At a young age, Jordan Moorhead already had a mindset of having financial independence and not sticking to a 9-5 job. He left college when he started his own fitness business and earned income.
After working in the fitness industry, he took the risk of becoming a real estate agent in Minneapolis and Austin where he continuously bought more rental properties and earned more passive income. Now, he is the owner of The Moorhead Team and has been continuously getting deals and has been helping people get started in real estate.
In today’s episode, Jordan shared how his dedication of achieving financial freedom has led him to where he is today. He also shared the risks he took on starting a real estate business and how he overcame them.
If you want to learn tips for investing in real estate, this episode is for you!
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Listen to the podcast here
How Jordan Moorhead Achieved Financial Freedom From Being In The Fitness Industry To Becoming A Real Estate Investor
I’m here with Nick Monge. Nick, how are you doing?
I’m doing great. How about you?
I’m doing good. I’ve got another house hack. It’s that time of year for me. I had a house hack on a contract that fell through for the most ridiculous reason ever. What happened was I needed to submit my earnest money on a Friday. The title company never sent me the wire instructions. On that Friday, I asked for that. They never sent them to me until Monday.
On Monday, once I got them, I sent the earnest money over immediately, but because I was in breach of the contract, the seller decided to rescind it. They didn’t want to push the earnest money deadline out and make an amend for me, so I lost the deal. Everything happens for a reason, so I’m not super upset about it. I’ve got another one under contract that I’m pretty excited about. How’s your life?
Everything is going well with me. I’m still adjusting from the military life. Three months being out here in Denver, I’m definitely getting more and more used to it. I’m staying busy and waiting for my broker’s license to come through, taking care of these kids when my wife has a new job. I’m living the civilian life for now. I’m enjoying it. It’s funny for somebody to say that because 98.5% of the US population has never been in the military. For somebody that was in for nine years, it’s definitely an adjustment.
I can’t imagine. I would say I can relate, but I can’t. You’re a stay-at-home dad right now, so it sounds like you’re living the dream.
I like it.
We have a great show. Jordan Moorhead has been a contact of mine for more than a year now. We’ve been talking online for a while on Facebook and Instagram. We had a conversation at the BiggerPockets Conference in October 2019 in Nashville and he’s got a pretty cool story. He got hit by a car on his motorcycle. He started a fitness business. He’s moved from Kentucky to Minneapolis down to Austin. He was able to do the FHA loan without staying there for a year. He’s got a cool story. What it boils down to is he achieved financial independence at a relatively young age, which has allowed him to take some pretty big risks. One of those risks has been leaving his home base in Minneapolis for 9, 10 years and moving down to Austin, Texas, where he resides now.
It was a good chat with him. All of the readers are going to get some good information out of this episode.
I sure hope so. Let’s bring Jordan in, and we’ll help to have a good show.
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Welcome to the show, Jordan, how are you doing?
I’m good. How are you? Thanks for having me, Craig.
Thanks for coming on. We’ve chatted a little bit here and there over Facebook, Instagram, and all that good stuff. Have we ever had a conversation in person?
At the BiggerPockets conference in 2019 in Nashville. I hope we can do it again in 2020 in New Orleans.
New Orleans would be a fun place. It could be the same vibe as Nashville. New Orleans is a little bit more jazzy than country, but it would be fun either way.
More flavor.
We’ve got you on the show. We’ve been chatting for a while. I know you’re in real estate. I know you made a big move from Minneapolis to Austin while you already had a pretty good business over there. We’re definitely going to want to dive into that and explain how financial independence helps you make that move. First, how did you find out about financial independence? Where did you get started? Where did you hear it from?
It started a long time ago. I always remember not wanting somebody else to tell me what to do or when to do it. I was talking with a buddy, and we figured out that we had started talking about buying rental property properties and not having to be reliant on a job when we were around thirteen. I have memories of talking with him about how it would be great if we bought these houses, somebody else paid all the bills and we made money off. We didn’t have to necessarily work a job. It’s been a long time for me. I saw my parents work corporate jobs. My mother worked until she retired, and my father until he was 55. He got into real estate. Seeing them go through that grind and being unhappy at work was a big lesson to me that I needed to do something different.
You thought of that on your own at thirteen years old. That sounds pretty incredible. Was there any influence from anybody, or are you just that smart?
