They ask the hard questions about how each partner views money and wealth, how far into the future the wealth is expected to manifest, how hands-on each partner wants to be, and which investing options a relationship can withstand in terms of work and initial capital output. Jessilyn and Brian talk about the many ways a couple can learn together, some without even setting foot outside the house, and why they’re important. They guide listeners to consider various real estate strategies such as fix and flip, hold and rent, renovate and refinance, turnkey, wholesaling, Airbnb, and more. Jessilyn and Brian share their lived experience and knowledge to help you and your partner lay the foundation for real estate investing success.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We support couples in achieving their wealth goals by sharing our journey of overcoming barriers to build our financial empire.
Brian Persson: [00:00:20] With our extensive personal experience and increasing demand from couples seeking alignment to invest confidently in real estate, we created the Riches, Relationships, and Real Estate program to help you achieve your goals.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:33] Today’s topic is about collaborative learning and how it lays the foundation for success. So we’re going to delve into getting educated in real estate together, which will help align your objectives and strategies. We all grew up with some form of understanding in the finance or lack thereof, and what that means. And when you get together with your partner, you may have come from very different backgrounds and have very different understandings. But when you’re going to choose to build your wealth and your portfolio together, you want to make sure you have the same understanding, strategies, objectives. I mean, if you look at our history, I grew up on a farm, I know we speak of this before, and it was kind of simple. You buy a house, you have your mortgage and you pay it off, and then you work hard to pay your bills and then you just kind of live. And that’s how I grew up.
Brian Persson: [00:01:25] Yeah. And farmers as, most people know, aren’t exactly the most money savvy of people. I have farmers in my family too. And listening to their financial conversations about how to keep the farm afloat is something. Yeah, but I grew up with an accountant for a father and a banker for a mum. So you would think that I was financially educated, but I don’t recall learning anything about financial education other than exactly what you learned. And that is buy a house, pay it off, which I think is what 99% of people out there hear. And that’s how they grew up.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:03] Yeah, I think it’s kind of the societal norm. So it doesn’t matter if you come from money or not, education or not, we all grow up thinking, okay, we got to buy a house, a car, you pay it off, and you just work hard to live. And there’s really not much past that. Not in the education systems, not from generation to generation.
Brian Persson: [00:02:20] But how do you, how does your house really, like, build you wealth? Because at the end of it, if you don’t have any savings, if you don’t have anything paying you back, which your house does not pay you back, it just takes money from you for your whole life effectively, how do you live past having retirement and no job? And where does your income come from? Right? You need something.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:42] You do. And we chose to go into the real estate world just based on the things we learn as we get a little older and our teenage years, 20s, 30s. But to delve into our first takeaway, define your objectives for investing in real estate. And there are many different reasons and objectives for investing in real estate. I know when we first hopped on that bus, ours was long-term wealth. We were looking to just build some wealth for long-term. We weren’t thinking currently with what we had. We were young, we had good careers, we made money, we knew we were going to build our career. So we were just like, hey, let’s get some real estate and have it for, you know, later in life.
Brian Persson: [00:03:22] Yeah, well, I think we’re a little bit more of the jump out of the plane and build the parachute on the way down, kind of people.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:30] Yes.
Brian Persson: [00:03:30] And part of that is I don’t even recall us thinking about long-term wealth. It was just real estate was a shiny object that we knew was a good investment. And we just jumped on to it. The, at the time, we were buying small condos so the impact to our, you know, our financials wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t like we were buying a house and losing our shorts on it. And so we just kind of jumped. But over time we figured out all the different strategies and objectives for investing in real estate. And we flip-flopped around a whole bunch of strategies in the early years, trying to sort out what exactly real estate meant to us. And it took a while to really define how we wanted to invest in real estate.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:16] Yeah, I know we definitely really thought long and hard about the property flipping, right? Because there was several times we were going to buy property just to flip it. And that’s your quick profits, which makes sense. It’s quick. You’re in, you’re out, you’re done. You got your money. But like, there are risks associated with that. There are time commitments associated with that. And after we really analyzed it, we were just like, no, that’s just not for us. We both had full-time careers, like that can be a full-time job renovating a home, especially if you want to be able to turn it around in a short time frame because that’s how you’re making your money. So I think that’s when we hopped more on the passive income side. So buy it, hold, rent kind of a concept.
