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00:00:00
Brad: Hello and welcome to ChooseFI. Today on the show, we have Sunny Burns back after six plus years. When he last was on in episode 139, he was 88.92% of the way to FI and what an interesting guy. His episode was one that really stuck with me because he had a little bit of everything and he was just so optimized in terms of his FI journey with real estate. He flipped cars. I think he flipped over 17 different cars. He just had this wealth of knowledge and just a lot of these little hacks that were incredibly interesting, including this smart scholarship from the Department of Defense that actually paid him $25,000 a year to go to college plus those years for free. It was just an incredible story and he followed up with me earlier this year saying he reached FI and he left his W2 job seven months ago after working for 13 years as a mechanical engineer with the DoD and he gave up really what were the golden handcuffs of a $147,000 a year job, but now his family of seven are living the stay-at-home dream that they always planned. I think you really can enjoy this episode. It has a ton of actionable knowledge, a ton of fun things. I’m going to leave it at that. With that, welcome to ChooseFI.
00:01:28
Brad: Sonny, welcome back to ChooseFI. It’s good to see you.
00:01:31
Sunny: Hey, it’s so good to be here. Six years it’s been.
00:01:33
Brad: Isn’t that crazy? Neither of us could believe how long it was. Episode 139, 139 and then 139r, which we used to do these roundups every Friday for a couple of years. Anybody who wants to go back and listen to Sonny’s first two episodes, because he actually featured on the roundup also, these episodes were amazing. I listened to them in the last couple of days and they are just chock full of just actionable detail. He just has an incredible story and we’re going to touch on a bunch of those things from the old days, but really we’re going to pick up from today. Sonny, in 2019, mid-2019, I think you were, as you said, you’re an engineer, so you’re a mechanical engineer. You were 88.92% of the way to FI, which I thought was amazing and hilarious all rolled into one. Your dream at that point, you said, was to have a stay-at-home family. I wanted to fast forward to, we’re recording this in November of 2025, where are you now?
00:02:36
Sunny: As soon as I graduated college, I became a mechanical engineer for the Department of Defense. 13 years I was working there and just eight months ago, I left my W-2. I was making $147,000. It was pretty hard to say goodbye. It was a pretty easy, cushy government job as a federal employee, but that was the dream. My wife, 10 years ago when we had our oldest child, left her job and the dream was to follow suit and be a stay-at-home family. We have five kids now, five kids who she was homeschooling alone, so it became a lot. I could see her struggling and this opportunity came along with the whole Elon Musk doge thing. They were like, hey, if you leave, we’re going to give you six months of paid leave. I’m like, hey, this is a great launching point. I’ve been talking about financial independence, retiring early forever. Let’s leap. I’m 35 years old now. I took that leap, no more W-2 for the last eight months. Now I’m not being paid, just living the financial independence, retire early lifestyle. We met that goal of being a stay-at-home family.
00:03:38
Brad: Oh my goodness. There’s seven things in there that I want to talk about already. First, congrats. That’s incredible. A family of seven.
00:03:49
Sunny: Yes, family of seven. Still fit in a Toyota Sienna minivan.
00:03:54
Brad: All right, nice. What’s the age range of the kids? How old is the youngest?
00:03:57
Sunny: Youngest is about to turn two next week. We have two years old, three, five, eight, and 10.
00:04:03
Brad: Wow. That’s quite a range. You are homeschooling? You and your wife are homeschooling?
00:04:07
Sunny: Yes. My wife, the last 10 years, has primarily been doing the brunt of it, but now I’m on board. I’ve been teaching my little girl to read the last couple of months, and yeah, homeschooling.
00:04:15
Brad: Interesting. I know in this day and age with AI and I’ve heard of the alpha school and things like that, I don’t imagine that’s what you’re part of, but are there new resources that are applicable? I know you’re up on this kind of stuff, so that’s why I want to ask you specifically. Anything you guys have come across?
00:04:33
Sunny: Yeah. No, there are so many. We’re part of two homeschool co-ops. We do a forest school every Thursday. Actually, I just got back from a homeschool co-op. Every Friday we do another more academic co-op. I teach at Toastmasters Club. My wife does pre-K, but yeah, they do academics there. Then the forest school one, we’re more learning about nature, survival skills, and things like that, and just hanging out in the woods.
00:05:08
Brad: Okay. I like that. My wife was actually homeschooled K through 12. She did go to college. She became a teacher and all that. We’re second-generation homeschoolers. I went to public school, but we can count second generation. We were mostly doing paper curriculum because that’s what she knew, but with five kids, we needed something to officiate and guide us along the way. We moved towards Chromebooks and digital now with most of the older kids, but with the younger ones, we’re still trying to do paper curriculum, get their writing skills advanced, and things like that.
00:05:38
Sunny: Okay. I like that. Yeah. I just wasn’t sure in the same age of Khan Academy and all these different things that are available.
00:05:44
Brad: We do Khan Academy for math.
00:05:49
Sunny: Nice. Okay. I had my girls do that in their elementary school years for a little bit. It was really enjoyable. It’s neat to be able to have your kids go at their own pace too. If they’re advanced, they can go as far and as fast as they want. If not, they can go as slow as they want. I just thought that Khan Academy is wonderful for anybody interested in learning about just about anything. It’s K-H-A-N Khan Academy. Yeah, it’s something really, really special.
00:06:00
Brad: You said second generation homeschool, which is interesting. Now, second generation FI is something. That’s a term that Jonathan loved for years and years and years. Frankly, I haven’t mentioned that all that often. When you said that, it jogged my memory. How do you think about financial independence? Before we get back to your story and go from there, how do you think about financial independence for your kids? I know something you talked about on the first episode way back when was having Roth IRAs for your kids and having earned income and et cetera, et cetera. How do you roll financial education into the homeschooling?