My dad has been a big influence to me the entire time. Although he hasn’t necessarily always pursued FI, rental property investing or anything like that, he has always encouraged the ideas to me. He’s been super frugal the entire time. I can remember we have motion-activated light sensors in the bathrooms, so we can’t leave the lights on. “You don’t buy a new car. You buy a used car because when you buy a new car, it drops 20% the minute you fall off the lot. You need to save money. You need to invest.”
For me, through reading books, talking to people, and listening to podcasts, I started to figure out that I can apply those principles and also pursue financial independence and be able to do what I want when I want where I want. For me, it’s always been important to be able to live where I want to live and do what I want to do with my time.
Did you grow up in Minneapolis?
I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. That’s where my father is still a real estate agent and lives. I moved to Minneapolis at 21 in the middle of college. I started college a little bit late. I actually ended up not finishing college. I moved there to finish college and ended up not finishing college and spent more than 9.5 years there.
College brought you there. What got you into real estate over there?
I moved up there and went to college. I moved up there to get sober. I’ve been sober for a long time and I needed to go to Minneapolis to do that. It wasn’t working in Louisville. I started in college there and got through community college, which was essentially free because I had those Pell Grants and all that, that covered all the tuition.
I got to the point where I’d done all my credits I could do in a two-year. I needed to pick a four-year. I started looking at the debt that I was going to have to take on to get a four-year degree in what I was going to make by taking on this debt, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I ended up starting my own fitness business at that point in time and started making good money, so it didn’t make sense to continue.
It’s incredible that you could think like that at a relatively young age. You’re able to make the decision to not go the route of everybody else finishing college and getting a degree that helps you make $60,000 or $70,000 a year. You could probably take those 2 or 3 years that you would spend in college to start a business. In those same 2 or 3 years, maybe you’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
I was in college and I got a personal training certificate and started training people. I was making $50 or $60 an hour personal training people. I realized I was going to make the same if I finished my four-year degree starting now. I wasn’t going to make any more money. It made sense to not pay for all these expensive classes that I was going to take and back off and grow the personal training business. I ended up growing that to two trainers, an admin and getting up to 62 clients paying around $300 a month at the end of it. It worked out a lot better for me personally.
How much is that a month? Are you making $18,000 a month?
It was close to that. It was over $15,000. That’s gross. That’s the whole business. This business makes so much money that they’re making $50 a sale. We were doing pretty well. I was keeping a majority of that.
What overhead did you have for that business?
Salaries were the main one. The salaries of the personal trainers and the admin. The next one was we paid rent for space and that wasn’t too bad. Salaries are the biggest thing.
How many years did you do the personal training thing?
Five years.
You did the personal training when you were 21 and 26.
I started when I was 23. I owned the business until I was 30. It’s about seven years. I stopped being in the business so much at 27 or 28 because I started to sell real estate. I still ran the real estate business at the same time as owning the fitness business. I would go in a couple of times a week and make sure everything was going well. I trusted my employees, so I didn’t have to micromanage them.
What ended up happening with the personal fitness business? Did you end up selling that?
I sold it in 2018. My plan in 2018 was to move down here to Austin. I technically did, so I moved into the house that I’m in right now and took off the next morning on a motorcycle ride and never came back. Essentially, I got hit by a car. I was in a hospital for two weeks and I was in a rehab center for a little over a month. I did a lot of rehab after that too.
That has been at least a year setback for you.
That set me back for about 1.5 years.
You cannot just dump money on any real estate deal. Don't put more down payment just to make a deal work or do a large rehab without calculating it first. Share on XThere’s a lot to unpack here. When did you get your license in Minnesota? Let’s start there first.
September 2017.
When did you get your first rental property?
That was before that. I got that in December of 2016.
Let’s start in December 2016. You are in Minneapolis, you’re working on your fitness business, primarily, you’re doing pretty good at it and making good money. You’ve always had this idea of real estate in the back of your head from when you were a kid, and now you feel comfortable diving in. What does that first deal look like?
I’m going to start a little bit before that. I had started looking in 2014 but had the whole analysis paralysis and didn’t think I knew enough and didn’t do it for some reason. I moved down here in 2015 and ended up moving back to Minneapolis in the spring of 2016 because I didn’t budget right. I didn’t have any passive income. I ran out of money. I was down here and I ran out of money, so I picked up my fitness business back. I hadn’t lost it. I was doing all online training of people. I picked that up in June of 2016. I ran with it and grew it tremendously at that time. I got 50 or so clients that year, so it went nuts.
