How to Build Your 2026 Real Estate Investing Plan

We're closing out the year with one of our most popular episodes because what better time to plan your financial freedom than right after the holidays? This says, "The Real Estate Rookie Podcast and I'm Asher Bear." As you unwind from Christmas and start thinking about what you want 2026 to look like, this rerun with Dave Meyer is exactly what you need. Most investors go into the new year saying they want to build wealth, but they don't have a clear plan, timeline or number. They just stay stuck. In this episode, Dave walks you through how to define your financial goals, calculate your freedom number, choose the right strategy and reverse engineer your real estate game plan. Before January hits, take an hour to map out what your future could look like. Financial independence isn't a dream, it's a math equation. Let's get into the episode. Hey everyone, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Podcast, I'm Dave Meyer. Thank you all so much for being here. I want to ask you all a question to start this episode and I want you to be honest. How many of you actually have a specific financial goal? I'm not just talking about, "Oh, I want to be financial free." I'm talking specifically like I want $10,000 a month in cash flow by 2035. How many of you have that level of goal? I think if we're all being honest with each other, it's like basically none of us. Maybe 2% of you have actually gone out and done this. That's okay. It took me probably eight years of investing in real estate and being really into personal finance. Before I figured out that I really mattered whether or not I had a financial goal, and that might be okay at the beginning of your investing career to be perfectly honest. But if you want to build a portfolio of low risk, high upside investments over a sustained period of time, you need to have a plan, you need to have a strategy, and in order to have that, you need to have good goals. Today, what we're going to do is talk about goal setting and how to do it the right way. I'm going to break this down into three really actionable parts and you all should just follow along. I'm actually going to break out the whiteboard and show you some really simple tools, like actual things that you could do either as you're listening or later today when you go home, go and actually do this so that you have these financial goals, especially as we head into a new year, you can have these specific goals and build a plan backwards from those goals. The three parts we're going to go over are first, the long term goal, and this is the most important. We're going to spend most of our time here, figuring out why you're doing this in the first place. Where do you want to be? 10 years or now? 15 years? 20 years? A vague notion of being wealthier or having more time. That's not good enough. What you need is a specific goal and I'm going to help you get that today. The second part is defining a one year goal because once you've figured out the long term vision, then you need to sort of back into more achievable, more actionable things that you could do in the next year. Then part three is a three year vision. We're going to do long term picture, then one year, then three years. As you'll see, even though very few people have actually done this, it's really not hard. By the end of this podcast episode, you're going to have these three numbers and I promise you, it will help you a ton as you formulate your strategy as an investor. Let's get into it. The long. First up, we're going to be talking about our long term financial goals and there's basically two different questions that I want you all to answer by the end of this section here. Number one, how much money do you want, and number two, this is the one that people miss, is when do you want it by? The key to doing this the right way is finding something that is tough, like you want to be a little bit uncomfortable. You don't want to be, oh, for sure, I'm going to be able to hit that number, but you want to feel like if I execute my plan well, if I'm diligent, if I work hard, I'm going to be able to hit that number. That's sort of the magic balance that you're looking for here, section. So these are the first concepts. The first question is how much do you want to have, and the second question that we want to answer here is how long, right, those were the two things I said. So let's start with how much. There's different ways that people can answer this, you can answer this through net worth, you can answer it through cash flow, through your portfolio. For me, the way that I think about it is the after tax money that I need to support my lifestyle. So I recommend that people think about it this way. After tax income, because all of us are going to be taxed differently. Real estate has a lot of tax advantages. So if you're using real estate for your lot of your income, you might not need to earn as much as you would in a normal job because you're going to have those tax advantages, which is why I prefer this after tax income thumb. Now for those of you who don't have a budget or don't really understand what your spending is right now, that's probably a good place to start. I would recommend you have a budget or go onto your banking app. It doesn't need to be super complicated. Most people, if you have online banking, go and look at your online banking and figure out what your average