00:06:33
Sunny: Right. Actually, all five of our kids have Roth IRAs, their own Roth IRAs, which we started at the age of zero for most of them. I have a YouTube channel. We’re not very big, just 12,000 subscribers, but they’re featured in all our YouTube channels. That’s how I get them income to roll into their Roth IRAs because we get advertisements and we get paid through the YouTube channel. They’re my models in my YouTube channel. That’s how I pay them. They all have Roth IRAs. I don’t tell them about the Roth IRA just because I don’t want them to know I got thousands of dollars, blah, blah, blah. I had this hunger growing up just because we were poor. I had this hunger to succeed and make my way in my own life. I had to pay for my own college. We talked about that in 139. I won’t rehash it, but I think I’m going to tell my kids the same thing. If they want to go to college, they’re going to have to pay for it themselves. I’ve been very intentional about teaching my kids finances from the get-go. We do the bank of dad method. I’m sure you’ve heard of that, where we give our kids 1% interest at the end of every month for their savings.
00:07:28
Brad: My 10-year-old, he’s got $600 saves. He gets 1% of that $6 at the end of every month. If he can get his savings up higher, my little kids, they start out with a baseline of $2. I guess it’s more like an allowance. I don’t really love allowance, but I like this interest method. At the baseline, it’s $2. The little ones, they’re still making those mistakes of every time we go to a soccer game, they’re going to the snack stand and buying all the fruit roll-ups they can and things like that. I think most kids that walk around, they don’t even know what a piece of candy costs. My kids at least understand that because they’re making the mistakes of buying whatever they want whenever they want it. My older ones, they’ve grown out of that. He just sold a Pokemon card that he traded for… Anyway, he sold it on eBay for $107. He’s all excited, telling everybody, I just made $107. He’s gotten the concept of what things are worth and the value of things. We always talk about money with our kids all the time.
00:08:30
Brad: This is something that I definitely am dealing with with both my girls. My kids are a bit older than yours. I have an almost 14-year-old and a 17-year-old. It’s interesting because I think as the kids get older, and you’ve already deduced this with the age range of 2 to 10, the lessons are different. How much you want them involved in it actually expands. It’s interesting because we were just talking about this with the girls and saying, hey, maybe it’s time for… They each have a quote-unquote credit card, but it’s just an authorized user card on one of my accounts. It’s all commingled. They don’t really see it. It comes out of my bank account. It doesn’t come out of theirs. I’m actually contemplating either… I’m not sure that I can open cards in their names at this point. Maybe my older one is probably pretty close. But anyway, opening up a card and having it very specifically, that is that child’s card. It’s linked to their bank accounts. The auto pay comes out of their bank account. Again, I have to deal with all the details on whether you can do this or not in that it’s in my name and the bank accounts in their name. Yada, yada, yada. I’m sure people are yelling at me right now. Nevertheless, for them to be able to deal with this and actually set up the auto pay and see it come out every month. I love your bank of dad, which is a really cool thing. We did start with allowance. I think there’s something to that. We don’t do it as an allowance for like, oh, you have to take out the garbage and you get a dollar. It was used under the guise of financial education. I think at the end of the day, that’s what we want to do as parents, is we want to educate our children and make them successful adults. So yeah, I guess you and I differ a little bit on that, but it’s probably at the fundamental essence, it’s the same thing.
00:10:13
Sunny: But talk to me about the bank of dad though, because I think this is actually something that a lot of people can take away from this. You’re ultimately incentivizing behavior, which is frankly another thing we do as humans and also as parents, right? It’s like you incentivize certain behavior. And obviously by giving interest based on the amount they have, you are incentivizing more savings. But I’m curious, how do you pass those lessons along?
00:10:33
Sunny: Yeah, so I don’t know. We just do it with all the kids and they all get that 1% at the end of every month. And I think, you know, the kids always ask me for it, like once it’s near the end of the month, is it the first yet? Is it the first yet? And they’re always wanting for that to happen because yeah, like I said, the two little ones, the three-year-old and the five-year-old, they’re always buying snacks and buying these little knickknacks all the time. They’re much better savers at this point because they have goals. Like, I don’t know, my older one likes drones and things, so he wants to buy a nice drone. So I think he’s learned that lesson through the years of not just spending every single penny he earns right away, but if he can save it, then he can buy those greater things that are worthwhile.
00:11:16
Brad: That’s very cool. I like that a lot. So yeah, for people out there, it doesn’t just have to be a 1%.
00:11:21
Sunny: You can incentivize any type of behavior, which is actually really interesting, right? We talk about 401k matches, and that’s something you should always get at your job. Well, you can also do that with your kids. If you can incentivize a match on a certain type of investing or a certain type of savings, right? So hey, you just got $100 for a gift. Yeah, you could spend it all. In my case, my kids would go to Lululemon or something like that. Yeah, you could spend it all. Or any percent of it you save, I’ll match 25% of it, something like that. I’m just making this up off the top of my head, of course. You could do whatever type of match or whatever type of incentivizing you want. I mean, Sunny, I think it’s a really cool part of a holistic second-generation FI concept because they don’t learn this stuff other than at your homeschool. They don’t learn this stuff at school. We didn’t learn any of this at school. We learned it along the way or maybe if we’re lucky from our parents in some way. But I think those of us in the FI community can be a whole lot more intentional.
00:12:20
Brad: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s go back to Doge, which maybe this was one of the few good things that came out of Doge. So you got six months of severance?
00:12:28
Sunny: Yeah, six months of full salary, full health benefits, and yeah, that was it. I didn’t have to show up to work. I didn’t have to do anything and just got paid leave. So it was kind of like our runway where we were like, hey, my spreadsheet says right now I’m 122% financially independent. We’re making more passive income than our expenses by 122%, but is that real? We were like, okay, let’s see if we can save that entire paycheck for the other six months. I think it was coming around to $80,000 or something. So that was the goal. The next six months, let’s save 80K and see if that happens, and we did, and it was awesome.
00:13:05
Brad: Okay, I think for a lot of people, there’s one more year syndrome, right? That’s something we’ve dealt with for a long time. It’s easy to stay. Now, you are an optimized person. Just knowing what I know about you over the years, you’re optimized, but nevertheless, like you said, you’re making $147,000. Pretty cushy government job. That can’t be easy to give up, right?
