Real Estate Investing & Work-Life Balance

Jessilyn (00:33)
Today we’re going to talk about real estate investing and work-life balance. In this episode, we’re going to explore our experiences with real estate investing and work-life balance because building wealth should feel attainable. So we’re going to unpack our experiences and the practical strategies we use so you can grow your portfolio, protect your time, and have your investments support the life you want to live. So I’m going to roll right into this because the whole concept of work-life balance has been…

in the media and around for quite a few years and I think that typical work-life balance is not actually achievable the way it’s perceived in the media. And I say that and I’ve had a lot of people approach me over the last couple years talking about work-life balance and it’s like, well actually there’s work that sometimes takes away part of your life. There’s times where there are stressful moments or deliverables do

or tenants calling or things you need to fix and you have to deal with it. So you balance what you’re doing in that moment. But then you know if you’ve worked extra time in a week or a month, you later take that time and put a little extra time into your family or your life. And you balance that in the moment as well.

So as long as you’re balancing what you’re doing in any kind of given moment or day, and don’t hold yourself rigid to life, work, balance, because if you’re sitting there going, I got a clock out at four o’clock, I can’t take any more calls for the rest of the day, I need life balance, and then a tenant calls, that’s not reality.

Brian (02:13)
Yeah, if you’re managing your own properties, it’s definitely not reality. So I guess that’s one of the things what we should define is what does sort of the general culture consider to be work-life balance? Is it nine to five and then you manage to leave your job at home or your job at your workplace? You know, what does it actually mean? In my opinion, think culturally, most people look at it as I work from nine to five, my job doesn’t follow me home, you know, I get to sit and…

eat supper with my family and watch Netflix later on. And you know, have my weekends completely free. I think that is what most people would consider to be a true work-life balance.

Jessilyn (02:54)
And I would agree, but I think that’s old school. If you look at how the times have changed, in one of my contracts that I’m working, I had a contractor join me and he came back and he said, you know, I’ve taken up pickleball. I’m like, that’s fantastic. He goes, yeah, it helps keep me healthy and I’ve lost 20 pounds. He goes, but it’s 10 a.m. on Tuesdays. I’m like, so? He goes, well, I gotta work. I’m like.

I don’t fully agree with that. mean, if you’re putting in, say you got to do 40 hours a week and you take two hours off from 10 till noon on a Tuesday, I personally don’t care if you want to make up that extra two hours in an evening, on a weekend, however it works for you. But that is balanced for him because he didn’t want to give up his pickleball and his lifestyle that was helping him for work.

Brian (03:47)
Yeah, which rolls right into our first kind of point here is like the inability of you to be flexible around your employment or your contracts, whatever that might look like. And that can have a big impact on how you might go about investing in real estate. Because if you have an inflexibility inside of your job, whatever that looks like, how do you then achieve more time to do real estate investing?

like ⁓ your fellow contractor there, he just didn’t see the way that he could arrange his time properly.

Jessilyn (04:23)
Yeah, and when I helped him, he was super excited, signed a contract, joined my team, no problem. ⁓

Brian (04:28)
Yeah, yeah, and one of the things that’s been going on in ⁓ some economists that you hear talking about is this thing called the gig economy. And they say that, you know, in the future, not too far in the future, everybody will be in a gig economy. So you won’t have ⁓ employment per se, or you won’t have like a contract. You will have a number of small gigs that you are stringing together throughout your…

career or throughout your employment, whatever that looks like. And if you can string together a whole bunch of gigs like that, then you definitely can control your time and you can work around, you know, the nine to five so that you can invest in real estate properly.

Jessilyn (05:12)
Interesting. I imagine though, stringing a few gigs together, there is some balance you got to find in there. I mean, we might call them boundaries, but like, if you’ve got five gigs, even if they’re smaller, the clients could be demanding depending on what deliverables are due and when. But again, it’s not like you could only do this for today because you got to take time off because you’ve worked too much. It’s a matter of

Okay, I’ve just spent two weeks solid working on client deliverables. I’m taking four days off, right?

