A 25-Year-Old Built $500K in Stocks, 13 Rentals, and $10K a Month, While Spending Just $24K a Year

On ChooseFI episode 605, “Retire in Less Than 10 Years,” Cody Berman described what he called “a financial freedom sprint from 22 to 25.” He scaled his entrepreneurial income from $96,000 in year one to over $400,000 while keeping his personal spending pinned at $24,000 a year. That is roughly a $379,000 annual gap, and the gap is the whole story.

For context, the typical American household spent $78,535 in 2024, per the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. The national personal savings rate in the first quarter of 2026 was 3.9%, down from 6.2% two years earlier. Berman’s effective savings rate, on his own reported figures, sits north of 90%. That is not normal. It is not supposed to be normal. But the underlying mechanic is the only one that matters in personal finance, and it scales down to ordinary numbers.

Co-host Brad Barrett put the principle plainly on the same show. “If you had made $500,000 a year and spend $500,000 a year, you are just as poor as somebody making X amount and spending X amount. It’s about that gap.” The verdict here is simple. Berman’s lifestyle is extreme. The gap math is what travels, and it is right.

How Berman widened the gap

Most personal-finance advice attacks one side of the equation. Cut lattes. Or alternatively, ask for a raise. Berman attacked both sides at once, and hard. On the spending side he held the line at $24,000 a year, which mostly means low-cost housing through his own rentals, minimal services, and skipping the two categories where Americans spend most of their money. Nationally, housing and healthcare alone made up roughly 34% of total personal consumption in May 2026.

On the income side, he treated entrepreneurship like a portfolio of bets. He has said he tested more than 20 side hustles in three years to find the ones that scaled.

Compare that to the median worker pulling roughly $37.53 an hour in May 2026 according to the BLS, where doubling income usually requires either changing employers or changing skills. Berman’s path required changing products until one worked.

Where the money went

The gap is only useful if you deploy it. Berman split his into three buckets, which is the part worth copying even if the dollar amounts are not.

1. Index funds for the nest egg. Just before his 26th birthday he reported “$500K in the stock market.” Boring, broad, and the part that compounds while he sleeps.
2. Rental real estate for cash flow. He reported 13 rental properties bringing in $3,700 a month in net cash flow after PITI, CapEx, maintenance, all that stuff. Worth noting he built this portfolio into a softer housing market, with existing home sales running at 4.17 million annualized in May 2026, inside what the National Association of Realtors classifies as a soft range.
3. A digital-products business for semi-passive income. He pegged it at about $10,000 a month, which covers his entire annual spend in roughly two and a half months.

Three asset classes, three different jobs. Stocks for growth, rentals for monthly checks, digital products for high-margin cash that does not require a new tenant every year.

The CampFI piece nobody wants to admit matters

Berman says the actual unlock was not a spreadsheet. It was meeting people already living financially independent in person at CampFI, which made the goal feel concrete rather than theoretical. This sounds soft, but it is the variable that changes everything for most readers. You can run the compounding math in a calculator a hundred times. You will still quit if you have never met anyone who actually pulled it off.

What to actually do with this

You are probably not going to live on $24,000 a year. You do not have to. Run the gap math on your own numbers. Write down annual after-tax income, write down annual spending, and stare at the difference.

That number, deployed for a decade or two into something that compounds, is your retirement. Then pick one lever for the next ninety days. Either widen the gap on the spending side by cutting one large recurring expense, or on the income side by testing one specific side income, not twenty. Find one local ChooseFI meetup if the idea of doing this alone sounds exhausting, because for most people it is.

The ratio is what carries across income levels in Berman’s story.

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