00:13:26
Sunny: So hard, so hard. And that’s the thing, but that could turn into one more year syndrome, into five more years, into 20 more years. I don’t know if there was a pension looming. That’s another factor for some people, maybe you?
00:13:38
Sunny: Yeah, no, for every year I stayed, I get an additional percent towards my pension. So right now, after 13 years of working there, I get 13% of my highest three salaries once I’m 59 ½.
00:13:49
Brad: Okay, and every subsequent year, you would have gotten another percent?
00:13:53
Sunny: Right, so if I was there 20 years, that would have been 20%, yeah.
00:13:56
Brad: Okay, gotcha. All right, so there was an opportunity cost, but the nice thing is there wasn’t, that’s not quite as bad as I would have feared, because for some people, many, it’s a, you hit that X number of years. It’s 20 years, you get nothing prior, or then you get the full pension at 20. Okay, so that’s a little mitigating factor for you, so that’s not quite as bad.
00:14:14
Sunny: There was something, like if I hit my minimum retirement age, which would have been 47, just because I started so early, then I would have got full health benefits right when I retired at 47. So now I don’t have any of those health benefits. So that was something, but I’m like, 47, that’s 12 years from now. I am not holding out that long, so that wasn’t really a factor for me.
00:14:35
Brad: I gotcha. Okay, so the spreadsheet said you were, whatever, 122% FI, you’re a smart guy, you and your wife are really optimized, but nevertheless, you were still working, right? Even though you had said, my dream is to have a stay-at-home family. Was it really just the six months? Was it like you were looking for an excuse? Talk me through that, because I think this is the point that can really help people.
00:14:56
Sunny: Right, no, I think, so we do a lot of rental real estate. We have 11 doors in the New York City area. So we started that journey 10 years ago and kind of bought houses, and we were just doing a lot of renovations. So out of those 11 units, we’ve replaced 10 kitchens, 10 bathrooms, so there’s a lot of costs involved there. So we were constantly reinvesting money. My paycheck was going into those properties to make them better. So we never really felt that cash-heavy. We had a lot of HELOC debt and things like that. Our net worth now, we’re worth $3 million net worth-wise, so we’re doing really good as a 35-year-old person with a family of five, but we never had so much cash because all the cash would go into these renovations and things. So I guess because we didn’t have a nest egg or a cash nest egg anyway, we never felt like, oh, we have room to just say goodbye to the job, just because we were borrowing from HELOCs and things like that to pay for these renovations and things. I feel like very soon we would have felt like, okay, we have a surplus of cash, we’re done with renovating, maybe we can think about retiring early, but that never came. And then once this Doge thing came, it was just like a light bulb, like, whoa. Before that, I was not thinking, I was thinking like two years, but I always said two years, even since six years ago, I was like, oh, in two years, I’m gonna retire, in two years, I’m gonna retire, and it was always like that. So no, this definitely was a catalyst for making this action.
00:16:19
Brad: Okay, love it. And that’s the thing, right? Like, we can’t beat ourselves up about it. I know my catalyst, I’ve mentioned this so many times on the podcast, my catalyst was this tiny little pathetic thing where it was, in essence, the workday previously started at 8.30 a.m., and then all of a sudden, the powers that be said, oh no, work starts at 8 a.m. now. It was just like, I’m like, well, screw that. This is ridiculous. I’m not giving you two and a half hours of my life every week for a year. It made no sense. So anyway, but sometimes that little exogenous shock can make all the difference in the world. It can just wake you up. So okay, $3 million net worth, but I’m assuming a significant majority of that is in the real estate properties, in the 11 doors. I know you have your numbers documented, so we can really dive into this. Let’s go through the net worth in terms of broad buckets.
00:17:06
Sunny: Yeah, so a majority is real estate, just because how things have appreciated over the years. So we have $3.8 million worth of real estate. That’s what it’s appraised at, but what we owe on it is about 1.3 million. So in total, 2.4 million of what we have after debts. In terms of Roth IRAs, we have 355,000. 401ks, we have 326,000. And then cash is right around 100,000 right now. So right, but roughly 2.4 million of the slightly over 3 million in net worth is in equity in the properties.
00:17:45
Sunny: Right, and that’s what we’re living off of right now. We’re actually not utilizing the 4% rule at all. All we’re living off of is the rental income from three properties, 11 units. It’s two four-families and one three-family.
00:18:00
Brad: Okay, gotcha. It’s so interesting, right? Because everything is a decision. Because in theory, you could sell those properties for roughly 2.4 million, probably less some commissions, et cetera. But even just saying 2.4 million, and then you could take the 4% on that, right? And you’re at a little over 100 grand right there. But it looks like from your spreadsheets that I’ve seen on your website and what you send me, those 11 doors, that 2.4 million, is producing a net profit of about $123,000 approximately. So you’re doing a little bit better, certainly, than what you would in selling.
00:18:34
Sunny: It’s funny because I think a lot of people, and I love your opinion on this, Tony. So there are people who are looking for this bizarre purity test when it comes to FI. FI only works if you only have assets in the stock market and you sell exactly 4% of them and you earn nothing else and you do nothing else and you basically sit and stare at a wall. I think it’s, as you can tell from the sarcasm dripping from my voice, I think it’s utterly preposterous. But in essence, you took that money that would have been invested, and you just bought some rental real estate with it and it kicks off income, which is essentially the same. So anyway, long story short, I’d love your thoughts on are you not doing FI according to the book because 80% of your net worth is in rental real estate?
00:19:20
Sunny: Yeah, no, like you, I think whatever way you can buy your freedom, buy it. I have a lot of friends who do the 4% rule, but a lot of them have stress when there’s a down market or something or they’re like, oh, maybe I shouldn’t have left so early because now my 4% is only 100,000 rather than the 130,000 it was when I retired or whatever. And I just feel like with rental real estate, there’s so much control. I’ve vetted every single one of my tenants that I have in those 11 units. I know who they are. A lot of my former tenants have gone on to buy houses and things, so they’re good people. But I have so much control over this rental income. And I know it’s going to be there. And I just like that about it, just like the cash flow. And just, yeah, it’s and I feel like when you withdraw from your 401k and your IRA, it kind of feels like you’re taking away from something that could be growing. But the rental income is a lot more easy mentally, I think, because it’s just going to come in every month, you know, when tenants pay their rent. It’s not like you’re stealing away from your nest egg, or you’re stealing away from this big pot of money that’s growing at 8% a year or whatever. So I think mentally, it just feels like, oh, yeah, this, this rent’s coming in, of course, I could just be funneling it into like a brokerage account or an IRA or something. But mentally, just like, oh, yeah, I’m going to be getting $123,000 a year from the rental income, we can live off that it just feels good to me.
