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

BiggerPockets Money Podcast

BiggerPockets

Investing, Education, Business

4.6 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Think you’ve blown your chances of achieving FIRE? You haven’t! Just ask Nik Johnson, who spent years growing his nest egg, only to have it completely wiped out with one bad financial decision. Despite losing everything, he managed to rebuild it from ground zero and still retire early! Welcome to another episode of “Life After FIRE”! Nik and his wife had done everything right. They practiced frugality, saved aggressively, and invested at every opportunity. But everything was turned on its head when Nik decided to empty his retirement accounts and open a car dealership. Within just one year, Nik’s company had gone belly up, and as a result, all the money he had worked so hard to save was gone. It seemed that he had missed his one shot at early retirement, but rather than giving up on that dream, he started over. If he could do it once, he could do it again! So, Nik found a W2 job, picked up a second job to fast-track his savings, and started throwing all his money at retirement accounts and real estate investments, and now, he and his wife are recently retired! Stick around as Nik shows you how to avoid the middle-class trap, what life looks like after FIRE, and the importance of community once you retire! In This Episode We Cover How Nik built, lost, and rebuilt his investments and still achieved FIRE Supercharging your investments by creating extra income streams How not to find seed money for a risky entrepreneurial venture The savvy financial moves Nik made to avoid the middle-class trap What the average “day in the life” of an early retiree looks like Why you need a strong community around you once you retire And So Much More! Links from the Show Mindy on BiggerPockets Scott on BiggerPockets Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Join BiggerPockets for FREE Email Mindy: [email protected] Email Scott: [email protected] BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group Follow BiggerPockets Money on Instagram “Like” BiggerPockets Money on Facebook BiggerPockets Money YouTube Channel Everyday Money Heroes Podcast Join a ChooseFI Group Grab the Book, “Set for Life” Sign Up for the BiggerPockets Money Newsletter Find an Investor-Friendly Agent in Your Area Buying at the Peak, Surviving a Crash, and STILL Being Able to Quit at 38 Connect with Carl (00:00) Intro (01:22) Growing His “Empire” (08:58) Losing $150K! (12:05) Rebuilding His Wealth (16:48) Life After FIRE (24:20) Nik’s Investment Portfolio (28:34) Connect with Nik! Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-618 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today we are talking with Nick Johnson, a man who built an empire, lost it all, and then built it back again.
0:12.3	Hello, hello, hello, my dear listeners. As you may or may not know, my husband, Carl, and I have a new YouTube series on the Bigger Pockets Money YouTube channel called
0:21.8	Life After Fire. And as a very special bonus, we're going to be airing episodes here on the
0:27.7	podcast on Wednesdays. Without further ado, let's get into it. Hi there. My name is Mindy
0:32.6	and I'm Carl Jensen. And this is the Mindy. And Carl. On Life After Fire, where we talk about what happens after you reach financial independence.
0:40.2	Why do we call the show Life After Fire, LAF, laugh?
0:43.6	Laugh.
0:44.8	Because we're laughing.
0:46.2	No, because we're talking about and talking to people who are living their best life after reaching financial independence.
0:52.1	All right, we are so excited to get into the show.
0:54.4	Nick, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. I'm extremely excited
0:58.2	to be here and thank you all for the time. Yeah, I'm super excited to have Nick on. So the
1:02.4	backstory to this show is I met Nick at FinCon, which is a conference for creators. And he started
1:09.0	telling me this story of how he built up his financial situation.
1:14.0	And then he made a move that did not go well, lost it all, and then built it back up again.
1:19.2	He said, if I can get it once, I can get it twice. And I thought that was so cool. No victim
1:24.1	attitude, no pity party. Just, okay, I did this. I can do it again. So that's what
1:28.7	we are going to be talking about today. Nick, let's jump into how you had built it up the first time.
1:36.3	All right, act one, right? So what happened is that I originally was a computer programmer.
1:42.6	So I was an application developer. And so whenever I hear Carl say,
1:44.9	hello world, it makes me giggle a little bit on the inside because if you're in that world,
1:48.1	you understand the backstory to hello world. I did that. My wife was a college professor. She taught
	...

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