How Your Belief Systems Affect Your Wealth

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:42] And your upbringing. So your grandparents, your aunts, your uncles, teachers, your best friend’s parents, whatever you watched as you grew up before you became an adult and were on your own. That is where a lot of your belief systems come from.

 

Brian Persson: [00:01:54] Yep. And people don’t really like to think that they are their parents. But the truth is, is that you are a lot of those people. You’re specifically your parents, plus these little combinations of other people who have come into your life early on in your life, like before high school, when you were, when you were very young.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:13] Yeah. And a lot of what your parents did might not work for you today.

 

Brian Persson: [00:02:18] No, no. Changing environments, changing mentalities, changing everything.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:23] The economies, the way you make money, the way you invest, the way you build it. Quite different now than, say, when our parents were younger.

 

Brian Persson: [00:02:33] Yeah. The only constant is change, as they say. And things that happen in the past are not going to work for you. So those old belief systems that were handed down to you just are not going to work in any new environment. And they might not work for your goals either. Your goals and your parents goals might be very different. And so you can’t take the same set of actions and and expect the same set of results.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:57] Yeah, I think a very popular belief system that is handed down from generation to generation is that the man is the moneymaker. The man should be the provider, and the female stays home and raises the family, takes care of the house. That’s just so old school. That’s not today. Obviously, I’m a very independent woman who built my career very hard, and I shifted careers too, mid time there and in there had two boys and you took over a lot of what we would deem the household duties that a typical woman was generally expected to take care of, including like drop off and pick up of the boys at daycare and then at school and at their sports. Volunteer. You volunteer for a lot of the kids travel expenditures that they do in school. And as you note, that majority are moms there. It’s not the dads. And that’s just…

 

Brian Persson: [00:03:54] I’m always the only dad. Maybe once in a blue moon, I get, I get a dad with me.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:58] Yeah. And I personally, I think it’s great. There are certain times I do things with the kids as well, and there are definitely still roles I play with the kids when it comes to the mom side of it, but I just had, you had a career where it was stable. You were an employee. It was close to home, not even a ten minute drive, close to the schools. You were there for years, so you knew what to expect. You could plan around it. Whereas I had a career that I switched often. Not necessarily the career itself, but I was a contractor. So I switched roles, I switched companies, and I just kept growing and becoming, you know, become a senior project manager. That takes a lot more generally effort. And I put in a lot more hours at times depending on the projects. So it just was easier in some ways for you to be able to manage the household.

 

Brian Persson: [00:04:46] Yeah. My career, just like you said, my career was well established. It was five minutes away from home, your, most of your positions were anywhere from half an hour or more away from home.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:57] Yeah.

 

Brian Persson: [00:04:58] And the hours were different. Like, everything aligned to me being sort of Mr. Mom and driving the kids to school and going on the field trips. Plus, I think you would just get bored out of your mind if you had to go to, you know, some of the science centers and museums.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:13] Being in a tin can with 40 children, I think would hurt my ears.

 

Brian Persson: [00:05:18] Yeah, the busses are fun. Yeah, the busses are really fun. That’s a different story. But, uh–.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:22] But also, if you look at it from a perspective, and I know we’ve talked about this over different years in our marriage is because at some point I also made quite a bit more money. As contractors generally do. People would look at that too, quite differently because generally it hurts the man’s ego, let’s put it how it is. They’re intimidated. They don’t like if their wife is making more than them. And it’s just, it’s not an easy position necessarily to be in. And we worked through that and had to grow through that. That doesn’t mean it’s all, you know, I mean, when it comes to real estate investing, yes, I made more money, which was perfect for putting money down to buy these properties, but I didn’t qualify like you. So there’s advantages no matter how you look at it. But you got to look at it for how it’s going to work for you as a family, not how it worked in the past or what the norms or society think or expect.

 

Brian Persson: [00:06:15] Yeah, I think the idea here is that whatever was handed down to you from your parents is not necessarily going to match your goals, and that’s kind of what we’re talking about. The way that our goals were aligned and the way that our parents did it definitely would not have worked and definitely would not have brought us to where we are today. You know, if we follow their belief systems, and operated in the way that we wanted to operate, like with our goals, I think we’d be poor right now because they would have just conflicted so badly between our goals and between our belief systems that we would have just, like, collapsed.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:51] Yeah.