In June or July of 2016, I started looking for my first duplex. My advice to everybody is at least have a general idea of where you want to be because Minneapolis St. Paul is a pretty big area, and I started looking everywhere. It was all about the deal for me at that point. I looked in St. Paul, I looked 25 minutes away from the gym where I was going to be. I looked everywhere.
Eventually three months into looking, I realized that I need to find something that’s at least going to be commutable to where I work every day. I found a place in Northeast Minneapolis, which is about fifteen minutes from the gym I worked at. It was in pretty rough shape. It needed to be fixed up a little bit, but it was in good enough shape where it passed an FHA appraisal, which you’re familiar with. Those get a little tough sometimes.
Can you explain to people what an FHA is and what the FHA appraisal is?
I had no money going into this. I had enough for the down payment. At $182,000, that was close to $6,000. The place is $182,000, and 3.5% of that was close to $6,000. I had that with cash and some IRA at the time. FHA is the Federal Housing Administration. You’re allowed to have one loan at a time and they’ll finance anything from 1 to 4 units.
For me, it made more sense to buy a duplex. I run into a lot of buyers that want to buy a fourplex but it’s harder to find fourplexes in Minneapolis, St. Paul that makes sense, so it made more sense to buy a duplex with a loan down payment, FHA loan, with 3.5% down. I had to pay around $100 of private mortgage insurance because I wasn’t putting 20% down, but the deal still worked great.
The appraisal on that is a little bit harder. Why is that? Do you know?
They want you to be able to move into the property and live in it right away so my first product was a good example of somewhere that was in rough shape cosmetically but there were a few things wrong that I couldn’t live in right away. The stove didn’t work. The whole front door of the stove had fallen off and the burners didn’t work. You can’t cook. They’re not going to let you live there if you can’t cook. The kitchen sink didn’t work at all. It was leaking so they turned the water off. They require that the kitchen sink be fixed and there were one or two other small safety or livability repairs they had us make or had the seller make.
The property itself cosmetically was disgusting. It had tracks in the carpet where people had been walking for over twenty years and they had never fixed the carpet. There are splatters all over the walls. It smelled like cigarettes. They don’t necessarily care about that stuff. They care about livability and safety. They’re going to do an inspection. We could talk about the deal I’m working on right now later if you want to. I’m trying to do an FHA and it’s probably not going to work for some reason, but they want you to be able to move in and live in it on day one.
That makes perfect sense because the FHA loan is an owner-occupied loan, so they want to make sure that you are going to adhere to what the loan standards are.
It’s owner-occupied with super low down payment, 3.5% down so they want to make sure that you can move in and you don’t have to do a lot of repairs to live there because they’re assuming, “This person probably doesn’t have a ton of money if they can only put 3.5% down.”
You bought the property for $182,000. What was your mortgage on that?
The mortgage was right around $1,200 a month.
That seems high for that price. Do you have taxes and insurance there?
Taxes were high and insurance was fairly high. Taxes in Minneapolis were around $4,000 a year. My insurance is about $150 a month but the rent on the top unit was $1,200. It’s a pretty sweet deal. The rents were pretty high.
It seems like you were living in the bottom unit.
I lived in the bottom unit. I also had a roommate in the bottom unit who paid me $450 a month. He should have paid me $600 a month but he’s an accountant, and the deal was that he was going to do my accounting for my fitness business for that $150 a month discount, and it didn’t work out so well. That was my first lesson. If you don’t get discounts for tenants to do work cleaning, accounting, or whatever, you charge them and pay them. I also had another spare room that I used on Airbnb.
How much was that bringing in on average?
That was about $600 a month. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I wasn’t supposed to be doing that with an FHA loan. You’re technically not supposed to do short-term rentals but I had no idea.
Ignorance is bliss. I didn’t know that either. I definitely have done that. That sounds like a pretty good deal. It sounds like you’ve got that property for $182,000. I suspect you put some work into it or did you have to?
Something I’ve done from the beginning is I’ve never done any of the work myself because I heard all these stories about, “If you want to scale, you need to keep your time to its highest and best use.” My highest and best use of the time was growing my fitness business, which was making me a lot of money. I paid $3,000 in the beginning, which I borrowed from my father to do carpet and paint so it would at least be livable, and we could move in. Over the next two years, I put about $10,000 or $12,000 into the kitchen, bathroom, and other things to fix it. Lucky for me, there was a hailstorm about a year into me living there and all the siding got replaced. It looked good when I sold it.