Brian (05:47)
Yeah, yeah. And a gig lifestyle or that type of work does create more of a turned on environment where you are kind of always on. So maybe a gig happens later on in the day when you expect it to be off or your client contacts you. Now you have this attitude of like kind of always being turned on to your job. so how do you turn that off? And that’s where ⁓ my

sort of perception of work-life balance comes in and that’s all about just what are your intentions towards your life? What are your intentions towards your goals, your family, your career, and are you taking actions that are lining up with your intentions? So if your intentions are to be rich and wealthy, then you need to take actions that line up with rich and wealthy. And that might look like having a lifestyle where

your job is more connected to you than perhaps you want at that moment, but ultimately your intention is going to create future wealth where you could probably be completely turned off for long periods of time and not be connected to your job or any other career or business.

Jessilyn (07:03)
Right. So it’s almost like invest more upfront. And I don’t necessarily mean just financially, but I mean time and work. So eventually your money is, you’re working less for your money and your money’s working more for you. And so for the traditional lifestyle where people retired at 65, well, now maybe you’re retiring at 45 or 50.

Brian (07:26)
Yeah. Yeah. So like if your intention is to spend lots of time with your family and, and be home for supper and, have those evenings free, go for it. I got nothing against that, but also don’t complain about the flip side where your wealth is not growing as fast as you want. Your income is not growing as fast as you want. And, and perhaps all the things where the, the other guys who are working maybe 40 hours in a normal job, plus another 10 or 20 hours in a side job or on their real estate.

investments are seemingly getting ahead of you, you need to factor that in and say, this is the lifestyle I chose, so this is the lifestyle that it looks like. Exactly.

Jessilyn (08:07)
Yeah, you get what you put in.

Absolutely. And I think on the line of like the long flexible work hours, which rolls in with work from home boundaries, I think the pandemic really opened our eyes to show us what we can do working from home. Right. And I know the flexibility I have when we work from home is incredible because firstly, I save

on average two and a half hours a day when I have to be in the office. And I don’t mean just the commute and the parking. I mean getting ready, packing lunch, out what I’m wearing, getting myself ready for the day. And I’m like, in those two and a half hours that I don’t have to do when I work from home, I can add in more life balance. Meaning I now have time to go for more walks or meditation or working out or I can switch.

some of my meetings and attend things with our kids and take them to appointments and not have to stress out about leaving work early because I could book it in the middle of the day if that’s when the appointment was available.

Brian (09:16)
Yeah, five years in or after the pandemic now, I think we’re only just starting to get used to driving again. You now have to travel into the city occasionally. I’m in a number of different meetings that are in person, but there was a solid number of years after the pandemic where if we had to drive five minutes, we were like, oh my God, that’s too much effort.

Jessilyn (09:45)
We now appreciate those driving drives.

Brian (09:47)
But you’re absolutely right. It completely changed the way that people did business. Whereas probably previous to the pandemic, I would meet a lot of people for coffee. So I’d have to drive often into Edmonton, which is a 20 minute drive from our kind of bedroom community, and meet them for coffee for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, however long the coffee takes. And then you got to drive 20 minutes back. Well, now you’re an hour and a half to two hours in for one meeting.

I now try to, if it’s possible, jam three to four Zoom meetings in that same two-hour period where I normally would have had to drive wasted time, meet for coffee, productive time, and then drive again, more wasted time. Yeah. And even recently, some of the longer commutes where I have to take an Uber, I’m like, this is actually fantastic because guess what?

I get 20 to 30 minutes where I can work in the backseat of someone else’s car and on my way to a destination of an in-person meeting. So Uber and spending that little bit of extra money has ended up being actually a boon for us instead of me having to drive myself for its waste of time.

