Financial Fortitude

Throughout all of that to support us. And we ended up going through 2020 and 2021 and somewhat rebuilding ourselves. And we couldn’t have done it without real estate behind us because real estate effectively paid the bills throughout 2020 and 2021 and allowed us to really recreate who we are.

Jessilyn Persson (01:07)
Yeah, I was out of a job come, I think, mid-October 2019 and then you gave your notice, what, three days shy of the world shutting down, which we didn’t plan for in terms of the pandemic. We didn’t anticipate that.

Brian Persson (01:27)
Just like, how do you not anticipate a pandemic coming? We didn’t really watch the news. That was one thing.

Jessilyn Persson (01:36)
It’s really true. We thought it was a bit of a joke. What people were doing with toilet paper, should be very specific, not the pandemic itself. yeah, and so then you gave your notice and three days later everything shut down and we’re like, okay, here we are. And while we were building a business with some of our partners, made it much harder because we were online as opposed to the events that we were supposed to be doing and all the in-person activities. And then of course, when you start any business, you usually make a lot of income off the hop. So

or real estate supported us to start building that and figuring out, what does this look like and what does it mean for our family?

Brian Persson (02:14)
Yeah, and we did a lot of personal development in that time too. So we, we both had the time freedom of no nine to five job anymore. ⁓ and we could build the business and take any extra time left over to build ourselves too. So there were, there was a lot of building in general, ⁓ across many, many different things. And that included the business and ourselves. without real estate to help us and support us and, and, ⁓ kind of, kind of carry us through that period.

we really would not have been able to do that. And it might’ve looked like a totally different picture over those two years.

Jessilyn Persson (02:50)
Oh, it absolutely would have. We would have had to find a job, one of us, if not both of us. But yeah, so rolling into our first takeaway here is I think financial fortitude, building safety nets into your investment plan. And I know we had that, maintaining emergency reserves specifically for, I mean, we can say property expenses, which is a…

an automatic for us, but then there’s things that you can’t predict like job loss, which we’ve had ⁓ pandemic, which we’ve all had illnesses, which I’ve had, right? These things that you don’t know they’re coming and, but they come and then it’s like, what do you do?

Brian Persson (03:35)
Yeah. And I always look back at real estate and go like, you know, real estate really didn’t pay us enough, ⁓ over the years. And then I look at like the, accounts and how much financial fortitude there is inside of the real estate. And I realized that it just looks like we’re broke on paper. It, we’re, really not broke. Like when, when you add up all the dollars and that, financial fortitude is what keeps us.

you know, sleeping well at night today. And it’s what carried us through the 2020 period when we needed to rebuild ourselves and we needed to pivot into that new ⁓ career and that new business building opportunity.

Jessilyn Persson (04:17)
Yeah. And I mean, when we talk about emergency reserves, obviously there are options. There’s straight out cash. ⁓ And then there’s the HELOC, right? The Home Equity Line of Credit, which we relied on through the pandemic. ⁓ And we have it on multiple properties just because that’s how we qualified. And of course they all have their benefits and disadvantages, but it worked in our favor.

in a time of need. And now of course we have them and we utilize them to buy more investments. So a little bit of a different strategy, but it’s still part of our strategy and we still have HELOCs, which we will always have, whether we’re carrying a balance or something is different, but we will always have them because we know we can rely on them in need.

Brian Persson (04:57)
Yeah, there’s two ways to think about a HELOCs when it comes to your financial fortitude. A lot of people say, you know, save three months of income in, or, know, if anything goes wrong, then you have that three months of income and sitting in a bank account somewhere. We like to sort of supercharge that what would normally be savings and we actually put it into our HELOC or, or effectively against our mortgage. So instead of having.

let’s just come up with a round number $10,000 sitting to the side in case of, you know, an emergency fund, we have $10,000 sitting on a HELOC where we put more and more money against that in, that ends up paying down the mortgage as well, saving us interest, but also creates that balance for a fund. The disadvantage to it is that you have to be very careful not to spend it. And, and as we know, ⁓

A lot of the world is in and people in the world are in great, like greatly higher levels of debt than they than it was 10 years or 20 years ago. And that’s, that can be a danger for a lot of people. So you gotta, you gotta account your free personality. You know, what, what’s my personality? Do I need to, do I need the cash or can I be responsible enough to have a large credit line as my rainy day or my emergency fund?

