About

How Making Passive Income Changed Our Lives

Hello, I am Matt Hale! My wife Karen and I are the founders of Operation Awesome Life. Read below to learn more about our story.

Karen and I grew up 3.5 hours apart in Colorado. Karen grew up in small town Grand Junction, Colorado. And I grew up just outside of Denver, in Lakewood. After high school I made my way to Grand Junction to pursue a finance degree at Colorado Mesa University.

After I graduated I moved to Denver, but a chance meeting back in Grand Junction had Karen and I starting our relationship. A few months later Karen transferred from Colorado Mesa University to Metro State University in Denver where she would graduate with a marketing degree.

Shortly after graduation I found myself trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I remember my sweet grandma having a conversation with me about my plans. I told her that I wasn’t sure yet what I wanted to do. She looked at me sternly and said “Well, you go and get a good job, that’s what you do.” and then smiled sweetly. Although I knew she meant the best for me and probably didn’t want to see her grandson wind up a deadbeat or something, but this really bothered me. It bothered me because it was almost as if she was saying I didn’t have a choice in what I wanted to do. I don’t blame her, this is exactly how most people feel. Society has bred this type of thinking into us for decades.

Karen was still finishing school at Metro State and I was working a variety of jobs that didn’t appeal to me. Some I liked, but couldn’t figure out of how to make money doing them, while others provided me a steady paycheck, but I really hated.

This left me very confused and honestly a little depressed. I felt like I was trapped in jail! I really had no idea what to do, so I just continued working my job during the day and coming home at night where I would spend every hour racking my brain and obsessing on what I could do to get out of the situation I was in.

Then something happened. Karen’s dad gave me a book. This book changed my life forever, the book was Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. I didn’t know what to think when her dad gave me this book, but I knew one thing, I liked the idea of being rich! So maybe the title was enough to get me reading this book, I’m not sure, but the important thing was that I read it.

Rich Dad Poor Dad completely opened my eyes to a new world. A world centered around passive income. Before this book I didn’t have the slightest idea what that phrase even meant, but I devoured the book and studied it day and night until I was finished with it. I would read in the morning, I would read at lunch break, then I would read at night. Every chance I got to read I would take full advantage because he was speaking gospel to my ears! Pretty soon I was finished with that book, but in some ways it left me with more questions than answers.

So I read Cashflow Quadrant and other books written by Robert Kiyosaki. Although these books gave me invaluable knowledge and a great base of financial knowledge, I still was unsure how to actually apply the knowledge in real life.

One of the biggest obstacles I needed to overcome was my lack of money. It wasn’t until the last few years that I found out I didn’t need nearly as much money as I thought I did to start. But the lack of money was my story I told myself for years as to why I couldn’t get started with my own passive income business.

Throughout this time, I think Karen thought I was a little crazy! Later she even admitted to me that she didn’t know why I was so unhappy working a job for someone else. But soon Karen graduated and began her career path. Like me she worked a few different jobs, some of which she liked but didn’t get paid much, and others that paid her more, but she didn’t like too much.

Shortly after Karen’s graduation, we got married on June 21st 2008. Definitely the best day of my life! We had a really awesome wedding at Black Bear Golf Course in Parker, Colorado. After the wedding we flew out 2 days later to Riviera Maya, Mexico for our honeymoon!

We settled into our little house in Arvada, Colorado and continued working our jobs. At this time I was a real estate agent with my dad’s brokerage. Although I enjoyed being a Realtor, it wasn’t good timing as the real estate market was in the pits in 2008 and the only way I knew how to market to get real estate deals was to send out mailers to my friends, all of which were fresh out of college and buying a house was about the last thing in the world they were thinking about. I learned an important lesson from my experience as a real estate agent. I learned that the key to any business was making sales. Let’s face it, if you don’t know how to get more customers you won’t survive in business. I knew this was the key.

By the winter of 2008 I began getting this feeling that maybe we should move somewhere else. Mostly because I felt like I was in a rut. By this point I had read dozens of books on passive income, business, trading stocks, and real estate, but I was fresh out of ideas of the next move to make. Looking back I think I was really afraid of failure and also worried that my friends and family would just look at me like I was a flake if I changed my path every few months. Basically I knew that I needed some new scenery to hopefully generate new ideas and some space from me worrying about what others thought of me if I failed at a few things.

