Grayson

I'm a student at Grand Canyon University here in Phoenix, Arizona, and I just started working at Neighborhood Ventures with CEO Jamison Manwaring.

Grayson

Here, this company, and they're doing great things. How's it going today?

Jamison

Hey, it's good. I'm glad to be up here in the studio again, talking about real estate investing, entrepreneurship, all the all the fun stuff.

Grayson

Oh yeah. So let's just dove right in. So a term that I hear from all my friends and their business majors and things like that is the term financial freedom. It's a proper term. It's thrown around a lot.

Grayson

Not a lot of people really know exactly what it means. So let's talk about financial freedom. I think you told me before that you actually became financially free through real estate and that real estate provided that for you.

Grayson

So financial freedom is essentially, you know, where you have expenses. But then your income, your passive income outweighs your expenses and therefore you no longer have it. You have to work. So basically, your everything on top of that is earned income.

Grayson

It's kind of extra. So in your words, what do you like? How did you become financially free in your life?

Jamison

Yeah. So I really became in a position to become financially free from my corporate job. So I know that's not what a lot of people want to hear. Everyone wants to hear. You can do it all in real estate.

Jamison

For me, I made some good income, I saved as much as I could. I invested it and I invested a bunch in the stock market because I was working on the stock market at the time as an equity analyst, and I realized pretty quickly that I didn't like putting my money in the stock market and started investing

Jamison

in real estate. And then I joined a company that got bought out and through that transaction, that's really what kind of gave me the opportunity to either spend that money on something dumb or to try to buy an asset that generated passive income or, you know, use that money to invest it.

Jamison

And I took that that opportunity to up to buy a piece of real estate. And since that time, I have enough passive income now where I all my expenses are covered. And that was that was a big transition for me because, you know, you grow up knowing you're going to have.

Jamison

To get a job one day, and once you get the job, you start working in the in the rat race and you're trying to make as much money as you can, then at some point you start saying, Well, how do I get out of this?

Jamison

And that was a big turning point for me, because once that that investment started paying off, I had enough money coming in every month so that I didn't have to to work to pay my bills.

Grayson

Yeah, I think that's a great message for people out there is, you know, maybe you're working a job and you get a raise or you get a bonus or you get a tax return, something like that and you get a little bit of extra cash cash you want, you have to fight that, that lifestyle creep of OK

Grayson

, now making more money. That means that now I can go get those shoes I've always wanted. Now I can buy that car. I can make the car payment every month on this Tesla that I want in my whole life.

Grayson

You know, things like that. You ready to fight that lifestyle creep, which is something you did, which instead of, you know, buying those things that you, that you want, you had a little bit of delayed gratification. You bought assets that then allowed you to have more freedom in your life by becoming financially free to those assets.

Jamison

Yeah. And it's it's super hard because you get the pressure of the people around you. You want to keep up with the Joneses, you want to. You've always wanted those those things in your life. And I got really aggressive.

Jamison

I was basically about % of my income. I was I was using to live on and % I was investing, and I knew that I was building a little bit of a nest egg, but I kept things pretty lean.

Jamison

You know, I also like to travel. I like to experience things, but I don't like having a lot of stuff, so I limit what I buy. And I was living in New York at the time, too, so you don't have a lot of room to put anything anyway.

Jamison

So I was putting as much money away as I could. I bought my first building. It was a ten unit building when I was living in New York, started getting some good cash flow off of that. I really like that transaction.

Jamison

That was what really converted me away from the stock market, which I know very well, having worked there. And I didn't like the volatility of the stock market. So if you want to try to make it big and in investing and get a real pop, you can do that in the stock market.

Jamison

You got to be really smart. You got to know what's going on more than the rest of the people who are in the market to beat everybody else there. And does it have the potential to do that? Yes.

Jamison

Does it also have the potential to take your your earnings down from the hard earned money that you've put away and in a given day have a ten or or % loss? Yes, I had that and I hated that.

Jamison

It didn't feel good to me. Some people can do it. I didn't want to do that. So when I had the opportunity by this piece of real estate, my first project was units. I bought it right? Remodeled, it started seeing cash flow come from it, and I loved that process, and it was it was like night

Jamison

and day. Owning a piece of real estate versus owning versus investing in the stock market. So for me, I was like, I want to do more of that, and that's really what got me going. But you have to start by saying, I got to stop spending.

Jamison

I got to stop caring what everyone else thinks about me. I got to put more money away because ultimately I don't want to live my life working a nine to five job corporate job just to survive. I want the freedom to do what I want with my time to work remotely, to earn good wages and to start

Jamison

making money off of the assets that I own. And it's it's brilliant. But you have to be disciplined to do it, especially at the beginning.