00:20:47
Brad: Yeah, no, I like that. And I think, ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s to each their own, right? Because I think what we’ve tried to educate people here on so much is the 4% rule works, it really, really does, even though it doesn’t, like you said, it doesn’t feel as good. Because, frankly, most of us have been savers for many, many years, just by virtue of being FI, we’ve had to save for a decade, two decades, whatever it may be. And it’s hard to flip that switch. But flip that switch, you have to sometimes, right? And it’s just if that was part of your plan, okay, well…
00:21:18
Brad: I need to sell assets. And that’s fine. Obviously, if you have money rolling in, if that had been part of your plan all along, like with rental real estate, or frankly, buying a business is another way of doing it. It’s the exact same thing. You’re just buying assets, right? Whether you’re buying stocks, or you’re buying a business or buying real estate, you are literally buying assets that are ultimately going to kick off the money you need to live in FI. With stocks, you need to sell some of them. Yeah, it’s just how it works. So it’s all part and parcel. But I think it’s what makes you sleep well at night.
00:21:48
For me, having 11 properties, like you’ve done all the work, you know this stuff inside and out, you’ve been doing this for a decade, but for me, the stress of owning the properties would be overwhelming. But isn’t that so cool? Everyone, you need to deeply understand yourself. I love that there are probably 50% of the people listening to me saying, “Oh, yeah, I couldn’t imagine doing real estate. I’ll just take my stock market.” And then the other 50% are saying, “Oh, yeah, Sunny, obviously, who would want to do that? This is a no-brainer.”
00:22:21
Sunny: Yeah, but the amount of emergency calls I’ve had over the last 10 years being a landlord is stressful sometimes. You know, I’m working a full-time job, and I got to lock myself out. Oh, the toilet’s clogged again. Oh, I found a rat in my apartment. It’s been a journey. My wife and I are so grateful for the freedom we’ve bought now, but over those 10 years, it was kind of like working a second job a lot of the time. We’ve made those properties so optimized now that I know when those water heaters are going to go; I know which ones we replaced, and I know how it’s going to last. It works really well right now.
00:23:02
Brad: Do you have detailed maintenance spreadsheets for every single one? I’m thinking about the real estate investor out there who’s like, “Sunny, help me out here. How do you do this?”
00:23:11
Sunny: You say that, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s a good idea.” I do have some general notes like, “Hey, this apartment we painted with this sheen and this color,” so we can do touch-ups here and there. I have a lot of things recorded, but I generally just have it in my head like, “Oh, yeah, I can go into my invoices and see when we replaced that water heater.” So I think I should probably have a spreadsheet with the maintenance logs; that’s a good idea.
00:23:34
Brad: So it sounds like you’ve been the property manager for much of this time. Has that changed? Are you still the property manager?
00:23:45
Sunny: Well, I spent 12 months in Japan. I took my whole family. There was a big opportunity through my work, the Department of Defense, to work as an ambassador engineer with the Japanese Ministry of Defense for a year. During that time, we still had to manage these properties, so I had to hire a property manager, someone on the ground who could take care of things. I put my landscaper on group text with all my tenants. He was kind of a handyman too, so he started helping out. I would wake up a lot of mornings in Japan, and the tenant would have been like, “Hey, this issue happened,” and he would say, “I’ll be right over.” I could see the text messages when I woke up and everything was already taken care of. It worked out really well. He still helps out with the property now, but I’m a little more hands-on for the bigger issues.
00:25:00
Brad: How much are your family’s annual expenses? What are you trying to cover?
00:25:11
Sunny: Last time, I gave you all the granular detail—our life costs around $100k.
00:25:27
Brad: So all in, your life costs 100 grand, and you’re making just from the rental about $123k.
00:25:39
Sunny: Yeah, so we have a decent savings rate, and whatever was about $800,000 in various vehicles is just sitting there compounding, which is wonderful.
00:25:48
Brad: Is there a thought to go totally hands-off with it and hire a property manager, even if it’s 10%? You have some wiggle room in there, right?
00:26:09
Sunny: It is, but when I was thinking about going to Japan, I started interviewing property managers, and I found people around the 7-8% range in our North Jersey rents, which is a lot higher near New York City. They’re okay with 7-8%, but that’s on the gross rent. I realized that as you’re going into that, our gross rents are about $274,000, so it’s a lot more than our net. It would be a huge chunk I just didn’t like how the property managers were incentivized. They’d call a plumber, and that plumber charges $1,000 to replace a clog, plus they would charge an additional percentage just for making the call. It didn’t seem to incentivize correctly.
00:27:18
Brad: It sounds like you’ve built good relationships with your tenants.
00:27:22
Sunny: Yeah, many of them have become friends. I guess I’m a little resistant to introduce a new factor that could mess it all up. I like the concept of a small and mighty landlord; we haven’t bought anything since 2020. We just want enough for our financial independence. I probably put in an average of 5 to 10 hours a month on these properties. Most of the regular maintenance is taken care of by a landscaping guy. I know all the contractors, and I can give them that call without worrying about a 15% mark-up and ensure it’s handled properly.
00:28:04
Brad: That makes sense.
00:28:09
Sunny: We’re not planning to pay off the mortgages. If we have a crazy surplus of cash, maybe we will, but they’re all under 3.5% interest rates. Paying them off early doesn’t make sense when I can just invest that cash elsewhere.
00:29:14
Brad: Do you plan on paying off the mortgages?
00:29:19
Sunny: No, if we had a surplus, maybe, but with rates at 3.5% or lower, I don’t see the need.
