Why I write this.

I didn't grow up with money. My school lunches were subsidized, new clothes weren't really on the table, and eating out was something other families did.

That changed a bit when my mom remarried and I met Grandpa George. He was the first person I knew personally who had money: a college professor with rental properties and an old boat we'd take out on the Puget Sound. He talked to me about money constantly, how it worked, why it mattered, and how it was going to shape the rest of my life.

At nine I got obsessed with retirement, which is admittedly a strange thing for a nine-year-old to be obsessed with. I read every personal finance book I could get my hands on.

My dad was a framer and later a general contractor, so I spent my high school summers (and one full year after) framing, tiling and siding his houses. Houses were never a foreign thing to me.

College didn't really feel like an option, though. Neither of my parents had gone, so at 19 I joined the Air Force. I spent 14 years on active duty and left as a Captain, and pretty much every spare moment went into reading about investing, starting side hustles, and trying to grow my portfolio so I could retire as early as possible.

I started making money in real estate with flips. The first few were quick and easy, an extra few thousand here and there, and I figured I had it handled. Then I took on a renovation that was too big for me.

It ran years past schedule and way past budget, and the whole time the house sat empty while I paid the loans on it every month.

The strange part is that on paper I was fine. I had equity in that house. But equity doesn't pay a bill, and every month I was stressed about the payment because I didn't have the income to cover it.

No matter how big your portfolio is, the thing that actually matters day to day is knowing your bills are paid.

So after that I started buying things that paid me. I used a VA loan on a duplex in Ohio, lived in one side and rented out the other. The mortgage was about $1,300 a month and the other side rented for $950, so my housing cost me about $350 a month. For the first time in my life I had money left over at the end of the month.

From there it was a fourplex and a second duplex, and eventually more than two dozen rentals.

Being a landlord is still work, though, and I won't pretend otherwise. I manage every one of them myself, so when something breaks the tenant calls me, and when a family moves out, finding the next one is my job.

Then I started lending on private mortgage notes, which is basically being the bank on a house. As the lender you check the house and the borrower once, up front, before you lend. After that the owner and the family living there take care of the house, and an amortized note pays the lender principal and interest every month.

So which do I like better? Rentals and notes are still my two favorite ways to get paid. But notes are the one I appreciate more on the day a furnace goes out. Like every investment, a note carries risk: the money is committed for the full term, and if a borrower stops paying, getting it back runs through a foreclosure.

By 33 my rentals covered my bills, so I left the Air Force. I'd finally done the thing I set out to do at nine years old.

For about four years after that I didn't have a paycheck. I spent about two of them traveling (Asia, Europe, South America, Mexico), and I didn't apply for a single bank loan the whole time, because I knew exactly how a lender reads a file with no job income on it. Every deal I did in those years ran on private money instead.

Then I went back to work, by choice, at a remote job I actually enjoy. The real estate pays the bills either way. That's what retirement ended up meaning for me: not never working again, just the paycheck becoming optional.

Today I buy affordable houses in Ohio with private money and sell them to families on payments. I still own my rentals and manage them myself, and I lend on notes of my own.

All of that changed how I think about retirement, and it's the reason I write Income Over Wealth.

The framework I was taught, and had to unlearn, is to accumulate as much as you can. Bigger number, better retirement. I think that works fine while you're working. But wealth on paper gets fragile once it's the thing that's supposed to pay your bills.

A good example: not long ago I sold one of my own rentals. It had about $100K of equity sitting in it and was paying me $300 to $400 a month. On paper it was a nice asset. As income it was a pretty bad one.

So what do you actually need once the paycheck stops? Income that shows up every month, whether the market is up or down, whether you're working or not, and whether you're 55 or 85.

That's what Income Over Wealth is about: the ways to build stable, predictable income for the rest of your life. You won't hear much about most of them from Wall Street or an insurance agent, mostly because of how each of them gets paid, and I don't really blame them for that. Here you get the plain version, with simple breakdowns, real numbers and the trade-offs included.

I write a free letter every Tuesday, mostly about what's actually happening in my business that week. If being the bank on a house is what caught your eye, the Private Lender Starter Kit is a free guide to how it works from the lender's side: get the Starter Kit. And if you want to see how far you are from bills paid by income, the Retirement Income Roadmap takes about 30 seconds.

If you'd rather collect income than chase wealth, I think you'll like it here.

- Dan