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Our journey wasn’t the easiest one. The road we took to get to where we are now wasn’t paved with just rainbows and sunshine. We did not rely on luck, there was no Magic Pill and we didn’t have a “parachute” to bail us out if we failed… we are just simple folks who wanted to have more time to spend with our kids and live our lives to the fullest.

It has now been 3 years since we left our regular nine-to-five jobs to become full-time online entrepreneurs, be our own boss for a change and have that freedom. We learned so much and we keep learning as we go through our daily responsibilities. You know what? Life has been so much more rewarding.

All the risks we took and sacrifices we made eventually paid off. Sure, it gets difficult at times, but it’s also such a gratifying experience to reach out and help so many people. We also get to enjoy our time with the kids, be there for them when they need us the most, it’s how we knew that this was the right fit for us.

Today is what we fondly call our “Quit-iversary,” so we’re going to celebrate this milestone by flipping this episode with our take on living the Flipped Lifestyle 24/7, talk about life and dive into very interesting and inspiring stuff.

Let’s get this show on the road y’all!

You Will Learn:

• Some of our views in life.
• How we started our online business journey.
• Plus a lot more!

Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:

• Elementary Librarian
  
• Flip Your Life Membership
  
• Our 100th Podcast Episode where Shane talks about our humble beginnings
• Our early podcast episode that showed our old car held together with duct tape
  
• Our success story on Forbes!
• Patt Flynn invites us over @ SPI: From Teachers to Totally Rocking it Online
• Entrepreneur on Fire: Shane & Jocelyn Sams share how their AH-HA moment led to freedom!
• More of our Success Stories here! 🙂

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!

Can’t Miss Moment

Today’s “Can’t Miss Moment” is buying our new house.  We are closing in approximately two weeks.  And, we are really, really excited about it.

Thank you for listening!

Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!

If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!

 

Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!

Jocelyn:  Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we celebrate the 3rd anniversary of Flipping Our Lives with online business.

Shane:  Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where Life always comes before work.  We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.  We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online.  And now, we help other families do the same.  Are you ready to flip your life?  Alright.  Let’s get started.

Jocelyn:  Welcome to today’s show.  Today is a very special day and we are changing things up here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.  I even get to do the introduction.

Shane:  This was part of the deal when we decided to do something different today.  Jocelyn’s like, “I’m starting the show.  You always start the show.  Not today.”

Jocelyn:  Yes, so I just went through like a five-minute thing about – I didn’t even know what to say.  Because I never do this.

Shane:  This is take four of Jocelyn trying to start the show because she’s not usually doing it.  So, but it started now so let’s go.

Jocelyn:  Alright, so normally on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, we bring on our Flip Your Life community members and we do a live consulting call.  But, today is a special day.  Today is September 27th and it is actually the third year anniversary of us leaving our teaching jobs, which is awesome.  So, we wanted to do a special show and we left on September 27th, 2013.  So, today’s a three-year anniversary of that.  And we also did a second year, what we call our quit anniversary podcast back in 2015.  So, if you want to go back and listen to that, we’ll put a link to that in today’s show notes.  For me, it’s just really hard to believe it has been three years.

Shane:  Yeah, I know what you mean.  like in some ways it’s been like a whirlwind, where it seems like we blinked and we’ve gotten to this point.  But then, in other ways, like this has just become so much the way our life is and like we love the way that we get to work online.  We’re location independent and just all the things that come with running an online business.  They’re like – I can’t even imagine our life being anything different and it seems like another lifetime or just another world when we used to do that kind of nine-to-five grind.  We have that job, we had to show about every single day.  Where I – we had to stand in the hallways and you couldn’t go to the bathroom until it was in between classes.  Things like that.  It just – it seems like such a lifetime ago.  I can’t even really remember almost what that was like.

Jocelyn:  Yeah, and the thing I learned about online business is not like it was at school.  Like I feel like for us honestly that the sky’s the limit…

Shane:  Right.

Jocelyn:  Like there’s always so many more things that we could be doing and just so many ways to improve.  And it’s so exciting to work on your projects and improve them rather than going somewhere and working on somebody else’s work.

Shane:  Yeah, I always felt like there was a ceiling in our careers before when we worked for other people where there was a certain pace go – you could only make for your entire life.  And you could do so – certain things to make a little more money like get your Master’s degree or do something different.  But, there was still always a ceiling and if someone else had total control over that.  And, we are just so far removed from that now that I can’t imagine what life would be like if we had now went down this road.

