Our Story--Finding Purpose

We always knew we wanted to invest in real estate. Both of our families have real estate investments and we were interested in buying income producing rental properties as soon as we had the opportunity.

When we were first married, Chris was serving as a Naval Officer and we had the opportunity to experience the adventure of military life. We saw various parts of the world and lived all over the country. When we weren’t busy joy-riding nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines, we learned that some of our more experienced Wardroom friends would purchase a house at each new duty station, and then convert the property to a rental when the Navy moved them to their next duty station. This opened our minds to investing in remote markets, and through our research we discovered that certain markets had more opportunities for strong income producing investments.

Learning from the experience of more seasoned investors, we began to refine our own investing strategy. Jennifer was networking, analyzing properties and exploring investment opportunities in a variety of markets. She selected a few of the best markets and we started making offers on investment properties. Chris’ time in the Navy was coming up for renewal and as exciting as Navy life was, we wanted to thoughtfully evaluate our next steps. Navy life was an adventure, but we weren’t thriving under the demands of the military so we began to ask ourselves the questions,

“If we didn’t have to work, how would we spend our time?”

and

“Is how we are spending 40+ hours a week what we would be doing if we were set for life?”

Asking these question helped us shape a vision for the life we wanted to provide for our family and the conviction and purpose we felt called to live by.

While Chris went back and forth between deployments and working 90+ hours a week, we found the free time we had was focused on conversations about lifestyle design. Knowing Chris was getting out of the military soon, we wanted to be purposeful with where we chose to live, what we did for work, and the life we created. Time is our greatest asset and not having a lot of it to ourselves helped us realize that.

In the meantime, we had our first child. As our family was growing we could see how investment properties would create opportunities for us and free up our time as our new child, and investment portfolio grew.

As we made plans for the life we wanted to create post-military, and knowing we were going to invest in real estate, Chris’s dad unexpectedly passed away. He was young and in the first couple years of retirement with hopes of how he would spend his time. The shock and the loss of not only losing him in our life, but the hard-earned time seemingly taken away from him affirmed our desire to free up our time with passive income from investment properties.

In the meantime, we had our second child. We were gearing up for another cross country move with a new baby and job changes but the busyness and uncertainty of life reinforced our desire to invest.

We began aggressively building our real estate portfolio with single family homes. Jennifer made connections with wholesalers, brokers, rehabbers, property managers and other investors in remote markets. Chris is a spreadsheet wizard so with each new acquisition, he revamped our investing timeline and evaluated the return on investment. Friends began asking about our process and criteria for income properties and we began guiding them as they built their own portfolios.

As Jennifer continued to build remote teams to manage our investments, Chris kept running numbers and we considered the benefit of adding partners for larger commercial investment properties. Our deal flow was steady and increasing and we realized that we could do more deals and increase our returns by adding partners to do larger deals.

So here we are. We created Slaughter Invest, LLC, for the purpose of creating financial freedom for ourselves and others. Our life philosophy is to help others overcome obstacles and our investing gives us the freedom of time and freedom of finances to make a positive impact on those around us.