Starting your REI business and building your marriage

[Jordan Northrup]

Hello all,

I came across the BiggerPockets community as a way to educate myself in REI before taking the big plunge and looking for my first deal. My wife and I have very stable, well paying jobs in the Washington DC metro area, but we've made the decision we want to take charge of our financial futures instead of continually trading time for dollars like our families do. We realize this will be a slow and methodical process, but we believe this is the way forward.

Here's where our paths diverge.  I'm a "big picture" guy who has a vision and creates plans and goes after them with intensity.  My military training has taught me to come up with a plan, even if not perfect, and execute it with 100% intensity and be flexible enough to adjust direction and tackle problems in the moment.  My wife is a perfectionist and gets mired in the details, treating every piece of information with equal weight.  She usually requires extensive research and analysis before making simple decisions because she doesn't want to be wrong.  A complete, 100% plan covering all "what-ifs" must be written and vetted before taking action.  Sometimes a decision cannot be made and we get stuck in analysis paralysis.  

You can already see the problems just over the horizon. We agree on the goal, but how to get there? I'd be very interested to hear peoples' thoughts on how they integrated REI with the personal side of things and lived to tell about it.