Brian Persson: [00:04:58] Current and future passive income. So growing passive income into the future. But everybody’s different. I know we know people who, you know, they don’t quite have the careers that we had. They’re not able to, like, generate that kind of money that we were able to generate and put into real estate. So sometimes you have to do property flipping and there’s, you might want to flip a property just to build up your capital and build up your capital over time until you can really, like, get that engine started.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:29] And I mean, it’s always diversification, right? We were not just 100% real estate. We never have been and we never will be. We invest in multiple different avenues. So that was definitely, it’s part of our strategy now. Like you said in the beginning, it was just a shiny object, seemed like a good idea so we jumped on it. But I don’t think we’d ever say that it’s all real estate, like all or nothing, right? We believe in the combination of multiple things. So yeah, some quick steps to get there to determine your objectives for investing in real estate is define your timeline. So set short-term and long-term goals. As I’ve discussed in many podcasts, like my goal was I wanted a new property every two years. Now, I threw that out there kind of willy-nilly, if you will. I didn’t really have a rhyme or reason for why I did that, and I didn’t run any kind of numbers to figure out why I wanted that. It just seemed like a great idea at the time, but it worked and I stuck to it. So if nothing else, it was the concept and the goal that got us a property every two years up until we really decided to advance our real estate portfolio.
Brian Persson: [00:06:32] Mhm. One of the stories that I keep telling is about the first time I ever entered into like a true real estate networking room and I met a guy who was just like, oh yeah, you know, I’m on track to like have $25,000 passive income in about ten years. And it was just like casual conversation to him.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:51] That was, sorry, passive income per month.
Brian Persson: [00:06:52] Passive income. Yeah. Like through his real estate.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:54] But per month.
Brian Persson: [00:06:55] Per month. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah per month. But for him it was just this totally casual conversation. For me it was like blowing my mind because at that time that was more than even our good careers were making per month.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:07] Per month. Yes.
Brian Persson: [00:07:09] And so, you know, it was it was like, okay, now our objectives are changing and what I ended up doing is going home and saying, okay, given what we have right now in our real estate portfolio, how do we achieve that, what that guy’s got, and I reverse-engineered it. And over the years, what did we end up doing? We ended up selling all our condos, which were not as high performing, and ended up going into suited houses which were very high performing. So, you know, we changed. We changed over the course of ten years our objectives. And you might find out there in the audience that you will too.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:45] Oh yeah. And that’s like part of our steps here is like exploring your options, which we did. We explored a few options and as you said, you worked backwards. You took kind of the goals, what you wanted by, say, ten years from now. And then you worked it back to say, hey, what’s that going to take? Absolutely. No, those are definitely some interesting choices we went through when we decided to research and when we understood the magnitude of what we could make in real estate.
Brian Persson: [00:08:14] Yeah, yeah. And now our objectives are even different than they were about buying as many suited properties as we could. Now we’re looking for more location freedom. So we can’t really manage properties in a particular location if we’re not able to be in that location, if we’re like out of country or wherever we might be. And so we’re shifting some of our focus into where other people do the work, for example, like alternative investments. Yeah. And now our objectives are shifting again so that we’re still investing in real estate but we have like the freedom of location to get away from our actual, like the physical properties.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:54] Yeah, absolutely. So takeaway number two is to understand the ways to make money in real estate. Right? There’s, I mean, there’s multiple ways to make money. And we don’t use one, like we utilize as many ways we can. Right? And I think the biggest one at first for us I think was cash flow. And here in Alberta we make some pretty good cash flow comparative when we speak to our partners out in Toronto, out East, when like what is cash flow? Like they’re working for appreciation, right.
Brian Persson: [00:09:25] Yeah, yeah. Their properties out there are so expensive that it’s very difficult to make anything cash flow. But here, you know, our properties are worth a third of the price generally. And it’s not hard to make something cash flow. You can find lots that will cash flow.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:39] Yeah absolutely. But then on the flip side, when you look at the appreciation, their appreciation and their time frame, way quicker than ours.
Brian Persson: [00:09:47] Yeah, Alberta is very much boom and bust. So yeah, you do have to measure the markets. But for me, just as a cardinal rule across anywhere you invest, like no matter if you were investing in a foreign country or you were investing in the United States or Canada, wherever you’re putting your money, you should cash flow. Because, as we know, like recent events where the interest rates have gone sky high, if you are not already cash flowing in that property, then you’re going to go from a negative position to a very negative position. And with us, in our properties, they were all cash flowing well at the before the interest rate spikes. And they’re still cash flowing. They’re just not cash flowing as well. But we’re, the properties are still floating themselves and we’re still able to put money into our own pocket.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:10:34] Yeah yeah. And another great way to make money in real estate, of course, is the mortgage pay down. And, I mean, you pay down the mortgage and it could sit there, right? And you just have a smaller mortgage which gets paid off sooner. Or alternatively, when your mortgage comes up like we’ve done time and time again, is we refinance it, we pull that money out and we buy another property. Right? Another investment.