You went in there for $180,000. Over the course of a couple of years do you put about $15,000 or so into it. You went ahead and got $1,200 for the top unit, $450 for one room, and $600 for the other room. Your total rent coming in is $2,350 on a $1,200 mortgage, and you’re living for free.
It was pretty great. After all expenses, I probably made $500 or $600 a month.
That’s absurd plus living for free, which is probably another $500 to $600 a month if you were to have a comparable room somewhere else in St. Paul/Minneapolis.
It’s $600 to $700. You can find those deals for $500 but typically $600 or $700.
You’re looking at over $1,000 net difference in terms of your monthly cashflow from that one deal. When did you sell? How much did you sell it for?
I sold it in the middle of 2018. I bought it in December of 2016. I ended up trying to refinance. I tried to pull a HELOC but I couldn’t get the money out that I wanted. I sold it outright for $327,000. It worked out great. I had moved out at that point. I had intended to hold it long-term as a rental but couldn’t get the money out so I sold it.
You’ve got a $150,000 equity increase in three years.
Not even, 2.5 years.
That’s the power of real estate. That’s how you can expedite your time for financial independence because you live for free. You’re making money and that real estate is appreciating. You’ve got $150,000 Plus living for free. What happened?
While I was there, I was doing pretty well in the fitness business. While I was there, I was living for free and making $600 a month so I saved a ton of money in my first six months of house hacking. I ended up buying a six-plex in Louisville, Kentucky, which is about five minutes away from where my dad lives. After I sold that place, I did a 1031 exchange into another two six-plex, which is on the same street. A few months after that, I bought this place in Austin that I’m living in right now.
What year is this? When did you sell the first house hack?
You already had a six-plex in Louisville, Kentucky, and you bought two more six-plexes with that $150,000 1031 exchange.
Plus, some extra cash. It wasn’t quite enough. I had to put around $200,000 or something down. I’ve always lived frugally. At the time, I was saving 75% of my income. I had some money sitting around so I did 1031 plus some cash on mine and bought two more six-plexes. I refinanced the first six-plex into that loan there too so covered part of the equity I needed to buy the other two. The first one I did seller financing, so I didn’t put a full 20% or 25% down on it. I put 15% down on it.
In anything you are doing, never quit and always be creative. Share on XHow did you find these six-plex deals? What are the numbers on those? What’s your cashflow on those? Give us a little detail there.
They each make about $4,400 a month now. I purchased them anywhere from $330,000 to $350,000 for each of them. They were all found on the MLS through my dad, who was a realtor. He’s been doing this for over fifteen years. He’s pretty good at negotiating with people. He got the prices down. Honestly, with the second six-plex, I was going to buy one and he found out through the realtor that they had another one. I got him to package the deal together. He’d done a pretty good deal on the package. That helped quite a bit.
The first one, I bought for $350,000 and the income was $4,400. My mortgage to the guy was only around $1,500 a month. It was principal and interest to the seller in that case. The mortgage for all three is $4,700 a month and they make around $12,000 to $13,000 a month, depending on the month. With COVID, we’ve had a couple of tenants trying to play the game of, “I’m not going to pay because you can’t evict me.” It’s not a huge deal. It’s just a temporary shortcoming.
You’re making about $8,000 to $9,000 over the mortgage on those three six-plexes. After expenses and stuff, maybe you’re saying your cashflow is about $4,000 or $5,000.
$3,000 to $4,000 depending on the month. The water bills are every other month, so some months look great. Some months aren’t so great but it’s still good, positive cashflow. I’m happy with it. I’ve got a property manager that takes care of everything for me and I don’t have to do anything except click checks.
How did you find your team down there? Is it through your dad? Your dad is a realtor, but do you use his property managers and staff as well?
Yeah, he does. I found the first 2 or 3 through him, and I’m on my fourth now. I’ve been through three. They were too expensive on the expenses end for me. They did a great job. The last guy did an amazing job, awesome customer service, but they had high expenses when they did maintenance and repairs. This guy who’s doing my property management is the father of a good buddy of mine that I went to high school with in Louisville. He has all the connections for getting cheap work done. He’s super frugal himself. He’s a real estate investor. He owns dozens of houses and knows how to get done cheaply.
