How to Create Realistic Real Estate Investment Goals as a Couple

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:56] Today’s topic is, how to create realistic real estate investment goals as a couple.

Brian Persson: [00:01:03] So why is this important? That’s the question we always ask, what we’re trying to output here is, why are these topics that we’re covering important? Personally, I think that realistic real estate goals are important because real estate can be very intimidating. We’ve encountered a lot of couples where they just don’t want to start. It’s so threatening to them that they literally will not start in real estate at all. It’s kind of one of those things where once you start lifting the weights, it gets easier and easier. I like to provide a framework that will give, basically, the realistic expectations. Where you just have to stretch yourself a little bit and not too far. Any thoughts on that?

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:50] Getting into real estate is always a big leap for most people, and generally it’s an individual leap. Not very often do you find a couple leaping in it together at the same time on the same page. If you set goals together for your real estate, you want to do it where you’re both actually involved in the conversation. It is actually both your goals, not one set of goals, and the other one’s just agreeing to agree or to be nice or not to create conflict. You want to make sure you’re both on the same page for building your wealth and building your real estate, it’ll make it so much easier. Regardless of whether both of you actually do the real estate part itself, but if you’re both on the same page and both invested from a goal set perspective, then you’re at least there. The other partner is a great support for you.

Brian Persson: [00:02:43] You’re always going to be in it together. It’s not like one partner is only doing the work. One of the most important things of joint venture partnerships, where you have a money partner and an active partner is that, even though the money partner is just bringing the money, they need to know how to run a proforma as well, because otherwise they don’t really understand what they’re investing in. The same thing goes with a couple. If the husband is doing all the work, the wife should still understand the real estate business because otherwise she doesn’t understand what their relationship has really got into and vice versa. Someone might actually be doing ‘boots on the ground’, but both of you should understand what you’re getting into.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:27] Absolutely. It impacts both of you in the end, regardless of who’s doing the legwork and who’s maybe more the support. Whether it’s your finances impacted, emotionally, physically, if your partner’s got into real estate and something went sideways, your partner’s going to feel the stress of that and that stress comes home. So regardless of who’s doing what in the business of real estate, there is an absolute impact felt, seen, heard holistically for your family.

Brian Persson: [00:03:54] That’s one of the things we actually teach a lot of our couples, is something we call the ‘sleep at night factor’ where, what can you invest in that is going to help you sleep at night? Are you going to invest in something that is going to keep you worried and up at night? Or are you going to invest in something that you’re more confident in and makes you feel good and you understand it as an investment?

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:16] Real estate, as we’ve mentioned before, is a vast field. There are so many different ways to invest in it, and there is something in real estate that can work for everyone. But they need to explore those options before they jump in with both feet on any one option to say, this is my game. Because it may not be if you have not explored every avenue of what that investment will take from you physically, financially, mentally, as opposed to other options that are on the table. So make sure to consider your options before you just go and choose an option. I wouldn’t do it blindly.

Brian Persson: [00:04:49] One of the last reasons that I think creating realistic real estate investment goals is, we encounter a lot of couples where they say, I’m going to have $50 million of real estate, and they haven’t bought their first property yet. It’s like, do you have $1 of real estate yet? How do you know what $50 million of real estate really looks like? So a realistic goal would maybe get them to their first million.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:16] Or their first property.

Brian Persson: [00:05:18] Nowadays, two properties is $1 million, even here in Edmonton where it’s super cheap. Canada standards, anyway. But people have these really, really lofty goals that are so big that they don’t even know where to get started and they end up just stalling out right from the beginning.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:05:35] Whether your goal is 100 doors or $50 million, no, start one. Start with one door, one property, $1 million, however that looks. But it’s kind of stepping stones. Once you have that, now you have a little bit of experience under your belt to be like, do I really want 100 doors? Do I want this kind of 100 doors? Do I have the mentality, the financial ability, the physical ability to do that 100 doors? The first one is achievable. Trying to do 100 off the start, you will fail.

Brian Persson: [00:06:11] You might even find out at the first one that it’s not your thing. You just need to give your money to somebody else and have them do the real estate for you. That might be your game. But that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. If you get unrealistic, 100 doors is not unrealistic. It’s unrealistic if you don’t have anything, any doors at all right now. Just get those first few goals in there that are really realistic and are just going to stretch you enough that it’s not going to break you. It’s just going to stretch you.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:06:44] Absolutely. So to create your realistic real estate investment goals with your partner, first takeaway is to start with the end in mind.

Brian Persson: [00:06:54] Why are you investing in real estate at all? Why do you want to be wealthy? That’s the end.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:00] Why do you want to be wealthy, and what does that look like for you? There are different levels of wealth. I know we note the first one is security. Savings, rainy day funds, you can pay all your bills. That’s the level that I find most people strive towards, is what they would call wealth. That’s the first level. The second one is where you can cover all your expenses with passive income.