Jessilyn (11:01)
Right? so there’s definitely some great things that came out of learning to work from home. But with that came also some other things that I think many people had to figure out is the instant access when you’re at home. So to your computer, to your email. it’s like, so generally speaking, when you left the office, you shut the computer down, you didn’t see it again until the next morning. But now it’s so accessible that sometimes it’s hard to turn it off.

Brian (11:30)
Yeah, and that’s what we kind of talked about earlier. It’s like, what are your intentions? And if your intentions are to be rich and wealthy and have a good income, well, you might have to have a little bit more of a connected and turned on lifestyle where you are available a little bit more than you maybe prefer. But that’s the way it is. For me, we still manage some of our own properties in our local neighborhood. And my tenants are fantastic.

they don’t generally call me at all. So sometimes, in fact, just a few days ago it happened where a tenant called me and I’m like, well, that’s weird because this never happens. And we were mid conversation and I literally just like clipped the end of my sentence and picked up the phone because here I’m thinking like something bad’s going down at one of my properties. And there, you know, if it was, if there wasn’t an intention that was set in our relationship and in this family and the way that we wanted to build our wealth, you probably would have got really annoyed.

Jessilyn (12:28)
That is a great example. And I say that because, yes, this is where we emphasized be on the same page with your partner. Because I’m sure in the past, and many other people can relate, that if you’re in mid-conversation with your partner and suddenly he or she just picks up the phone and ignores you, that’s called anger. And I mean, now I get it. I’m like, yep, we know tenants are a priority. It’s part of our wealth.

But typical, typically people would be upset by that and I get it. But if you’re on the same page, then your partner shouldn’t get upset with you if you’re picking up a call from a tenant or from business, especially if it’s something you’re waiting on or you couldn’t expect. So make sure you’re on the same page with your partner.

Brian (13:15)
Yeah, you know that if I’m picking up the phone, you know, and I’m cutting my sentence off midway, ⁓ that I need to take this call and there’s something important going down.

Jessilyn (13:25)
yeah, we’re pretty good at monitoring our phones and we only answer them unless it’s critical or we know it’s like a tenant or business ⁓ or maybe my dad. But other than that, we don’t necessarily answer a phone, especially if we already had an intention set in that time space or say we’re having a conversation on financials or relationships or with the boys. Yes, be very intentional with your time.

Brian (13:49)
Yeah, and our two boys, they also understand it too. I think it was last week I also had to drive to a rental property after a soccer game because the tenant, a brand new tenant, unfortunately locked herself out.

Jessilyn (14:04)
It happens.

Brian (14:05)
And it was actually kind of funny because I’m sitting there and I’m chatting with the two tenants that are living in this property. you know, one of them was brand new. One of them was a very, very long-term tenant. So just making sure that they’re comfortable and they understand who their landlord is and that he’s a friendly guy and, you know, not out to get him. I make a lot of effort with my tenants in that way so that they know that, you know, I’m a real person too, right? And, but what they didn’t know was that my son was sitting in the car.

waiting for me after a soccer game. And I’m chatting for, it wasn’t very long, three or four minutes. And then I’m like, okay, I better go. Cause I got my son in my car and like their entire attitude like flipped on its head. And they’re like, my God, your son is in your car. Why is he in the car? Like we didn’t mean to be talking so long. It’s like, no, no, no, no. Like you don’t get it. Like this is not what I said, but like this is what my mind, where my mind went to is like, it’s okay because you don’t get it. I, that’s okay for our family. And that’s the way that our family operates. Cause

That’s what we have to do to get to where we want to get to.

Jessilyn (15:06)
Yep. No, that’s a great example. speaking of kids, I think another area where work-life balance can be impacted is the division of labor at home, lack of childcare, school activities. ⁓ And depending on how you have it set up in your household, generally, traditionally, what I find is that it falls to the moms to manage the household holistically, the school, making sure all the events.

And that can impact their work or ⁓ their ability to invest. But you can find a balance in there with your partner of that workload. Definitely makes life easier.