 

Brian Persson: [00:06:51] Yeah. So we needed to change our belief systems in order to match our goals. And then our goals, powered by our belief systems now can move forward.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:00] Absolutely. And I mean, also some of the belief systems could fall under, like even when I had our first son and I felt obligated to try and be a stay at home mom. And then when it just didn’t work for me and my personality, I felt guilt being back to work for at least the first three weeks. And I remember speaking to another mom who was an older mom, her kids were older by then, and she just said, it doesn’t matter if you work or if you stay home. She goes, you do what’s right for you and your family. And I was like, oh, well, it’s right for me to be a working mom, right? But I had to really accept that, wrap my head around it and be okay with it and not care if anyone commented on me being working, and why am I not home with the kids? And how are you okay with them being in daycare care or day home and just accept it and and just stand in what you stand for, for you and your family.

 

Brian Persson: [00:07:54] It’s really hard sometimes, though, to understand how to change your belief system until you hear things like that. Like, for example, I knew a couple C-level moms that needed to get back to work and they would literally bring their baby to the boardroom. And, you know, I don’t know how old the baby was, probably like a couple months old, but the baby would be sitting on the boardroom table in their chair or whatever, whatever they were sitting in–

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:19] — car seat, probably.

 

Brian Persson: [00:08:20] Yeah, car seat or whatever. But, you know, right in the boardroom. And that’s the way that that mom made it work. But if you don’t hear that story and you just look at the popular opinion or the way that society kind of outputs some of these ideas, it’s very hard to see that that’s even possible.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:39] Yeah. So takeaway number two is review your belief systems frequently because they, firstly, if you haven’t reviewed them, start there. And odds are you’re quite similar to what your parents are. If you look at your parents and you look at what you do, I bet you it’s a direct replica. Now review them as you go through, as you get married, as you have kids, as you switch careers or become an entrepreneur, whatever that looks like for you. Because I know our belief systems have changed.

 

Brian Persson: [00:09:08] Oh yeah. And they will again.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:09] Yeah, they absolutely will. They change with the economy. They change when you have things like the pandemic that just happened a few years ago, like you’ve got to be able to shift and change as things in your environment change.

 

Brian Persson: [00:09:22] That’s why you need to review them, is because things will change. And all of a sudden experiences that you once thought were workable are no longer workable. And so when you review them, don’t beat yourself up about them, but be critical about about how they work. Just look at how they work instead of like how they are broken or wrong. You’re really just looking at do these belief systems empower me? Do these belief systems work for me? Are they going to get me to where I want to go? And if they don’t, that’s where you need to be critical and decide on how they might exit your life in some way, where you just have to get rid of those belief systems and maybe adopt new ones.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:04] Yeah, I think a great story, we were at a company barbecue last weekend, and I know some of the employees. I’m a contractor, but some of the employees were talking about when they retire at X age, they get a monthly income of X amount. If they wait five years, they get this much more. And I remember there was one of the guys there, he’s like, what? That’s all we’re taking home?

 

Brian Persson: [00:10:29] Yeah.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:29] And then another one’s like, no, no, no, that can’t be right. So they pulled out their online calculator or website or whatever it was, and they did the math and it was, and it’s like, okay, now that you guys know that, let’s change that. Like you can invest in real estate and make more in cash flow a month than what your pension is going to make for you.

 

Brian Persson: [00:10:49] Yeah, I overheard that conversation at that barbecue and I remember going, oh my God, is that, that’s what a pension is about? And these guys work for a very good union and one of the largest here around in our city. And their pension just sounded crazy low to me. And yet people work for those pensions. And I’m not saying pensions are bad. Like pensions, pensions do have their place. But if your belief is that the only way that you can retire is to get through to that pension amount, then there’s another world out there for you that you can potentially start to believe in, and it will enhance the what you can do with your pension and what you can do with your retirement at the end of it. But you got to review it. And you have to understand that there are other opportunities.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:11:42] Yeah, absolutely review it because I believe some of these guys were banking on that’s what they’re going to have when they retire. And it’s just not enough. It’s not enough to live in our world today. And I remember I looked up and I kind of chuckled. And I’m like, guys, I make more than that now in cash flow from my properties. And they just looked at me like, what? That’s a thing? I’m like, yeah, you can invest now. And when you’re, because they’re still young guys. They’re in their 40s. You can invest now and you could be making more in cash flow, still collect your pension because you’re going to collect it anyways for the time you put in, and then you can live a really comfortable retirement.

