How to Get Your Partner on Board with Real Estate Investing

Brian Persson: [00:01:14] Well, our personal story is that I resisted the real estate investing in the beginning.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:20] He did.

 

Brian Persson: [00:01:20] Yeah. And, uh, what happened? We were unable to buy. We were unable to buy what we wanted or perhaps what was a better performing portfolio. And then when we actually got on board with each other and we were on the same page and wanting to invest in real estate, our portfolio tripled basically in the course of a couple of years and became a lot easier as well. So it just increases your bond between the two people and the relationship ultimately will increase your overall wealth.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:53] Yeah. Another great thing about being aligned with your partner is it opens ideas that you may not see singularly, like the old adage that two heads are better than one. It’s true. I mean, how many things did I point out that you may not have caught the same way I did? And then once we talked it through, we both had a better understanding of what it was.

 

Brian Persson: [00:02:14] Yeah, yeah, we can constantly bounce ideas back and forth off of each other, make sure that they’re sane and they’re not going to sink your financial empire.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:24] Yes. So the first takeaway is to have the conversation. So make space for it. And book time specifically. In previous episodes, as you may have heard, we’re very passionate about having the conversation, communication and booking it in our calendar to make sure we’re heard and we’re actually open and available to listen to that specific thing or topic at that time.

 

Brian Persson: [00:02:53] If your partner is not on board with real estate and you’re trying to get them on board with real estate, this is a big thing. Booking that conversation. Have it over date night if you need to, but you need to be consistent about it because otherwise your real estate investing future is going to be happenstance. It might happen if the conversations happen to happen and it might not happen. You got to be diligent and you got to be committed to having those conversations. So put it in your calendar.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:22] Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the conversation, I mean, I remember the first conversation I think we probably ever had around mortgages and home equity line of credits, and interest rates and investing and all that. And we were only dating for maybe three months, I think. And I don’t know if you were being nice or I dragged you along to my family reunion that that summer, and we were just kind of out walking on a night because, of course, it’s so beautiful in British Columbia, where we were. And you were telling me all about the mortgage you currently had and the home equity line of credit on it and the interest rates. And I looked at you and I said, well, if your HELOC interest rate is lower than your mortgage, why don’t you pull from there, pay down your mortgage, and then you have the option to pay off your HELOC at any time, whereas you’re locked in with the mortgage and your response?

 

Brian Persson: [00:04:18] Why didn’t I do that sooner?

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:20] Yeah, it was just something you didn’t think about, right?

 

Brian Persson: [00:04:23] No, no, part of that is just financial education. Having conversations with your partner will get you both financially educated, because you’re just gonna go deeper into the space of real estate investing by having those conversations. In this particular instance, just never thinking about why would you pay a lower interest rate when you’re borrowing from a revolving line of credit? It made no sense to me, right? Don’t borrow from credit is kind of like the thing that I grew up with back then. And so to borrow from credit and pay off a nice stable mortgage, or at least that’s what I thought it was at that time, made absolutely no sense.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:05] Yeah. And then I kind of called it out and it was just more kind of I was curious what your reasoning was behind it, but that in the end saved interest on the entire purchase.

 

Brian Persson: [00:05:15] Saved interest, and it led to other things. By having those conversations, you’re going to lead to other solutions. You’re going to lead to other types of investments and ways of building your wealth. In that particular case, the eye opener was you can use revolving line of credit. You can use credit to pay off mortgages and at a later point in the future, past that conversation, when we were married, we ended up doing that exact same maneuver to nearly pay off our house. And then ultimately, in the end, we ended up refinancing the whole thing and buying a whole bunch more properties. But it created wealth over the long term just having that one conversation because opportunities that didn’t exist before now opened up not just that day, but way into the future.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:05] Absolutely. And so when you’re having that conversation with your partner, make sure to ask very specific questions so you’re not stuck in the yes, no, kind of gray zone where they’re not really putting thought into it. I know one conversation we had was around our roles in real estate because again, when we first started, we both thought we could do it all. And then over time, we learned that our personalities just didn’t jive with some of the work, like me and rent and tenants was not for me.

 

Brian Persson: [00:06:36] No, no, that’s my forte. But being specific about your questions is really what we’re getting at. If you just go to your partner and ask, how do you feel about real estate investing, you are going to get every answer under the sun, and most of them are not going to be meaningful. We actually teach this in our Discover Define Design framework on how to properly have a conversation. And you don’t ask generic questions like how do you feel about real estate investing? Get specific. Ask what role would you play if we invested in real estate?