I can remember looking out the back window of our house in Arvada, and staring at the snow thinking maybe we should try something completely different. After all, we were young and we could always turn around and come back!

One day Karen and I were driving in the car and I said to her, “Do you ever think about maybe moving and trying somewhere else?”. Surprisingly she said yes. We both kind of looked at each other in shock. We sort of smiled nervously and started throwing out ideas of where we would try. The big three were California, Arizona, and Florida. Long story short we decided on Florida, mostly for the beaches and climate.

About 7 months later we were packing our 2 cars full of everything we didn’t sell at the garage sale and our black lab “Jet”. It took us 3 days but we made it! This was the first sign that we were risk takers. When we sold most of our belongings, put the rest in storage, and moved out to Florida, we didn’t know where we were going to live. And I’m not saying what house, I’m saying what city. We had three cities in mind: Sarasota, Fort Myers, and Cape Coral.

We booked a place to stay in a little rinky dink hotel in Sarasota when we arrived for our first night in Florida. Exhausted and really needing to get out of the cars we checked into our hotel room and went to our room. We were there for 5 minutes when Karen screamed! I said what, what is it? She said look and pointed to the night stand. I looked and there was a huge bug that looked like a cockroach on steroids! I’m not going to lie, I didn’t like the looks of that thing either. Then I looked and spotted another one!

We had had enough so we went down to the front desk and asked for another room. The front desk person was really rude and said they couldn’t do anything about it. She said the room was clean and she had no other rooms available for us. Karen really began getting upset from the combination of exhaustion and the bad room circumstances, so I decided to go next door to another hotel and see if we could stay there. Luckily we were able to change hotels, but in the morning after looking around Sarasota we weren’t convinced it was the place for us to move to. So we decided to drive south to Fort Myers and Cape Coral.

When we got to Cape Coral it wasn’t really what we were looking for and Fort Myers wasn’t either. At this point we really considered packing up and heading back to Colorado. Then Karen said, wait why don’t we drive north a little to the Clearwater area. She said my family and I used to vacation there and meet my grandma every year. So I said sure, might as well go take a look!

So we packed the cars and headed north the next morning, it was the 4th of July 2009. As we drove over the St. Petersburg Skyway bridge and past the famous Don Cesar hotel things started looking better to us. We continued driving north along the Gulf Coast and by the time we got into Clearwater, we knew we had found our new home!

Being the 4th of July, we were having a difficult time finding a place to rent, however we got really lucky and went into a local real estate office. We spoke to the agent on duty, and they said to come back in a couple of hours and they would show us a place! We used the time to walk across the street and look at the beach. I can remember the feeling I had when we walked over the beach walkway and noticed the sparkling white sand and the wild sea grass leading to greenish blue waters, it was paradise! Later that day we looked at and signed a lease on the apartment the real estate agent we spoke to showed us.

We were literally living on faith, we packed all belongings into 2 cars and drove 1900 miles, rented a place on the 4th of July across the street from the most beautiful beach we had ever seen. Now what?

We spent the next 4 weeks doing nothing, and it was the most amazing time of our lives! We felt like we were on a permanent vacation! Each day, we would wake up at what time we wanted to, we would take a walk with our dog Jet around exploring the new place we were in, then we would fix ourselves a nice cold drink, put our backpack beach chairs on our backs and head to the beach to read a book, sip on our drink, and take a dip in the warm gulf waters.

After about a month or so, we decided we probably needed to earn some kind of income. Karen decided for the time being she would go to the Olive Garden to wait tables as she had already done that before in Colorado. I started looking for a career job. I convinced myself this was what I should do. But the job market in Florida in 2009 was not good, in fact it was awful! I searched for about a month, but after no good progress in locating even a decent prospective job, I decided to do what I swore that I wouldn’t.

