I'm Linda & This is My Story.
During our most painful moments, sometimes God shows us the path in the most unexpected ways possible. These moments are HARD. You look up and realize just how far you've fallen, and just how far you must climb to even get back on your feet. This is our story from financial ruin to financial freedom through leverage and passive income.
Financial Ruin to Financial Freedom.
I'll start by saying that my journey to financial freedom was not easy. It was a journey filled with challenges, setbacks, and extreme moments of doubt. Moments I wanted to give up, to cry, to hide... moments where, just briefly, I did.
It felt suffocating.
I remember the day we hit rock bottom. It was the day I realized we were drowning in debt, and I didn't know how to swim back to the surface. I remember turning to my husband Jimmy, and seeing how distraught and hopeless he felt. We were on the cusp of complete financial failure.
We had no clue how to get out.
When Jimmy and I got married, it seemed like success was inevitable. We had money, and we were good with money, or so I thought. But then the economy in Texas crashed. I joke about it now, but heck, back in the 1980s when this all happened, I didn’t even know what the word “economy” meant!
How I Got Into Real Estate.
Before the dry Texas dust began to settle, Jimmy was forced to sell his businesses — he owned and operated a few nightclubs in the Dallas area — for $600,000 more than we owed. Suddenly, it all came crashing down. After that, the money that was coming in was nowhere near what was needed to repay the banks the hundreds of thousands of dollars we owed them.
Overnight, Jimmy went from driving a brand new red Cadillac to a dusty brown Ford Pinto with a dent in the door.
And me? I had never worked a job for more than minimum wage.
This was rock bottom.
Jimmy and I needed to make a change, and fast. We couldn't keep living like this, and we didn't want our future to be defined by past mistakes.
He often jokes about this story, about how we got into real estate. We had a developer friend who said if we wanted to get rich, we needed to get into real estate. The developer was talking about his line of work. What Jimmy heard, though, was something else entirely:
"Marry a pretty lady and get her to sell houses."
Yes, this is how I ended up becoming a real estate agent.
Finding My Passion
I never wanted to feel that way again... so out of control, so helpless, so financially unstable.
I made $3,000 my first year as a real estate agent.
But I didn't give up. I worked hard, and ultimately Jimmy joined me in the business. We found our success, first as agents then as owners.
In 2023, Dr. Benjamin Hardy included my story in his book 10X is Easier than 2X. Mine is one of many where he demonstrates how to 10X your life. He follows my journey from being an agent to joining Keller Williams to selling my business and generating passive income for my family.
Discovering passive income was like setting off a firework in my head. I knew THIS is what we needed.
THIS is where I needed to focus my energy. And Jimmy was right there with me.
Learning that we could put in effort up front and it could continue generating income for us not just while we slept, but for YEARS to come sparked a new passion in both of us.
A Passion For Passive Income.
The lightbulb moment came when we were masterminding with a business psychotherapist who worked with the top 1% of industry professionals.
At one of our meetings, he turned to us and said, “What you have built is great, but you do realize that the day you sell your last house will be the last dollar you will ever make in real estate, right?”
Our mentor went on to say that we had two fundamental problems. First, we thought we had a business, but if Jim and I couldn’t step away from that business for at least 6 months and watch it grow without us there, then we didn’t really have one. Second, we needed to focus on other income streams and more specifically, passive income streams.
This sent Jimmy and I on our journey to build passive income through real estate investing. It was the early 90’s. And yes, we were still in debt!
Only by solving these two problems could we have the freedom and options we so desperately wanted.
We set our sights on buying 20 investment properties, all of which we would rent out for positive cash flow. We partnered with a builder friend on our first two deals and we haven’t looked back!
Today we own over 110 long-term rental properties, 16 vacation rentals in Branson Mo., 6 commercial buildings, 4 real estate franchises… and it all started from building one successful business as a real estate agent.
Our experience building a portfolio of rental properties led to the opportunity to co-author one of the cornerstone Keller Ink books, HOLD: How to Find, Buy, and Rent Houses for Wealth. We always say "We are just two ordinary people who want to live an extraordinary life." Part of that desire is to share the knowledge we've gained in more than 30 years in the business.
My Favorite Business
Having moved from being a solo agent to having a team, then operating a Keller Williams Market Center, I was tasked by Gary Keller to help the company expand into new territories in the 1990s.
The area I would focus my efforts on would become the Ohio Valley Region.
I spent months traveling to Ohio, wondering what I was doing going from the nice sunny lands in Texas to a place that was SO, SO cold in the winter.
Over time, I found success and helped build the region to what it is today, housing over 25 KW Market Centers, thousands of agents, and spanning three states: the southern half of Ohio, all of Kentucky, and all of Indiana.
This led to something quite unexpected: Profit Share.
Keller Williams grows through referrals, and by recruiting so many top leaders into the company, I became the top earning associate at the company. To date, Jimmy and I have passively earned more than $16 million in Profit Share, changing the lives of thousands of agents in the process.
These days, my son Pres and I coach and train others within KW on how to build their downlines, earn passive income through Profit Share, and build life-long relationships that change the lives of agents worldwide!