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:10] Right, right. And then you can roll that right into questions like, what kind of real estate investing would we do? You know, whether you’re choosing between residential or commercial at a very high level. And then if you choose residential like we did, then that gets down into like, would we do buy and hold? Would we do fix and flips? Would we do wholesale? Like there’s so many different avenues and likely if you’re not in the real estate investing world, you’re not necessarily educated on all those aspects, but maybe your partner actually knows about some of them and might have some knowledge to share, or an actual interest specific to one thing over another.

 

Brian Persson: [00:07:47] By having those conversations, you can start to explore what you’re missing in the real estate investment sphere, you might not know about commercial and realized by having a conversation that you don’t know about commercial, and then you can further see where your sort of grit lies in what type of real estate investing you as a couple would want to do. Because different types of real estate investing require different time periods, different money in the bank, different levels of grit and skills. So you really got to analyze what your relationship is capable of.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:24] Absolutely. And in the conversation, one thing we want to note is to be resilient, persistent, and patient. So we started investing together in 2009 when we bought our first little condo together for a rental purposes. But it wasn’t until 2017 until I actually got you on the same page as my vision and my goals. But I persistently pushed you and tried to buy more property and just kept encouraging you and having the conversations.

 

Brian Persson: [00:09:01] Yeah, you got to be persistent. You can’t just assume that you have the conversation once and that’s it. And that’s your real estate conversation. And then you’re going to be happily on your way to real estate investing as a partnership.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:14] Or not at all.

 

Brian Persson: [00:09:15] Or potentially, yeah, you will just stall out and not have any type of investment. We sat at a lot of tables and a lot of different conferences, and you could clearly tell that only one half of the partnership was there because they had very, very few conversations around real estate. They obviously had no persistence, and they didn’t want to push through that particular conversation in order to get to like, some really good wealth generation within that family.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:45] Right. I mean, a lot of people might be afraid to rock the boat or upset their partner or straight up, they just don’t know how to have the conversation to get their partner on board.

 

Brian Persson: [00:09:56] I love to just say, always ask how or what, you know, when you’re having your conversation with your partner, don’t ask why. Why don’t you want to invest in real estate? It’s very accusatory.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:08] Yeah.

 

Brian Persson: [00:10:09] They will get their back up right away. So ask like, how do you think we could invest in real estate? Get them to be the solution maker for you and come up with their own solutions rather than feeling like they’re backed into a corner.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:21] Yeah, no, that’s great advice for any conversations. But definitely real estate investing as we’re focused. So our takeaway number two is to normalize real estate investing. So make it a casual everyday kind of thing. And it’s not this big elephant in the room that you’re staring at and hoping one day your partner understands that elephant and what it’s going to get you and where it’s going to go. I mean, one of the ways to do that is to introduce them to people who have done it. And as we speak very candidly a lot about when I was just didn’t believe you couldn’t do more real estate, so I signed you up for this group to join. And that put you in the room with other real estate investors where you, I wasn’t in the picture, you got to have conversations with people who’ve been there, done that, doing it, and it opened your eyes.

 

Brian Persson: [00:11:16] Real estate investing is going to be scary. If one of you is not on board, if one of the pieces of the partnership is not on board, then real estate investing for that person who is not on board is going to look really scary. So you got to normalize it. If you can get them around people who have done it and who talk about it casually as you were just mentioning, I went into a room full of real estate investors for the networking event that you signed me up for, and there were people who had already been successful real estate investors, already in the game, and for them it was very normalized. Like to them it was no big deal. And so for me to be in that room and hear it as a normal part of conversation was a big deal, because real estate investors back then, to me were these phenomenal, somehow magical people that were able to put together portfolios that, you know, that generate tons of money. And now we’re in that boat and people come to us and look at us like, I’m pretty sure, with the same eyes I looked at some of these people. And now we’re the normalizers.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:27] Yeah, it’s definitely normal in our household. Like, you know, when you’re driving the kids home from school and your eight year old asks if we’re going to buy him a condo and we say, well, when are you thinking? He’s like, well, when I’m 15, we’re like, no, you cannot live on your own at 15. But I’m glad you’re thinking about real estate.

 

Brian Persson: [00:12:47] But yeah. That’s just it, is that their understanding, the eight year old is understanding what it means to have ownership of property and, you know, at a limited level. But he comes with me to go and investigate properties and see what’s going on. So he not only is in the management of it, but he’s in the buying of it, and he’s got some forward thinking on what it might look like to own property. And so for him, as an eight year old, real estate investing or just real estate in general is a completely normal topic.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:13:22] Yeah, yeah. One way to help normalize the conversation around real estate investing is if you have any friends or colleagues who are real estate investors, go on like dinner nights with them and have that conversation because, as we know, it’s hard to have that conversation when it’s just always you and your partner if your partner is not on board with it, like you’re not going to get far because they don’t understand it or they’ll just tune you out. But if you can introduce them to people who are there or in the industry, know what it’s about, they can share their wins and their stories, which gives your partner a different perspective of real estate investing that isn’t just yours.

