I can trace most of my decisions back to my core desire of building freedom into my life. From pursuing a degree in engineering to accepting my first job in the oil fields of Wyoming, back to my first lemonade stand as a kid, and all the side gigs in between - financial freedom has been at the forefront of every decision. But it goes further, I want freedom in all aspects of my life and when I realized that my corporate career didn’t allow me to build the life I wanted, I quit.
It was one of the scariest things I had ever done *at the time* (that’s the thing about making big, scary, brave moves, they get easier the more you do them). I had a lot of work to do to let go of the doctrine that “quitters never prosper” to embrace that more accurate realization that we’re meant to try things, quit them, then try something new until we find what really lights us up. That’s how I would classify the first two years of entrepreneurship for myself: lots of pivots until I discovered what deep inside me was driving the pivots.
That’s the hard work.
I continued my side hustles of photography, video and design. I opened a coworking space in a town of 6000 people (a town that’s most known for a biker rally that only takes place for two weeks out of the year). I started a podcast, I worked with female entrepreneurs, but most importantly, I opened myself up to the risk of starting something from nothing. And that is when things started rolling.
My husband and I invested in building our first spec house in Colorado right around the time we went from two incomes, to one. We started a construction company in the Black Hills with some aligned partners which allowed my husband to also jump into entrepreneurship. We bought a nightmare of a foreclosure house, spent nine months gutting it and building new, which lead me to get my real estate license, in between the bouts of morning sickness because during all this upheaval, we found out we were pregnant. We purchased some land in Deadwood with some other aligned partners and started building a spec house locally while continuing to invest in our next spec house in Colorado. If this reads like a blur, it was. This is how I knew I was on the right track of living aligned with my mission, opportunities began to present themselves once we made our first investment in real estate.
I consumed as much content on real estate investing as I could. Podcasts and books and online courses, yet I found myself looking for something that wasn’t there - how did these investors get started? How did they make their very first deal when they didn’t already have the capital, the history, the lenders, the knowledge. I wanted to see people like me, brand new, trying to navigate the world of real estate, building the plane as they were flying it.
And that’s why I’m here, perhaps it’s why you’re here too. I recognize that what’s missing in the real estate world is more people sharing how they did it, particularly, more women. I want to build a different life for myself and my family. I want to invest and play big and help other people do the same. Whether it’s buying your first home and analyzing the investment component of your purchase, or it’s saving up to buy your first investment property, I want to cheer you on, share my experience, and encourage more people, like you, to build freedom in their lives through empowered investing.