In this episode of the "Corporate vs. Entrepreneur" series, host Cody interviews Christian Osgood about his deliberate decision to take a roughly 75% pay cut—from a $250,000 corporate salary to a $60,000 entrepreneurial base—in order to prioritize the quality of his time and accelerate his education. Christian explains that while his hourly rate dropped from $96 to $23, the work environment became far more enjoyable, with a supportive team and meaningful client interactions. He emphasizes that the true value lies in how he spends his time, not the dollar amount attached to it. By focusing on skill development and building a passive‑income real‑estate portfolio, he aims to achieve financial freedom within 13 months. Christian and Cody discuss practical goal‑setting without anchoring to a specific hourly wage, using examples like acquiring a four‑plex in Seattle or a ten‑plex in lower‑cost areas to generate $5,000 a month in net rental income. They advocate “compressing time” by networking, learning, and consistently working toward portfolio growth, arguing that money is abundant while time is finite. The conversation concludes with a call for viewers of any age to reassess how they value their time versus money.
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Hey YouTube, this is Cody. I've got Christian back for this week's video of Corporate vs. Entrepreneur. And today we're talking about prioritizing your time over your money. Christian is an excellent example of this because he took about a 75% pay cut in the last 13 months to spend a lot of time focusing on his education, which is really starting to scale up his portfolio today. Christian, can you share a little bit about what you were doing in the corporate world and shifting over to the entrepreneur side of things?
Absolutely. In my corporate job, I was making about $250,000 a year, uh, working about 50 hours a week. That comes out to $96 per hour as the prescribed value that my company told me my time is worth. I didn't really enjoy stressful quotas, starting at zero every month, You are at your desk from here to here. Every day looks roughly the same. There's a lot of stuff that you put up with for $100 an hour, roughly. Leaving that, I am making $60,000 a year as a base pay. That's my guarantee here. So that's $23 per hour of work. That's a lot less.
That's a lot less. It is.
And it's worth it for a few reasons. One, the quality of your time. Is a huge part of the equation that I think most people miss. If you are miserable for $100 an hour, it's how much suck am I willing to sell in exchange for money? If I am loving what I do, like I do here at Blackwell, where I have a great team of people I enjoy who I come into work with, the clients we have, the learning that I get to do, and I'm being paid $23 an hour for it, My time is a far better exchange. In addition, I still do have to live. The skills that I'm learning are helping me create a base of passive income that will in the future roll money to me every month regardless of what time I spend. So I am investing in my future as well and buying more time with my reduced pay.
Yeah. And one of the reasons that we wanted to create this video is a lot of our target audience is younger, not just in age, but in the industry. Your age is irrelevant in this video. Whether you're 40 years old, 50 years old, 15 years old, and you're looking to get started, the biggest piece of this is don't equate a dollar amount to your time. I've been talking about this for a while with folks in my sphere. I've really never had a strong W-2. I've never had a 9 to 5. I've never really been able to assign a dollar amount to my time. I've just done things for the expected reward of getting free time in the future. So whether you're in your teens right now, you're watching this video, or you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, you need to take out that block of, "Oh, I'm worth X amount of money." Christian took a huge pay cut because of the amount of education he's getting out of this experience. And because of that, he will be financially free from his real estate within 13 months of making that shift. Which feels pretty good.
I feel like that is a good exchange of my time.
Yeah. And if you take a dollar amount away, build a goal, and then figure out how to solve that puzzle, if you focus on just one thing and you hammer it out for a couple years, you can figure out that puzzle. If you need to make $5,000 a month, to live comfortably from passive income? Solve that equation. How do I get to $5,000 a month? Well, if you're in Tacoma, if you're in the Seattle area, it might take you one fourplex paid off. If you're in cheaper cost of living areas where it's a little bit less cost prohibitive, the rents are a little lower, then maybe you need a tenplex. You need 10 rental units at $500 a month net income. And so you can build towards that goal, but if you're assigning a dollar amount, when you're doing this game of real estate, you're jumping into the entrepreneur role, odds are you're not going to hit your quota, whatever you assign value on, because you don't make money right away. It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. And so you're more likely to wash out. It's a big thing. Take that number away, throw it in the garbage can, and just prioritize spending time on building up your skills, and building up that knowledge base of, "This is what I want to do. This is how I get there." Connect with the people that can help take time out of the equation. I like to call it compressing time out of the situation and work daily towards building that portfolio or the business that's going to give you the life you want to live.
Remember, there's no lack of money out there. The pool is infinite. If we run out, the government will go ahead and print more. Money is not the problem. Your time is finite. So you need to value your time more than your money.
So that's today's video of corporate versus entrepreneur. Let us know in the comments below if you have any thoughts, questions, concerns, or if you have any other videos you would like us to create. Christian has a very different perspective than I do. He's done an extra decade. He's had an extra decade to go through the sales cycle, to do the business game. And so if you have questions, let us know. We'll make it happen. I'll see you guys next week.