Brian Persson: [00:07:28] Real estate literally pays for your life.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:07:29] That is a pretty big goal. You got to start with that one door to be able to get to that goal. Then the third level of wealth is, you have complete time and money freedom.

Brian Persson: [00:07:42] Just to give some examples of real life scenarios around these three levels of wealth, we’ve experienced, basically, two of them already. We’re working on the third one, of complete time freedom. I don’t know if we’ll ever do that because we just enjoy what we do.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:01] Oh no, we’ll have complete time freedom, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to continue to coach and work with people, because we love that.

Brian Persson: [00:08:08] From the outside perspective, it might look like we’re still working fairly good.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:08:14] But it’s our time. It’s a choice of what we’re doing with it, as opposed to being cuffed to that 9 to 5, or having a boss or something can just crush our day because we don’t have full control and management of it.

Brian Persson: [00:08:25] Exactly. So for us, the level one of securities and savings and rainy day funds, we achieved that quite a long time ago. What it looked like to us was actually shuffling a lot of our household expenses into the real estate budget. A significant portion of our mortgage was paid by our real estate funds, our real estate portfolio. We were able to draw on the real estate if we needed to. Say, we needed to buy a car, we could buy the car out of the real estate investment rather than out of our own pockets. It was very advantageous because we could use some of the real estate which was generating money on the side instead of our own hard earned dollars. Then in 2020 and 2021, we were actually able to use our real estate to, basically, fund our life so that we could go work on a business and not worry about whether or not we’re going to have to go broke any month because we can’t pay our bills. We had the real estate to fund us for almost two years in that sense, so that we could have the freedom to work on that business.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:09:37] Absolutely. When you start with the end in mind, the end in mind might be the third option we mentioned about wealth, where you have complete time and money freedom. But remember, for the year you’re in, 2025 which we’re just starting here, the end in mind is not going to come by the end of this year. This is where we’re saying, that could be your end goal, your family goal, then you got to break that down into what that’s going to look like, what it’s going to take for you to get there. Then from there, you’ll pick a goal for 2025 to help those stepping stones to get to your complete time and money freedom.

Brian Persson: [00:10:16] Really, we’re listing out these levels of wealth so that you can place yourself in where you are right now. Maybe you already have real estate, and maybe it already is generating some security for you. You’re not aiming for level one, you’re maybe aiming for level two or level three. But if you don’t have anything to start right now, well then a great place to start is level one. Have real estate as your future wealth, as a backup plan for any kind of life’s mishaps and disasters that happen and are going to happen. Then maybe real estate can take you on a nice vacation here and there. Then as you get level one under your belt, then move up to level two. Then as you get level two, move up to level three.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:11:03] Yeah, absolutely. I think part of that rolled into our takeaway number two, which is to take inventory of what you have. Like you said, if you’re already in real estate you might not be starting at the wealth level one, you might be in two or moving into three. But when you’re taking inventory of what you have, you want to figure out, what do you have? Not just asset wise, finances, but your skill capability. What you currently can make money at, what you can possibly make money at in the future based on your skill sets. Of course when I say ‘you’, I mean the collective ‘you’, your family, your partner. Time, how much time do you currently have with the work you’re doing, with the work your partner is doing, and where can you maybe shift some of that time and utilize it for other income streams and end-goal building activities?

Brian Persson: [00:11:51] Part of taking inventory, as well, is just your desire for it. Some people are good with the slow game, building real estate over 20 years. Some people want to do it right now, they want it in the next couple of years. You got to take inventory of how much fire is burning in your belly towards that. Do you have the stamina and the time and the money to actually fund that quick ascent? There’s a lot of things to consider when you first start in real estate. We encounter people who have lofty goals, and they really have done no inventory taking of their own personal life. Things like, I want to save $1 million in three years. They have a struggling business, they don’t want to use debt to actually buy the real estate, they want to buy the houses with cash.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:12:46] But they don’t have any cash in the bank.

Brian Persson: [00:12:49] So they have all these preconceived notions of how they’re going to go about doing it. We have to kind of reverse engineer their plan to show them, you have to shift some things here if you’re actually going to want to achieve this. More often than not, they realize that they don’t want to shift anything, and so they have to change the plan. It ends up becoming a ten year plan rather than a three year plan or something like that.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:13:14] You made a good point about, do you have the stamina if you want this big real estate portfolio. In a short time frame, do you have the stamina to send to build that? But also consider, do you have the stamina to maintain that once you’ve got it?