00:30:00
Brad: You reference small money real estate. Is that Chad Carson’s concept?
00:30:09
Sunny: Yes, he talks about finding that enough point, then optimizing your rentals to make them as easy as possible. We have about $1.3 million in mortgages, but we do not plan to pay them off anytime soon.
00:30:31
Brad: That makes sense. You have a whole bunch of side hustles, one being the Turo rental car business. Tell us more about that.
00:30:37
Sunny: Turo is kind of like Airbnb for cars. We bought a minivan when we had our third child. I had this 2009 Toyota Yaris with roll-up windows just sitting there. I always want to optimize and use my liabilities to make them assets, so I rented it out on Turo. I was renting it for $35 a day. The first year, I earned $6,400, and then in 2021, I earned another $5,500.
00:31:26
Brad: That was from one car that you bought for $5,000?
00:31:30
Sunny: Yes, I essentially made about $18,000 on a car I bought for $5,000. It was an awesome experience, and now my little brother does it too.
00:31:46
Sunny: My other brother’s thinking about doing it, so yeah.
00:31:49
Brad: Wow, okay, all right.
00:31:51
Sunny: So you’re gonna have to pass along some actionable tips here because I suspect there are people who are, their antennas are raised here. How viable is this for everyday people? How much effort is it? How much like schlepping, like delivering the car to people? Like how much trouble is it?
00:32:06
Sunny: Yeah, so I just parked the car right in front of our house on the street. I had a lockbox right on my house with a code, and I’d give the code to the renter and they’d just go to, like it was right under the mailbox. They’d go to it, they’d put in the code, grab the keys, and then just rent out the car. Honestly, it’s very easy and I like that. It’s not a huge, I mean, cars, used cars are more expensive now. And your car has to be under 13 years old. That’s the limit that Turo gives. I think there’s a mileage, maybe like 120,000, it has to be below that, something like that. But yeah, a lot of people don’t have the capital to maybe buy a rental property, but they have the capital to buy a car. So that’s why my little brother is like, “How do I make some passive income?” I’m like, “Hey, try Turo.” So he’s been doing it for like a year and a half now. It’s gone really well. I just added a second car to his fleet of rental cars.
00:32:54
Sunny: Some people, this is their livelihood. I know someone in Colorado with 28 Jeeps, and that’s how he makes his family’s income. That’s all he does, is rent out his 28 Jeeps. And yeah, you have some issues sometimes with the lower-end cars; a $35-a-day rental sometimes comes back smelling like weed. So I bought an ozone generator. You learn little tricks to get rid of smells and things. So there are some issues, but more likely than not, they were good people and they would leave it back clean. Maybe I’d have to take my hand car vacuum and do a little 20-minute cleaning.
00:33:24
Sunny: I don’t know, honestly, thinking about doing it again, it was a little annoying with one car. I think with a fleet, where I am being a multimillionaire now, it’s just not worth it so much, but I think it’d be a great thing for my son. Maybe I can go in with him as a partnership and he can clean the vehicle and do a quick 20-minute turnaround each time. I think it’s a great investment and a passive income stream or semi-passive income stream for people who want to build kind of like a smaller rental kind of business like this without going into properties.
00:33:50
Sunny: And it’s funny, and I swear to you and to everybody listening, I’m not making this up. In the last 48 hours, I had this thought experiment. I was undertaking this thought experiment of like, what would it look like to invest in something that could generate cash flow? They’re like, maybe people aren’t doing it because they don’t have assets. Like you said, they’re not multimillionaires, right? Whereas I have some assets, I’m even thinking like, I don’t know, landscaping equipment or heavy-duty, like tree stump grinders or something, like literally just as a thought experiment. Turo was one of the ones that crossed my mind. But again, like you, I wouldn’t want to do just one car because that’s a lot of hassle. Whereas, what if you had 30 or 50 cars, $55,000 cars? Okay, well, that’s not an insignificant amount of money, but if you have-
00:34:46
Sunny: Well, you just grow it iteratively.
00:34:48
Brad: Yeah, right. But like, what would it look like to hire someone to run that for you? What would it look like, where do you park them? These are the questions that I’m, again, at the very beginning of this journey in terms of thinking about it. And frankly, am I gonna actually do this? I doubt it, but it’s fun to think about.
00:35:01
Sunny: And I think Turo is something that, so let’s talk about your brother. What is holding, is it cash? Is it assets that’s holding him back? Like, is he planning on doing five, 10, 20 cars?
00:35:12
Sunny: I think that’s the plan. I mean, he’s only 26, so he’s a lot younger than me. So yeah, he just didn’t have a lot of capital. He had enough capital to do one. He’s been doing it for a year. He finally got enough capital to buy a second one off that business, really. And so I think he likes it. I think he’s just gonna keep going for it and keep growing that fleet and getting that passive income to keep going up and up and up.
00:35:31
Brad: Okay, all right, I like that.
00:35:32
Sunny: So yeah, my mind is spinning because, right, is it viable in this day and age to find a $5,000 car? Yeah, maybe, maybe not for most people. But if you look hard enough, and again, it’s about learning. And I think, Sunny, that’s what’s interesting about you to me, is that it seems like you just approach these problems, and you just kind of knock them down, right? In my mind, you’ve been buying and selling cars for your whole adult lifetime, and maybe even when you’re a teenager, frankly. When I said, “Can you find a $5,000 car?” you just nodded and said, basically, “Yeah, of course.” In my mind, I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know if you could,” you know, yada, yada, yada, right? But I suspect you can.
00:36:11
Sunny: And could you turn that into, like you said, $6,400 in one year, $5,500 in another, at just $35 a day? That’s not bad, right? That’s more than 100% return in one year.
00:36:24
Brad: I mean, someone had it up for 80 days. It’s an 80-day trip, so, you know, you can make a decent amount of money.
00:36:27
Brad: Okay, I like it. Switching gears to yet another one of your, I don’t know if we’ll call this a side hustle, but it probably qualifies. You have a family of seven. I know now you have a lot of time, and travel is a massive aspect of your current and future life.