Grayson

Yeah. So let's talk about I know you. I think you're only your second was your second property in Mexico. I think your second property was so you bought a property in Rocky Point Mexico. It was an eight unit and you lived in one.

Grayson

Is that right?

Jamison

Yeah. So I was working at a company. Getting a really good salary like my job and kind of out of nowhere an activist investor came in and it was pretty clear they were going to want to take us private and they forced a sell of the company and it ended up.

Jamison

Initially, I was not excited about it, but ended up working out great because we got bought out. I had only been there for about a year and a half and I got a chunk of money from the stock options that I had earned in that period.

Jamison

And from that and the sell of this first ten unit building, they happened around the same time. And I had always wanted to own a property on the beach and found this eight unit building in Mexico, that was a home.

Jamison

It was a single family home, but the rooms all had their own bathrooms and private entrances. And the property needed a lot of work, but I knew that if you was remodeled the right way, you could turn it into a really effective Airbnb that generated really good cash flow.

Jamison

In Rocky Point Mexico, it's a little beach town about three and a half hour south of Phenix. There's not enough units to meet the demand of all the people that want to go down there on the weekends. So I bought the building, spent a summer down there, living on the beach, renovating it, and we opened in the

Jamison

fall of and it's just been a great property, generated really strong cash flow and from the cash flow from that property, I have been able to I haven't I didn't have a paycheck for four years because I had cash flow from that property, and that's when I started Neighborhood Ventures.

Grayson

Yeah. So you became financially free by investing in real estate, but you made your money on Wall Street and you made your money by being an equity analyst, which is something that you were talented at, something you were good at.

Grayson

You got your finance degree in college, so you went down the career path of going to Wall Street and making money there, and then you invested your money in real estate. And I think that for a lot of people, that's probably the best path for them to is, you know, everybody wants to flip houses wholesale, they want

Grayson

to make cash, they want to make their income in real estate and then invest on top of that. But that's not the best path for everybody.

Jamison

It's what the gurus right now are telling you to do. Become a wholesaler. Flip homes. And it's it's really attractive because everyone's like, Oh, I want to get in real estate investing my friends, the people who I know have done really well in real estate.

Jamison

They're pilots, they're doctors, they're they're salesmen and they take their earnings. They spend as little as they can and they invest in real estate. So it might not be what you want to hear, but you got to figure out where you're going to make your most amount of your money, where you're going to make the most money

Jamison

for you to live on and then to save as much as you can. I was getting my hair cut a couple of weeks ago and my barber had on the table. Rich dad, poor dad book which one? My favorite books.

Jamison

So I asked him about it and he's like, so excited about it. He's been a barber for years. Really good, barber. And he said, You know, I'm really excited now to start flipping homes. And I've heard this from people before that hear about rich dad, poor dad and real estate.

Jamison

And he he was really thinking about transition his whole career to flipping houses. And I flipped homes before on my own and my family has. And it's a ton of work. If you go flip a house, there's a ton of work, a ton of risk.

Jamison

You can do really well in it if you're into construction, if you know a trade yourself. If you have friends who are contractors, you may be a real estate agent. You can find really good deals and you can contract it out.

Jamison

If you have some cash that you can put out there for a while and hopefully sell that house in that period. Get a hard money loan. There's a lot to it. And you know, what I told him was, don't think you have to do that to get rich in real estate or to build wealth and real estate

Jamison

. The way you probably most likely to do that is by continuing to be a great barber and saving as much as you can in investing in real estate. And that's that's how it worked for me. I think that's how it works for most people, but it's also delayed gratification because you have to figure out, OK, where am

Jamison

I going to make the money then? Because I'm I'm I got to I got to find my way and you do. You have to find your way to to make the most income you can. It takes a little bit of time, but you can always come back to real estate if you have some cash to invest.

Jamison

The folks out there selling you a course on how to flip to do these other things that you can do to to, you know, get rich in real estate, there's a viable business there, but you got to realize when you get into it, that's a whole industry.

Jamison

You know, we remodel our apartment buildings. It's a lot of work to find good work, good good contractors to find materials at good pricing, to manage that whole process. And it's a full time job. So don't think you have to do that to to get rich in real estate, you can work hard, make your money, invest in real estate. That's what I did.

Grayson

Yeah, but you still want to make you still want to be educated on real estate, even investing in real estate, right? You still want to have even if you are a doctor and you make all your money at, you know, owning your own practice or whatever it is, you still, if you're going to invest in a piece

Grayson

of real estate, you still want to know, you know what you're doing. You still have to educate yourself before you make an investment. Because whatever investment you make, you want to invest in something that you know and that you're confident in, and you can't be confident in something if you don't know exactly what you're investing in.