Brian Persson: [00:13:27] Real estate takes grit. It does take grit. That’s why we teach the ‘sleep at night factor’, that’s where your personal grit level comes in and teaches you about what you’re capable of investing into when it comes to real estate investments.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:13:44] We really strongly advise working with your partner on this to see what your partner’s strengths are as well. Because I know when we first jumped into real estate, and I would say we jumped. We were just like, this is real estate. This is great. We’re going to do it all, both of us. It took some lessons and maneuvering to realize, no, you’re going to manage our portfolio. That is not meant for my personality. But off the hop, how much energy did I expend trying to learn it, figuring out I had to figure it out, understanding it, and then the emotions that came when things happened, and how it maybe bothered me or stressed me out versus you. It wasn’t until years later that we-well, we knew pretty soon off the hop, within the first year, I was not meant to be the landlord. But still, through that transgression of building our real estate portfolio, we are still working on, okay, what am I going to study and work on versus what are you going to study and work on and learn when it comes to the real estate, the business? Plus don’t forget, we both have full time jobs. We have two young boys, a household, there’s a lot. If one of the partners decides they’re going to take it all on, it’s going to overwhelm and shut them down at some point. They’re going to get sick.

Brian Persson: [00:14:58] Potentially, yeah.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:14:59] It’s just too much to manage everything. But if you split it up based on, firstly, your strengths, your skill set and also your passion. Maybe you don’t know a lot about real estate, but you have a strong passion and you want to learn it. Absolutely pick it up. But if you’re not really interested in, say, the Landlord Tenancy Act, then that probably should go to the partner that has more of a style to acknowledge and accept and understand that.

Brian Persson: [00:15:27] Or outsource it, get property management. Early on we property managed, and even to this day 15 years later, it’s very clear that you should not be the property manager.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:15:42] Absolutely, that’s okay. Once you have figured out the end in mind, your goal is, what that’s going to look like and you’ve taken inventory, then that’s when you want to design a plan. Again, a plan can be big. If your end goal is, you want to be 100% financed by your real estate, everything’s covered by your passive income in, let’s say, ten years. Okay, that’s your big plan. Then you take inventory of everything you’ve got and you break it down and you know it’s going to take ten years to build that. Design a plan, but I wouldn’t recommend designing a ten year plan. I’d design a plan for this year. Because from there you are going to have a lot of ‘aha’ moments, lessons learned, what you liked, what you didn’t like, what your partner was okay with, what your partner wasn’t good with. From there, you’ll build your next plan and your next plan until, before you know it, you’re ten years and your fully funded by your real estate.

Brian Persson: [00:16:44] Exactly. We’ve learned that lesson, where our plans were a little bit too long. It’s very, very hard to grasp what that length of plan is actually going to do. Then you end up going through a year or two years, and all of a sudden you realize that you’re not achieving what you’ve wanted to achieve. You’re not entirely sure why, but you’re way behind the ball when it comes to the amount of time you’ve spent on it. I would encourage, as we do now, break it down into even smaller chunks than a year so that you know what you’re doing, in that month at least. That way you have a number of different tasks that you can accomplish in a particular month. As compared to, I’m going to do this over the course of a year. Then November rolls around and you have literally 30 days in December, which is a very busy time with Christmas and everything, to finish your entire plan. Don’t do that.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:17:42] We really encourage and support a 90 day action plan, which is broken down by week. Then each week you know what you’re doing. Each week in review, you can see if you’ve missed anything from the week before. If you need to push it into the next week, what from that week’s got to go. You can see how your time is shifting. It’s easier to see a miss in a week than it is to see 11 months of misses.

Brian Persson: [00:18:05] 100%. There’s psychology around the 90 day action plan. Humans, our brains basically work in 90 day cycles. We tend to have a problem remembering and actioning things out past 90 days. To have it in a 90 day cycle, that means that you largely can hold everything that you need to do in that 90 days inside your brain at one particular time without losing any of it.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:18:30] I mean, this is a 90 day plan to build your real estate, but there’s all kinds of life going on around you. Whether it be your kids, if you have another job, household things. Those all impact that 90 days, which is a short-ish time frame to relatively keep it all together in your head of what’s going on. 90 days makes it easy, whereas if you’re six months, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Also, if you’re in that 90 days and something does happen, maybe there was a flood, that’s going to take time out of your goals because now you’re working on that. If someone gets sick, if something happens to a relative, all those are hits to your time and your energy, and you need to be able to allow for that. If you’ve got a six month tight time and you don’t allow for any of that space for life, you’re not going to hit that six months. Then you’re just going to be so hard on yourself to think that you failed, when in reality, no life happened.

