Back in 2013 I was running a successful real estate team in Houston, Tx. The market was booming at the time. I was making more money than I could ever of dreamed of. I built a name for myself in under a year in one of the top real estate markets in the nation. I thought I was on top of the world. I was a hustler. I worked day and night and was good at what I did and thought that I was living the dream. Making money, was what life was about right??? I thought I was happy. I mean, I had it all. The house, the car, the business, the clothes, the fancy private school for my child. What else could I possibly need.
One day in August 2014 changed it all for me. A sequence of events led to the cops coming to our house for a friends actions and resulted in my husband being handcuffed, assaulted, and put in jail. His only charge was "resisting arrest". How can the only charge be resisting arrest if you were not under arrest in the first place? After he spent a horrendous night in one of the worst county jails in the nation, we were finally able to post his bail. We spent the next 9 months of our lives and $10,000 fighting this erroneous charge and clearing his record of something that didn't even make sense. After 9 months of repeated court dates, meetings with the attorney, etc we decided to change attorneys. We met with a local defense attorney whom just so happened to be having lunch the next day with the judge we had been seeing. We paid this attorney $3000 on top of the $10,000 we already spent and I kid you not, the next day, he walked into court with this judge/his buddy and had the case dropped immediately. I was absolutely dumfounded at how this could be. Of course I was grateful that this was over but how it happened didn't sit well with me. I couldn't just forget it. We had been treated like absolute criminals for the greater part of year and just like that the whole thing was dropped because this attorney knew the judge. How could this be our justice system?
The point in telling you this is to illustrate how the changes in me came about. This experience sent me into a whirlwind of research trying to understand what was really going on in the world. How could this system I thought was designed to protect the people be so corrupted? It made me start questioning what else was going on.
My research sent me down a rabbit hole that you can never return from. Once you peel back the layers, lift the vail of deceit, there is no going back.
My discoveries brought me to the tragic state of our environment. It showed me how greed was destroying the only home we have, earth. I couldn't stand it. I was always a doer, a fixer and I felt so compelled to do something about it. In all this discovering, I came into a moment of self reflection. Was I helping or causing this societal and environmental decay? I had to face the hard truth... I was a real estate developer. We acquired land for builders, cleared the land and built cheap developments and sold them for top dollar. The homes they were building weren't going to last 40 years before they ended up in a landfill somewhere. I had a hard decisions to make. This was how I provided for my family. This was how I bought all the things that I thought made me happy. What was I going to do?
The decisions was kind of made for me. After all of this, I started to lose motivation to go to work. I started not caring if my deals closed or not. I knew it was hurting us financially but that didn't seem to matter. This was an extremely stressful point in my life. I felt like I couldn't physically make myself do this work anymore but how were we going to survive? My husband and I both worked together and this was our only source of income. It caused fights, chaos, and stress in our lives. Finally after a near breakdown, I came to my husband and told him I couldn't do it anymore. I knew it would change our lives but I didn't care. I did not want to be the problem I was seeing in the world. I was passionate about creating a change for our future and for my kids future that I couldn't live as a hypocrite. Although it wasn't easy, we both agreed we would quit real estate, sell off our business, and move out of the city to a home we owned in a nearby suburb.
I'm not going to lie, it sucked. Going from living a very comfortable life to barely making it wasn't easy, especially with two kids to care for and another on the way. I am so grateful for my loving and supportive husband for being so understanding through this transition. It was soley me who wanted to end the business and change our lives forever. He made the sacrifices to make this happen. He went out and got a 9a-5p job making a fraction of what we formally made to pay our bills. He hated that job but did it anyways. I love him so much for this.
Here we are are now 4 years later from when this all started. We now live in a small town outside of Dallas where we homestead, grow our own food, raise animals, unschool our kids and live a much simpler and more beautiful than ever before life. We have continued our entrepreneurship spirit in order to support ourselves but in a way that now aligns with our values and nourishes our soul. My husband learned woodworking and now supports our family building custom cabinets and quality wood pieces. He builds them on our property and is able to be home with our kids and in control of his own schedule.
The ultimate takeaway from our story is we followed our hearts and we went for it. We made big sacrifices to get us to our ultimate happiness. We didn't allow money and comfort to keep us stuck in a life that was no longer serving our soul. There were many bumps along the way and it wasn't always easy but looking back now, I am so grateful that we did it. You don't always have to see where you are going to take the leap. Just do it. If you feel it, go for it!
I will continue to share our journey and our story on this platform and I look forward to connecting with you guys about it!