Jocelyn:  The purpose of today’s podcast isn’t really to like brag or pat ourselves on the back.  We more just wanted to explain a little bit about our journey for some of you who may be new to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.  We just wanted you to see kind of where we’ve been and we hope that by doing these type of shows that you might learn from some of our successes and even our failures along the way.

Shane:  Yeah, one of the common things that we see a lot of times when people hear about where we are now, is we get a lot of comments.  Like, “Oh, well we were kind of an overnight success.”, “Oh, wow, you guys just stumbled into this.”, or almost like a lottery mentality like, “Oh, I’m glad that worked out for you, you guys are so lucky.”  But, I – we want to just tell you guys now, even looking back, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses.  It was very hard in the beginning.  With a little persistence and a little hard work, we got to where we are now and we really do believe that anyone can do this.  Everyone won’t.  Some people won’t put in the sacrifices.  Some people won’t give up the things they have to give up at first to get more later.  But, hopefully, you can learn a little bit from what we did and that will help you figure out how you can do it, too.

Jocelyn:  Alright, we’re going to go back to 2013 which was the year that we actually left our jobs we started, our online business in 2012 while we were still full time teachers.  And, that story has been told a whole lot.  I mean, if you’re interested in listening to that story back, we can put some links to some various places that we’ve told that on our podcast and maybe on some others as well.  But, this is going to be more about when we actually decided to quit our jobs.  How we made that decision.  Because this is a question that a lot of people have for us.

Shane:  We started having the discussion to quit our jobs probably in about June of 2013.  We didn’t really plan on quitting our job in September, that wasn’t the goal.  We had planned on working the entire school year all the way to May of 2014 and then kind of doing – taking a checkup of where we were.  To see if maybe possibly we could make it on our own.

Jocelyn:  And, this is something that is kind of unheard of.  For those of you who worked in the school system, people don’t leave their jobs in the middle of the school year.

Shane:  No.

Jocelyn:  It is very unusual for that to happen.  Maybe for like a medical reason or something like that, I mean, I’ve seen that happen before.  But, people don’t just up and quit usually.  So, it’s something that was really unusual to even be thinking about.  And, I’ll be totally honest, I was really, really against the idea.

Shane:  I tried to tell Jocelyn into quitting our job before the school year started.

Jocelyn:  Pretty much when we started online business…

Shane:  When we started the online business…

Jocelyn:  In 2012.

Shane:  Before we were making any money.  But, Jocelyn just – we would not have it.  So, we – as a couple – we decided, hey, let’s go forward, we’ll do this school year.  We’ll see what happens.  If we’ve got enough money to think about it, we’ll look at it again next summer.  So, it was a crazy time of the year, like Jocelyn said.  The school year had just started.  I was in the middle of a football season.  I think we were in like the third week of the season when we decided to go tell our bosses that we were going to quit our jobs.  But then, we started to bear a lot of fruit in our business.  We had been working really hard for over a year to try to build this thing up.  In July and August of 2013, were really, really good months.  July was the first time we ever went over five figures in a single month and we pretty much doubled July in August.  That year, we grossed over $30,000 in August of 2013 and it really made us sit back and reevaluate, can we, right now, quit our jobs?  Are we in a position to say, “Hey, we’re not going to probably make $30, $40,000 a month every month.  But we just made a large chunk of money, can we live on this for a year and, if we can do something like that part time. What could we do if we would quit our jobs and go full time.”  Even with the money we had just made in those last two months, there were a lot of reasons that were screaming at us.  Do not quit your job.

Jocelyn:  And a lot of people, too.

Shane:  And a lot people, yeah, we’ll do – we’re getting into that.  One of the reasons – I had tenure.  I could not be fired from my job.  I pretty much have a guaranteed teaching position in that school district until the day I retired.  We had two little bitty kids who we had to have insurance for and food for and keep them sheltered and all of that.  Also, to these two months were a huge anomaly.  We had never made more than a couple of thousand dollars online in a single month before July and August of 2013.  This was not a trend.  This was not something that we could say, “Oh, yes this is going to happen every single time we do this.” It was kind of just an aberration of what was happening in our online business.  So, just like everybody else we had a mortgage, we had all – we had student loans.  We have things like that going on.  It was really, really risky to quit our jobs right then and there in September.