spend is per month, right? And this is a great place to start when you're figuring out what you want your income to be. And I want to be clear that you can't just make this number up. You could, but I don't recommend it. It would be easy to just say, again, I want $30,000 a month in after tax income. That's a ton of money. And maybe you do aspire to that. And if you've thought about this hard and come up to that number, that is okay. But there is risk and overshooting here because if you say $30,000 and all you need is $20,000, that means you might work in a job or build your portfolio longer than you actually need to. So I'm going to find the balance of getting what we want out of our lifestyle and making the most time for ourselves. And so if you're working unnecessarily to achieve an income that you don't actually need, that kind of goes against the purpose, right? And so I really recommend just starting rooted in what you're actually doing today. Now I expect for some people who are listening and watching the podcast right now, they might be okay with their current income. You know, if you are established, you like your lifestyle, that's really all you have to do is figure out your budget and average spend if you're comfortable staying at this level. If you are not and you want to expand your lifestyle in some way, I would just say try and be specific about that. So if your budget right now is $5,000 a month, I wouldn't just randomly say $10,000, I would just spend 20 minutes thinking about the things that you would want that you don't have now and how much more that costs. It's really not that hard. I actually have, as part of my book, start with strategy, there's a Excel file that goes through this and that actually helps you calculate these numbers so you can do that or you could just do it on a piece of paper, honestly, it's not that hard. So I'm going to assume that our budget and what we want is $7,500 per month. But there is one more advanced move that we need to do, right? Like we want $7,500 a month in today's dollars and I know this is going to get a little bit nerdy, but this is, I think, truly the number one mistake people make in setting their financial goals is not accounting for inflation. This is a big picture stat, but the value of your dollar on average gets cut in half every 30 years. Just think about that for a second. So if you are near my age, I'm 38 years old. I probably will be retired at 68, hopefully, in 30 years, if I was making $10,000 a month, it would be the equivalent of having $5,000 a month today. Now, this is a big problem that a lot of people face in retirement and I don't want all of you to face that problem. So I want you to adjust upward your goal to account for inflation. For us, in our example here that we're falling along with, our goal is going to be $10,000 per month. We're going to adjust up for inflation from $7,500 because we want to make sure that our spending power stays at that $7,500 level well into the future and in the future you're likely to need at least $10,000 to be able to do that. I'm not doing this in a very precise way. I'm doing $10,000 because that's a nice round number due to, but adjust upward your goal to account for inflation. That's the main thing here in our, so that's step one in figuring out how much you need is what actually you need to fund your lifestyle. Step two is going to come where we figure out what our equity goal is in our real estate. So we need a real estate equity goal because even though the way that you're going to replace your income long term is through cash flow, I personally believe that it's easier to think about this by thinking about how much equity you actually need. Now I'm not one of those people who doesn't think cash flow is important. I only buy deals that cash flow, but I am not focused on cash flow really in my career because what I believe and what I know based on all the analysis I do is that the best way to have cash flow later in your investing career is to have a lot of equity. Once you have equity, once you have money, cash flow is super easy, so I'm going to extrapolate our goal out from we had $10,000 a month, but for this calculation we need to do annual. So what I'm going to do is say that we want $120,000 per year in cash flow. And then the next thing I need to look at is what cash on cash return do I realistically believe that I can get 20 years from now? And I know that's hard to project, but it's got to be somewhere between 5 and 8%. I'll tell you that. That's the number you should be picking. I like 6%. I think we'll be able to do better than 5%, 8% a little bit higher. This is not deals that you've held on to for a long time saying you can go out and buy off the MLS, you can buy an apartment building, and get this number. This is equivalent to what anyone who's familiar with commercial real estate would call a cap rate. And so I believe 20 years from now, I'm still going to be able to buy 6 caps. And that's a 6% cash on cash return. So all I'm going to do is divide my annual goal of $120,000 by 6% cash on cash return. And what I know from that is that I will need $2 million in equity to be sure pretty much 100% sure that I could get the cash flow I need at the end of the day. So for me, this becomes my goal as a real estate investor. I'm sitting here in 2025 thinking, how do I get $2 million in equity by the time I want to retire? This is obviously just one