You made that switch when?
I made the switch to this guy in February 2020. I had my last property manager for about 1.5 years or so, maybe even two years. I had the first one only for a few months and the one before that only for a few months.
Sometimes you got to jump through property managers to find a good one. I’m in the same boat in Birmingham. They’re down there dragging their feet and stuff. I’m getting ready to hire my own property manager, a new one.
I’m not too quick to burn a bridge or let somebody go but when it’s not working after a few months to a year, it doesn’t make sense.
You got to find your good team and you got to keep iterating until you got the perfect match. You’ve got about $4,000 to $5,000 coming in a month here. I suspect you live on much less than that.
Around $3,000 a month. I’m frugal. I don’t have a lot to spend money on. I pay about $500 to live in this unit and Austin here. I don’t have a car payment. I don’t have a lot of expenses.
Because you were frugal and you have passive income and you already get those properties, you were able to take a risk here and make your life a little bit better. Explain to everybody what you did and what that risk was. How did the financial independence side take that and potentially make even more money to come?
The risk to move into Austin here?
Yeah. You left all your clients in Minneapolis.
I’ve got to another agent there that’s helping me and we’re still working on stuff there, so I’m still helping in Minneapolis too. I was making a good income in Minneapolis, but I didn’t like the winters. I didn’t like it six months out of the year. It was cold and dark all the time. It’s not what I want. I knew if I wanted to move back to Austin, I needed to house hack again because the reason I had to leave here before was I had no money and no job. I needed to reduce my living expenses so I would be able to at least cover it with my passive income and be okay building up a career here as a real estate agent, which can take 6 months to 1 year.
I needed the passive income from my rentals. More importantly, I needed the cheap housing expense from living in a house hack. I bought this house hack back when I still own a fitness business and I was going to run the fitness business from down here. I came down here and got hit by that car and ended up having to sell the fitness business because I couldn’t do anything with it. I’ve had this since 2018.
Even though it was the house hack, you rented it out full-time because you had a life-changing incident. Is that why you were able to do that?
Yeah. I did everything with the lender’s knowledge and made sure I kept him in the loop. I couldn’t move in here. I needed care for quite a few months and needed to get my life back in order before I could come back.
That’s the one stipulation on these owner-occupied loans. Typically, you have to live there for a year and you have to have the intent to live there for a year. If something out of the ordinary happens, you get hit by a car, you’ve changed jobs, you get married, something crazy that happens, a life-changing event, then you’re able to get out of that one-year thing.
I had a buddy that bought an owner-occupied property to live in. His intention was, “I’m going to live here for a year or more.” He lived there for a few months and then there was a gang funeral on the street. There was a horse-drawn carriage with a bunch of people wearing blue and they had some banners or something saying the Crips. He called his lender and said, “I can’t live here anymore. This place is dangerous. What can we do?” The guy said, “We can get you out of there.” He bought another house to move into that’s not in a gang neighborhood.
Perfect example. There are ways around it if you feel like you’re obligated to stay somewhere unsafe or something like that.
Don’t do it with the intent of like, “I’m going to move into a dangerous neighborhood and get a rental and move out of it,” because of that. If something bad happens or you have a life-changing event, then you have possibilities to get out. They’re not going to keep you trapped in this place.
Your passive income from your rental portfolio has allowed you to make that jump from Minneapolis to Austin. How are you restarting and resetting? How are you building up your database and your clients out here?
It’s always been a goal for me to have as many coffee meetings a week because I can have at least three. I’ll go talk real estate with anybody. As a realtor, I never have people sign paperwork. Craig, I’m sure you’re familiar with what they say, “Get a contract sign right away. Get your buyer’s agency agreement signed.” I don’t do that. I don’t feel like I need to push sales on people. If you want to work with me, you’re going to work with me. I don’t need to trap you in a contract. I’ve never done that. I’ve always gotten together with as many people as I can. Find networking on Facebook, BiggerPockets, and places like that. I get to meet people every week anywhere I go. Do that over and over until you’ve got a huge database.
That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. It’s a numbers game. It’s a big funnel. Talk real estate. Provide as much value as possible with no expectation of anything in return. You will get a lot in return because you’ll look like a good guy. You’ll look super genuine and nice, and people will want to work with you.
