Building Your REI Business Without Hurting Your Marriage

Starting a real estate investing business with your spouse can be a real challenge! I know from personal experience that going from having your own separate jobs—even if they’re in the same field—to working together to build a business has its ups and downs. Even if you’re building a real estate investing business while your spouse continues to work or pursue other things, it can still be really easy to let your relationship fall by the wayside.

That’s why it’s important to focus on both growing your business and nurturing your marriage. But how do you do that? Tarek and I have developed a few great ways to keep our relationship fresh and strong while focusing the time and energy we need on our investing business. Here are just a few of my favorite things we do to avoid ruining our marriage while we flip more and more houses.

Don’t Skip Date Night

When Tarek and I first started flipping houses, we had basically no money at all. We were starting a family, and we didn’t have anything extra that we could spend on frivolous stuff. That didn’t mean that we stopped having our weekly date nights, though. Sometimes we just went on a walk by the beach. Sometimes we popped some popcorn, turned the lights off, and put on a movie to pretend we were out at a movie theater.

No matter how busy you are and no matter how much or little money you have, always make time for date night. It can be simple or elaborate, cheap or expensive, but it’s absolutely necessary. Take some time to date each other, and you’ll always remember why you fell in love in the first place.

Divide Up Your Household and Professional Responsibilities

Whether you’re working together or not, both of your lives are about to change (hopefully for the better). You’re going to be doing a lot more work from home, and you’re going to have more unstructured time. That means it’s time to sit down and talk about your household and professional responsibilities.

If you’re working together, you can divide up the work for your real estate investments based on each of your individual strengths. Maybe one of you will be in charge of driving for dollars while the other works on finding funding for your flips. Either way, and whether or not you’re working together, you’ll want to address how to make home life smoother, more efficient, and more enjoyable. That could mean reevaluating and dividing up chores or it could mean hiring a maid service to take care of regular cleaning while the two of you work.

Communication Is Key

Finally, always keep lines of communication open. If you’re quitting an office job to pursue your dream of being your own boss, you might have a few weeks or months of living on a tighter budget than you’re accustomed to. Talk about this and how the two of you can manage without adding a lot of stress to each other’s lives. If you’re worried about something, tell your spouse, and make sure that they know they can talk to you too.

It’s important to remember that change can be good for a relationship and that building your own real estate investing business will give you more time together while bringing in more income. There might be a few rough patches along the way, but the more open you are with each other, the smoother it’ll be and the more you’ll enjoy the transition to your new life.

For more information about real estate investing, visit Real Estate Elevated's BiggerPockets blog.