example. If you said you wanted, I don't know, $150,000 a year in income, but you're a little bit more conservative and you think that you could only get a 5% cash on cash return, then you're going to need $3 million, for example, in equity. Or if you only need $100,000 and you're more confident that you're going to be able to get an 8% cash on cash return, was that come out to be? That's $1.25 million. So whatever these numbers are for you, this is the financial goal I want you all to come up with. How much equity does your portfolio need to be worth? And I'm not saying the value of your properties, that is not what I'm saying. It's the equity you actually own in those properties, that's what you need to be calculating. So if it's $2 million, $3 million, $1 million, doesn't matter, figure this out for yourself. Okay, so now we have answered question number one. Remember, we started by saying, how much do you need and how long we now know how much? We're going to use $2 million as our example. And we're going to get to how long now, which is what we call your time horizon. And this is super important thing that not a lot of people think about, but your time horizon is really going to dictate your investing strategy. It's true. I'm going to explain that more right after this quick break. My assistant's great. He's also terrible because he's me turns out multitasking isn't a great business model, but lay knows real estate investors grow faster when they spend time closing deals. Not buried in admin work. 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Welcome back to The Bigger Pockets Podcast. I'm Dave Meyer going through how to set good quality financial goals that will help you formulate a great investing strategy heading into 2026 and honestly for the rest of your investing career. Before the break, we talked about just needing to know how much you want and I recommend thinking about that in terms of equity. There's a couple of steps to that as a reminder, figure out the after tax income that you want, adjust it for inflation, divide it by the cap rate you think you can get. And that's going to get you that equity number that you want. We're going to be using $2 million as an example. Now the question then becomes how long and this one is a little bit more of an art than a science because most people will just say ASAP, right? You want to be retired in three years or five years or seven years. And for some people, that might be realistic. If you were just trying to replace your income without any additional lifestyle enhancements, I would say that the average there is eight to 12 years. You could probably replace your income assuming that you have enough capital to buy your first property today. So I think a lot of people are in that situation. So eight to 12 years could be a good time frame. That's for doing pretty plain vanilla kinds of deals. If you're willing to be a little more active, maybe take on a little bit more risk, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, you can speed up that timeline. But for most people, I think we're going to be talking about something around for eight, 10, 15 years. And they might feel like a long time, but I've been doing this for 15 years and I promise you it is really not that bad. And it is so worth it. Taking 15 years to achieve financial freedom is amazing. I am sorry that people in the internet lie and say that they do this in three to five years. Some of them do, but I promise you the average person, it takes 10 to 15 years, unless you want to take on a lot of risk, or you're pouring 60 hours a week into this business, 10 to 15 years, totally doable. You can probably do it in eight to seven if you're going to be even a little bit active in your portfolio. So just think about that for yourself, where you're starting out and where you want to get to. I'm going to just assume for the purposes of our example that we're going to start with let's call it $75,000 in savings that we can invest today. And that we want to retire within 15 years. Now I understand that some people want to do it faster and that is definitely possible. This is the time to dictate that. If you want to go faster, you need one of a few things to happen. One, you need to be starting with a lot of money, I know it's not really silly, but it's true. Like if you have a million dollars, you're probably going to be able to do it pretty fast, right? Like that's a lot of money to start with. The second thing you could do is try and increase your income to I did this by deciding to go to a state school and go back to college for a master's degree and try and increase my income to accelerate my financial freedom through real estate by making more in my day job. Some people might want to do that. The third option is to do it through real estate. And I know this is a very common question on here, but it's not required. But if you think that you could go and flip houses and make a ton of money, that might be something to consider. If you think you can wholesale an addition to your job or you can wholesale and make more money than you do today, also a decent option. If you think that you would be a great real estate agent and would be able to make more money than your current job, that's another way that you can do it too. Some people. And then the fourth option is to do value ad real estate investing. And so that would be, I think, for the majority of people listening