Brian Persson: [00:19:25] That’s why these should be realistic goals. Your life is going to come in, and you should be honest and truthful with yourself about how much time you can really put towards your real estate. We have a couple clients that want to do real estate and have extremely intensive jobs. They think that they’re going to manage their own portfolio. It’s just totally unrealistic. It takes us a long time to convince these people, because they are high achievers. They’re like us, and we’ve ran into these traps too, where we take on way too much. We’re totally unrealistic with what we’re taking on, and all of a sudden there’s no time in the day for anything. Things start to lag behind. So you got to be very realistic about how much time you can actually take on towards your real estate portfolio.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:20:18] Absolutely. When you’re designing your plan, we recommend, sit down with your partner, review, meet and revise frequently. We say weekly, just book a reoccurring meeting in your calendar every week where that time is already set aside for you to review what’s going on, whether it’s good or bad. If it’s good, celebrate. If it’s bad, adjust your goals and your plan accordingly to accommodate what happened.

Brian Persson: [00:20:45] That’s a big part of our teaching as well with our clients, is creating a scheduled communication plan and not letting communication go to chance. Hoping that you have enough time on a particular week to chat with your partner about how to build your wealth. It should be regular and put into the calendar so that it doesn’t ever stop the flow of that communication.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:09] You’re saying that for building your wealth, but we highly recommend doing that for all aspects of your life. Have one to talk about building your wealth, but keep that separate when you’re talking about your finances. Where are you at, and what does it look like from budgeting? Keep that a separate conversation from your relationship, how it’s going. Another one with the kids and what’s going on with them. If you decide I got 30 minutes put aside on Sunday at 10 a.m. to cover everything in the household, it’s not going to go well because you don’t have time in 30 minutes to cover all those topics. We recommend one topic, maybe two if they are sequenced or they kind of depend on each other.

Brian Persson: [00:21:49] Ideally, have the questions lined up in advance so that you don’t have to go, what should we talk about this week?

Jessilyn Persson: [00:21:56] Definitely, whatever you’re putting in your calendar, title it. ‘Financial discussion’, ‘wealth discussion’, ‘relationship review’.

Brian Persson: [00:22:03] Questions inside of those topics.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:05] Absolutely.

Brian Persson: [00:22:06] Be realistic about the time that you’re going to set for it. The conversation we have every Sunday morning with our kids is right after breakfast. We know that they’re sitting at the table, and we know they’ve had their breakfast, and we know that they’re not running around the house trying to ‘get their play on’ for the day.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:25] They’re still a little settled, we know their bellies are full and we know they want to run. They’re ready to go, so they will take that time to talk with us so they can go play.

Brian Persson: [00:22:35] For us, it’s in the afternoons. Usually we give our kids that hour of screen time, so we know when they have that hour of screen time in the afternoons, then they’re occupied.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:45] We’ll have quiet time.

Brian Persson: [00:22:46] They’re occupied, they’re quiet, and that’s a good chance for us to sit down and have our conversation. So be realistic and don’t try and just jam it into any moment of the day that you can.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:22:57] Yeah, absolutely. Whatever time you set aside, make sure it’s planned accordingly so your kids have something where they’re distracted so they’re not distracting you. Then of course, when you’re designing your plan, find partners, mentors, coaches, someone to help you accelerate your goal. Review what it is, talk it out with you. Someone who’s been there. They can help you see and understand if it’s realistic, what your goals are, what your expectations are, if it’s actually realistic. Then they can also help you get there a lot quicker than doing it on your own, if you’ve never done it.

Brian Persson: [00:23:32] They’ll point out the pitfalls, they’ll point out what works, they’ll point out what doesn’t work, and they’ll skip a lot of steps for you that you won’t have to learn the hard way.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:23:42] Yeah, absolutely. We have many stories of where we’ve done it alone versus getting a coach. In hindsight, it would have saved us so much money and time.

Brian Persson: [00:23:53] Oh, 100%. I can’t think of any situations that really stalled us, per se, in terms of like, oh my God, we lost a deal or oh my God, we lost all this money. But absolutely, our acceleration, how fast we were able to build our portfolio, would have been 10, 100 times faster if we had hired a coach earlier on in our career.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:15] That, in hindsight, would have made us more money.

Brian Persson: [00:24:17] Long run, made us more money. But that said, personally I’ve helped clients pull a deal out of the fire. Unfortunately, that’s a little bit of a burden of coaching, is that a lot of people come to you when they’re in the fire. But if they didn’t have me, then that deal would have got lost, they would have lost thousands of dollars. Find those coaches before you’re in the panic stage and you have dollars on the line that are about to go out the door.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:24:53] So to recap our takeaways from today is, the first one is to start with the end in mind when you’re creating your goals with your partner for real estate. The second one is take inventory of what you currently have. Lastly, design a plan to get you to where you want to go. In our next episode, we will be talking about the numerous possibilities in real estate. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Life by Design podcast.

Brian Persson: [00:25:19] Before you go, don’t forget to visit discoverlifebydesign.ca to book your discovery call and build your customized wealth strategy with us. We release new episodes every two weeks, so be sure to hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast app and join us on this journey to create your life by design.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:25:38] Thanks again for listening, it’s been a pleasure being with you today. We’re Jessilyn and Brian and we’ll see you next time.