We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jenn Bailey a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jenn, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been one of the most interesting investments you’ve made – and did you win or lose? (Note, these responses are only intended as entertainment and shouldn’t be construed as investment advice)

In a time of Tiktok & Youtube financial advice to financial planner commercials on old school TV, I have lived through it, and this is my advice. If you start where I did, then ramen and ham sandwiches are no stranger. I quickly realized that older generations started talking about “levels” once I began to find some success. Levels of financial success, levels of buying power, level of perceived influence. As I kept working hard to climb each level, which took decades of learning the pitfalls/traps, meeting with wealth managers that require “X” amount to work with them (X=way too much money) and onto the next levels where the wealth managers are invite only, where they set your life up to be protected and talk of math Quants to help your investment portfolios.
I can reflect over all of it and it collectively concludes me with… My best investment was one that required effort. I bought a home and installed my own floors, effort equaled increased equity…and sold the house for more money. My husband worked for a tech company for a good salary and earned stock shares, Effort equaled increased equity.
My worst investment…believing someone else was going to make me wealthy.

Jenn, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My Name is Jenn Bailey and I am the founder of the Unity Group of Legacy Mutual Mortgage. I got into this industry by way of the FBI in 2008 during the financial crisis. I was hired to lead a team to investigate mortgage fraud in America. After years of investigating 1000’s of cases and some people you might know if you watch TV, I realized with how many that committed fraud they just didn’t have a loan officer that knew how to purchases the homes legally. So, I decided to flip the script and start helping people buy homes above board with the same benefits, simple as that! Over the years, we have now created the largest team in Texas to help people with their individual life situations. I am most proud of the people that our team is comprised of, intelligent, compassionate, and caring. It is not uncommon to see a teammate teared up after hearing someone’s story (I’m looking at you Regina) or being with a client and now friend while they go through Chemo (Shout out Crystal)…. Our team and the culture of caring we developed is what I am so proud of.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Yes, cheat code time! To preface my husband, who shows signs of Asperger’s syndrome from time to all the time, and who spent years reading every business book he could get his hands on, well into the 100’s so here is the top 5:

My personal MBA
The Power of Consistency
Lean Start-up
Challenger Sale
Google University digital marketing course

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Somewhat controversial answer here, I had to unlearn listening to my peers and news predictions. Not to say the news is right or wrong, but I needed to silence it and that took a lot of time and was very difficult to learn. The back story goes: when I first started, the news was always telling me the sky is falling and why even bother, for obvious reasons that needed to be muted. It was hard to accept the fact that these financial “gurus” on TV didn’t actually have a crystal ball to predict the future. When I decided that each day my market is great and were gonna crush it, magically we started to do better and the “high price of rice in China” suddenly seemed to not affect my life anymore. Controversial opinion continued, “not listening to my peers.” Let me just say I attend EVERY best practices meeting I possibly can, and I work with some of the best and brightest! However, what few people know is that when I’m in those meetings, I’m not listening to what is working for them, I am wondering why that action is working for them. I know that if I do the same thing as them, then I would only get the same result, well then how would I ever win? I had to start thinking about how things work and not just what to do. Which leads me to this sentence… how many other loan officers do you see articles about in magazines? 😉

Contact Info:

• Website: https://unitygrouphomeloans.com/
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