Finance Influencer Paula Pant Explains the FIRE Strategy That Can Help You Get Rich
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T. Woods
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Angela Corry
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Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) is a strategy who adherents are dedicated to earning and saving an extraordinary (to the point of extreme) amount of money to facilitate retiring far, far earlier than traditional lifestyles typically allow. The FIRE system is based on the idea of severe frugality as well as massive savings and big investments, all far more than normal because they’ll allow the FIRE devotee to have a much longer and more prosperous retirement than others.
That said, not everyone has the same interpretation of the FIRE strategy. On a recent episode of GOBanking Rates’ The Richer Way podcast, host Jaime Catmull had a fascinating discussion with host of the podcast Afford Anything, Paula Pant. In the episode, titled “Best Side Hustles to Make You Money,” Pant strongly recommended the real estate world as a place to successfully leave a 9 to 5 job and develop a side hustle. How? With her own definition of FIRE.
Pant’s very different definition of FIRE (as it pertains to hustling in the real estate world) breaks down as Financial Psychology, Investing, Real Estate and Entrepreneurship.
“In terms of how do you get started, your financial psychology or money mindset is the single most important component of this,” Pant noted. “Without that, you’re not ready for the rest of it. So get your money mindset right … It’s not enough to want to leave your 9 to 5… Don’t retire away from something, retire into something.”
What does Pants mean by the “money mindset” or “financial psychology”? She defines it as “the difference between people who go to work just because they want to collect the paycheck, versus people who go to work because they believe in the mission and the purpose of what their workplace is trying to do. They have a sense of mastery and autonomy within their workplace. They enjoy developing and growing their skill set. They feel like they make contributions to the overall team and the mission.” The most crucial aspect of her FIRE real estate strategy is a mindset that is dedicated to the cause of selling real estate. It’s not enough to simply want to use the side hustle as a money-making means, but to truly care about the industry, and what it seeks to accomplish.
As for the rest of her version of the acronym, she noted that “it’s fitting that ‘Real estate’ is between ‘Investing’ and ‘ Entrepreneurship,’ because real estate truly is a hybrid between those two.” By that she means if one intends to utilize real estate as a side hustle, they must truly invest themselves and their time in it to become genuine entrepreneurs:
“It’s like putting $100 into the stock market or into an index fund. There’s compounding growth, but if you don’t stick with it long enough to enjoy the benefits of compounding growth, then it’s not going to seem very spectacular. That’s why I say real estate is a hybrid between investing in entrepreneurship. If you stay with it for the long term, it’s a fantastic opportunity, but you need to be able to get through that first year and that second year when you’ve done a lot of work and haven’t yet seen huge returns.”
Bottom line, Pants believes that even a side hustle requires the kind of mental dedication one would apply to a full career — it requires “Financial psychology” and an “Investment” of time and energy in the world of “Real estate” to achieve “Entrepreneurship.”
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