Family is Your Foundation to Financial Freedom

Mike: Welcome back to the FlipNerd.com REI Classroom, where experts from across the real estate investing industry teach you quick lessons to take your business to the next level. Now, let’s meet today’s expert host.

Pete: Hey, guys. This is Pete Asmus, The TURNKEY Investor, and today I’m going to be The Family Investor. I am today’s host for the REI Classroom. Today, we’re going to be talking all about how family can be the foundation to financial freedom. So don’t go anywhere.

Mike: This REI Classroom real estate lesson is sponsored by theinvestormachine.com, FlipNerd’s private investor coaching program and your blueprint to investing success.

Pete: All right, guys. Hey. There we are again. Man, I keep looking at the blue light over here thinking that I’m looking at you guys, and I know I’ve got to be like looking right off of your shoulder. So I apologize for that. All right? But I’m so pumped about today’s episode, and I’m promising you, I’m going to try everything I can to keep this thing at like four to five minutes and not go crazy-long. But I have somebody helping me that will stick her hand up and go, “Hey,” if I go too crazy. Okay?
I’m really excited about this one, because to me, this is really what I’ve based my whole life off of. When my son was five years old, he got brain cancer. I was traveling around the country at that time, and I was building up this pool company, I was the president of it, and I was killing it. I was doing really well. But I was always gone. I wasn’t around my family at all. To me, it was just about making money. It was about financial success.
When my son got cancer, it shut down my whole life. I mean, it completely made me inact- . . . I just couldn’t work. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t do anything. So because of that, I lost the job that I had at the time, because it’s kind of hard to be a salesperson if you’re not able to do any sales. So because of that, I think it was a really awesome thing that happened to me. As bad as all of these things were, they shifted my views on everything. By me coming back, I ended up shifting the way I looked at how I wanted my life to be managed.
I started realizing that there were so many people out there that talked about how they missed their time with their family. You’d always hear like, “Don’t miss this time. It’s going to go by fast. This is going to happen. This is going to happen.” I realized that I was playing right into the whole cats in the cradle thing. I was never home, I was always gone, and I was building this lifestyle for my family that I was never there for. It was like, “Well, this doesn’t really make sense. How are you creating this great life for your family, but you’re never part of it? They’re going and doing things, but they don’t know you.” I couldn’t handle that anymore.
So when this happened with my son, I made a big shift. Now, because of this shift . . . It’s funny. I was talking to a few investors a couple weeks ago and I said, “I’m not as successful as I want to be,” and they go, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, because I really built my whole platform around my family.” I mean, if you’ve ever met me, if you ever meet me, if it’s in California, typically, you’re going to meet my family when it happens. If it’s somewhere they can drive, they come with me. I bring them everywhere with me. The reason I do that is because I want to be connected with them. I don’t ever want them to be separated, and it does a few things.
By them being around me all the time, my girls are learning all about real estate. My wife is involved in the whole process. She can completely spit what we do. It’s absolutely nuts when I hear her start talking about real estate and everything, and it connects us as a family. By doing that, it allows me now, instead of me being gone and building this financial freedom without them, now I’m building it with them.
That was the point that the investors had to me. They said, “I can’t believe you think that you’re not successful, when all we ever do is see you with your family everywhere. You have the life that you wanted. How are you thinking it’s not successful?” To me, it’s because when I was a kid, I envisioned, “I’m going to have five boats, and this and that, and a plane,” and all these materialistic things.
It’s not really until we have family that we really understand what is so important about life. It’s family. It’s about creating an environment that you can do things with them. So when they said that, all of a sudden I realized that I had created the life I wanted to four years ago.” I mean, from a financial standpoint, I wasn’t able to do everything that I can do at this point, but I was with my family all the time.
At that moment, I changed and I began including my family in everything. I know that that can be hard. A lot of times, our spouses may not really identify with what we’re doing. I think that to really kind of pull punches here and go, “Look. I’m going to call a spade a spade,” typically if your spouse doesn’t believe in what you’re doing, it’s because they’ve had a bad experience. Typically, if it’s your spouse, it’s going to be with you.
That’s hard to say, but there’s a lot of us and I was included where I was constantly, “I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do this,” to, “I’m going to do it” so much that your spouse starts to go, “Look. You’re not going to do anything, and just I don’t really believe it anymore.” So if you have that spouse, here’s what needs to happen. It needs to be you. You need to step up and prove to them how serious you are about doing this. You need to step up and create that connection with them. Get them involved. Bring them with you.
If you’re going to go and look at properties, bring your whole . . . I bring my whole family. I have videos of my girls walking through jacked up properties that we’re going to tear apart and rebuild again. If you include your family, you’re not going to hear, “You were gone all day.” You’re not going to hear, “You don’t care about us.” You’re not going to hear all these different things, because they’re with you. They’re involved. They’re engaged in that life that you’re truly building, but they’re building it with you.
You know? It’s weird. To get really personal, before I included my wife in what we were doing, we started growing distant and I didn’t really want to talk to her about certain things. Because it’s like, man, she didn’t understand and I didn’t want to have to like for 40 minutes explain the background behind the statement I wanted to make. I just wanted to make the two-second statement and have her understand. But because she didn’t do anything with me, she couldn’t do that. So it started to cause this separation and because of that, we started to fight more. That’s weird, right?
I know it’s hard for us guys to understand. But when women aren’t paid attention to, they tend to feel like we don’t care about them and they start to freak out, and get upset. Then, you have conflict within the house, and when you have conflict within the house, it becomes a lot more challenging to be in a good mood out when you’re raising money, or when you’re building relationships, or when you’re creating connections. Because you have this challenge at home, it may cause you to go home early and miss an opportunity.
That’s why I’m saying, when you bring your family into everything that you’re doing, everything that you’re doing becomes more financially secure. Your spouse cares about it, because they’re involved in it. They want you to go out. They want to go out and stay out later. You need new clothes to go to this event? They’re down with that, because they’re getting new clothes to go to that event too. So it’s not like it’s always just about you getting something and them not. By us including everybody, we allow them to be part of this, take part in it, and help create their own future as well.
In addition, when I include my daughters in this and my son as he gets older, I’m giving them a foundation to build from. I’m showing them how to negotiate, how to create money. How to create it, not make it, and there’s a big difference. When you make money, that’s an hourly thing. When you create money, that’s an infinite thing.
You can create as much as you want, as long as you create it the right way and you’re focused. It comes down to, again, going back to an earlier video, personal branding, making sure that you stand for the right thing, that you’re attracting the right people to you and that you’re creating something that’s going to last a long time. Nothing is going to last a long time if it’s not built with a great foundation, and that’s going to come from family and relationships.
So I hope you guys learned something today. I love talking about this topic. I literally could keep talking and just I think I’m getting close to my number, so I’m going to be good with that. If you guys have any questions about who I am or connecting with me, or wanting to go hang out at Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm, or Sea World, or any other place that we have passes, check out that author box below and click it. Let’s get in contact and connect together. Besides that, I’ll see you guys on the next video and as always, go make something happen. Bye, guys.

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