Jessilyn Persson (06:16)
Yeah, and that’s a lot to do also with risk tolerance, which you want to know between you and your partner, because one of you might be comfortable with debt and one of you may not. And if you’re not aligned, it can be detrimental.

Brian Persson (06:28)
Yeah. And then on top of that, you know, we also have insurance for many, different things just to make sure that neither one of us nor our kids are hard done by. So we have a few different types of life insurance. We have a disability and critical illness. We have even, even going all the way down to our tenant level, we have our tenants carry insurance as well, because that way the bill is not on us in order to

you know, deal with a flood in a basement or something like that. If it’s a tenant’s fault, then the tenant’s insurance can can take care of that.

Jessilyn Persson (07:05)
Absolutely. And then running what if scenarios. So for example, if a partner loses income for six months, and I think that this is a great one. I know so back in April of 2024, your contract ended, the one that you had. But we knew, I think we knew it was coming to an end. was a set timeline and I still had mine. And so we ran different situations, like if you had a full-time contract versus if I did, could we put you a part-time contract? I keep a full-time.

and then what would that look like and how much time would that give you to build up our business? And I mean, that’s the one we ended up running with ⁓ and it worked out for us, but we ran multiple scenarios before we actually made a decision on what worked best for us as a family.

Brian Persson (07:48)
Yeah. Yeah. And, and, ⁓ again, it goes back to personality and, and even more so the personality between you and your, your partner. Are your plans going to jive with your partner? Are they going to jive with, with you? You really got to think it, think it out holistically. You can’t think it out as in what would I do.

Jessilyn Persson (08:08)
Yeah. So second takeaway is designing a portfolio that can pivot. So you want to be agile. ⁓ And while we diversify, and I think we’ve talked about this, well, of course we have a love for ⁓ real estate. We have diversified on what type of real estate as well as ⁓ REITs and investments like that, where there are different investment levels. There’s different lengths. There’s different ⁓ rules around how liquid it is.

Brian Persson (08:36)
Yeah, diversification is honestly one of my core pillars of investing. ⁓ It’s pretty well the first thing I talk about with my clients. And it’s the first thing I think about when it comes to our investments. How well can we diversify both with how illiquid or liquid our investments are. Also, what are those investments? Are they public investments? Are they private investments? Are they investments under our control, like real estate? Are they investments under somebody else’s control, like a joint venture?

We kind of spread it out a fair bit so that we are never suffering in any one sector of our investment. But I would say that the large majority of our investments are in real estate where it’s under our control and we can understand what is going on in our own personal portfolio. As Warren Buffett says, know, put your eggs in one basket and watch that basket very, very carefully. That’s kind of our methodology as well.

Jessilyn Persson (09:35)
Right, right. And then also like in designing your portfolio, you want to have a location strategy, right? Investing in markets was not just strong rental demand and high influx of people, but economic diversity. And I know we hit a really big, I don’t know if a windfall is the right word here in Alberta over the last year or two, where we’ve had, think 200,000 over 200,000 people.

migrate into Alberta in the last year, which of course is great for… ⁓

Brian Persson (10:06)
Yeah,

and to qualify that into terms of percentage as a 4 % population increase per year, is insane, year after year. Yeah, so Alberta, for us, Alberta was a great place. also happen to be investing here, but that wasn’t the end all be all of it either. We’ve also put money into very different things like REITs where the real estate is across the country and across potentially even

Jessilyn Persson (10:15)
Yeah.

Brian Persson (10:34)
United States and other parts of the world. So if you actually added up sort of the number of places and the number of different things that we’ve invested into, it would be a little bit staggering actually, the diversity of what we’ve invested into. And sometimes it is just simply what you’re investing into. So like a REIT can, you know, check off 10 boxes with a single share if you want to really diversify your investments in that way.

Jessilyn Persson (11:05)
Yeah, and I know we look at when we say location strategy, ⁓ economic diversity. So here where we live is heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy government. I mean, yes, we have oil as well, but government specific, which we know they’ll always be jobs. So there’s always people coming in. There’s always going to be income. It supports the strategy of what we’re doing with buy and holds.