When I left Colorado I was valeting cars for a short period of time to supplement my real estate sales business. The weird thing about it was that I actually made a lot more money valeting cars at fine dining restaurants than in the real estate business. I was pulling in nearly $300 per night, but it was far from what I wanted to do with my life. When I left Colorado I swore I would never valet again. But, I went back on my word and picked up a valet job to help pay the bills while I decided what to do.

The valeting job was far from good, I made much less than I did in Denver. Some days I made as little as $6. I remember running over a quarter of a mile to get cars for 6 hours and then making about $25 for the entire shift. What’s worse is I had to drive 40 minutes to Tampa to get to work. Some days I wondered if I was even making any money at all after the driving back and forth from work.

The days of sunshine at the beach and living in paradise began to fade into tough work and rekindled uncertainty of what I wanted to do with my life. Karen stayed strong and continued looking for a career job. She found one in a sales position at a senior living facility in the town next to where we lived.

She began working full time and eager to begin a sales career. But before long she started rapidly changing her feelings about what she wanted from her life and she began to see my ways of wanted to start my own business and work for myself.

A few months into working at the senior living facility, Karen’s boss didn’t want to go to a seminar called “Get Motivated”, so she gave her the two tickets and she said she could take me along with her if she liked. This was really odd because her boss normally wasn’t too friendly to Karen. Karen and I were so excited to be able to spend the day together, little did we know that this day would be the starting point to a great change in our lives.

The Get Motivated seminar was filled with really great speakers, most notably one in particular. His name was James Smith. James was absolutely electrifying, he had the whole arena in Tampa listening intently to every word! He spoke about investing in real estate and how to get in the game of life! He said far too many people watch little men on TV wearing tight spandex chase a little ball, but don’t bother to get in the game of their own lives. He also said, stop walking around with someone else’s name on your back, and get in your own game!

James won Karen and I over and we ran to purchase tickets to his 3 day real estate seminar for $50. We couldn’t even afford this at the time so we made the purchase with a credit card hoping it might be the answer to our prayers for direction for me and also now for Karen.

Fast forward to the 3 day real estate seminar with the James Smith real estate company. It was amazing, we started learning all kinds of ways to make money in real estate. The only problem was we didn’t know how to implement them, we just had an overview of the ideas. On the second day of this seminar the James Smith company began offering packages to the audience to learn at the much anticipated M5 event. The goal was to make 5 million in 5 years, hence M5. When they said the price was $10,000 to attend this event in Orlando, I felt my heart drop.

We couldn’t even afford to pay $50 to go to the 3 day mini seminar how could we come up with this huge amount of money? That day at lunch Karen and I began talking, and all of the sudden an idea came to me. I looked at Karen and I said, “If we aren’t willing to take this risk to pay this money to learn how to make money, we’ll never be able to take the risk in the real world when an investment opportunity comes our way.” To my surprise Karen looked at me and said, “You’re right!” We both knew we had to face our fear of risk head on if we wanted to live an extraordinary life. So that night Karen and I went home totally filled with anxiety of how we could pay for this. This was our first lesson in structuring a deal. We had one night to decide how to finance a real estate seminar for $10,000.

By the next morning we had figured it out, we would pay for the seminar with 2 credit cards, both of which had an interest rate close to 20%. We couldn’t pay for it all with one card because we didn’t have a high enough credit limit on either card, and we already had $4,000 in credit debt on one of the cards.

That whole last day of the seminar was a wild ride of emotions and second guessing whether or not we should really go for it. But in the end we stuck to our convictions and paid the $10,000 to go to the M5 event.

A couple of weeks later we received a call from the James Smith company. This time they were offering us an additional coaching package to have someone help us one-on-one with our real estate journey. The cost of this was $6,000. Again we stepped up and finagled our finances to pay for the $6,000 coaching. When it was all said and done we had spent close to $20,000 on real estate classes and events.

So what happened? We went to the M5 and had an amazing time! We met some extraordinary people. One guy we met personally owned 1000 mobile homes. He made roughly $300 per month per unit. That was roughly $300,000 per month he was making on renting and financing mobile homes. But what made his story more interesting was that a few years prior to this he was homeless living in a van. To structure his first real estate deal he borrowed a friend’s credit card because he himself couldn’t get one. Luckily for him his friend was very kind and allowed him to borrow his card as long as he paid it off.

