How REI Helped Me Fall Back In Love With My Job

[Joe Delgrosso]

I can't think of a witty intro (sleep deprivation from twin babies)...so I'll just jump right in to my story! 

I'm 34 years old and I've been in the unscripted TV industry going on 20 years. Cheers to unpaid internships back in the day before they started cracking down on free labor! The last 8 years or so I've been lucky enough to be on the executive level producing shows for networks like Discovery, History, Tru TV, Netflix and TLC to name a few and it's been great. 

The pros of the industry are great income, traveling to cool places, making fun content and meeting awesome people. However, the cons are that it's a churn and burn career (average time people stay at a company is generally 3 years) in a constant state of change. This change and overall unsteadiness has really heated up over the last 5 years due to new streaming platforms and everyone trying to fight for viewer's attention. I don't know one individual on the buyer (networks) or seller (producers) side who aren't in fear of losing their job on a regular basis. In these recent years I've seen top industry performers just flat out leave TV because they couldn't take the pressure of all the unknown factors. 

So like many in my industry I found myself resentful of it. Safe to say I came to hate an industry that I'd been in love with before I could drive. Who wants to live in a constant state of worry? You become almost a prisoner of your job - sacrificing your values or views just to make sure you stay employed for as long as you can. That's NO way to live in my opinion. Enter real estate investing! 

We bought our first single family rental property in 2016, not really knowing why or how to properly run it. I just saw my parents do it and knew it was a good investment. We treated the cash flow from it as our "vacation fund", but never thought of growing it into something more. Then as the TV industry got worse and worse (2017/2018), I found BIGGER POCKETS and RICH DAD POOR DAD as I was scouring the internet for a way to get out of TV. 

An already long story short - after listening to the podcasts and reading lots of the books we fast tracked our real estate investing and we bought 5 more properties over the last 2 years. We're buy and hold investors that look for monthly cash flow from each property we target. Now we're sitting at 6 properties total that generate a healthy monthly passive cash flow (mail box money as they say!). 

However...what I thought would happen DIDN'T happen. I thought that once I reached a solid cash flow that would allow me to walk away from TV I would jump out head first. Instead, the financial security the cash flow provided gave me more security in my job. I knew if I lost my job, we would be ok because of the properties.  This security made me BETTER at my job. I'm now much more willing to take chances and enjoy the moments instead of worrying so much...and let me tell you IT'S AMAZING! 

So now instead of living off the property cash flow, we just let it reinvest itself into more properties so we can continue to grow. I don't plan on working in TV too much longer, but when I choose to leave it will be on my terms. I never saw this coming, but instead of real estate investing helping me get out of my industry it instead allowed me to fall back in love with it! 

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