Brian (15:49)
Yeah, and we’ve had all kinds of different balances throughout history. ⁓ Previous to the pandemic, I was employed and I had a very flexible position where I could do drop-off and pick up and all the things in between. I could always sneak out of the office and grab a kid if he was sick or whatever it was. And you were deep into your project management career, so you were very often required to be downtown.

your hours were a little bit longer. So it worked out really, really well. And then as we’re rotating through the business after the pandemic, there was times when we were both home for, basically we were both home for almost two years together working on certain businesses. And then there was, you know, a shift of now how do we work with contracts when we’re both contracted inside of the same house and we got meetings together and they’re overrunning each other. And we’ve probably experienced just about every type of

scenario inside of the household.

Jessilyn (16:50)
Yeah, and I mean, every relationship is different. In ours, I still manage the household. I book everything, I take care of everything for the kids. You do the driving around, but you manage everything to do with real estate. Like we find a balance that works for us and then we both have contracts. So, I mean, both busy, both things we need to keep each other aware of. And that’s why we book our weekly meetings also, because with all that going on…

There’s just no way I can keep up with the real estate and what’s going on and you can keep up with the household and what’s going on. So we need that time to just share ideas and experiences and what happened and maybe make some decisions if that’s where we’re at ⁓ in that time.

Brian (17:31)
Yeah, and that’s one of the things that in our programs, especially the program for couples, we strongly push on that, is to have set and defined weekly meetings where we have one in particular for business, we have one for our relationship, we have one for the kids.

Jessilyn (17:52)
and one for our financials.

Brian (17:53)
Yeah, and one for our financials. So we have all these different set meetings throughout the week that allow us to discuss very specific topics so that we can actually cover the topic quickly, doesn’t take a lot of our time, and allows us to make sure that we’re on track for our goals and how we’re moving forward to a lot of this. So many conversations in some of the couples that we work with just happen by chance.

or by handstands or by default. And I mean, we were there years and years ago. was kind of like the kettle starts boiling over and all of a sudden, like you’re mad at your partner for something because like the, had just been going on too long and you let it boil over. That doesn’t happen very much anymore because everything is always aired pretty well every week. And it’s…

the other person’s responsibility to make sure that they are airing what they need to air.

Jessilyn (18:55)
Yeah. And when there is a duality of roles and you decide to split it, make sure you understand what your partner is going through because a lot of time we just do. We go, we do things, we get it done, but your partner may not be aware of what the other one is doing or the effort it takes to get it done. And then if we’re sitting there thinking, okay, well, what is he doing all day? Like he’s got all this time. Cause you understand what it takes.

for what he’s doing, it’s hard for your partner to appreciate the work that’s being done and the overload that it can cause if you have something come up in a certain situation and your partner, for example, has got to keep going and pushing through to get it done. And if you’re not aware or you don’t understand it, you’re just annoyed.

Brian (19:47)
Yeah, yeah, like even with us working out of the household, it’s very hard for me to see what you’re doing. It’s very hard for you to see what I’m doing. So you know that I’m managing the real estate when I run out of the house to to like manage the real estate. That’s very clear. Like I, you know, hey, see you later. I’m off to a rental property. I’ll be back in like an hour. Right. Yeah. But, you know, the viewing emails and all the other.

paperwork management, filing, that other stuff that goes on, talking with all the different professionals, that’s very invisible to you, right? And you have a whole world going on that is rather invisible to me. so we’re looking at this tip of the iceberg and thinking it’s the whole thing and not realizing that there’s 90 % of the iceberg and all the other work that has been going on below the surface there that we simply just don’t see.

we have this misconception of how much work actually goes into a particular task and to that particular outcome.

