How did you convince YOUR spouse about real estate's awesomeness?

[Brandon Turner]

I'm working on a potential article about this...

So, it's rare that two romantic partners discover the awesomeness of real estate at the exact same time. So, if you discovered real estate first, how did you convince your significant other? OR if your significant other drug you into the game, how did they accomplish this? 

Thanks all! 

[Brian Burke]

My wife and I met when I was 18, she was 17 and we were both working in a grocery store. I wanted more out of life and was always thinking of ways to make money. I remember she and I sitting around the dining room table at my parent's house, where I was living without electricity because they couldn't pay the bill, stuffing envelopes by candlelight so I could get rich quick. Convincing her was easy because we were too young and dumb to know any better. We just did it because we didn't have much else to do.

It took a long time to make RE work.  The first property we bought was a year later...a rental with 100% financing and we rented it to my mom because she needed a roof over her head for my younger brother and sisters. She couldn't afford to pay rent after a while and we couldn't afford to carry it and pay rent on our apartment on grocery store wages, so we were forced to kick out my own family and sell...a really bad experience right out of the gate that didn't exactly warm my wife up to real estate investing.  By now we were a couple of years older and no longer too dumb to know better.  It was a really low point in our lives.

It took a couple of years to do another deal and I got her to go along with it because I'd been working so hard for so long and constantly studying and "I'd do better this time".  She went along with my plan but wasn't nearly as excited about it as I was.  We flipped that house and made a whopping $1,500 which was less than I'd spent on computers and supplies to have this "business". Again, I had failed to show her how great my idea was and I could see that she didn't share my excitement.  Even I had my doubts...maybe she was right and this was all a waste of time?

Fortunately for me she (and I) hung in there and supported me in my passion long enough for me to do a few profitable flips and once the money was coming in the proof was in the pudding...maybe this crazy business idea does work, after all.  By now she was my biggest cheerleader, and it was that alone that propelled me to do better and do more.

Then along came 2008.  We lost millions. We didn't lose any properties like many folks did, but our net worth was completely wiped out and we were over $2 million in debt.  Now I had the task of convincing her that not only does this business work but we should start again!  Imagine how tough it is to make that case, but she ultimately knew that we had to get back up and keep going.  There was just no other way to dig out of a hole that deep so with her support we went right back at it and she was there by my side making it happen.  I'm so glad she did, because within one year from starting over we paid off over one million of debt and built a bigger business than we would have ever imagined.  

I couldn't have done it without my wife's support.  Thinking back to being 18 with nothing to my name but a dream, there was no way to get from there to having bought over $200 million of real estate over the last 25 years without her support when times were good but especially when times were bad and supporting me was probably the hardest choice.