We met others that had all kinds of interesting ways of structuring real estate deals to buy apartment buildings, single family homes, hotels, billboards, and many other things! In the end we liked the idea of starting with mobile homes. We liked this because we could buy a mobile home for a few thousand dollars and rent it out for a $300 profit each month. Also we wanted to help others so we gave them the option to buy the mobile home on very favorable terms.

This mobile home venture began with a couple of mobile homes, and soon turned into us working with a mobile home park owner and advertising close to 30 mobile homes all within less than a years’ time. But unfortunately we found out that many of the people we were trying to help didn’t want our help at all. They actually wanted to take advantage of us by moving into our units and then never paying us any rent money.  One day I went to the mobile home park with the owner and I witnessed him speaking with some problem tenants. These tenants were obviously not taking care of the unit and the park owner was not happy. Because of the situation he was very rude to the tenants and spoke to them as if they were beneath him. That day while driving home I began asking myself how this man who was very wealthy so unhappy. Why after all these years of operating his mobile home park business was he so mean and unhappy with his tenants? The answer I came to was that constantly dealing with people that were trying to hurt him or take advantage of him in some way had made him cold to people.

After 2 years of working on this we decided that this was not the type of work we wanted to do. We wanted to help people and to provide value and help to people who actually wanted help and wanted to grow in their lives.

This was probably the hardest decision I ever had to make, in fact I became a little depressed because I had spent a couple of years working towards a goal and made good headway but decided to stop, not because I wasn’t making money, but because I decided I wanted my life path to be different and more positive. What made this period even more difficult was that I had suffered a back injury that kept me from working for 3 months. My physical therapist told me I must lie down all day for 3 months. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t sit in a chair, and I was in constant agonizing pain.

After months of rehabilitating I got my body in a place where I could function again, I began running and working out to get myself back in shape as I gained a lot of weight from inactivity. While I was on the couch I read almost every day. One book I read was the 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. This book was incredibly eye opening to me. This book told me that it was possible to build a truly passive income business online that would give you incredible amounts of freedom. Before this book I never thought it would be possible to live this freely, to have complete control of your finances, your work hours, your schedule, even where you lived!

Although the 4 Hour Work Week told me what I wanted, I still didn’t know how to get there. So I began looking for someone to coach me. I knew coaching in real estate worked very well and I also knew it was the fastest way to learn something so I began looking on Craigslist.

One day I came across a craigslist ad that offered to coach people how to make money online. I immediately called the gentleman and signed up for coaching with him. His fee was only $1,000. By this time $1,000 seemed very cheap because I just spent about $20,000 on real estate coaching prior to this.

I didn’t learn how to build a passive 4 Hour Workweek type of income and lifestyle, but it did help me learn some basics of making money online. Basics that proved to be very useful later.

But once again after this online coaching I came to the conclusion that this particular strategy wasn’t exactly right for me. I’m sure some people thought I was crazy because again I was making money doing a business, but I decided to stop. I decided to stop because I knew what I wanted and this was close, but still not what I was looking for. There were many good qualities of this business. I was able to make consistent profits, I could work anywhere I wanted to, but it was lacking one major thing. I couldn’t figure out how to scale the business and turn it into a passive income type of business that would allow myself the freedom I desired, and more importantly enough income to allow my wife to quit her job so that we could truly be free to travel or live anywhere we pleased.

Once again i was feeling a little lost, but I always knew where I was going, I just didn’t know how I would get there yet.

In late 2012 I was looking for answers online once again on Craigslist. I came across an add talking about teaching people how to trade forex. By that point I had read nearly 20 books on trading stocks, currencies, options, and more and always had loved the stock market and had a strong interest in it. I called the gentleman and set an appointment to meet with him in a few days. When we met he showed me how he was making roughly $20,000 per month trading currencies. He quoted me a price of $3,500 to teach me how to trade. I went home talked to Karen and we agreed I should do it!