 

Brian Persson: [00:14:01] Yeah, we have lots of friends that one side of the partnership or the other has come around because of just having them over for supper, having them over for drinks, going out to an event with them. The partner who wasn’t on board has seen it and been in the environment long enough that they are starting to shift and starting to be more interested and actually start to take an active role in the real estate investing.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:26] It’s also, you know, if you’re talking to a real estate investment couple who are successful and your partner sees that, how successful they are, and if they can speak to the ease of it. Now, I’m not saying it’s easy, but the ease of it once you get into it and you have those conversations and figure it out, your partner might be again more open to at least starting more of that conversation.

 

Brian Persson: [00:14:50] Yeah. Another really great way to normalize real estate investing is actually to listen to podcasts. We did that a lot driving around, usually on trips between cities, you know, you have 3 to 5 hours depending on where you’re going to listen. Crazy ideas came out of some of those podcasts where, you know, ways of doing real estate that we had never conceived before started to come out. And me, the one who was sort of at that time maxing out, the 2017 period and, you know, starting to resist real estate, I started to get more on board with it because of some of those podcasts. Because now what I was hearing all of a sudden made what we could do a little bit more normal and achievable.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:37] Yeah. And it’s great if you’re in the vehicle together, because then you’re both hearing the same story and you can have a conversation about it when it’s done, or ask questions if you didn’t understand, or talk about the ideas. And then you both know you’ve heard the same story, the same options, so you’re at least coming from the same understanding. Another, I think, idea that really worked well for us, as we alluded to, is that we went to a lot of conferences, so we would book our kids out with grandpa and grandma, and we would attend these conferences and not just here in Alberta, but across Canada. We went to so many. But taking that space just for you and me. So we both go to the conference and we’re learning, obviously we’re seeing the same speakers together, and in between breaks we’re meeting people, which is great, and we’re having lunch and dinner with them. But then in the evening we could take it away, and over dinner we’d discuss kind of what we thought of it and what ideas we loved and what we didn’t. And out of there came so many great things, like not even just real estate investing in terms of the residential we do, but partnerships came out of that for other investments. And like it was just, it’s a great way to put you in that world holistically. And then, of course, kids at grandparents, it gave us the space to really digest it before we were back with the heavy load of running a home.

 

Brian Persson: [00:17:01] Yeah, it was a great combination. Being able to be in that real estate investment investing environment and also have time away just almost like a date night or a date weekend to go and spend some time with your partner. And you get the best of both worlds, right? You get the relationship aspect and you also get the educational aspect.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:22] Absolutely. And that actually lines well into our takeaway three, which is get educated together, which is what we have done via, like you said, podcasts and real estate conferences. But it’s not just real estate, like we’ve gotten educated together in other ways that attributed to our real estate. Like we took a, oh it’s called the Money Clinic at the time, and that was all around money mindset. And I mean, I know I had a few epiphanies and big wows out of that course, but we were able to discuss it together and I think get a better understanding of each other’s perspectives and experience considering the different dynamics we grew up with when it came to money.

 

Brian Persson: [00:18:01] Exactly. Getting educated does not mean both of you learning how to deal with tenants. Because to this day, you still don’t know how to deal with tenants. I’m the one who does that. But it means getting your money mindset right. Getting financially educated. Like what is money really as a tool? Not necessarily as how you feel about it, you know, what are the ways that you can make money in real estate? What are the ways that you want to make money in real estate? All those parts of it are part of the education of real estate and require, as we said earlier, a lot of conversation, and you’re going to share ideas back and forth, and you’re going to try to experience what the other person is learning and see, as we do very often in our relationship, point the other person down particular paths to perhaps educate them in an area where your partner needs a little bit more education. It’s way deeper than just how to manage a real estate portfolio. There’s many, many aspects to how you need to get educated around the whole sphere of what it takes to be in real estate.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:10] Yeah, I know you brought up a good point because in real estate investing education, you’re right, it’s not all about we both got to learn how to deal with tenants, or we both got to learn how, like, the Tenancy Act or whatever it’s called, I don’t even know that, we both got to learn, you know, in terms of, like, properties or it’s not the real estate management of the real estate investing portfolio that you necessarily need to be both educated in. It’s like you said, it’s the firstly, the mindset of where you are understanding each other’s backgrounds when it comes to money and the thoughts and fears around that. Then it’s about the investment. So okay, is it real estate we want to do? And then you got to talk about like you said, there’s like how many different ways can you invest in real estate. So review what those are and what the work entails to do any one of those. And make sure you two are on the same page for whichever one you choose. But to expand that, you also need to have that vision. It’s like, okay, you’ve chosen real estate to grow your wealth portfolio, but what’s your wealth portfolio? Have you talked about what you want to see as as a couple, as a family? And then backtrack that to say, well, what’s it going to take? Like how many properties am I going to need in what time frame? And if you back that up, you’re like, okay to do that what kind of money do I need to acquire to invest in that? And then how am I going to get that money? Like, is it something we’re making ourselves? Is it joint venture partners? Capital? I mean, there’s just so many different things to learn with your partner.