Brian Persson: [00:10:56] Yeah, actually, just coincidentally, one of my very first properties, the first property I bought personally for myself is actually being sold in about five days. And how many times have we pulled money out of that property over the last 20 years? I mean, we’ve done, we’ve recycled that dollar so many times by pulling the money out, paying down the mortgage, pulling the money out, paying down the mortgage. And what, probably about two thirds of that time was with tenants in it. So renters. So other people were paying for us to pull out that money and buy other things with it, right, buy other properties and mortgage paydown is huge in that sense.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:11:36] It is. Absolutely. And so are tax advantages.
Brian Persson: [00:11:39] Tax advantages. Massive. Yeah. Yeah. Having a highly advantageous tax scheme, and not illegal scheme, but just having a really good accountant–
Jessilyn Persson: [00:11:51] — a plan, we’ll call it a plan.
Brian Persson: [00:11:52] Yeah, but having a good accountant and having a good, all the different partners that you need, from bookkeepers to accountants to everybody else to try and manage the taxes in your portfolio, makes such a difference to the bottom line.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:08] Yeah. So, and of course, some of the steps we took to get into where we are today was we both read a lot of different books and articles. We listened to podcasts quite a bit when we did our road trips. There were certain podcasts that we loved. And then being surrounded, of course, by like-minded individuals when we joined the real estate investment group, the local one, and we constantly would make sure we were at their conferences, which weren’t just in Alberta. Right? We crossed into British Columbia, Toronto, Ontario, across cities because we wanted to see because of course, different markets, different rules, different regulations, different taxes. We just learned from others and just kept exploring and figuring out, okay, what is it like here? What would it look like there, and what are others doing and how are they taking advantage of the opportunities in real estate?
Brian Persson: [00:13:01] Yeah, you get a really wide variety of people around you and you, and all that can happen is that your mind opens up to all kinds of different ideas and ultimately, you will have more power behind your real estate portfolio by having met those people, by having those people around you, and even if they’re not involved in your real estate portfolio and they’re just sitting there supporting you in the rooms and having conversations, it makes such a difference to being involved with those people in those rooms.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:13:32] Yeah. And not just that. I mean, from those rooms, we learned of other opportunities, like when we went and took the money clinic, which was all around money mindset. And that is a huge player when it comes to any investing. It doesn’t matter what you’re going to invest in, if your mindset isn’t right, your investments aren’t going to go where you need to go. And so like, we took that course together and that was a huge eye opener, I think probably for both of us. But definitely it was something for me to just really understand where my past learnings, aka childhood, the things I just learned and just stuck with and carried them through into my adulthood, and didn’t realize it was unconsciously making some decisions that weren’t helping me and weren’t good for us and our portfolio. But once you kind of dig through those and you change them, then you grow and abundance is everywhere.
Brian Persson: [00:14:29] Yeah, and that’s what I was just going to get at, is in those rooms, that it’s full of abundance. Right? When you have real estate investors are a particular bunch in that they’re super social people generally. I think you just pretty well have to be because of all the different aspects of your portfolio. You’re just constantly networking and filling holes in your portfolio and and meeting new people and getting new ideas, but also just the abundance, right? You never come across a real estate investor that is really like, ah, you know, that’s just not, I’m just never gonna, that’s never for me. It’s not going to be in my wheelhouse. Like it’s like they can’t do it right? And a real estate investor will always be how do I do it? Or like, is it something I want to do? Not like I don’t have the money. Yeah. And so there’s just an abundance in those rooms and it kind of gets contagious. And you end up realizing that you have way more than you actually have, instead of looking at your life, you know, like you’re poor for some reason, which I think even people who do make good money sometimes have that view on their lives.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:37] Haha. Oh, I think you were speaking to me when you said that. I chuckle because you’re right. I made, we made really good money and had a real estate portfolio, great careers, and I was still saving for that rainy day, just like we did as a kid, right? I mean, farm kids didn’t have much money. And so I always kind of, I had that poverty mentality and it was just making sure even when I had money saved, I still had to save money to save money because it just, right? I had, when I shifted my mindset to realize where spent money makes you money, right, borrowed money, however you want to look at it. Or certain things you got to do to get ahead. I was holding myself back. So, yeah. No, very, very true.