 

Brian Persson: [00:12:21] Yeah. And just to be clear, you don’t need 100 doors to like equate to whatever your good pension is. You probably only need maybe 4 or 5 doors. If you can get to that amount and you can play the game of real estate out over 20 years or more, then you will do very, very well in that. So it’s not a crazy out of the ballpark kind of number that you would need to invest into. But getting to that first door, for most people, that’s where their belief system really has to get challenged, right? And they maybe understand real estate is a good deal, but they don’t really understand how it fits with them because chances are, you know, just like they’re focused on their pension, they’re not focused on the other things. And they and their belief system is literally blinding them from even understanding or knowing what those other things might be, those other ways of wealth.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:13:16] Yeah. And their belief systems generally are what was told to them when it comes to real estate. Because I had a conversation last week, again, I was at a work luncheon and a couple individuals asked what else I did, and I shared it, and they’re like, don’t you find renters, like they’re just a pain in the butt and you lose money and they’re just going on and on, I’m just sitting there smiling, going, my renters pay me well. I am grateful for my renters, but they have this belief system. Either they have, I find it funny that generally there are solo, so they have one rental or two rental properties, so they haven’t made it a system, a business, a way to make it work so it’s functioning well for them and it’s more of a default because they’ve inherited it or something. And so now they’re not really looking at it as an opportunity that it is. And that’s just a belief system. If they were to shift what it looked like, that would be like a money-making machine for them. And they would, the only thing they have to change is their belief system.

 

Brian Persson: [00:14:12] Yeah. We started our real estate journey a long time ago when we were significantly less educated than we are now. So we ended up having our real estate in our personal names, but having it there and having literally side by side with our personal income and our personal everything else, we still segment it like a business. It’s almost like it doesn’t exist in our personal lives. It’s over to the side somewhere. And you get frustrated with me sometimes because we’re not allowed to touch the money in certain types of ways, even though it’s sitting in the bank account right next to our personal bank account. And I’m very strict on that because it is a business. It is not, it is not a like, playtime kind of thing that we can use and abuse in a personal kind of manner. And so because we treat it like that, our real estate is very successful and we can have that segregation between like our personal lives and the real estate itself, even though the real estate is technically in our personal like sphere.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:18] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It’s a separate business for us.

 

Brian Persson: [00:15:21] But like a lot of people, I think like you were talking about there, they treat it as the same. So the lines get blurred between what their real estate is and what their personal stuff is. And then you have problems.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:35] Yeah. It doesn’t just get blurred like in the bank account, but it gets blurred in your time, right? Like people look at it as, oh, this is costing me time and blah blah, blah. This is my personal time. I want to be doing this and that, as opposed to looking at it like, this is making me money. This is providing for my family. This is providing for my retirement. Right? So yeah, all depending on how you look at it. Which rolls us into takeaway number three, you can reprogram your belief systems.

 

Brian Persson: [00:16:01] They are not set in stone.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:03] No. It’s like building a muscle. You can put in the reps to change your belief system.

 

Brian Persson: [00:16:07] Yeah, yeah. Like anything you can focus on what you need to change. And you can put in those little habits and those little changes and work on them every day. And eventually, just like building the muscle, you’ll either lift more weights or have a whole nother belief system that’s going to be much more workable for you.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:25] Yeah, and a lot of time it’s a lot about what you don’t know you don’t know. So there’s so much you probably don’t know when it comes to investing in real estate and building your wealth, but there are so many podcasts, books, networking places you can learn and you’re going to, so many light bulbs are going to go off and you’ll be like, oh, I didn’t know that. Oh, I didn’t know that.

 

Brian Persson: [00:16:43] Well, let’s dive into the phrase, you don’t know what you don’t know. So that’s a tricky one for people because you don’t, if you’re not in real estate right now, if you’re not an investor, you don’t know how to do real estate. But you do know that real estate investing exists.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:01] Correct.

 

Brian Persson: [00:17:02] Right. What you don’t know that you don’t know is things that you have never even heard of, or never even conceived as a possibility. Those things are where you’re, like you you can just superpower your belief system when you start hanging out amongst people who actually know things that you don’t know and can start teaching you things that you don’t know you don’t know. Then all of a sudden, your whole world opens up in a whole different possibility that never existed before.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:31] Right. Like, I’m sure we’ve shared this example many times, but when you came home one day and you said you’re done investing. And at that time, I can’t remember how many doors we had, but you’re like, I can’t handle anymore, I have enough, I’m stressed out. And I was like, not having it. So I signed you up for a networking group. You went there and you met this guy who told you, what did he tell you?

 

Brian Persson: [00:17:54] So we played this little game, and the game was to be, to answer the question on your name tag. And he was asking the question of like, what’s an appropriate amount of cash flow? Something along those lines, I can’t remember. It was years ago. But he just kind of flippantly said, you know, I think the appropriate amount of cash flow or like what my current trajectory is, is $25,000 a month in less than ten years. And I couldn’t even conceive $25,000 a month in passive income at that time and nevertheless, in ten years or less, you know. Maybe 25,000, in like 30 years, once all the properties are paid off and you have the 100 door scenario, right? In my head at that time, you need 100 doors to create that. He wasn’t going to have anywhere close to 100 doors. I can’t remember what his exact goal was, but it was, it was under 20 doors, if I remember correctly.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:49] Right. So that’s something you didn’t know you didn’t know.

