Avery:
“To take a little break from the actual real estate investing and talk about our personal relationships with money, we have Lisa Chastain from the Real Money podcast to help us understand all things related to personal finance. How’s it going, Lisa?”

Lisa:
“Awesome! So grateful to be here, yeah, thank you for having me on.”

Avery:
“Can you start by telling our audience a little bit about yourself?”

Lisa:
“Yeah, sure! I’m on a mission primarily for women to be the financial leaders of their lives. Let’s start there because you can’t do anything unless you know what your goals are. I mean, I guess you could do a lot of things, but you can’t effectively take the right steps if you don’t know what your personal financial goals are.”

Avery:
“Right, and I think if you ask that question to a lot of people, they’re like, ‘Oh, to be financially independent.’ What would your response be to that?”

Lisa:
“In terms of getting to that point, what are the things we have to implement to be able to get to that very nebulous goal in the future? Getting there starts with the very first thing anybody needs to do: getting out of the ‘should box.’ Stop ‘should-ing’ all over themselves, and listen. You and I are both in different ways part of the financial industry, giving financial support, advice, knowledge, and wisdom, but we tend to look out and see what others are doing.”

Avery:
“Absolutely.”

Lisa:
“And we think that’s what we should be doing financially. Short-term rentals are included in that box. People think, ‘I should do this because I think it will make me money.’ Get out of the should box and start asking the real questions. Like, what kind of life do I want to live, and how much money does that take?”

Avery:
“Right.”

Lisa:
“It takes courage to ask more specific questions about where you’re headed in life and how much it’s going to cost to get you there. Then you choose different financial vehicles to help you get there. For example, if you want to invest in real estate and need to save $50,000 to get there, you start to ask, ‘What should I be doing?'”

Avery:
“Right, it gets more real when you get that specific.”

Lisa:
“Exactly. People usually start with, ‘I want to have this amount.’ But we have to get more personal. Honestly, looking at the end of your life, what do you want to be able to say about it? None of us knows when that will be, but for me, it’s true for our family that my husband is still working a 9-to-5 job. He has a W2, and he says, ‘I want to be retired by 55.’ He wants to have the option to leave by then—not that he will, but it’s about having the option. And that’s for everybody.”