AMA - Alignment with your life partner

Today’s another AMA episode, ask me anything. Nicolas from Washington asks:

“If I may ask, how do you move things forward and get things accomplished without causing pain or hardships to those around you (in my case my wife) when they are in a slower lane?”

Nicolas, this is a great question. I understand that you’re currently trying to balance a full time job, self-care, family, friends and investing.

What you’re describing is a common problem. I can’t say that I do this perfectly. Some days I’ll be recording a show after my wife has gone to sleep. It’s a matter of choosing what to put in your calendar and aligning it with your goals.

The first word that comes to mind from your question is the word stress. It feels like you’re experiencing stress. My definition of stress is the gap that exists between expectation and reality. Stress lives in that gap. If there’s no gap, there can be no stress. Since there are only two variables, you’re choices are to focus on aligning expectations, or alter the reality. There’s not much else.

In the case of your wife, this is an exercise in determining how to involve your wife in the decision-making process around investing. The points of stress can be many:

1) It might be around the time required to manage an investment

2) It could be whether investing in this particular asset class is a safe investment.

3) Some people simply have no entrepreneurial genes within them. They don’t understand it. They think that business owners are pushy people and they would just rather go to their 9-5 government job and trust that the system will take care of them.

4) Maybe your wife has a belief system that investing is risky and the only safe thing is to keep your money in the bank.

I don’t know in your specific case where the disconnect is. But I will say that you need to invest time in gaining alignment with your wife. That is a process.

Sometimes a spouse says. I don’t understand all this real estate stuff. You can go ahead and do what you want as long as it doesn’t take time away from the family. Again, I don’t know your specific circumstance.

If there’s something that’s important to you, then you may simply want to ask her to make an investment in time to understand it enough so that you can both be aligned. You’re not asking for her to become immersed in it, not to make it her hobby or her passion. Maybe there something she’s into that is not your passion. Maybe she’s interested in lilac trees or quilting. You may want to reciprocate by showing genuine interest in something that’s important to her. Again, it’s not going to become your passion. You commit to understand it enough that you get a deeper understanding of her.

There’s no absolute right or wrong way to do this business. Some people are happy owning three vacation rentals that earn as much net income as a 10 unit apartment building. Others want to be active part owners in a portfolio of 100 apartments, and still others want to be passive investors in a portfolio of 1,000 apartments.