00:36:43
Sunny: But also, your not-too-distant past life, also. You mentioned the year-long trip to Japan. You mentioned renting out your single-family home, the house that you guys live in. But that suggests to me you haven’t sold it since, but you’re still traveling for intermediate and or long periods of time. Talk to us about what does this cost? How do you afford it? Like, what does travel look like for a family of seven that has a house in a high-cost-of-living New Jersey area?
00:37:10
Sunny: Yeah, so we love to travel. We’ve always been traveling. I’m making it a goal by spring next year to have gone to 46 states with my wife. We’re at like 25 right now, but we’re planning this massive 60-day-long road trip all across the country, taking all the kids with us, and so it’s gonna be exciting.
00:37:28
Sunny: For the last eight months, we haven’t been working, so we homeschool our kids, so no school obligations. We do have some obligations of co-op, but we can get covered and things like that. So, we’re like, we have all this time, we wanna travel a lot, but if we travel a lot, then our expenses are no longer what they were, and how can we afford to travel all this time?
00:37:46
Sunny: So, I got the idea to start Airbnb-ing our primary residence when we go on travel, and I call it our perpetual travel machine because we can actually make more money Airbnb-ing our house than we spend on traveling. We first started this in August of this past year. We went on a 10-day bicycling adventure across the Erie Canal from Buffalo, New York to Albany, 360 miles. We took all the kids with us. My oldest 10-year-old pedaled the whole thing. My wife had an e-bike, and she could take three kids with her, and I had one kid on the back of my bike.
00:38:10
Sunny: Over 10 days, we did about 36 miles a day, biking from town to town. I think we spent about $1,200 on the trip, but we Airbnb-ed our house the entire 10 days we were gone, and we made like $2,300 for the 10 days we Airbnb-ed it. So, we made more money Airbnb-ing our house than that trip.
00:38:44
Sunny: And then, for the entire month of August, we made $5,800 Airbnb-ing our house. My wife went to Austria and took her aging parents. That was kind of a dream of hers. She had the baby too, while I had four kids with me. We went camping, nonstop camping. We spent more hours outside in the month of August than inside, if you include being in a tent.
00:39:01
Sunny: I took my kids down the shore, went camping on the beach. We spent $28 a night on a state of New York island camping on Lake George. We had a whole island to ourselves for $28 a night. We paddled there two miles. We made bank just Airbnb-ing our house and having a great time outdoors with our family.
00:39:19
Sunny: Later this month, in two weeks, I’m doing an Ironman in Mexico. I’m bringing my whole family with me. We’re gonna spend two and a half weeks there, and someone’s gonna be enjoying our house on Thanksgiving. We’re gonna put in the leaves, and they’re gonna have 10 people here enjoying Thanksgiving at our lake house here that we live in.
00:39:40
Sunny: In January, we’re going for three weeks to Brazil. I’ve never been to South America. I’m like, “Hey, let’s do it.” I have a cool hack about that I could talk about. We did Mexico and Brazil with miles, so I’m super excited about that because it’s hard with a family of seven to do everything with miles, but we did it.
00:40:01
Sunny: And then next year in the spring, we’re planning a 60-day road trip across the country, and we’ll be Airbnb-ing our house the whole time. We make more money than we spend traveling, and I’m so excited about this perpetual travel machine that we’ve created.
00:40:15
Brad: That’s unreal. Is there something special about your house? Are you near New York City?
00:40:21
Sunny: We’re an hour out from New York City, kind of in Morris County, New Jersey. It’s not special. We’re in a small town called Mine Hill, New Jersey.
00:40:30
Sunny: Our house was only $360,000. In New Jersey, that’s pretty low; we bought that in 2020. It backed up to woods, and there’s a lake back there. I have a kayak rack with six kayaks. I’m an avid biker, and I take my kids biking.
00:40:56
Sunny: We have 25 bikes in the garage that people can use. I put a full-size trampoline in our basement. I could put a link to our Airbnb if you want. It’s pretty cool, our house. You know, we have a blow-up hot tub. I like to do ice plunges in the lake and then go into the hot tub. I pictured that in our Airbnb thing. I don’t know if guests will be doing that, but we have a pool in the summer people can use. It’s just a cool house. You know, nothing really special. And people just seem to like to rent it. I’m honestly surprised how quickly things get booked up through Airbnb. I think there’s just a lot of people who travel and want a place that can accommodate like a larger family. We encourage families to stay. We say right on it, this is our personal residence. We don’t want trouble with our neighbors. So we encourage families to stay. We say no to parties, no parties allowed.
00:41:41
Sunny: So far, our guests have been awesome. I think we have seven stays at this point, and everyone has left the place like spotless. I’m honestly shocked. I think it’s because it’s primarily families that have stayed, and they’ve left it so clean.
00:41:54
Sunny: I’m just shocked, honestly.
00:41:57
Brad: That’s incredible. Yeah, I’m thinking about all the limiting beliefs that I would have or people would have. And yeah, it would be, how can I rent out my own place? People are gonna wreck it, whatever.
00:42:05
Brad: Or frankly, why is anybody gonna rent my house in random suburban Richmond? Even though I know objectively I live in a great spot.
00:42:13
Brad: Like, it’s a nice place. But my limiting belief is, oh, come on, who’s really gonna rent your house in Richmond, Virginia?
00:42:20
Sunny: But I guess, I mean, it’s shocking to hear how quickly you’ve rented this.
00:42:24
Brad: Yeah, I mean, people travel everywhere.
00:42:25
Sunny: So we used to, for two and a half years, three years, we had, in our four-family house, we had a separate room that we couldn’t really rent out as a fifth unit. So we had it as a bedroom Airbnb.
00:42:33
Sunny: We made it Japanese-themed to kind of attract people. So people were sleeping on the floor on tatami mats. We had a projector with anime DVDs. We had a Japanese-style bidet toilet.
00:42:45
Sunny: We were a little close to New York City then, like 30 minutes out, so still not that close. But people, there was a funeral house in town. So people would come for funerals. People would just come to visit family that lived in town, you know, and they didn’t have a bedroom for them.