All of it boils down to that agreement that you talked about. Don’t trap someone into an agreement. You have to win their business and you have to keep winning their business. If you do show a house with them and they feel like you haven’t done a good job and go with someone else, that’s your fault, not theirs.
I’ve always felt that way. I do this because I want to help people. That’s why I got into this. I started investing first and then I said, “I want to help people with house hacking, investing, and financial independence.” That’s why I love doing it. I’ve gone through periods of time where I’ve worked 12 or 14-hour a day and still loved all of it, but I couldn’t do it if it was just all about money. It’s not about money for me. It’s about helping people.
What’s next for you now that you’re down in Austin?
I’m working on buying another house hack here. I’m going to get this one fixed up. I’m going to separate the utilities here. It’s a single-family with an ADU, so there’s 1 electric meter, 1 water meter, and 1 gas meter. To make this more profitable, I’m going to separate the electric meters. I have an electrician working on that. I bought sub-meters and I’m going to sub-meter the water in both units. I have a plumber coming to do that here.
Your property is zoned for duplex then?
Yeah. It’s SF-3 zoning here, which allows 2 units on 1 property. Even with that, all the neighborhood around me, there’s lots of the same stuff or there are two units and they’ve sold off each unit. I could do that if I wanted to, but I want to hold it as a rental and appreciation. I’m going to separate utilities.
I’m sure the readers will be curious, how much does that cost to separate the electric and sub-meter the water?
The electric is about $2,000 with permits and doing it the right way. Getting a meter put in is about $2,000 for the electricity that I’m using. The water because I don’t have a water heater in this unit back here, that’s going to be about $2,000, too. I need to get a water heater installed back here, and then I’ve got the sub-meters which are about $300. I have to have a plumber install these sub-meters. It comes with a braided line and meter on it.
With his time, it’s going to be a couple of hundred bucks. Water heater is about $500 for the 30-gallon I’m going to get. The sub-meter is for $300 and his time is going to be around $2,000. Similar prices for each, but I’m going to save $100 a month on electric and around $50 or $60 a month on water. It’s absolutely worth it in the long run.
We’re getting to the end here. Is there anything else you want to share?
I’m working on my next house hack here. I hear all the time, “You can’t house hack in X, Y, Z. You can’t house hack in Austin. You can’t house hack in Denver,” or wherever. I found ways to make it work down here and I’m going to continue to find ways to make it work. Look at how you can make it work. That’s how life has worked well for me. It’s not, “I can’t do this,” but, “How can I do it?”
Maybe in Austin, it’s been doing big rehabs. I spent about $60,000 on this rehab here. I’m going to spend similar on the next duplex I’m going to move into. I’ve got a good FHA lender here so when I get to the ability to do an FHA 203(k), I’ll probably do that and spend $30,000-plus. There are absolutely ways to do it. You have to find the right deal where it’s still going to work. You can’t just dump money into anything. Don’t put more down payment down to make a deal work. Don’t do a large rehab and not put that into your calculations. Think you can always make things work so figure out, “How can I do this?” Rather than, “I can’t do this.”
Every deal can work, but how can you make it work? Evaluate how much it costs to make it work. If that final number works, great. If not, you move on to the next deal. There’s plenty out there. I do love that.
There’s always a way to make everything work. You’ve got to be creative and you have to not quit when somebody says no.
Keep a positive mindset by steering away from social media sites typically filled with negativity. Share on XIt’s that Rich Dad Poor Dad mentality.
That helps a ton. With anything you’re doing, it’s all about not quitting and being creative. That’s why I like real estate because there’s lots of room to be creative.
It’s probably time to get into The Final Four.
You mentioned you like to read a lot. What is the book that you’re reading right now?
I’m reading the book from BiggerPockets on passive investing, The Hands‑Off Investor.
It’s by Brian Burke, a great guy.
That’s a good book. I read two books. I read one in the morning. I wake up early and I get going. I read a chapter. That’s my morning book. I can’t remember the book I’m reading at night. I just started reading it. I try to keep a book in the car, too, so if I get stopped somewhere, I can read. I keep books everywhere.
You mentioned your morning. Do you wake up early? What’s your morning routine? What time do you wake up? What’s your normal day look like?
It’s been 6:00 AM. When this whole Corona thing started, I was getting up at 5:30, and then I’ve shifted that up. I get up at 6:00. I do a goal journal. I use Grant Cardone’s journal. I read a chapter of the book and I drink a big glass of water, and then I’ll go work out. I’ll either go run and do arm training at the gym or I’ll do a full-body workout.
