I did it. I have 4 units, I quit my job, and I got licensed

[Andrew Ashby]

I did it. I took the leap. With only 4 rental units (2 SFRs and 1 duplex), I quit my six-figure job in pharmaceutical sales, got my real estate license, and moved my family back to Florida. How did I get here? I'd say after buying my duplex in December 2016, rehabbing it with my family, and watching it be successful, I had become far more acclimated to risk taking. It was my taste of honey and I absolutely loved it. I couldn't go back to the vinegar of my day job. I needed to take my part time gig to full time to be happy. How did I get here?

I served 5.5 years as a U.S. Navy officer. I bought my first house with 100% VA financing in Jacksonville FL in June 2008 just a month after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy. I knew the market was in decline and I thought it was a perfect time to buy. Little did I know that the Jacksonville market was nowhere near bottom and the 3/2 I paid $155,000 for had been bought by a flipper 6 months previously for $95,000. So when it came time for me to relocate to Rhode Island for military orders in October 2012, I became an accidental landlord because I still owed far more on the house than it was worth at the time and I understood that short sales were treated the same for FICO as foreclosures. I still own that SFR to this day and it will soon finally be profitable after subtracting reserves.

I left the Navy in the fall of 2013 and entered pharmaceutical sales in Central Florida. 

My real estate awakening began in the summer of 2016 when I was preparing to buy another SFR as a primary residence in Chattanooga (another work move). It started with audiobooks--first Rich Dad Poor Dad, closely followed by Brandon Turner's Rental Property Investing and then several more Rich Dad adviser series books. I bought and moved into that SFR in August 2016 and immediately set a goal of making my first intentional investment-only purchase by year's end. I set my sights on a Section 8 duplex in Chattanooga and closed that deal in December of 2016. That experience made real to me what I already knew...that I was destined to be in real estate full time and it was only a matter of time.

As the months wore on after getting my taste of honey so to speak, I became more and more disenfranchised with my day job as I listened to over 200 hours of BP podcasts and more than 10 real estate books. I actively began looking for other lines of work to get me relocated to Florida, but I knew that whatever I found would only be another means to an end to my full time real estate dream. After several phone interviews and many dozens of inquiries, I finally concluded that the answer to misery was staring me in the mirror. It was me. It was time to take the leap and go into real estate full time in the only way I saw immediately possible--get licensed and move back to Florida. And that's exactly what happened. I started real estate school online, gave notice to my employer, leased out my own primary residence as my 4th unit, and moved my family back to Florida. 

I'm now a full time real estate agent (Masters Realty) and investor in Orlando and I couldn't be happier.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefor all progress depends on the unreasonable man."--George Bernard Shaw