Brian Persson (11:27)
Yeah. And one of the, if you’re new into real estate and you, want to take a lesson from us, ⁓ which we’ve already learned that lesson from by your real estate investment far enough away that you cannot manage it. ⁓ that, that came from, ⁓ a, mentor of, of mine, Alfonso Quadra from, ⁓ the wealth genius group. And, that, that’s one of the things that he says. And the reason is because if you can’t.

manage it, it forces you to run your real estate like a business. And there are parts of our real estate portfolio, which are a little too close to home. And I actually still do manage simply because I cannot wrap my head around paying that amount of money for property management when they’re literally five or 10 minutes away. So, you know, manage some stuff if you, if you want to, but realize that one day you’re going to have to turn that real estate investment into a business.

And it might be better for you to just have it far enough away that you have, you’re forced into making it a business right from day one.

Jessilyn Persson (12:31)
Yeah, I know that’s some great advice. I know I’ve heard many people talk about the how they manage their own properties and then you start to hear their stories of how they haven’t increased rent in five years or They you know, they’ve got tenants that they just want to be nice and I’m like, ⁓ but nice isn’t business

Brian Persson (12:47)
Yeah. And to be clear, the properties that are close enough for me to manage, I do run them like a business. Yeah, you do. Yeah. They very much are. It’s just, I happen to have to drive to them every once in a while. I usually it’s to meet a contractor to facilitate some service that needs to go on. ⁓ yeah, the rents are raised appropriately and I outsource everything. I don’t fix toilets or anything like that anymore. And it’s, and

For those of you again, starting out, fixing toilets, even if you got the skills, it just might not be worth your time. You really, really wanna consider whether or not you should be doing that or you should be hiring that service out. If you can’t hire that service out, did you buy the right property and did you buy the right deal? That’s the next question I would ask.

Jessilyn Persson (13:34)
Absolutely. And then last, we want to roll into partnerships and practice. your partner, your husband, your wife, whatever that looks like, communication and having a long-term strategy. know we’ve spoken on several different podcast episodes about communication because it’s so key. It’s probably critical across everything here. ⁓ But you want to treat real estate as a shared life strategy, not just

and investment and you want to be on the same page about investing. And I know when we first started dating back in the day, we were definitely on the same page for investing in real estate, but we didn’t, we’re on the same page for the same plan. And we didn’t realize it of course, until like, I don’t know how many years later, eight, nine. ⁓ But slowly over time, we realized that we weren’t on the same plan and we got on the same page when it came to investing in real estate. And now we have these wonderful lofty goals and

and milestones we’ve reached. But when there’s individuals who are couples, I should say, who aren’t on the same page, we’ve watched several of our business partners and our friends who, one is hardcore believer and investor in real estate, and then their partner wants nothing to do with it.

Brian Persson (14:51)
Yeah, yeah. we, and we try to help those people out. In fact, I would say that, you know, previous to our actual business, we were investing in real estate and we were figuring out how we operated together and that, and the way that we operated together and the way that we communicated and the way that we got onto the same page together was really the genesis of our business itself. Yeah. Where we actually started to invite other people into our real estate investments. And we started to.

to work with other people through coaching or through investments to actually build their wealth and their future for that couple as well. And it really came down to us knowing that, we managed to get through all this. We managed to put pretty solid structure together under us. I wonder if we can replicate that for others. And then the actual business ⁓ was sort of born out of that.

Jessilyn Persson (15:48)
Yeah, absolutely. And we schedule and we always recommend this to all our clients, scheduling check-ins, whether they’re quarterly or annually. I know we just, we love real estate and business. So we talk about it more than quarterly. We probably talk about it every week or two. But we definitely meet yearly to go through our plans and our goals and what does that look like and what are we looking to achieve? And did we reach our goals from the previous year, that kind of a thing. And we spend quite a few hours.

People might be surprised, like we don’t just sit down for 30 minutes on our annual one. mean, weekly, yeah, it might be 15, 20 minute conversation. But on an annual basis, we’re probably two, three, sometimes five hours and not always on the same day we break it up depending on what we want to achieve and how we want to break that down.