00:43:01
Sunny: And they didn’t want to stay at a hotel 20 minutes away, so they wanted to stay in town. There’s always reasons people are staying wherever they’re staying. So I think it’s just, you know, it’s easier than people think.
00:43:07
Brad: Yeah, and I love just all the little hacks just embedded in what you said, like even just the Lake George thing.
00:43:11
Sunny: So first off, for anybody who’s ever been to Lake George, it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s a nice place in New York State. Just renting a little island, what’d you say? $28, $30 or something?
00:43:24
Sunny: $28 a night, it’s insane. We had a whole island to ourselves. Water’s crystal clear. I think it’s the cleanest lake in all of the US because it’s spring-fed.
00:43:29
Sunny: We were just snorkeling, seeing fish, you know, rope swings. We had such a good time. That’s a great place in the summer, that’s for sure.
00:43:39
Brad: So, okay, miles and points for a family of seven. Most people think that’s impossible. How’d you do it?
00:43:51
Sunny: Honestly, I don’t know how we do it. I think, you know, so for the last, like, seven years, I feel like we’ve kept everything domestic. Always road trips with the car, just because seven tickets are so expensive on a plane.
00:44:06
Sunny: But we’ve still been opening credit cards, so we just had a lot of miles. I think, like, the United Airlines card, we had like 300,000 United miles. I can pull up those numbers if you want.
00:44:16
Sunny: I think we got a good deal, so I can tell what we spent on Mexico. But we just had a lot of miles over the years for United and American, and that’s what we booked Brazil and Mexico with.
00:44:27
Sunny: I think this might be the key, is with your flexibility; it wasn’t like, hey, we need to travel on July 4th and come back on July 19th. It’s, hey, we want to travel.
00:44:40
Sunny: It wasn’t even necessarily Brazil and Mexico. I was looking at the calendar and being like, okay, yeah, so I’ll go like five days before my Ironman event because it was the cheapest miles, and then, you know, we’ll stay, I think we did end up staying like four days longer.
00:44:55
Sunny: Just because it was cheaper on the miles.
00:45:02
Brad: Yeah, right, and that’s the cool thing about flexibility. I think this is just one of the myriad of ways that we can benefit from being flexible with our time.
00:45:10
Sunny: Like, I was listening to another old episode, and it was something about like, oh, people, it might have even been the roundup, actually, that you were on, was when do most people go to the grocery store? Well, they go on Saturday or Sunday, or Costco, Saturday or Sunday at three o’clock when everyone else is there, and you have to stand in line at Costco for an hour, right?
00:45:33
Sunny: Whereas like, when you’re flexible, you can go whenever you want. I get there at 10 a.m. when it opens, I’m the first person online.
00:45:40
Sunny: We took our whole family to Six Flags yesterday, a Thursday, a random Thursday in the middle of November, and we took them to Six Flags, so they knew there was gonna be no lines.
00:45:53
Sunny: So we went to Lake George, and they have a Six Flags at Lake George, which is $20 cheaper season passes than New Jersey. We ended up getting $60 season passes for this year and next year at Six Flags.
00:46:03
Brad: Nice, very cool.
00:46:05
Sunny: We just went to Doherty Park too.
00:46:06
Brad: That’s great; talk about a nice FI hack or way to spend money. It’s usually under $100 for an annual pass, depending on what park you’re getting it at, and you can just go an unlimited number of times.
00:46:15
Sunny: It was only $60.
00:46:17
Sunny: I was amazed. Only $60 for a season pass for this year and next year, and then the parking is $40 by itself, so with the season pass, it’s included.
00:46:29
Sunny: So yeah, going back to the miles just real quick, with some flexibility. I always tell people that is the key in terms of succeeding with miles and points. Can I be flexible?
00:46:37
Sunny: That is the first rule of succeeding with miles and points. If you can be flexible, you can go almost anywhere you want, and you can go for nearly free.
00:46:43
Brad: So for anybody who’s new to this, we have a ton of resources at ChooseFI.com/travel and also our credit cards list at ChooseFI.com/cards, and you can basically find all the information there.
00:47:00
Sunny: I’m gonna be doing a bunch of episodes on this in 2026, so stay tuned because really travel rewards are a way for most of us to take one or two close to free vacations at least every single year if we’re smart about it.
00:47:14
Brad: So you mentioned a hack for Brazil.
00:47:17
Sunny: Oh yeah, so Brazil for Americans, they charge—we were gonna have to pay over $1,000 in visa fees to go to Brazil as Americans for my family of seven, which adds up to like $150 a person or whatever.
00:47:29
Sunny: So we are dual citizens. Actually, my little daughter is a triple citizen: Japan, Austria, and America. I’m also a dual citizen, so I can use my Japanese passport to go into Brazil and not pay any visa, and my kids are all Austrian citizens, so they can go into Brazil and not pay any visa.
00:47:48
Sunny: We saved ourselves $1,000 by using our alternate passports to go into Brazil.
00:47:54
Brad: Oh, gotcha. Are there any interesting stories on getting the Austrian and Japanese passports?
00:48:01
Sunny: My mother-in-law, she’s Austrian, so she could pass that down to my wife, who can then pass that down to our kids. Japanese is similar, but you have to do it within three months of birth for the Japanese citizenship, which I didn’t know for my older four kids, so I could only get it for my fifth child.
00:48:25
Brad: Okay, so yeah, I’ve looked into this a little bit, and it really does vary country by country. I signed up for Ancestry.com just to see if I might have some Eastern European ancestry because it looks like I might have some opportunities there.
00:48:37
Sunny: For sure, Poland might be a slightly easier one, and Italy, but you need to be able to definitively prove lineage.
00:48:45
Sunny: Having multiple passports can be really, really valuable, especially in an FI life. It opens up so many additional options like not having to deal with visa fees.
00:48:55
Brad: It could also help with travel restrictions and allowances in the EU, where, say, you have to leave the country every 90 days if you don’t have an EU passport.
00:49:03
Sunny: Exactly, that could be a massive, massive bonus if you have roots in these countries.
00:49:09
Brad: That might be something to really look into.
00:50:10
Sunny: And say that that’s gonna help, just this one random little one-off comment, you know? I like it.