Jessilyn (20:52)
Absolutely. And just throwing it out there, it takes a lot more work to manage kids than people realize. I mean, it’s like, well, you’re just getting to school. You’re picking them up. No. There are report cards you have to review, school fees, field trips you have to sign off, waivers you got to go through, assignments and homework you got to help them. You got to run out for supplies. You got to make sure they’re eating properly and they got their snacks and they’re getting to their sports. And it just, doesn’t stop. You think it does, but then it’s like, well, here’s a hot lunch order.

now they need New Jersey’s and it is never ending, so please show your partner appreciation for taking care of the children and packing all that. But we’re gonna move on into some of the financial pressures when it comes to work-life balance and real estate investing and how sometimes those lines can be blurred.

Brian (21:44)
Yeah, the real blur is, it depends on how you do your real estate, I guess. But like for us, we invested fairly early and fairly uneducated when we first started investing. So some of our original properties are actually in our personal name still. And I remember early on, you ⁓ would see the two bank accounts sitting side by side and one of them would be flush with cash, the rental bank account.

And our other one was just our transactional monthly account. And it was often a lower balance. And you’re like, well, why don’t we use that money in the rental account? was like, uh-uh. Like, no, no. They might, those bank accounts might be sitting side by side together, but like that’s a business account and that’s a personal account. But the temptation and a lot of people I talk to of just using that extra money for what they want is very, very strong. And so the financial lines get blurred between

you know, what you should use your real estate money for, what you should use your real estate equity for. And the, I think one of the reasons that we’re so successful with real estate in the portfolio we have is that the lines are very black and white. Like the only reason money crosses one of those lines is for a very transactional reason. And it’s more often than not recorded and logged so that the transaction is known and it’s not like we’re just

transferring money in and out of certain accounts and into certain real estate portfolios and out.

Jessilyn (23:21)
Yeah, no, that’s a great point you make there. And I know we have a friend who is a real estate investor, and she’s also a bookkeeper by trade. And even she struggles with it. And it’s not a skill set thing. She absolutely knows how to do bookkeeping, and she knows how to do real estate investing. And it’s a mindset issue, right? It’s like, yes, there is money in there. And yes, technically, you can take it out. But what are the repercussions of taking that out?

and the implications like from a tax perspective, from how you used it versus if you need it because suddenly now a furnace went and you don’t have the funds that you thought you had. So it’s training, like you said, your mind right off the start to know the difference between personal and business money.

Brian (24:07)
Yeah, and specifically, you’re focused on the financial pressures there of what a lot of relationships and a lot of people experience. ⁓ In that particular case, our friend was not looking at the equity that she had on her property as a usable thing. Basically, a lot of us are trained by our parents, and the money mindset that we take forward with our

⁓ in life is often usually our parents money mindset and not even our own. Yeah. And so if you don’t understand that if you use debt to generate more assets, that’s a really good use of debt. And especially like absolutely those assets should pay you more than the debt that you are incurring. So that’s the mindset shift. Whereas if I remember a family vacation we were on a couple of years ago, we were chatting about

I think it was my mom and dad’s, what was it, 50th anniversary, I think? Yeah. They were talking about how they hadn’t had a mortgage in like 20 years. And my brother-in-law and my sister had a very, very low mortgage on a really nice big house, right? And I was like, well, what are you doing with that thing? That the rest of the equity, nothing. Like our goal is to pay off our mortgage. And somehow it came around to like us.

talking about our mortgages and we mentioned how much mortgage debt we had and it was like in the millions. And a lot of faces went green. You’re very uncomfortable with that much debt. Yeah. And for us, it was like, no, no, no, no, I want more. Like the more mortgage debt I have, if especially if I have someone else paying for that debt and I’m putting money in my pocket at the end of the month and I’m paying down

Jessilyn (25:41)
They were very uncomfortable.

Brian (26:01)
Principle, that is a fantastic use of my finances.

Jessilyn (26:05)
It’s a business debt that makes us money.

Brian (26:08)
But people can’t deal with those kind of financial pressures. They don’t look at it like ⁓ having multimillion dollars worth of debt and having someone else pay for that debt. They just look at it like, am that far in debt and they think it’s a hole they can’t ever climb out of.

Jessilyn (26:28)
Yeah, it’s an interesting perspective. And starting to wrap things up here a little bit, one more topic we want to really touch base on was guilt and unrealistic expectations. And that I think I’m very familiar with. had a lot of that. I think before we even had a big real estate portfolio, ⁓ it was going back to work after I had kids. I dealt with some severe guilt of wanting to be a working mom instead of just a stay-at-home mom.

And I had to work through that. But there’s guilt even after that. Like if you miss a kid’s last minute teacher lets you know that tomorrow is a reading day with your kid and it’s like, wow, that was less than 24 hours notice. How am I supposed to take that off work? It’s just sometimes not feasible for many parents or to drive if you’re downtown back to their school for 20 minutes of reading to go back downtown. And then we carry this guilt like, oh, I should be there with my son or I should be there reading. And it’s like, well, no, what are your priorities? What are your intentions?

And if you do that with your kiddos after school or on weekends, it’s okay if you’re missing some of those other events.

Brian (27:34)
Yeah, and goes back to, like you said, intention. And nowadays, like the whole reading leak and the ability to go and do different activities with our kids in schools, ⁓ we’ve worked long and hard to create that kind of style around our life. But we work through a lot of guilt. We’ve dealt with a lot of unrealistic expectations.

Yeah. know, the thinking that you can be the super mom and do all the work and do all the mom stuff and do everything in between. the reality is it’s just not realistic. There’s just too much. There’s not enough time in the day and there’s too many activities going on. So it will lead you to like burnout. You’ll just get kind of angry at life if your expectations are always misaligned.

Jessilyn (28:31)
You’ve

got to find some balance in there. And like I said, maybe you make up for it on the weekend or the evening or bring in grandpa to go read with him, right? Like you can share some of these joys of life with your children or someone else is also enjoying the experience like grandpa or grandma. And that gives you a little bit more space to be you in work or investing or whatever else you might need to do in your any given day.

Brian (28:58)
Yeah, and in general, if you want to manage your guilt, just set really strong expectations. And we’ve done that very well. We’ve set our expectations between each other and between what we want for our wealth and our careers and our kids fairly well. things will always have to be worked out and your expectations will change, but if they’re not communicated. So this has happened a couple of times in our relationship where

you’ve changed your expectations, but you didn’t communicate it to me and probably vice versa. Yeah, of course. But the whole point is that like if it’s uncommunicated, you know, it’s very clear in your head what the expectation is. And so sometimes we think we should be mind readers. And the reality is that it’s not very clear in my head what that expectation should be. So communicate, communicate, communicate. And once the expectation is communicated, it’s usually not a problem. The problem

Jessilyn (29:30)
definitely vice versa.

Brian (29:56)
comes in that blind spot of, know, ⁓ how was I supposed to know that I was, that this was the expectation and how was I supposed to fulfill this expectation when it was completely unknown?

Jessilyn (30:08)
Absolutely. So what is the most important takeaway from what we discussed today? For me, I’d say find balance in what you’re doing day to day and don’t focus so much on the work-life balance. Just make sure you’re balanced in whatever you’re doing at that moment.

Brian (30:23)
Yeah, for me, it’s just about setting your intentions and are your intentions and your actions lined up? Is the work-life balance that you have created in line with your ⁓ intentions? Are your goals in line with your intentions? Are you taking the actions towards those intentions? So get those intentions really clear and make sure all your actions are focused on them.

Jessilyn (30:51)
Thanks so much for tuning in. Listen for more real estate investing stories in the next episode of the Life By Design podcast.

Brian (30:57)
Before you go, don’t forget to visit weekendwealth.ca to take our quiz and discover what type of real estate investor you are. We release new episodes every two weeks, so be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favourite podcast app. Thank you for joining us on this journey to create your life by design.

Jessilyn (31:16)
Thanks again for listening. It’s been a pleasure being with you today.