 

Brian Persson: [00:18:52] No. I had no concept that, and the biggest concept out of that, what I got out of it, was that it was just a given to him. It was just like this casual comment he threw off in amongst this conversation of 4 or 5 different people. And it was the casualness that got me. Not necessarily the number, but it was like that, it is that casual to get to that number.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:15] That that easy for him, that comfortable.

 

Brian Persson: [00:19:17] Exactly. Yeah.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:18] And that there, one event changed your belief system.

 

Brian Persson: [00:19:22] 100%. Yeah. Yeah. We bought three more properties in the next year and a half after that, I think.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:29] Yeah, we sure did.

 

Brian Persson: [00:19:31] But yeah, like, if I hadn’t heard that and I hadn’t understood how easy and casual it could be, for him anyway, which then opened up the possibility of it being easy and casual for me. And now all of a sudden, the burden of all the tenants I had to manage, all the properties I had to manage suddenly just disappeared. Because in the course of an instant, he injected a whole new belief system into me. Without even knowing it. I doubt to this day, he even knows that.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:59] Yeah. Well, when you see him next, you should thank him.

 

Brian Persson: [00:20:01] Yeah.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:01] Or I will thank him. Yeah. So it’s, sometimes it’s about unlearning what you currently know. Not necessarily learning more and more and more. Sometimes just taking what you know that doesn’t work for you and unlearn it and move forward with something that does work.

 

Brian Persson: [00:20:18] 100%. You got to, I think, I think most of the challenge with belief systems is actually unlearning your current belief system so that you have space for a new belief system. My, both of our parents are great examples of that in different ways. Like for example, my mom will still talk about how businesses are dangerous and like and don’t hear me wrong, you do have to work hard at a business, and a lot of them do fail. But she will not, like her level of comfort towards me, and the fact that we run a business, is like very, very uncomfortable for her because 40 years ago, her father lost a business and it did devastate the family. But after that, her belief system was like rock solid in that businesses fail all the time and they destroy families.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:09] I’m not sure you realize you turned a year older yesterday. I think it’s been more than 40 years since your grandpa lost his business.

 

Brian Persson: [00:21:14] I have no idea, but it is a long time.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:15] I think it’s like 50 or 60 by now.

 

Brian Persson: [00:21:17] Even if it was five years, even if it was five years ago, it’s still like this thing from the past that is now influencing your future, right? So your belief system is always from your past. And my point is that, like sometimes you just need to unlearn what you already have learned. So my mom learned that businesses are dangerous.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:38] And she lives in fear of it every day. Here, like 60 years later, still in fear of it for, and not her, she wouldn’t, and no risk. She’s not gonna take any risk. And she’s even, like, sensitive to the fact that we’re entrepreneurs because of it.

 

Brian Persson: [00:21:53] And I’m not encouraging my parents to go out and start a business.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:56] They’re retired.

 

Brian Persson: [00:21:57] They’re retired. Yeah. But the point is, is that, you know, her belief system got written in stone on that day. And if you don’t review your belief system and then try to unlearn what you might have learned that is not working for you, then you’re going to get stuck with the same belief system, the one like in the example of my mom where things are dangerous, right? Business is dangerous. Because one thing happened to me in the past.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:23] And it didn’t even happen to her. It happened to her dad, right? So. Yeah. It’s interesting. Again, passed down from generation to generation.

 

Brian Persson: [00:22:31] Yeah. And like, your mom is another great example. You know, grew up in a very poor family. And to this day, like scrimps and saves and like, there’s money hidden all over the house and…

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:42] Yeah.

 

Brian Persson: [00:22:43] Does it exactly the way that her parents did it because that’s where she’s living. She’s living in that I have no money scenario.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:50] Yeah. Yeah. Doesn’t want to waste anything.

 

Brian Persson: [00:22:53] No, no, we can’t even throw out an old chair.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:00] Even if we’re replacing it.

 

Brian Persson: [00:23:01] We do. And we do. Yeah. And that upsets her. Right?

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:04] Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, definitely reprogram your belief systems. So that’s going to, I’m just going to recap our takeaways here. Number one, your belief system was given to you not created by you. You should review your belief systems frequently. And number three, you can reprogram your belief systems. Our next topic is going to be on how small, consistent habits can shape your wealth. Don’t forget to go to DiscoverLifeByDesign.ca/wealth and download Three Mistakes That Keep High-Achieving Couples From Building Their Wealth, Freedom, and Living a Life They Love.

 

Brian Persson: [00:23:38] We release podcasts every two weeks. Be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app to journey with us and create your life by design.

 

Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:46] Thanks for listening to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian.