Don't quit your 9-5, leverage it!

How many of you would like to quit your job today? As real estate investors, our goal is to be able to have the freedom to quit our 9-5 job, to have the freedom to do what we truly desire. Whether that be traveling around the world, spending more time with family, or whatever else your reasons are. Real estate allows us to do those things via cash flow, appreciation, loan paydown, and a lot more. However, before we get to enjoy those freedoms that real estate affords us, we have to leverage our W2 job to fund our real estate deals. Instead of focusing on how soon we can retire from our job, we should be diving deeper into our daily job and seeking to add more value to whichever company you work for. This will make you more of an asset to the company and thus will give you more opportunities for promotions thus increasing your salary. The higher your income the more you can leverage into your real estate business.

How does one leverage one's job? Well, you have to pay yourself FIRST, when that paycheck comes in; before you pay any of the bills such as the mortgage, utilities, or buy anything else, you have to set aside at least 10% of your income in a separate account. The purpose of that account is to help fund your deals, as that account grows you can use it for down payments, partnership, etc. After all, who are you working for? Is it the mortgage company? The credit card company or company X? You have to start working for yourself first and the way to do that at a W2 job is to always pay yourself first before paying any other entity.

There are other great benefits of having a 9-5 as a real estate investor, for starters if you are using traditional bank financing to fund your deals, then banks love to see that as the process is a lot smoother when you can show pay stubs, w2s, etc. Another benefit is that your 10% fund can act as a buffer if there is a vacancy or some expense that your reserves cannot cover, hopefully, that never happens but if it does you have that extra security. 

Have you been working for a while but don't have enough liquidity to get started investing in real estate? Well after you start paying yourself first, that will change but in the meantime, if your employer offers a 401K plan, you may be able to partner with your 401K to get started and the best thing is, you would be paying yourself back as the payments go back into your account with interest.

As we can see there are a lot of great benefits of investing with a 9-5 Job, although we may want to quit today and enjoy our freedoms. We keep coming back to this one word, leverage. We know we have to leverage our time, OPM, networking, and so forth but we never think about leveraging our job. Leverage it to the best of your ability, dive deeper into your work, add value to your team at work, become an expert so you can be compensated adequately thus leveraging even more into your real estate ventures, More Importantly Pay yourself first. 

When the time comes to finally walk away from your 9-5 you will have maximized your ability to leverage your job in all aspects possible to grow your real estate investing business.

Good luck hunting!