00:50:15
Sunny: So, okay, the 60-day road trip next year. Are you guys RVing it? Are you staying in hotels? What are you doing?
00:50:20
Sunny: So we are so cheap. I just can’t bring myself to buying an RV that gets five miles per gallon and goes 6,000 miles around the country. So, you know, we’re just sticking with that Toyota Sienna minivan, 2011, just hit 200,000 miles, going strong still. I did just buy, on Facebook Marketplace, a roof rack, so we’ll have a little more leg room than we’re normally accustomed to in our trips. But yeah, we are just going. We’re gonna be staying with friends and family. My brother just rented a house in Colorado. He just moved there. We’re gonna visit him for a week. I have family in California. We’ll stay there. But we’re also just gonna go to a lot of national parks and do tent camping. We love tent camping.
00:51:00
Sunny: We do backpacking all the time too, but yeah, we’re gonna stay at Glacier National Park for a while, go to Yellowstone, go to Yosemite, go to Mount Rushmore, and yeah, just go to a lot of these cool places. I’m so excited, because I haven’t been to that part, a lot of those parts of those Northwestern states, Utah, Idaho, Montana. I’m just excited. My wife’s always talking about Montana, seeing horses there, and just hear so many cool things about a lot of the national parks there. And just seeing a lot of friends that we haven’t seen in a while. So we’ll visit them. We told them, hey, we have all our camping gear. Just give us some floor space, and we’re happy.
00:51:35
Sunny: Ha ha, I love that. That’s really the cool part about FI, A, that flexibility, but B, you’re doing this with your family, right? Like you set this out as a goal. My dream is to have a stay-at-home family, and you succeeded, you and your wife succeeded, right? This clearly was a team. And you guys are there now. I just, I love it.
00:52:06
Sunny: So where do you go from here? So you have rental income that covers all your expenses. You have this, you’re getting more and more equity, obviously, every year, that just even without Express paying down your mortgages, you did it. What is the, like, I know your mind is not gonna just stop there.
00:52:14
Sunny: I know, yeah, so world school and the kids, that’s a big thing. You know, we’re starting to roll up, taking baby steps towards that. That’s a huge thing. Honestly, I thought when I was going to leave, when I left the federal government, that I’d have all this time, you know, I’m working 40 hours a week now. I could dedicate towards something else. But honestly, like, having five kids takes a lot of energy. You know, I’m a soccer coach. I’m helping kids learn to read. I’m doing math flashcards with all the kids. I’m, you know, I’m in it with my wife. And I feel like I get a lot of fulfillment from that.
00:52:44
Sunny: But I thought I’d still have a lot of surplus. I’m also training for an Ironman, which takes a lot of time. You know, that’s 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26 mile run. It’s a lot of time. My goal is to do it under 13 hours. So there’s a lot of time dedicated to training for that. I think once that’s over November 23rd, I’ll have a little more time again, because I had a lot of personal projects that I was thinking I was going to, you know, I have that YouTube channel I’m trying to grow.
00:53:05
Sunny: I made a patent two years ago that I’m trying to make into, I’m making prototypes for the product right now, but it’s just so slow going. My goal was to have that launched by the time my paycheck ended in September. And I’m not there yet. So there’s all these goals, but you know, I’m just trying to have the perspective that, you know, really the goal was to stay at home with family, spend the time with the family, and we have. You know, we’ve had so much fun this summer, just going on all these trips, you know, and just being a stay-at-home family. That’s the goal, and that’s been my perspective.
00:53:37
Sunny: And honestly, it’s a good life. You know, this FI life is awesome. And yeah, if it’s just baby steps I can take, then I’m gonna have to be happy with that, and I am.
00:53:45
Brad: I love that, man. It’s a good life, this FI life. That’s a pretty good quote. I like that.
00:53:50
Brad: All right, well that feels like the energetic end of the podcast here, Sonny. You know, it’s just really cool. I’m glad we reconnected. I’m glad you came back on, and I’m just really happy for you and your wife and your kids. Sounds like you’re just rock and rolling and just living that FI life. And that means, that might mean one of anything, right? Like one of so many different things that you can do, which is, hey, an Ironman. Hey, I’m teaching math. Hey, we’re gonna go on this trip. Hey, we’re gonna learn new things. Like it can be anything, and that’s the beautiful part of FI.
00:54:10
Brad: You’re a young guy. You’re, I think, 35 plus or minus, and your wife, I assume, is roughly the same, and you guys have another 60 years, and you can do whatever you want. And I think that is the goal of what we’re doing here, right? Like this FI journey is the one reliable way for middle-class people to get wealthy. It just is. It’s a life of intentionality, and it usually takes somewhere between one and two decades to get there, and you did it, and you rocked it, and here you are reaping the benefits of it.
00:54:54
Brad: It’s amazing, and I wish you a big congrats and good luck ahead of time for the Ironman. That’s no joke.
00:55:01
Sunny: Thank you, thank you, I’m excited.
00:55:03
Brad: All right, Sonny, so you have a website that I don’t know that you necessarily post to very often, but it’s got a ton of resources, especially for people who are looking. There’s this amazing scholarship that Sunny talked about in the first episode, episode 139. It’s called the Smart Scholarship. He has a whole article on that. He’s got like just a whole bunch of good stuff here. So while it isn’t updated that often, it’s still a great resource. So it’s famvestor.com, F-A-M-V-E-S-T-O-R.com.
00:55:33
Brad: And Sonny, you have a similarly named YouTube channel, is that right?
00:55:35
Sunny: Yeah, YouTube channel’s also called FamVestor, so yeah, check it out. I’m trying to be a little more proactive on that.
00:55:42
Brad: Okay, very cool. So yeah, if anybody wants to follow along with what his family’s up to, definitely check it out.
00:55:48
Brad: Sonny Burns, thank you, my friend.
00:55:50
Sunny: Hey, it was a lot of fun. Thanks so much for having me.
[FINAL TIMESTAMP] Podcast Extro: You’ve been listening to ChooseFI Podcast, where we help middle-class America build wealth one life hack at a time.
