It was over an hour drive to the closest movie theater. There wasn’t a Lowe’s, a Home Depot, or a Walmart within hours of the place. So if you went to anywhere in your state right now and you looked up the houses that are at least 45 minutes from the closest grocery store, that are at least an hour or more from the closest Lowe’s, Home Depot, or Walmart, houses are gonna be about $100,000. They’re on Washington state where the average house costs $700,000.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (16:19.0)
Houses are unaffordable where people want to live. And now, the biggest change that’s happened since 2020, that’s happened probably twice your age. in at least half a century, I’ve never seen this. Remote work is more of an option now than it has ever been in our entire lives. So when you add the element of remote work to houses being more affordable further out from the cities, you can actually find a place where rents to price ratios make sense.

Dylan Silver (16:22.745)
Yes.

Dylan Silver (16:34.138)
Yep. Yep.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (16:46.792)
It might not be close enough for you to property manage, but what are you willing to do to buy the properties that make your your you not have to go to work in the future? And that’s usually what it comes down to It’s what are you willing to do? Are you willing to self-educate? Are you willing to invest at a distance? Are you willing to relocate? Are you willing to house hack? Most times when I bring up house hacking people say they never would have house act three times and that’s probably the main reason My kids will inherit millions instead of inheriting inheriting me

when I’m too old to work and take care of myself.

Dylan Silver (17:17.978)
Dion, in hearing your story, I think about my journey and I didn’t have a family relying on me for a source of income, but I was relying on me and I was saying, how am I gonna partake in this American dream? And when I started to get into real estate, it was like my inner circle, my nuclear family, my friends, pretty much said what you’re doing is totally crazy. Like you’re giving up a good job.

where you’re making enough money to live in like a luxury apartment in San Antonio and have a nice car to basically live on half of what you were making beforehand and with absolutely no certainty and to be like an entrepreneur, like what are you doing? And that was two years ago today. And so we had different circumstances, but

Ultimately similar drive I think in here in talking about what you what you mentioned with not being close to like a Home Depot a Walmart. I completely completely see that point and I’m living out here like an hour outside of Dallas on a ranch in an alternative dwelling unit, right and when when people see this

They say, you know, well, I wouldn’t be willing to do that. And to your point, like, you have to be willing to sacrifice something. Like, they’re not just gonna hand you the keys to a home in the middle of the city. That’s not how it works. And the sacrifice comes at, you have to live a little bit unconventionally, just a little bit unconventionally.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (18:46.496)
Yeah, and it what’s this is where podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube University comes in. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Someone has done what we want to do, whether it’s wholesaling, flipping the Burr method or buy and hold the slow and boring way the way that I did it. But if you get into communities, those local REI meetups where you get into the, you know, find the person who’s done what you’ve wanted to do. There’s a lot of content creators. There’s one rental at a time, the lumberjack landlord, bigger pockets.

I’ve got a friend, Millennial Mike, who’s a law enforcement officer. He lives in a high cost of living area, but he invests in Gary, Indiana. And in about four years, he’s built a portfolio of 27 rentals as just a law enforcement officer. It’s almost like, so I’m going to point out, you and I are on opposite ends of a spectrum. I believe based on the choices that you made, congratulations, being willing to take the risks and everything, you’re an entrepreneur. I’m not.

I’ve tried a couple of businesses in my life, both of them failed. And so I’m not an entrepreneur. What I am is an investor. My goal was to put money to work. It ended up being to where I could retire after 12 years of investing, but that wasn’t my goal when I started. My goal when I was starting, a lot of people say they want to create generational wealth. And I mentioned it earlier, that wasn’t my goal. My goal was when I get so old that I can’t work anymore, I don’t want my kids to have to take care of me. Part of it is I don’t want to become a financial burden. The other part is

I saw how they were with pets and I want the resources to hire a paid professional. I don’t want my kids taking care of me. And so like an accidental byproduct is I created enough cashflow to make work optional. And some people when work is optional, they might go do that, that job scuba instructor or teacher or anything that they just love. They have passion about to go do that. Me, I’m the lazy person. I just can’t put into words how great life is not having an alarm clock.

Not knowing what day of the week it is. I kind of expected that. I’ve heard other investors say every day is Saturday. What I didn’t expect is I often don’t know what time of day it is. I play a lot of online games, know, World of Warcraft. It was actually a side hustle for a while where I played online, sold things in game to make more money to invest. And so I’ll text my friends two in the morning, two in the afternoon is exactly the same to me. And it probably sucks for my friends that are still working because I never know what time it is.