to this podcast, probably doing something like the Burr method, because that's going to allow you to invest in relatively safe rental properties, but also build equity at the same time. And so just think about which, if any of those things you want to do. If you don't want to do renovations, you don't want to change your job, and you're kind of just, you know, want to coast, that's totally fine. But it's going to take you probably 10 to 15 years. If you want to shorten that to, let's call it seven to 10 years, think about which of those things you can realistically do. Can you get more income or are you willing to put in the time and effort into doing things like the Burr method to grow your equity faster? For the purposes of our example, I'm going to say that we have $75,000 to invest today, and that we're going to shoot for, let's call it a 12 year time horizon. So that's what we got. That is step one of our long term goal. That's all it takes. I'm blabbing about and explaining this, and we did this in like 15 minutes, right? So you can do this in your own time, take 10, 15, 20 minutes, and figure this out. We know now that our goal as a real estate investor, the thing we need to be focusing on when we set our tactics, when we pick what deals to do, what markets to invest in. Our goal is to have $2 million in equity in 12 years. That's the goal that you need to set. And if you have this, I promise you, everything is going to get so much easier. That sounds so simple, and it is. But everything will get easier if you start to think about your portfolio in this way. Now, before we move on to one year goal, which we're going to do in a minute, just do a gut check and make sure that this sounds reasonable. Like if you, like if you wanted to the math, you could do that because I would recommend that. But if your goal is like, I need $5 million in five years and I'm starting with 50 grand, I'm sorry. That's just not going to work. If you're a rental property investor, you can expect your money to compound at somewhere between 10 and 25% depending on how involved you want to be. If you're just buying regular deals, 10% is probably 12%, is probably where you're going to be. If you're going to do the bur, you could probably do 20, 25, maybe 30%. And so think about that and see if you're within that realm of possibility. If your goal is way bigger and you're going to need to compound at 50 or 60 or 70%, honestly, you can do that. But you're going to have to flip houses. It's the only way you can earn those kinds of returns in real estate. And that comes with risk and a lot of time that doesn't make it wrong. But that's how you're going to have to do that. So think to yourself, is it worth it to me to do flipping and take on more risk and commit more time? Or should I just back out my goal a couple of years and take on less risky, less time intensive kinds of strategies? That's totally up to you. But just think about that before we move on to our one year goal. So that's step one of your financial goal. And then we're going to move on to our one year goal. Because obviously having that sort of 12 year vision isn't good enough. You need to start now backing into what you have to achieve this year to make sure that you're on track for year two, for year three, for your four, and so on, right? So the place that you need to start for your one year goal is by doing something that I would call a resource audit. And this sounds fancy and corporate, but it's not. It's just a question of how much time do you have to commit to real estate in the coming year and how much money, right? Everything comes down to these two questions, right? Our first year goal was what amount do you want in what timeframe or one year goal is going to come down to those same sort of variables that we're dealing with. Now we already answered the question for our example, which is $75,000. But for all of you out there, I really, really encourage you if you haven't done this yet, think about what are your investable assets right now, right? Investible assets are not your total net worth. It's how much money you can responsibly put into real estate today. So let's just use an example and say you have $50,000 saved up. You shouldn't invest all of that. You can't invest all of that because, you know, budgeting experts say you need three to six months of emergency funds to weather a storm, you know, we're going into a difficult economic period, I believe, and so you probably want six months of emergency funds. And if you have kids that might be even longer, that's up to you. But you need to set aside some money. And so it's not just the number in your bank account. That's not your investable assets. What you need to figure out is how much money you can responsibly put into real estate. So figure that out for yourself. But for our example here today, we're going to use $75,000 as an example. Now time is another really important variable here. Because again, if I wanted to grow as quickly as possible, I would flip houses. That is the best way to earn a lot of money quickly in real estate. But I don't have that time. And I in the example that we're going to use is going to say we don't have that time. We though are willing to put in, let's call it 10 hours per week for real estate, thousand. To me 10 hours a week, you're going to be able to do a lot in real estate investing. You're going to be able to find great deals. You're