Cody Berman Reached FIRE by 25 With 13 Rentals and $3,700 Monthly Cash Flow

Q: Can a $10,000 monthly passive income truly be built, or is it an influencer's myth?

Yes — a $10,000 monthly “passive” income can be built, but the influencer version is often misleading. Cody Berman’s case shows it is possible, but not effortless. His income did not come from a single trick. It came from a hybrid system: roughly $500,000 in stocks, 13 rental units producing about $3,700 a month, and a digital-products business bringing in more than $10,000 a month in mostly passive income. That required years of saving, investing, building an audience, creating products, and taking real estate risk with leverage. The key distinction is that “passive” usually means low ongoing effort after heavy upfront work, capital, or both. Digital products can scale well because they are built once and sold repeatedly, but they still require expertise, demand validation, marketing, and maintenance. Real estate can generate cash flow faster than a stock portfolio because debt amplifies returns, but it also adds vacancy, repair, rate, and overleveraging risk. For people relying mainly on investments, the math is demanding. To produce $120,000 a year, you may need around $1 million at a 12% yield, or closer to $2 million at 6%. Traditional stock-and-bond portfolios often require even more, especially if using conservative withdrawal rates below the old 4% rule for very early retirement. So the income target is real, but the myth is that it is easy, quick, or fully hands-off. In practice, it usually takes substantial capital, a scalable business, or both.

2 articles · Updated · Business Insider · Jun 20

Late 2021 marked Berman’s financial-independence point: before turning 26, he said he held about $500,000 in stocks, 13 rental units and roughly $3,700 a month in rental cash flow.
That approach shifted him away from a traditional $1 million FIRE target based on the 4% rule, which he had calculated to support about $40,000 in annual spending.
Roughly $200,000 in down payments let Berman and his wife buy 11 rental units between late 2020 and mid-2021, using leverage to generate more income than the same capital would in index funds.
His digital-products business added more than $10,000 a month in mostly passive income, reinforcing his view that recurring cash flow can shorten the path to FIRE.
Berman said the cash-flow model can reach independence in about two years for some investors, versus seven to eight years for the fastest nest-egg strategies, though he warned leverage can backfire.