Dylan Silver (20:47.769)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (21:14.916)
Have you ever heard of like Caribbean time? Have you heard of this?

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (21:19.383)
I’ve heard of Colombian time with my friends from Colombia that say, yeah, there’s no exact time when things start. It’s when we show up or when we’re ready.

Dylan Silver (21:27.396)
haven’t been to Columbia, it’s on my to-do list, but frankly when I was first starting to travel, the tickets to Columbia and back versus to the Caribbean back were just like twice as expensive, so I just started going to the Caribbean and now I’ve kind of been going back since then. But they don’t have seasons in the Caribbean, right? It’s always summer. So every day is the same. Now they might have a hurricane, right, but there’s no season. So you can ask someone in the Caribbean, you know, when did you start going to school?

be like, well, I think it might have been around March time frame, but I don’t really know. Well, was it summer? Well, I don’t know. Well, what year was it? I’m pretty sure it was last year. And that’s really how things are. And so I think about my life, and I’m like, get me out of the freezing cold. I live six years in Boston. I don’t want to do that. Let me live somewhere where I can lose track of time a little bit, please.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (22:24.674)
Yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I chase the good weather with the good scuba, right? I live in the Pacific Northwest. We have a great summer, but the scuba here is not really good. The water is murky, not warm. And so I’ll go to Columbia is kind of the same. It’s almost always summer. It’s on the equator. Basically Thailand has the best time to be in Thailand is November, December, January, Portugal and the Algarve of the Southern. It’s almost like Florida without hurricanes and alligators and a bunch of other stuff. So I chase the scuba, but I also chase the good weather.

I like it in the Pacific Northwest, but unlike you, don’t like the cold. And for a lot of my life, I was a truck driver or a police officer. I had an outdoor job and I was, I was at the whim of, you know, the weather. And now it’s nice that I just look and look at the whole globe and go pretty much, I mean, pretty much wherever I want to go. A couple of years ago, I thought, Oh, I’m going to go spend six months in Russia, but that’s put on hold for a while now. So we’ll see how that goes.

Dylan Silver (23:23.03)
Yeah, be very safe. very safe. Deon, where is the best place for scuba in the world?

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (23:30.646)
So this is just my opinion. are some people that will point out places in Australia that have better looking things. But for me, it’s Thailand. And it’s almost for the same reason that I live in the Pacific Northwest. So if you look at all of the US, there’s hurricanes, tornadoes, alligators, pythons, poisonous spiders, poisonous snakes everywhere, except in Washington state. So I like to live here. I’ve been in Columbia where you really have to figure out where the sharks are. Portugal’s is nice.

But there’s not a lot to see it comes down to Thailand anybody who scuba dives should spend at least a few months in Thailand there’s different islands to dive there’s a Cato Cato I probably said it wrong that used to be a prison island centuries ago. So some of the prison is underwater and you can actually dive there There’s no nothing trying to unalive you the only sharks they have are whale sharks, which is like a big cow like 20 30 foot cow and the water

The water and the air are so close in temperature, you can almost not tell when you’re getting in or out. You don’t need a full wetsuit, you don’t need a dry suit. Yeah, for me, it’s hands down Thailand and why I go back there in the winter.

Dylan Silver (24:32.772)
Really.

Dylan Silver (24:40.548)
Dion, thank you so much for coming on the show here today. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (24:47.256)
So I’m on YouTube, Dion Talk Financial Freedom. I’m known for two things. So every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Pacific, I do a live stream that lasts as long as the questions do. And I’ll answer every question, even the rude ones. I’m known for the binder strategy, which is a strategy where my tenants ask me to raise the rent. That’s actually what got me invited to Bigger Pockets. And I’m known for being the lazy investor. I don’t do anything creative. This is very easy to repeat. I was a single parent with three kids working full time.

And the way I manage my portfolio, I don’t have a property manager, takes me less than two hours a month. So what I do is I share how I got the portfolio and how I made my system streamlined to where I can live the life I want and self-manage my properties.

Dylan Silver (25:33.028)
Dion, thank you so much for coming on the show today, for talking to us about your journey as an investor and a little bit about Scuba here today too. Thank you, Dion, for being on the show.

Dion Talk Financial Freedom (25:44.078)
Thanks a lot for having me.