Brian Persson: [00:16:23] And things like the money clinic really helped you out.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:16:25] Yes.
Brian Persson: [00:16:26] And if you can’t go out there and find new mentors that are going to help you take a different perspective, then you want to see your future? Just look at your parents and see how they’re spending their money, see how they’re saving their money, and that is where 99% of everybody out there is going to learn how to manage their money. So your future is written right in your parents. So just take a look at your parents and ask, hey, do I want to be like my parents? Is that the finances that I want to have in my life? And if not, get into those rooms, get into, get out there networking and start to start finding a new way. Right? Find those mentors.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:07] Yeah. And there’s so many free resources these days with podcasts and online and books, libraries. Like there’s no shortage of resources to get yourself educated. If you don’t think you can find a room, or you don’t think you have the capacity to get into a room right away, definitely start with our resources online.
Brian Persson: [00:17:27] Might have babysitting issues or something like that. So start with the podcasts. Yeah, but the rooms are very important. Yeah. We, not only did we educate ourselves a lot in those rooms, but we met future partners.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:40] Yes.
Brian Persson: [00:17:40] Future coaches. You know, a lot of people that we still meet and talk to on a regular basis, are still in our lives, that are either we’re either doing business deals with or something involved in the wealth sphere, came from meeting people in those rooms.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:57] Yeah. And while in person, of course, is always better because there’s that aspect, if you’re in a situation where you can’t, maybe you live remote or you have kids and you can’t get sitting, like you were saying earlier, there’s also online networking, online platforms.
Brian Persson: [00:18:11] Yeah. Or switch it up. Your partner goes one month. You go the next month. Yeah.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:16] Yeah, absolutely. All right. We’ll move into takeaway number three which is decide which investment strategy will work for you and your partner. I mean there are a multitude of options out there. We have not done a few, we’ve explored a few and still chosen not to go into them. Like as we alluded to earlier, the fix and flip was just, we didn’t have the time and we didn’t want the stress of what that would look like with two full-time careers. But we have many friends and partners who’ve done it, and it worked very well for them.
Brian Persson: [00:18:48] Yeah. And sometimes if you really, really want to get into real estate and fix and flip might be the only way. It might be the only way for you to build capital and just really get yourself educated on it and get out there and do it.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:03] Yeah. And if you’re super, like, flexible with your lifestyle, I think that works for those who can physically move into the property and renovate it and live in there. I mean, a little harder for us with two kids and everything else we got going on, but it did, it does work for some individuals and some families. Another one that we explored more recently was Airbnb.
Brian Persson: [00:19:23] Yeah, a lot of people love Airbnb now, nowadays. I mean, you hear Airbnb and Vrbo and all those like all the time on the radio everywhere. And, they’re highly, highly profitable. But part of the reason why we didn’t go with it is because they’re also highly time consuming.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:19:41] Time consuming and one of the properties that we wanted to flip into an Airbnb was one of our condos, and it was the regulations. We weren’t allowed. So, I mean, make sure if you’re going to go into an Airbnb and it’s through a condo, check with your condo board before you go buy that condo, because they might be a hard no. And then you just, you have yourself, I don’t want to say stuck because you can buy or hold and rent it, but if that wasn’t your plan, that’s going to change your financial outlook for that piece.
Brian Persson: [00:20:09] But as an investment strategy, that’s a really good point. You should have multiple strategies for the same property, like have a A plan, have a B plan, have a C plan.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:19] We did because this is the one we just listed to sell. And it’s a third time having to list it just with the way the market’s been in Edmonton and we had it rented for years, and our plan B was to rent it out again if it wouldn’t sell. And then we considered the Airbnb until we realized condo board wouldn’t allow us. But like you said, we had options if it didn’t sell. And thankfully it did sell and closes next week. But again, we always had a backup and we ran the numbers for all of it to see what’s going to be effective and what it’s going to look like, and be prepared for that next move however it would have landed.
Brian Persson: [00:20:55] Yeah.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:56] Yeah, another one is wholesaling. That’s not, that’s something we haven’t ever dabbled into. But we know a lot of our friends who do it.
