Leave my high paying job to be an agent?

[Thomas Branson]

First off, I made this account to stay anonymous first and foremost. I'd hate for my employer or a coworker to see something with my name on a post like this and get myself in a sticky situation. Hope that's understandable.

Basics:

I'm 23.

Work 60 hours per week. I only have 2 hours of free time on work days, and most of that time is spent making my lunch, showering, and getting to work.

I have no credit card debt, no loans, no student debt. Simply a car payment and rent.

I make around $5,000 per month. Not ridiculous, but to be 23 with no responsibilities or much debt, it's fairly decent.

Long story short, I work a lot of hours and don't want a corporate job. I was considering saving up about 1 year's worth of expenses (minimum) and leaving my job on a good note, then taking up being an agent.

I would like to do start up businesses to sell, and do real estate on the side. I currently own two LLC's. One is a clothing brand (just launched, making approx. $300/mo, but have only been in business for 3 months) and I've already made back my initial startup cost. The other company is also a brand more based on accessories. No sales yet, just starting the website, legalities, etc.

Honestly, just doing some smaller side businesses from home to kind of get the basics down on what it takes to operate a small business. I figure it's better for me to work with sales, taxes, legalities, paperwork, shipping, etc through a small t-shirt company before jumping into something I can't handle.

I feel like working generally from home as an agent would give me more time to focus on my side businesses. My only concern is that I eventually want to, you guessed it, buy rental properties. I know this is going to be a challenge without a steady and consistent job.

I could go on and rant out the pros and cons forever. I would just like to know what you think.

[Ali Boone]

Hey "Thomas"! (good call) I think your plan is great and good for you for already getting into starting businesses. It's great experience, and the more you can do it while you have a steady paycheck, they less painful the lessons-learned are financially. 

I had a solid corporate job when I got into real estate. I started buying rental properties then, when my W2 was fantastic for mortgages, and at one point I got my agent's license because I had the opportunity to make money on investor referrals. Basically what happened is I continued to grow my agent business while I had my solid corporate paycheck until I knew I was losing money by not quitting my corporate job. The point of saying all that is- you can get your agent's license now and start to work on it. Becoming an agent, of any sort, has a big build time (meaning a lot of time with minimal to no income). So the more of that you can do while you have your regular job, the better. You can focus on buying rental properties now (of which you can make commish on if you have your license) and build all that out until it starts becoming bigger than your regular job.

If you are interested in doing commercial agent stuff at all, and you really are in Atlanta (not sure if changing the city is a cover-up), one of my best friends is a big commercial agent in Atlanta and would probably gladly take you under his wing for some coaching and ideas bouncing and such.

Either way, you're already off to a great start! If investor referrals are something you might want to dabble in if you get a license, reach out anytime and I can tell you more about it.