About this time our car, a 2002 Ford Focus, which was Karen’s car she bought in high school was really not running very well. It was green and sounded like a tank coming down the road as the old tired 4 cylinder engine revved. So we decided to buy a new car. We had about $25,000 in credit card debt mostly from coaching, and about $12,000 we had saved up from working our jobs, Karen as a server, me as a valet. We saved this cash with the incredible principle of pay yourself first which I learned from Rich Dad Poor Dad and The Richest Man In Babylon books. We found an Audi A4 that was a really good deal. We paid $12,000 for the car, but we made one of the most crucial decisions of our young business lives. We decided that we needed cash.

I can remember my Dad always use to say that cash is king. I never really knew what he meant by that until this day. Over the past few years I had scoured real estate, forex, and other business investments and I came to realize that cash truly is king! For instance if you have $50,000 in debt and $10,000 in cash and an opportunity comes along that costs $10,000 comes to you, you’re in luck because you have the $10,000 cash you can take advantage of the opportunity. On the other hand if you have $3,000 in cash and no debt and a $10,000 opportunity comes along, you’re out of luck. Because you don’t have the $10,000 in cash and the opportunity passes you by. The first example seems dire, but you actually have more power than in the second.

So because of this reason we decided to do something out of character to that point. We took the car to the bank and asked to take a loan out against the car. Because the car was actually valued at $19,000 the bank offered to loan us $25,000 for the car. So we took a car loan for $25,000 against a car that we paid $12,000 for. This would be used as seed capital later.

I spent some time focusing on forex and learned from one other gentleman as well, but inside I knew I didn’t only want to be a forex trader. I enjoyed it and liked learning about it, but I felt that I wasn’t really providing anything to people. But nonetheless this was the only thing I had at the time, and so I kept on learning and enjoying trading forex.

Then one day in 2013 I was looking around on YouTube and I came across a guy offering to train you how to make passive income online! I went to his website, he seemed good so I sent him a message. To my surprise he got back to me and I paid him $2,000 for coaching on how to make passive income selling information products in the form of eBooks. We paid for this coaching again with a 19% interest credit card. Because of the nature of the business we were also able to pay for the initial $15,000 we invested over the first year in this business with the 19% credit card. We didn’t want to use up our seed capital in case other opportunities came along that required cash.

This turned out to be a huge blessing, we took our coaches advice and began taking massive action towards our goals. Today this business is earning a large amount of passive income with very little effort. If we do want to make more income we simply work more, if not, we just continue to work the minimal 4 Hour Workweek style lifestyle to make sure things are running smoothly. This business was completely financed on a 19% credit card and completely cash flowed within a few months!

But this was just the beginning of our new online business. One day our mentor emailed us (and the rest of his subscribers list) a link to an opportunity to learn how to make passive income selling physical products online. It wasn’t offered by our coach, but he provided the link to where to sign up for this opportunity. The course cost $4,000 for 8 week modules of coaching and a 3 day event in Las Vegas at the end of the program.

The timing of this email was when we had family in town, so Karen and I couldn’t really speak too much about it, but once again we had a couple of days to make a quick decision if we were going to pay for this course or not. But we weren’t nervous this time. We weren’t nervous for two reasons. First we had become accustomed to investing in ourselves. Secondly, we were in a cash position that allowed us to not only invest in the course but to build the business.

As the time of writing this we have now been in this online products business for less than a year, but have had amazing success! In December of 2014 we had a record month of over $50,000 in online product sales in one month!

Although we have had some really great success, we know this is just the beginning for us and hopefully for you as well! In fact we are going to 3 more coaching events over the next few months as we write this. We have found that the secret to success is finding the right people to teach you how to do something. This is where we are hoping to help you. People who are subscribed to our newsletter will get access to the best opportunities available. Not only that, but as a subscriber you will get the added bonus of learning what we have found to be useful to us in business and other crucial areas of our lives. We are constantly learning and growing and truly want you all to grow with us!

Now that you’ve heard a short background on us, please feel free to look around our site and subscribe to our free VIP Newsletter. This newsletter is focused on our passion of helping others to the fastest path to freedom through creating passive income businesses!

To Your Success!

-Matt & Karen Hale