Jocelyn:  So, with all these things in mind, like what – I still don’t understand how you talked me into this because I’m not very – I’m a very practical person.  I – we were – like I always say, “Happy enough.” Like life was OK.  I think a lot of times people think well we had all this money saved up and we had all of…

Shane:  We had everything planned out perfectly forever exactly what we’ve been on that…

Jocelyn:  But, we really didn’t.  I mean, we had a little bit of money saved but it wasn’t a whole lot.  I mean, when you’re talking about quitting your normal nine to five job, it was a little scary.  So, how in the world did you approach me with this.  I mean I still remember.  But like what was going through your head when you were like, “I’m going to talk Jocelyn into this.”

Shane:  I don’t know how I talked you into it.  I remember when you agreed and I just was shocked because you actually were like, “OK, fine.  Let’s do it.  But, if it – anything goes wrong it’s all your fault.”, basically.  Like I just want – I knew, I just sometimes felt like I – we needed to do this because it’s kind of, “Go big or go home.”  And, if there’s no risk, there’s no reward.  And, Jocelyn always says, “We’re not going to wait until the end of our lives to live our lives.”  And, I felt like that’s what we were doing if we were putting off and delaying for another year of what was going on.  I mean, worst case scenario, we would have just went and gotten new teaching jobs.  Or we could have substitute taught or we could have got other jobs, folding sweaters at JC Penny’s or something.  I don’t know.  There was a lot of ways that we could’ve gotten enough money to live on but I just felt like we had to do it at that time.  I think the track record of the year before of taking risks and doing things outside the box, was kind of what gave me not leverage but the proof that, “Hey, it’s going to be OK.”  We did things that we tell other people to do all the time.  And, they don’t want to listen, they don’t want to do it.  They can’t fathom making certain sacrifices like one: just starting online business.  Proving that you can make any money online.  People think it’s a fairy tale.  Then we did some crazy things to prepare ourselves to move.  We sold our house.  We had a big, nice house.  It was like 2,400 square feet.  We had a pool, we had a really – like Jocelyn said, “A really good life.”  And, we kind of looked at each other when we started making a little bit of money online and said, “Well, what would life look like.  How could we quit our jobs?”  Well, we would have to have less mortgage, we would have to have less bills.  So, we sold our house.  We bought one that cost half as much and downsized so that we could afford to live on less money.  We canceled our cable.  Like I – we didn’t even have Netflix.  We just went to the library and checked out movies for entertainment and books.  We didn’t travel or go anywhere.  Once we started making money online a lot of people will make a couple of thousand dollars and they’ll go blow it on cool stuff they want to buy or trips.  We did not.  We started saving our money for the day when we would be able to get ourselves free from our nine to five’s and be able to invest all of our time into the business.  And, we sold so much of our stuff.  We really got rid of a lot of the clutter, and minimalized a lot of the things in our life.  And we, once again, we kept that money and kept investing it back.  So, all of these things that we were taking action on, taking risks, were working out.  But, it wasn’t because we were so smart or it was a miracle.  It was because we were doing it and I think that kind of softened you up to this.  Well, that stuff worked out OK.  So, let’s see what happens, maybe?  I don’t know.

Jocelyn:  No, I just want to speak to what you were saying about giving up stuff and making sacrifices.  I think a lot of times that people even like mainstream celebrity-type people will tell you about saving money is.  Well, cut out your daily drive-through, or your Starbucks, or something small throughout the day.  Well, we decided that wasn’t good enough.  We didn’t want to save a little bit of money here and there.  We wanted to drastically decrease…

Shane:  Right.

Jocelyn:  Our expenses.  And, so like Shane said earlier, “We are go bigger, go home people.”  And, so we said, “You know what, let’s halve our mortgage.”  That’s going to make a lot more difference than stopping going to the drive-through.

Shane:  We lived in a brand new construction.  It was only a few years old, in this nice neighborhood, full of kids, classic, small town, fairy tale kind of neighborhood.  And, we said, “You know what, let’s go buy an older house like being”, the little title thing on our house says, “Unknown”, because they don’t even…

Jocelyn:  Like the age of the house.

Shane:  They don’t even know like how – when this house was actually built.  It’s a nice house.  It was well-maintained and taken care of.  But, it is half the size, it is half the mortgage and it is an older home.  I mean, we do have problems.  We’ve got to update some things as we went along.  But, it may – it didn’t matter to us because we were warm, we were dry, kids had a place to lay their head down at night and so did we.  And, it was just a place for us to camp out and say, “This isn’t our forever home.  It’s our freedom home.”  This is the home that will allow us to free up resources to invest in a better future.  And, there’s a lot of people that just won’t make those sacrifices to do that.  So, I think that once we – we both had already kind of said, “We’re all in on making this work.”  The only thing we have left to do was to quit our jobs.  But, it wasn’t easy and I promise you, that first six months was really, really scary.  We probably had enough money, I guess we had enough saved up for maybe six months of living expenses, don’t you think?  Something like that…

Jocelyn:  Roughly, probably a lot less.

