Shawn Moore started dating the prettiest girl he had ever seen when he was 15. Eight years later, Teresa said, “I do.”
The young married couple was fresh outta college, and Shawn got hired as a sales rep for a steel service company. His job was to sell big truckloads of steel to manufacturers.
Since the operation was headquartered in Colorado, they ended up packing up and moving to Denver.
They would always talk about the future, how it would be bigger and better, how they’d become millionaires one day.
At the time, Shawn was only making $30,000 a year.
So they’d always been attracted to different opportunities along the way. T
hey were constantly going to Barnes & Noble and checking out the money-making section. And one of the topics that was always in the money-making section was real estate investing.
So that always stuck out, but Shawn and Teresa didn’t think it was in the cards for them because, heck, Shawn could barely put food on the table. How was he gonna go out and buy a house?
Eventually they attend a real estate seminar by a guy named Peter Conti.
Peter tells ’em what to do, they go do it, get a house under contract for $600k, right?
Just one small problem: they ain’t got $600k.
So they call up Peter and Peter tells ’em, “Relax, this is a good deal, and money loves good deals.”
In fact, Peter offered to cut ’em a check for $19k – just for finding the deal – and said he’d take it from there.
Which is exactly what happened.
So yeah, Shawn and Teresa basically pulled $19k outta thin air, and that’s about the time they knew real estate investing was something they could do after all.
As soon as the check cleared and Shawn saw the money in their bank account, he went and quit his job that same day.
They moved back to Utah to officially start their real estate investing career.
In the beginning, they did fix-and-flips. Built that up, added some long-term rentals, then met this developer who asks ’em to come do sales and marketing for his high-end ski and golf resort.
Super exclusive, really really expensive – a lifestyle unlike anything Shawn and Teresa had ever seen before.
Sounded like quite the adventure, so they said yes.
“These were $25-, $30 million dollar properties,” Shawn remembers.
“We had our own private jet – two private jets, actually – at the airport,” he adds. “And our job was to sell this lifestyle.”
“So we had this unlimited budget.”
“In fact, one time we were out for dinner in Vegas, 10 of us, and the bill was $50,000.”
“So that gives you an idea of how lavish this lifestyle was.”
“And then one day in June, in 2008, it came to a screeching halt,” Shawn says.
“The owners of the resort got indicted on securities charges and literally everything shut down overnight.”
When the gravy train stopped, Shawn, a cocky 30-year-old at the time, had no money set aside to fund his fancy new lifestyle.
All of a sudden banks were calling and creditors were knocking at the door.
Shawn was big mad. He was the victim in all of this, right? He hadn’t done anything wrong.
So he threw himself a six-month pity party and ended up losing everything.
At rock bottom, he and Teresa borrow money from his mom to attend another real estate conference; only this time, to learn how to sell real estate as agents.
Whaddya know, it worked.
They go on to crush it, get back on their feet, overcome fertility issues, have two beautiful twin babies, Wyatt and Grace.
While celebrating the kids’ birthday one year in Hawaii, Wyatt asks, “Dad if you love Hawaii so much, why not just sell houses here?”
That’s when the idea for Lifestyle Asset University (which then got rebranded to Vodyssey) was born.
Shawn now mentors thousands of others, helping them build lifestyle and financial freedom by investing in vacation homes.
His coaching costs $6,000.
Wild story.