Brian Persson: [00:21:03] Yeah wholesaling is great. It’s a fantastic way to not spend a lot of cash and still be in the game of real estate. It does require a lot of time. And you pretty well have to be a fairly social person because you’re going to be constantly talking to people. You’re going to be constantly talking to people who are wanting to sell their house to you, and you’re going to be constantly talking to people who want to buy that house that the person is selling. So a great, great opportunity for anyone out there if you don’t have a lot of cash, want to get into real estate, you want to build up your capital. Wholesaling is a great way to do it.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:38] Yeah, absolutely. And one of our favorites the BRRR. So the Buy, Renovate, Refinance and Rent. And that’s what we did with almost, I think all our houses that we suited, is we bought it first and then we renovated, got the basement suited, then we refinanced, pulled the money out to buy our next property. But then we hold, we hold and rent it out.
Brian Persson: [00:21:59] Yeah, only one property did we not do that where we bought it exactly as it was. But even then that BRRR – that B R R R – is just going to be, what is that, ten years down the road. So we’re just refinancing it ten years down the road where we bought it exactly as it is. Cash flow great. But then it was sort of a delayed BRRR program. So I think, I think that’s really where our go to is. We love that because you don’t have to buy the property for the full price of the property. You end up pulling out money and end up being pulling out more money than you maybe have put into the property and buy it for less.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:39] Yeah. And there’s advantages to both. Like, so when we buy it and then renovate it, of course there’s a time there where you can’t, you’re not getting rent because it’s not rentable for probably about six months by the time you gut the basement and renovate it. And there’s costs. So you got to have not just the cost to buy the property, so the down payment for the mortgage, but then now you need the cost for your contractors and to maintain that for six months. But then when you refinance it, usually it’s worth a lot more than obviously what you originally bought it for. So you can pull a lot out. But on the flip side, when you buy turnkey like we did, you can rent it right away. It’s turnkey. Exactly. It’s already renovated. You don’t have to deal with any of that. You’re on it and running and you know exactly what’s, it’s predictable, very predictable.
Brian Persson: [00:23:26] There’s advantages to both. The disadvantage, probably the biggest disadvantage to the BRRR is that you do need a lot of capital, because you have to buy the property and have all the renovation costs with you to get it through to that point where you can refinance it. So yeah, if you don’t have the capital right now, go with a fix and flip, that’s a little bit less capital. And go with wholesaling if you have almost no capital.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:51] Yeah. And one of our other favorite strategies is to invest in real estate investment trusts.
Brian Persson: [00:23:58] Yeah. Private capital investments. And there’s so many different varieties of it. It’s probably the best way to diversify your portfolio. Because in one buy of a REIT, you could be buying fractional shares of properties across Canada, the United States, and other places. So right away you’re all, you’re in a single buy, you’re you’re going across not only different asset classes like commercial and residential, but you’re also going against different locations like Canada and the United States. So fantastic way to diversify your portfolio in like one sweep.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:34] Yeah. And I think you alluded to earlier, one thing we love about this strategy is it’s hands off, right? We don’t have to do the work and we can live anywhere.
Brian Persson: [00:24:44] Yeah, yeah. The disadvantage to the REIT is that you really have to do your homework. You want to make sure that the people behind the REIT know what they’re doing, that they have a track record, that they’re not going to lose your money for you. I don’t know about you guys, but if I was to, if I’m going to lose my money, I’d like to lose my money. I would like it to be my mistake, you know? And you and I have made so many mistakes in real estate. We’ve lost. We’ve lost our money, for sure. But at least it’s my education that I’m paying for. And I get to choose sort of the risk factor of it. So with a REIT, like homework, homework, homework, homework. Like get in there and get to know that REIT so that you know where your money is going. And you know that your money is going to be safe. Yeah. But great diversification technique.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:25:33] Absolutely. And so when you’re deciding which investment strategy will work for you, some of the steps to get there, one is join our program. I mean, part of our program, we have an adversity assessment. It’ll help you understand your resilience and readiness. That’s just one very, very tiny piece of our program that can help you understand the whole gamut of when it comes to real estate investing, where you and your partner sit when it comes to that. And of course, the educational piece.
Brian Persson: [00:25:56] Yeah. Tiny piece, but probably the most important piece. Because so many people, and like we started off with, we just wanted to invest in real estate. Shiny object, right? Like let’s buy the first thing we can possibly buy. So we bought a cheap condo, you know, in a not-so-great area of town. And we made it work and we made it cash flow. But the stress and the, all the stuff we had to deal with with that condo, I don’t think we would have gone back to, or we wouldn’t have chose that if we knew what was going on in that place in the first place.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:26:30] Probably not. It definitely helped us figure out our level of grit, which is one of the steps we recommend doing first is to determine your grit level. Right? Because yeah, like you said it, hindsight. Well, you know, we may not have bought that condo.