Shane:  Roughly, probably about four.  But, we said, “You know what, if we just like don’t drink milk and only drink water and if we’ll just eat bread for the easy every third week, or something like that. We’ll be alright.”

Jocelyn:  It really was not quite…

Shane:  It wasn’t that bad but it was close…

Jocelyn:  That dire.

Shane:  It was close.  But, we probably had about six months’ living expenses.  And, we definitely hit some bumps in the road in that first year.

Jocelyn:  Things were going OK.  July and August, of course, were great.  September was pretty good because it’s still back to school for a lot of places and we had two school-related products.  So, those were pretty good.  Then we start hitting October and November.  Things are not going so well.  Just due to the nature of what we do.  It’s not necessarily because we were doing anything wrong.  It’s just because sales…

Shane:  Sales slowed down.

Jocelyn:  Sales slowed down.

Shane:  Yeah.

Jocelyn:  So, I did have a Black Friday sale at the end of November which has always been a really big deal for Elementary Librarian, and so that was pretty good.  Well, then we get into December.

Shane:  Oh, awful.  Yeah, Christmas just killed all of our sales, like completely.

Jocelyn:  So, December was not good and then in the winter time, January, February, March, April also not the best.

Shane:  Yeah, we actually launched, I launched a little football product that kind of helped us get a little bit more cash generated.  It was a weight lifting program for coaches.  So, we got that out there.  Made a few thousand dollars off of that.  But, then by the time we got to April and May, we were literally selling nothing.  Because the market was just kind of ending.  The school year was ending.  And, also, too we had – we were looking up at ourselves going we’ve made a ton of mistakes.  We were not outsourcing properly.  We were trying to do everything in our business.  We thought, oh, we’ve quit our jobs.  We’ve got all the time in the world.  Let’s just do everything.  We were trying to code websites, and just trying to do everything ourselves.  That was and we ended up basically getting into a giant roadblock, where everything kind of froze.  And, we were not marketing.  We were not – we were trying to do everything organic and we’ll just create content.  And, that all those – yeah, a miracle will come.  Just like the gurus say.  And, we weren’t actually out there spending money, promoting our product and getting it in front of the ride.  People – so, sales kind of slowed down to a halt almost.

Jocelyn:  And, beyond that we also were not charging enough.  We were still doing what’s called the launch model.  That means that we are constantly selling to new customers all the time which was becoming a little bit problematic because we weren’t doing the right things to acquire new customers.

Shane:  And, we had low prices so we weren’t making as much as we should have when we were selling things.

Jocelyn:  And so, it just so happened that earlier in the year before the sales slump that we talked about earlier.  That Shane had kind of coerced me – that’s a nice way of putting it – of…

Shane:  Telling me coercing, was it on me, go ahead.

Jocelyn:  He had sort of talked me into going to an event.  And, I was kind of like I don’t really know if this is what we need to do and we just quit our jobs like is this really right?

Shane:  Do we need to spend money on plane tickets, fly across the country and go to live events and network and learn things?  Yes, yes we do.

Jocelyn:  And, I think that that’s a mistake that a lot of people make.  They think, well, I really can’t afford this a 100 percent but I’m not going to do it.  But, for us, we were like, OK, we think we can afford this and it’s probably going to make a big difference so, let’s do it.

Shane:  We treated it like an investment basically.  Like we were going to spend the money to do this because we saw this slump that we were in and we had to take action and create some form of catalyst to get us out of this slump.  So, we decided, let’s go to a live event, and let’s learn from some people and see – and maybe talk to people about why it’s not working.

Jocelyn:  So, we went to the event.  We met some amazing people while we were there.  We learned a lot of stuff.  I mean, just beyond anything that you can pick up from a podcast, from a webinar or…

Shane:  From when we met on the lawn, hoping something works.  Basically.

Jocelyn:  Yeah.  Just being around people who get it and who know what you’re doing and maybe you’re a little bit further along than you is just amazing.

Shane:  And, these were our peers.  These were just people we met at the event, talking to them and building friendships.  These weren’t like – we didn’t get much from anybody speaking or doing anything like that.  It was more just talking to people who are in the game.  Because, let’s face it, if you’re an online business, no one around you understands what you’re doing.

Jocelyn:  Especially where we live.

Shane:  Yeah, especially where we live.  There’s just not anybody that can, you know, being an online entrepreneur is not the same as even owning a mom and pop main street shop.  You just – it’s different.  And, you’ve got to get around people that are doing it, the same thing that you do.

Jocelyn:  So, that was just a really exciting time in our business.  We came back really invigorated, ready to take the next steps.  We knew the next steps that we needed to take and that helped us to be able to create a six figure a month, in that July.  And, another six-figure a month in August.  So…

Shane:  August, yeah, it just blew up after we came back from that event.  But, it wasn’t necessarily because of all the things we learned.  It was because we actually came back and did them.  We didn’t accept there was a sales slump.  We said, “Why is this happening, how can we fix it, now let’s go take action on the plan and get it done.”

Jocelyn:  And, there’s something about spending money to make you do things.

Shane:  Yeah.

Jocelyn:  We…

Shane:  Investing in yourself, that’s it.

Jocelyn:  We’ve learned that so many times.  And, this has happened to us two different times now.  When we start getting a little bit complacent, we do something big.  And, a lot of times people out there would be like, “That’s crazy.  You don’t need to take risks like that.” But we know what makes things happen for us.  And for us it’s taking the huge risk.

Shane:  Yeah.  Investing in ourselves, getting on an airplane, flying to the other side of the world.  We went to a conference in Asia one time because we really wanted to meet some people that were going to the conference.  And, when you do those big things, big huge things happen.  That’s another reason going back to I think why we really wanted to quit our job in September, when I saw some things getting traction.  I didn’t know it was going to be OK.  I didn’t know we could make it if we quit our jobs.  Heck, really when you did the math, and you looked at the paper – why, we’re pretty much going to starve to death next June.  I mean that’s what it looked – it would have looked like.

Jocelyn:  And, I just want to throw out there, we didn’t have a huge amount of savings.  We didn’t have a rich family member who was going to bail us out.

Shane:  No.

Jocelyn:  I mean, I think a lot of times people look at successful people and think oh, well they have…

Shane:  They had to have fair advantages sometimes…

Jocelyn:  They have a parachute.

Shane:  Right.

Jocelyn:  And we really didn’t.

Shane:  Being successful is taking a chance when you don’t know it’s alright.  I just had someone the other day send me a message of how to flip your life community.  And they were like, “Hey, what kind of a promises can we make – well what can I expect the timeline of success? I – in three months I want to be making so much money that I need – I can quit my job and I don’t have to worry about it anyway.” And that’s just not how it works.  You just never know what tomorrow is going to bring.  Even today.  We have very predictable stable income.  Very stable through our membership sites, we have thousands of members and clients and customers.  But, even still, we can’t predict what’s going to happen in a year.  No matter how good your business is, you can’t predict that.  Sometimes, you just have to roll the dice and see what happens.  Because if you never roll the dice, you can never roll a seven.  That’s just the way it is.  You might roll snake eyes.  Things are bad, are going to happen when you do online business.  We knew that…

Jocelyn:  That was like Yoda.

Shane:  That was like Yoda, you know what I mean?  Like, yeah, like things go bad and that’s just the way it is.  But, you know what?  Sometimes, you just got to go forward anyway and see what happens.  Because if you never try, it’s never going to happen.  And I think that’s why I wanted to quit the jobs about it, because like – I just wanted to see what would happen.  See if we quit our jobs, see if things become successful, see if things work.  And, they did.  When we started making six-figure months, I mean, think about that.  You make over a $100,000 in a single month, like that’s just stuff you can’t even imagine until it actually happens.  But, it never happens unless you start.  It took us two years to make it.  And, I see so many online entrepreneurs that think, “Oh, I’m going to make it in two months.  Oh, I’m going to make it in three months.”, or “I’ll be like that person and that person in three months if I just, you know, do this one thing.  Magic trick.  Magic pill.” That’s not what it takes.  It takes a couple of years.  It takes some bumps in the road and yes, it takes huge, life-changing sacrifices and risks.  If you aren’t willing to do those things, you might never make it.  And I think that’s one reason that we started Flipped Lifestyle was to really shoot straight with people and be honest and quit all these gurus out there selling miracle systems and, “Seven Easy Steps to Make Your Digital Empire Grow”, like we wanted to talk to people straight and say, “This is what it takes to make it online.”

Jocelyn:  It was super important to us to really tell a true story about online business and what you can expect.  Because we saw so many times out there that people just weren’t really telling that true story or maybe they were pulling out the highlights.  And, for us it was important for people to know that online business is not always about quitting your job, or making hundreds of thousands of dollars.  It’s just about changing your family’s life for the better. Maybe, you’ll start an online business and maybe you’ll never replace your full time income.  But, that’s OK.  For some people, that’s what they want.  That’s their goal.  And, I think that with Flipped Lifestyle, that’s really the story that we’re trying to tell.  Is how we really got here, the bumps that we had along the way and how you can start something, too.  And, we’re not selling a big dream of quitting your job, or flying around the world or…

Shane:  We’re just telling our story that we did that basically.

Jocelyn:  And, we’re basically saying that you can change your family’s life somehow.  It may be in a smaller way.  It may be in a bigger way and we hope that it is.  But, that is the whole point behind what we do here at Flipped Lifestyle.  Is, we just want you to understand that change is possible.

Shane:  And, we have a friend who and I was in football coaching before I started all this stuff.  The first – one of the first businesses we had was (coachxo.com).  It’s not there anymore.  I’ve got it in stasis right now.  But, yeah, a buddy of mine that I met through that process is a football coach.  He’s been making his living online probably two years longer than we have.  And, he still coaches.  That’s what he wants to do.  But, he built an online business to support that.  We have a guy that just wanted his wife to be able to quit her job.  He just wanted to make enough money to replace her income to do that.  He wanted to keep his job because he loved it and he did.  Some people come to us and they’re like, “I want a thousand extra bucks a month just so I can buy a camper so we can travel in the summer time.”

Jocelyn:  Or go on a vacation.

Shane:  Yeah, that’s OK.  That’s exactly what online business is for.  And, that’s exactly what we mean we say, “Flip Your Life.”  Like it’s about changing your life for the better.  For us, we wanted to go all in.  Like Jocelyn said, “We’re kind of all or nothing people.”  And we said, “Let’s see if we can make our own money and fully live completely in online business.  Let’s build a life of complete location independence.”  These are the things that we want to do.  But, that doesn’t mean it’s right for everybody else.  Online business, the biggest thing I think we have learned, is it lets you build the exact lifestyle you want to build.  When you’re living the Flipped Lifestyle, it’s not you’re living on a beach in Bali or you’re flying all over the world, like Jocelyn said.  You are – you have changed the dynamic of how you interact with the world.  You are in control of your life, of your finances.  You have more leverage, more power.  No one can dictate to you what you’re doing in your life because you have this online business.  And that’s what it really means to live Flipped Lifestyle.

Jocelyn:  So, with that in mind, let’s talk a little bit about what the Flipped Lifestyle looks like for us three years later.  So, I’m very happy to say that we do now have cable again.  Hurray!

Shane:  Hurray!  We even have Netflix.  We have cable and Netflix.

Jocelyn:  We do.

Shane:  Which is big time.

Jocelyn:  And, I was actually able to watch the 2016 Olympics which was super exciting for me because the 2014 Olympics, we did not have cable.  And, therefore, could not watch the Olympics which was very, very sad for me because I love the Olympics.

Shane:  Yeah, I think of all the things that we sacrificed.  Like I remember you being the most like sad about not being able to watch the Olympics.  And, I trying to just keep up with the headlines but I can remember you going, “Oh, I really wish I could watch the Olympics.  This online business that better work out because I’m watching the next Olympics.”  I can actually remember you saying that.

Jocelyn:  And, I did.  So, that was really awesome for me.  I mean, it’s the little things, right?  We do travel all the time.  For me, experiences are so much more important than things.  I don’t really care that much about things.  In fact, I’m trying to get rid of a lot of our things.  And, we travel a lot.  That’s what we do for fun.  We don’t go around the world very often.  I mean, we do occasionally but usually it’s just right here in our backyard.  We take the kids to amusement parks, we go to zoos, we go to parks, I mean we just do a lot of different things as a family because we now have the money.  But, even more importantly we have the time to do things like that where we never did before.

Shane:  And, you know, like some other things have changed.  You know, we were driving old, beat-up cars when we first started.  I think one of our blog – podcast early on, there is actually a picture of our old car.  It had like – we had to duct tape the bumper back on one day because it like totally fell off.  And, the van that we had before we quit our jobs is kind of like scary to drive now because like…

Jocelyn:  We drove it today actually…

Shane:  We drove it today and it was making terrible noises.  So, I think we were going to get rid of that.  But, we were able to buy a brand new vehicle with cash.  We paid about $3,500 or something for a van last year.  It was just really cool because neither one of us had ever had a brand new, you know, off the lot car before.  And, we are still in what we call our, “Freedom House”, the little house that we downsized and moved out of.  Or moved into when we were about to quit our – or before we quit our jobs.  But, that is actually about to change because we are celebrating our three-year “Quit-aversary” by buying our dream property.  We are going to be leaving our “Freedom House” in and we have bought our “Forever House”.  We purchased a 30-acre farm just outside of town here, in our little town in Kentucky.  It actually has a lake on it.  We bought our own lake.  I’m – we’re trying to figure out if we can name the lake, “Flipped Lifestyle Lake” or something.  But, it does have a lake on it with a boat dock and a boat ramp.  And, it’s all private.  It’s all completely enclosed inside of our property.  There’s an amazing house on the property that’s 4,000 square feet which blows my mind that we were going to be moving into something that big.  And, I look back at the house that we were in before, the house that we were so scared to let go off.  We were like, we’ve got this beautiful house.  We’ve got a pool, we’ve got our half-acre on the back corner of this little neighborhood.  Everything is so perfect, how could we ever have anything better?  But, we said, “There – maybe there is something bigger and better out there.” And we took a chance.  And now, we’re buying a property that is literally 30 times bigger than the property that we owned before.  And, this – the house that we’re moving into is twice as big almost as any house that we’ve ever owned before.  And, we could have never even thought about buying a place like this if we had not taken a chance, rolled the dice, took a risk and quit our jobs three years ago.  So, what are the takeaways I guess, from this journey.  Like, this is super exciting for us to be able to make this next step in our life.  We’re super excited to watch our business continue to grow.  But, like what can you get out of our story.  Well, as with everything else, we sacrificed upfront.  We gave up a little then.  But, look what’s happening now. You get so much more when you take risks and sacrifice things if you’ll just do them than doing nothing.  There’s – if there’s no risk, there’s no reward in life.  You’re going to have to take chances.  There is a chance you’re going to lose money in some of the things you do online.  I know we have spent thousands of dollars that we got no ROI off of.  And, that’s just part of the game.  If you want the rewards, you’re going to have risk some things upfront. It was a huge risk for us to quit our jobs but we prepared, we gave ourselves a chance and we were able to achieve everything we’re achieving now because of those risks.

Jocelyn:  And, it’s like I said earlier, we’re not doing this to say, “Yes, we’re so awesome.”, that’s not the reason that we’re here.  And, I know that, there’s probably a lot of you out there thinking, “Well, all of that sounds really great but you don’t know our life situation.  Or, you’ve never had to deal with this.  Or, you don’t have this problem.”  We hear this all the time from people.  Even the closest people to us.  And, you might have listened to our podcast last year, in 2015.  And, maybe you’re still sitting on the sidelines thinking, “Oh, I still haven’t done anything.”  And, that’s the reason that we’re here today.  The purpose of today’s show is not to encourage you to go all in and quit your job tomorrow.  That’s not what we’re trying to say…

Shane:  We didn’t do that.  We did – we quit our jobs at a moment in time but we prepared for over a year to be in a position to quit our jobs.  We sold our house months and months before we quit our job.  We canceled cable like the third month we were in online business to free up money to pay for hosting.  So, all of these things we did were in advance to prepare us for what was going to happen in the future.  We didn’t know it was going to happen.  But, we were going to be ready when it did.

Jocelyn:  And so, we just want you to start taking action.  If you’ve been listening to this show for the last two years or however, long we’ve been doing I think it’s almost two years, maybe longer than two years…

Shane:  It’s over two years.

Jocelyn:  Yeah.  I don’t know.  So, anyway…

Shane:  It all blends together.

Jocelyn:  If you’ve been listening to this podcast for two years, and you’re still sitting here going, “Oh, I love that story.  I wish I could do that.”

Shane:  I wish it was my story…

Jocelyn:  Why aren’t you doing anything?

Shane:  Yeah.

Jocelyn:  That’s what I want to ask you today.  What would happen if Shane didn’t talk me into buying Elementary Librarian back in 2012?  Where would we be right now if we didn’t buy a lot of other domains, make a lot of terrible websites, and terrible products…

Shane:  Terrible.

Jocelyn:  And, keep learning and keep making the wrong steps and keep making some of the right steps.  What would happen if we didn’t do those things?

Shane:  Yeah, well where would we be if we had not invested $3 or $4,000 in going to that live event.  Going to all of these events that we’ve been to to figure out what was going to happen next.  Or to put money into things that did not work.  I remember I paid like $500 one time to buy a plug-in because I needed my website to do something and I turned it off like three months later and I’m never used it since.  Like, but we learned what to do, we learned what not to do.  And, I just cannot imagine where we would be now if we had not taken action four years ago to start this.  Three years ago to quit our jobs.  And then, the next year to go and learn more and do it again.

Jocelyn:  And so, maybe today you’re not ready to join our community.  Maybe you haven’t started a website yet.  Maybe you are just not sure what to do.  We have lots of free information available for you to know what to do for your first steps.  There are tons of free videos out there that you can watch to get your website up and running.  To get your content going.  We have a lot material.  Other people have a lot of material.  And, that will just help you just to do something.  Get started.  Put one foot in front of the other.  Baby steps will get you closer to your goal than standing still.

Shane:  Yeah, you need to start planting seeds now for whatever the next step in your life might be.  What you want it to be, what you hope it’s going to be.  Because if you keep building things brick-by-brick, if you keep planting seeds like we did, if you keep preparing for the day when you’re able to do all this.  And, preparation for everyone listening is going to be different.  Some of you are preparing for your next product launch.  Some of you are preparing to listen to the next podcast just to learn a little more about this to see if it’s even possible that you can attempt it.  But, you’ve got to keep taking next steps, or you’re never going to get to the point where you can do the things you want to do, too.

Jocelyn:  Alright, we are going to wrap up today’s show.  We hope that if nothing else that today’s episode has encouraged you to take some type of action towards your online business.  It doesn’t matter what your end goal is.  Maybe it’s to quit your job like we did.  Maybe, it’s to get some extra money for Christmas.  Maybe it’s to go on an exciting vacation.  I don’t know what your goal is.  But, I hope that this show has at least given you some ideas of why is it you can take action to get closer to that.  As we do every week, we are going to close today’s show with our, “Can’t Miss Moment”, and also a Bible verse.  Today’s “Can’t Miss Moment” is buying our new house.  We are closing in approximately two weeks.  And, we are really, really excited about it.  And, we do have a couple of pictures for you to look at if you’re interested in checking out our house. You can head over to flippedlifestyle.com and checkout today’s show notes.  And, one other thing that I wanted to say before we move on to today’s Bible verse is we’re also looking for podcast reviews.  If you have not reviewed our podcast on iTunes, we would greatly appreciate that on our Three-Year Anniversary.  Call it an anniversary present to us.  We do read every single one.  They mean a whole lot to us.  So, please if you have not left us a review, do so when you get a chance.

Shane:  I found a great Bible verse today and I really wanted to save this one, a lot of times we put these bible verses.  We don’t really align them to the episode.  We just want to share something about business, or life that the Bible really speaks to us during that week.  But I found this Bible verse today and I think it’s perfect for what we’re talking about.  Today’s Bible verse is from Philemon 1:22.  And, in it, Paul is writing to Philemon, a leader in the Colossian church and he says, “Prepare a guest room for me because I hope to be restored to you and answered to your prayers.” Now, it’s important to remember here, Paul is in jail.  I think in Rome.  He’s in actual jail and he doesn’t know if he’s going to ever see Philemon again.  He doesn’t know if he’s going to get out of jail.  He doesn’t know if they’re going to kill him.  He has not clue what the future will bring but he’s already preparing for that future.  And he says it with certainty, “Prepare a guest room for me”, because he hopes to see him again.  So, I want to encourage you guys today to take that and run with it.  Prepare for your future.  Stop wishing for the future.  Stop thinking, “Oh, it would be nice if I could do that.  It would be nice if I could flip my life. It will be nice to live the Flipped Lifestyle.”  Whatever that looks like for you prepare for the future.  Just like we did, when we sold our house and prepared for the day we could quit our job.  You prepare for the day you can do whatever you have to do to make your online dreams a reality.  That’s all the time we have for this week, guys.  Tune in next week when we will have another Flip Your Life member on the show for a free consulting call.  And, until then, get out there.  Take action and do whatever you have to do to flip your life.

Jocelyn:  Bye.