The Truth About Leaving Your Job for Real Estate Investing

**Jason Prichard** (0:01)
Thank you guys for coming. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Jason Prichard. A little quick backstory and introduction on me. I spent 15 years working in corporate America.
I reached a point where I was very disenchanted with my job and my life, and I wanted to make a change. I made that change 2014 I decided to pull myself out of the rat race in the last 10 years. Have been a very, very wild ride, and we're going to share our story today and all the ups and downs. One of the things that I will tell you is that, I guarantee you, I would not be standing up here today if it wasn't for my wife, Jen. And so, I want to talk to you guys, and Zuber talks about this all the time, how important it is to pick the right partner, and then also communicate openly about that. So today, what we'd love to do is share our journey, the ups and downs, and hopefully give you guys some learning lessons so you can circumvent some of the mistakes that we made over the last 10 years. I wanna quickly, before I pass things over to my wife, just thank Zuber for this opportunity. I have spoken on a lot of stages, but this is the very first time Jen and I have been able to do this together. So give us a little bit of grace. Thank you very much.
Definitely a full circle moment for me. I appreciate you guys.

**Jen Prichard** (1:19)
All right, so before we came up here, one of the guys in the back said, do you still get really nervous every time you go on stage? I said, oh, fuck, this is my first time, so.
So there you go. Okay. So hi, everyone. My name is Jen. Besides being a wife and a mom, which is my first priority, I worked in education for nearly 20 years, specifically in college admissions, and then ultimately as a high school counselor. I loved my job. I loved my W2 job. It was what I was meant to do for that season in my life.
And then eventually, in August 2022, I decided I was able to finally leave. I thought you were switching me sides. I was able to leave my W2 job, and since for the past year and a half, I've been working side by side with my husband. We share an office, so when I say side by side, we're like two and a half feet from each other.

**Jason Prichard** (2:13)
Literally side by side.

**Jen Prichard** (2:14)
Literally side by side. And I've been self-managing our rental properties. I have been helping him plan events. I get to be his paparazzi, so I tell him what side is better.
And then honestly, I just have to deal with everything that comes up on any given day. So whatever fire we have, he does not get to deal with it. Usually, I get to deal with it. So with that, I'm going to pass it back to my husband, who is going to quickly take you through our 10-year journey. And then we're going to slow it down a little bit, and we're going to go back to 2005-2006. And I'm going to tell you guys what that shit was really like.
Sorry, I'm not doing my job.

**Jason Prichard** (2:57)
All right, so let's take you quickly. I'll give you the condensed version of the last 10 years of our journey, right? So I was in corporate America from 1999 to 2014, burned the boats in 2014, and have not looked back since. So I officially left my job in 2014, and it took me almost a year of working every single day grinding, getting on the phone, going on appointments, looking for deals until we did our first flip in 2015, okay? How many people are in that stage of their journey right now? They're just getting started, they're working, doing that.
I'm so glad that you guys are here. This is what's really important, okay? So I want one lesson for you guys to take away. From here to here, I couldn't tell you how many times I almost quit. I couldn't tell you how many times I almost went back to corporate job and made the call to my old boss and just said, hey, look, listen, man, do you guys have a spot open? And here's the thing that I've learned, okay? I've met lots of people in this business that have never done a deal, and I've met lots of people that have done multiple deals. I've never met one person that did a real estate deal and then never did another one. So the most important thing that I would tell you is do not give up. If you're where Jason was in 2014, just keep going because once that first domino falls, things will start to snowball and you really start to gain some momentum. So you'll see how fast that momentum picked up for us. 2015, after almost a year, we flipped our first house and the snowball started to build and build and build. 2016, purchased our first rental.