going to be able to do value add. You're going to be able to self manage. You're going to be able to do a lot of things that you might want to do to maximize the early years of your investing or whatever. The next years of your investing, if you put in 10 hours a week. And so figure that out honestly for yourself, though. If you don't have 10 hours a week, be honest about that. Because if you buy a deal that requires 10 hours a week of a commitment and you only have 5, you're not going to operate that deal well. And this is exactly why you have to go through this process. Because I see so many investors going out there and just buying whatever deal. They buy a short term rental and they don't have a lot of time to furnish it. And then it just winds up being kind of a crappy short term rental and it doesn't perform. And then what's the point of doing that in the first place? So be honest with yourself about how much time you're going to be able to commit. That's how we're going to pick what deals that you should be doing in the next couple of years. So for me, if I'm trying to take a medium aggressive approach, which is what I recommend to most people, like you don't need to be really passive and really conservative. You don't need to be super aggressive. But if you want to do things like a burr or cosmetic rehabs on rental properties, those are fantastic ways to pursue financial independence. And the first, if you have 10 hours a week, you're going to be able to do that. So think about this for yourself. Once you have an answer to that, I think sort of paths kind of start to diverge here because what your answers are going to really depend on what you're going to do in 2026. So I'm going to draw up actually a little quadrant here, you know, about the two different variables that we're talking about. So on one axis, if you're listening on the podcast, I'm drawing a quadrant on the horizontal axis, I'm drawing time and on the vertical axis, but money. And where you fall in which quadrant, which box you fall in is going to really dictate what you should be doing in your first year. So if you're low on time, but you have lots of money, so you're in this first quadrant here, what I would invest in here is I would think about rental properties, right, because you don't have a lot of time, you're not going to be able to flip. So I think about rental properties, low leverage, because you have money. And so you're not going to need to put five or 10% down. So I'd say put 25% down. And then if you have time, I do cosmetic rehabs because you're not going to have time to do a big rehab because again, you're falling into this low time bucket. That's what I would look for. If you're just asking me and you fall into this bucket, you have money to invest, not a lot of time, buy rental properties, put 25% down, do a cosmetic rehab. Don't think that hard about it. This is going to work. Next quadrant that you go into is a lot of time and a lot of money. This is obviously a good place to be in, but what I would do is heavy into burrs. If I had both time and money, that makes a lot of sense to me, because that's going to grow my equity as quickly as possible. But if I did a heavy bur or heavy value at bur, that is going to take up a lot of time. But if you have time and money, I would go heavy into these burrs. The next one is high on time and low on money. The things that I would look to do are things like potentially wholesaling. I don't have a lot of experience in that, but if you wanted to, this is a good way to make money. I would try and partner on flips and see if you can use sweat equity or I know this is going to be controversial, make more money. I know that sounds silly, but if you don't have a lot of money, but you have a lot of time, go make more money. Whether that's doing a side hustle, investing in your education so you can increase your income to becoming an agent on the side. I don't know, but if you can make more money with that extra time that you have, that's probably going to be the best way to help your invest in career at this point. So think about that. Then we go into the last bucket, which is low money and low time. This is a tough place to be. If you don't have time and you don't have money, real estate investing is going to be very difficult for you. And I just want to be clear about that. I know there are tons of people on the internet who like to say you can get into this industry with no time, no money. I'm sorry, but that is not true or it is very, very rare. And I don't want to discourage you if you fall into this bucket because you can get from where you are today to becoming a real estate investor, but making a real estate investment is probably not the next step in your journey. What you need to focus on is one, either freeing up time so that you can do those other things I just talked about or earning more money, spending time saving money, you can still educate yourself as an investor, you can save money and then invest maybe in a year or two. Your goal is to get your foot in the door. And so if you're in that fourth quadrant, figure out a way. Your year one goal is find a way to get your foot in the door. And when we get to our three year goal in a little bit, you're going to be able to have a little bit more exciting goal. Don't worry about that, but your one is going to be just getting your foot in the door. If you're in these other quadrants, the way I