 

Brian Persson: [00:20:44] Yep. Having that vision, big conversation that you got to have, and then a lot of education to figure out how you’re going to achieve that vision. But, I mean, that’s the same thing in anything, you know, with when it comes to how you want to raise your kids, how you want to build a business, you need to have that vision and you need to deconstruct it back to its parts so that you know how to actually achieve it.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:08] Right. I remember in the group we were part of, the real estate investment group we were part of, their big thing was create a vision, a vision board, whatever you want to call it, of where would you like to be. If you could do anything, be anywhere, what does that look like?

 

Brian Persson: [00:21:24] Some people might just want 5-6000 extra dollars in their pocket every month and not have to work for it. Other people might be super happy with, you know, knowing that they have a couple properties that are going to be worth a million or so when they retire and they’re well taken care of. Other people, like this guy I met on one of the first nights I went to a real estate networking event who blew my mind back then, he was aiming for $25,000 a month within under ten years. So it’s different for everybody. You should find that so that you know what you’re driving for, because if you don’t, you’re going to just be shooting and you might not know what you’re actually aiming for.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:07] Yeah, I know we did a vision board. It was awesome. It was. But when we looked at it about a year, year and a half later, we kind of went, okay, we’ve accomplished almost all this. Like, now what? So you keep recreating as you grow, right? It’s not a one and done. For younger couples like ourselves, that’s not our end dream. Like what we had asked for on our original vision board, but it was great to see not just the display of it, but it come to fruition. Like because you just park it in some, I don’t know, closet, collects dust, and then you pull it out one day and you’re like, oh wow, like that’s crazy. It actually happened. But again, it’s because you’ve now brought to the forefront, you’re together on it because you did it together, and you’re actively working towards accomplishing what your joint goals are.

 

Brian Persson: [00:22:57] You’re going to achieve them. And don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself after you’ve achieved them.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:03] Yeah, and bigger and bigger dreams.

 

Brian Persson: [00:23:06] But on the flip side of that, sometimes it might take a little bit of time to achieve your goals. So have patience with your partner because your partner and you might not be traveling at the same speed. And you need to understand where they are and not derail the train, because perhaps you’re becoming insulting or maybe a little bit aggressive towards your partner on it. There’s a careful balancing act that has to go on between how fast are you moving? How fast is the relationship comfortable? How fast are you comfortable? How fast is your partner comfortable? Find that balance so that you can move along and keep the train rolling and have that patience to make sure that it keeps rolling.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:52] But remember also it’s like a wheel. There’s momentum. You got to get it started. And once you start coming together like I said, we started in 2009 investing in real estate together. But it wasn’t till 2017 where we got on the same page. And then it just, that wheel just was going down a mountain at lightning speed. Right? And so now we see all the wealth from our efforts. But how many years are we talking before we got there? Right?

 

Brian Persson: [00:24:18] It took a lot of years.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:19] Over a decade.

 

Brian Persson: [00:24:20] Which is part of the reason why we created our program to help people skip all that and not deal with all the lost years of wealth building that we could have done if we had been on the same page significantly earlier in our relationship.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:35] Yeah. And had a mentor or a coach to help guide us. Absolutely. All right. To recap our takeaways. First, have the conversation with your partner about real estate investing. Number two, normalize real estate investing. And the third one, is get educated together. Our next episode, because conversation is the hardest part of real estate investing, we’re going to go deeper into how to have that conversation.

 

Brian Persson: [00:25:03] We release podcasts every two weeks, so be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app to journey with us and create your life by design.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:25:13] Thanks for listening to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts, Jessilyn and Brian.