Brian Persson (16:36)
Yeah, all said and done, I would say we’re somewhere between six and eight hours of yearly planning for the year. ⁓ too many people set yearly goals and they don’t actually review them or really think about them after they set them. And that’s a danger for you and your future because you have to set those yearly goals. Then you have to break them down into quarterly goals. And then you, just like we do, you need to review that every week. So whether you actually pull out your goals every week or

or not, you still need to be in conversation every week and figuring out whether or not you’re even moving forward. Nevermind, like, are you moving forward to your goals? Because life gets in the way and you will drift away from your goals and even away from any action if you don’t sit down with your partner and talk pretty well on a weekly basis.

Jessilyn Persson (17:28)
Yeah, and also want to know like if you’ve achieved your goals and if you didn’t, why? And it’s not necessarily why as in a failure. It might be why as in six months into the year, your guys’s direction shifted and it wasn’t as much of a priority and then you want to evaluate is it a priority now? And maybe that’s just something you chalk up to say, hey, this is not where we want to go. And I mean, life happens and it changes us and we shift our goals according to our

plans each year. We know year over year it’s not going to be consistently the same. I mean we have a strategy that we follow and where we want to get to. But there’s times things come in and we’re just like, I just don’t want to do that anymore. And you realize there’s other things you want to do in life that you could utilize that same time for.

Brian Persson (18:13)
Yeah. Yeah. and I mean, it can be intimidating to take that amount of time on a weekly, quarterly, and, ⁓ and yearly basis to just plan all that out. And just to, just to even find time to sit down and have those conversations. But the difference in your future wealth and then in your relationship itself is going to be night and day. If you can not, not if you can find the time, but if you intentionally set the time aside to have those conversations.

you will notice a drastic difference in your life and in your relationship.

Jessilyn Persson (18:47)
Yeah. And I know we’re talking here about, ⁓ your real estate investment plan, but when you’re sitting down to do your annual review and setting your goals, because we’re coming up here to the end of the year, ⁓ you want to make sure you have defined your individual and shared goals. And that could be for yourself, your income, your lifestyle, your legacy. So we have a real estate goal that’s joint and legacy. Our legacy is, is obviously the same for, well, our kiddos and future.

whatever that looks like for them. But we also have ⁓ independent goals, right? And I know over the last probably monthish, I started to evaluate what I’m working on, what plan you’re working on, what space that takes for me. so what can I include in 2026 or not? What do I need to remove and what can I include? And then I started booking ⁓ either sessions with a coach or training or whatever it was that I wanted, how I want to grow.

in 2026.

Brian Persson (19:47)
Yeah, we’re diverse, right? There’s the me who is just me inside of my own head. There’s the me that is interacting with my wife. There’s the me that’s interacting with the family and with friends and, you know, career and my own pursuits. You got to take all of that into account in order to properly set your goals. You can’t just say, what are our goals? And then have it end at that because you’ll find yourself somewhat trapped and maybe even

limited or not living up to your potential if you only set goals for the couple. So set all the different goals for yourself, for your couple, for your family, for your business, whatever that looks like.

Jessilyn Persson (20:30)
Yeah, and make sure your voice is heard and that you’re hearing your partner’s voice as well. And then you want to make sure you recognize when to bring in outside help because you know what, sitting down and having this conversation sounds great, but we understand that sometimes disagreements happen and not everyone knows how to navigate those. And that’s where we, I mean, we’ve learned, but we’ve trained how to work through it ourselves. But part of that training and learning was bringing in outside help, whether that’s financial advisor, therapist, coach, that.

looks different to everyone. And I know we’ve shared multiple times over the last couple of years in our podcast where you were done with buying more properties and I wasn’t. I didn’t know how to bring this big audacious idea from my head to yours. So I just booked you into the Real Estate Investment Network and that shifted your thought process and made a huge shift for our family and our real estate and our legacy.

but I had to bring in that help and you had to go to it, otherwise we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Yeah, there’s a lot of times I think we’re stuck in our own head and we’re like, well, I don’t want to bother you. I don’t want to bother my friend. They’re too busy. They got so much going on. But I promise you, your loved ones want to help you. They just don’t always know you need it.

Yeah, so let’s roll into our takeaways from what we discussed today. So I’d say building safety nets into the plan because those what ifs, those curve balls, those life moments, they happen unexpectedly. And if they happen and you’re not prepared, it’s a lot harder to deal with.