would think about it is try and figure out one, how many deals you can realistically do and at what point? So if you're in quadrant one, you're doing these rental properties with low leverage, putting 25% down for cosmetic jobs. I would say maybe you could do one of those, right, is a realistic goal. One deal at, I'm going to target a 15% annualized return. I do deals like that all the time. If I don't have a lot of time right now and I find a decent deal, 15% annualized return, that's fantastic. The stock market averages eight to nine percent. It's having a good year this year, but eight to nine percent. If I can make 15% on a low effort deal, I'm pretty happy about that. That's just an example. That would be one goal, I would say. If you're going to do burrs, I would say maybe try and do two deals and try and get maybe a 40% annualized return. Because you're going to be able to hopefully do a burr. Maybe you do two of them. They take six months each and maybe they take nine months each. So let's just say you get into two deals at an annualized rate. You might not realize all of that in one year, but just say an annualized rate of 40%. Or if I'm wholesaling and you know, I'm in this third quadrant, remember that one is with low money, but high time, I would try and figure out how much more money you can make. How much can you save would be my year one goal? Not necessarily how many deals I can do, but if I'm in quadrant three and I have 20 grand, my goal would be something like $50,000 to invest next year. I know that doesn't sound as exciting as going out and buying a deal, but I promise you, if you save 50 grand next year, you're going to be able to do a great deal and it's going to accelerate your career probably faster than it is than trying to like get a little piece of a random deal or doing a really risky flip. That's my honest advice. That's what I would do if I were in that situation too. Now, going back to our example of having $75,000 to invest and 10 hours a week, I'm going for the birth. That's what I would personally try and do. And so my goal, my one year goal would be two births. And then on my first birth, I think I'll only be able to sell that first one or refinance that first one in the year. Maybe I'll do my start my second one within one year. But realistically, at 10 hours a week, I can only do one at a time. So I'm going to think about, that's probably a nine month project. And I'm going to say, I want to earn at least 40% on that deal. I want a 40% annualized return on that first deal. That's huge. 40% is awesome. That actually would come out to for $75,000. That's a $30,000 return, right? So already in year one, we've gone from $75,000 in equity that we need. We're trying to get to $2 million and we've already gone up to $105,000. If you're able to do that, I promise you, you are going to be able to hit your goal and I will do the math for that when we come back from this quick break, stick with us. You know you're in trouble when your assistant is also you. 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Because you can basically do the strategies that I just said well into the future. And I know like I said, you're going from 75,000 to 105,000 in your first year. I hope that sounds like a lot because it is. That's an amazing return. If you're making a 40% return, you should be super happy. But I just want to extrapolate this out a little bit because there's this kind of magical thing in math called the rule of 72. And this says that if you take the number 72 and you divide it by your rate of return that you're earning, that's how many years it will take your money to double. If you take the number 72, you're earning on average an annualized return of 10%. It's going to take you 7.2 years to double your money. Now, if you're doing the burr or cosmetic rehabs, which is what I think the majority of our audience should be doing, I think hitting 24% annualized returns is very practical. It's going to not going to take so much time. You're going to still need to be able to put in some work, find great deals. But if you can get, let's just round it to a 30% annualized return. That's going to take work, right? You're going to need to do cosmetic rehabs. You're going to need to do burrs to earn 30%. You can't just go buy a regular rental property and 30%. I'm just going to show you, like this is what I would do if I was starting with $75,000. I would just try and target this 30% annualized return every single year. Because I'm starting in year zero with $75,000, right? Then in year three, we'd have 150K. In year six, we'd have 300K. In year nine, we'd have 600K. See how this thing starts to compound? And then in year 12, we'd have 1.2 million. And then in year 15, we'd have 2.4 million. So this is actually a really good example, right? I kind of set our goal arbitrarily earlier. I was kind of just coming up with this example as we go. And what I came up with, as I said, I wanted $2 million in 12 years. Well, now I'm looking at this and I'm thinking that's probably a little unrealistic. In 12 years, even if I earned a 30% return, which is good, I would be at just $1.2 million in equity. That's still a great place to be. But it looks like my time horizon is going to be closer to 14 to 15 years. That's still awesome, right? I'm talking about being able to replace my income and earn $120,000 in after tax income. That's just 10 grand to spend every single month