I only asked because, after my move here, I’ve been trying to get back into my morning routine. It’s been tough for me because I’m used to structure in the military. I’m adjusting to that civilian life.
It might take me 2 to 3 hours to get up, read, work out, get back from the gym, eat breakfast, and shower. I need to get up early to do that and feel like I got my day started right.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
The best piece of advice I’ve ever received is to not give up. My parents were supportive of telling me, “Don’t give up. Just keep trying.” I don’t get discouraged easily and that’s helped me a ton as a real estate agent, a real estate investor, and a business person.
Why is financial independence so important to you? What is your why?
My why is I want to be able to live wherever I want to live and go wherever I want to go. I have family in Kentucky, Florida, New York, Texas, Minnesota, California, Mexico, and Washington State. They’re all over the place and I’d like to see more of them. If I’m stuck in a 9:00 to 5:00, I can’t do that.
I’m in the same boat with that. I want my time. I want to be able to be flexible and do whatever I want.
What is invisible but you wish people could see?
Positive energy.
That’s a good one.
That is good.
It’s so you couldn’t get so much negativity floating around anymore. Personally, I haven’t watched the news in a decade or so. I haven’t seen the Facebook newsfeed in several years. I make the mistake of getting on an event every so often. I have a Facebook account. I have it blocked on Google so I don’t see it when it pops up.
Just your friend’s posts?
Anybody’s posts. You can block the newsfeed. There’s a Google Chrome extension called Kill News Feed. In 2014, a guy showed me this Google Chrome extension and I haven’t seen the Facebook newsfeed on my computer since then. I make the mistake every so often of looking at it on my phone and I see all the posts and it’s awful.
Everything going on in the world is tough.
It’s not even right now. It’s always a bad negative input to your head. I try to keep positive things and constructive education going in my head, and Facebook is getting it.
That’s a great thing to do. I’m going to look up that Chrome extension.
I have had the app since 2013 or ‘14 and I’ve seen a drastic change in my mood from not seeing Facebook. I can still use Facebook to do my business post and respond to comments and messages because I can still see all those things.
I do still see on there a little bit. That’s great. Where can people find more about you?
Facebook, Instagram and BiggerPockets are probably the best places. BiggerPockets is probably the most positive that I have anymore, so I’m on BiggerPockets the most. I’m on Instagram fairly often. If you message me on Facebook, I’ll get the message.
We’ll hope that some people reach out to you. Thanks for coming to the show. I appreciate you taking your time.
Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.
Have a good one.
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That was it, guys. That was Jordan Moorhead, a real estate agent both in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Austin, Texas, helping house hackers pursue their dreams and get house hacks out there. He’s got a great story. I love how he made that educated decision to not finish college because it didn’t make sense for what he wanted to do, despite the fact that all of his other friends were likely doing the college thing. Instead, he decided to start that personal fitness company, get some passive income coming in, buy the rental properties here, and more passive income coming in. That unlocked his freedom and his ability to take that larger risk and move down to Austin.
He hit on some amazing points about frugality. When he mentioned the stories about how he had finished his two years of college and at that point, he was calculating his debt and it didn’t make sense to him. He jumped in and started his own business. That’s amazing when you have the ability to do that. Of course, when the house hacking comes in, it amplifies your freedom. He had a cool story. I had a great time talking with him. I’m definitely looking forward to chatting with him in the future.
With that being said, it was great seeing you and we’ll circle back next episode.
That sounds good. Talk to you soon.
Important Links
- Jordan Moorhead
- Rich Dad Poor Dad
- The Hands-Off Investor
- Facebook – Jordan Moorhead
- Instagram – Jordan Moorhead
- BiggerPockets – Jordan Moorhead
About Jordan Moorhead
An Entrepreneur since he was a kid.
He had a lawn business when he was 13 and walked around putting flyers around the neighborhood. He went the traditional route for a few years and worked jobs while he went to college. Getting laid off while in college was the best thing that ever happened to him.
He started investing in real estate in 2016 and was immediately hooked. He wanted to be a real estate investor since his early teens but listened too much to others to wait for the “right time”. The right time is always now.
His focus now is growing The Moorhead Team, investing in real estate and helping others get started in real estate as a Realtor or real estate investor.