Brian Persson: [00:26:47] It built up some thick skin. Yeah, but the thing is, is that people invest into real estate in ways that they shouldn’t invest into real estate. They literally have no capacity to invest in the real estate the way that they invested into that real estate and they end up being miserable, or they end up like just pulling the plug at weird periods of time that lose them money.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:27:10] Oh yeah.
Brian Persson: [00:27:11] So to know what you’re capable of and to go through this adversity assessment is huge. Because if you start off on the wrong foot, you’re always going to be on the wrong foot in your real estate portfolio.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:27:23] Yeah, it’s hard to course correct because real estate is a long, long game. It’s not a short game. And so your course correction is, could be several years out.
Brian Persson: [00:27:33] Yeah. You’re going to spend a tremendous amount of effort trying to fix those errors and inside of trying to fix those errors, you’re also still trying to figure yourself out and what you want. So imagine like doing exploration of the soul versus like crappy tenants and all that coming together all at the same time. You just get it right to start. Do the adversity assessment. Figure out what kind of real estate you should invest in from the beginning, and be happy through the whole, your whole real estate investing career.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:28:03] Yeah. And another one of the steps in there is run the numbers. It sounds so simple, yet it’s amazing how many people don’t. They’re like, oh, this looks like a great idea. And they put a deposit down and they’re going in for the win. And then they realize they got to pay out of pocket to help subsidize the monthly costs of it. It’s like, well, did you run the numbers?
Brian Persson: [00:28:24] So running the numbers is great. But the problem with running the numbers is that most people don’t know how to run the numbers.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:28:30] Fair.
Brian Persson: [00:28:31] And this is where you need a coach or someone who’s already done it.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:28:34] Us?
Brian Persson: [00:28:34] Yeah, it could be. Every person I’ve coached has brought me their spreadsheet. Sometimes they didn’t have a spreadsheet. They kind of just like eyeballed their bank account. And when they actually put it down on a spreadsheet and gave it to me, almost 100% of the time, they were missing something about the portfolio. And they were maybe 100, 200, $300 short a month here or there. Because they didn’t account for it. They didn’t, either they didn’t think it was part of the actual deal or they completely just forgot about it. And so now they have this skewed version of what their portfolio should look like.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:29:11] Yeah. And it might not sound like much, like say, oh, it’s only a hundred bucks a month I got to pay out of pocket. Might sound fine right now in this time and space, but that will change. Costs go up as we’ve seen, interest rates go up, insurance goes up, and suddenly that 100 bucks is now 300 bucks. And it’s like, well, wait, this, I didn’t, you know, buy real estate to pay for it. It’s supposed to pay me.
Brian Persson: [00:29:37] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you gotta you gotta run those numbers and you gotta have them reviewed. I review numbers with you and even with all the experience I have, there are still some times where you point out stuff.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:29:50] Yeah, absolutely.
Brian Persson: [00:29:52] And you’re really not even involved in the real estate portfolio, but having that second set of eyes, no matter who it is, will just open you up to another perspective.
Jessilyn Persson: [00:30:01] Oh yeah, it’s kind of a, I think we use this with your dad as because he’s a very experienced accountant and because he’s so experienced, he’s at a much higher level. So when you ask him to explain something to you about taxes, to him, it’s like, well, it’s simple. You just do this. And we’re sitting there going, what? Right? Like he doesn’t get a more of a beginner’s level. And I think it’s the same thing when it comes to running your numbers. Like you do it so often and for so long, it just naturally falls in. And so there’s sometimes little hiccups that you don’t catch because it just passes your purview. So when someone else reviews it and asks well, what is this about? And you go to explain it and you’re like, oh, you just didn’t catch it, right? Yeah. So to recap our takeaways for today. First one is to define your objectives for investing in real estate. Second one, understand the ways to make money in real estate. And third, decide which investment strategy will work for you and your partner. Our next topic is going to be about the number one way to destroy your wealth. This is big.
Brian Persson: [00:31:07] We’ve talked a lot about how to build it, how to create it, how to get your partner on board. But we’ve really ignored the downsides of real estate and just investing in general with your partner. So we’re going to talk about the number one way to destroy your wealth. 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: [00:31:31] Thanks for listening to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts Jessilyn and Brian.