in 14 to 15 years. I'm just starting with 75 grand, which takes time to build up, but it's not like you're starting with a millionaires amount of money. And I'm only putting in 10 hours per week into these deals. If you want to accelerate this, you can find ways to make more money and put more investable assets, save more money. Remember, this what I'm doing right here 14 to 15 years assumes I put no new money into my investments. I'm taking the 75K and I'm just extrapolating that. But for most people, you're going to be able to save money every month, put more money back in. That's going to help you get to 12 to 15 years. But that's what I want you to do at the end of this exercise is to be able to say, yeah, I gut checked this and I think that this is reasonable. For me, I would say now at the end of this exercise, my long term goal is $2 million. I'm actually going to say still in 12 years because I said 14 to 15 years would take it with no new money into it, but I think I'm going to be able to add some new money into it. So I actually do think 12 years is realistic. That is my long term goal. My one year goal is going to be I'm going to round to 100K in equity. And my three year goal, remember, I think that I want my money to double in three years, my three year goal is going to be $300,000. That's my example. This is what I want all of you to get to. Know these three numbers for yourself because once you do, you can already start to figure out what deals you should be doing, right? These are my goals. I know that I can't just go by on market MLS deals. I am not going to be flipping. I probably don't want to do short term rentals because although they can offer more cash flow, my goal is building equity. I know that my goal is building equity. And so that allows me to hone in on projects where I can do a burn or a cosmetic rehab. See how this is already helping me set my strategy just by knowing these numbers. There are so many great ways to make money in real estate. But I know my goal. So I know I'm going to do burs and cosmetic rehabs and I'm going to look for a market where I can do that for my 75K because I have enough money to get into a deal. And so I'm specifically going to look for markets where I can put in $75,000. For me, that's probably going to be somewhere in the Midwest or Southeast. You know, if I put 25% down, I'm probably going to target a deal that is like $250,000 a $50,000 rehab. Like that is something you can go out and achieve today. So I have basically backed into my buy box for next year. I know that if I want to hit my goal, I'm going to look in the Midwest for a burr or cosmetic deal that is in the $200 to $250,000 range with the $50,000 cosmetic rehab. That's amazing. So many people spend so much time trying to figure out what their buy boxes, all these different strategies. And coming up with this example in real time, just using these numbers that I'm making up. I already was able to figure out my buy box just by backing into where I want to be 20 years from now. And this is why I say that knowing these financial goals is the number one key thing that investors need to do that most of them miss. Spend 30 minutes right now figuring out what these numbers are for yourself. And I promise you, your plan for the rest of 2025 and 2026 and the rest of your investing career is going to become so much easier. Now I think in this podcast episode, I have given you enough to be able to do this. But if you like this concept and you really want to get a crystal clear vision of where you want to go in your investing career, I'm going to be a little bit of a pusher and recommend my book Start With Strategy. Literally the whole book is kind of about this idea that if you set your long term goals well, you can back into the right strategy. So if you want to go deep on this, you can check out my book on bigger pockets, it's called Start With Strategy. It's also on Amazon. But hopefully this has been enough for you to just do this by yourself. The book is just for people who want to go a little bit deeper. That's what we got for you guys today. If you have questions about this, please let me know. Or if you want to hear more content about this kind of stuff, we always talk about tactics and strategy. But I think this stuff is so important, which is why I wanted to do this episode today. If you want more content like this, please let us know in the comments or hit me up on Instagram where I'm at the data deli. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the Bigger Pockets podcast. I'm Dave Meyer. I'll see you next time. Hey, rookies. If you're watching this, we want you to apply to be a guest on the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. That's right. Ashley and I are looking for amazing stories just like yours to be a part of our Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Now, look, you don't need to be an expert. You don't need to have done thousands of deals. Even if you've done one deal, your story could help inspire the next listener. As a rookie investor, especially if you just got your first deal, it is all fresh in your minds. And you are the best person to tell your story. Give your experience on how you got it done to help someone else get their first deal. So head over to bigger pockets dot com slash guest. If you want to be a part of our show, again, that's bigger pockets dot com slash guest. And we'd love to have you on.