Sylvia Ho is joined by Jenny who, with her husband, just purchased their first investment property. Jenny shares the anxiety she had going into the process and how she overcame that anxiety by getting good advice and trusting professionals and her own instincts. 

Sylvia learns why Jenny and her husband wanted the investment property; for future retirement security and for additional tax breaks, and assures Jenny those are great motivations. Jenny reveals that her anxiety largely stemmed from it being their first time in the new territory of real estate and not knowing what to expect or how to handle things that came up. 

Jenny overcame her anxiety by talking with friends about their experiences, listening to Sylvia’s podcast, trusting their real estate agent, and assessing properties based on whether she would want to live in them or not, to ensure future tenants would feel at home. Sylvia explores all this advice with Jenny and offers additional insight into maintaining landlord books, tax records, and real estate agent costs for finding tenants. This episode shines a light on how a potentially daunting process is made easier with the right research and people guiding your decision and offering support.

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Transcript

Sylvia Ho: [00:00:05 ] Hey, friends, have you ever wondered how you can pay off your mortgage faster? Or maybe you like to help your kids get into the real estate market, or better yet, retire with some passive income? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Sylvia Ho Mortgage podcast. My name is Sylvia. I'm here to teach you how to achieve your goals simply by owning just one more property. Hey everyone, welcome to the JOMP podcast. My name is Sylvia and I'm going to be your host today. Today we're going to be interviewing a client who just recently purchased their first investment property. So today I want to welcome Jenny. Jenny, thanks so much for coming to the JOMP podcast.

Jenny: [00:00:48 ] Hi, Sylvia. Thanks for having me.

Sylvia Ho: [00:00:51 ] How do you feel? You just bought your first place.

Jenny: [00:00:54 ] I'm actually really excited about it because it's something that we've thought about for a while and now we're finally doing it. Like, it's really exciting, but at the same time there's a bit of anxious and nervous. Like we don't know what's going to happen, but more excited than anything.

Sylvia Ho: [00:01:15 ] Beautiful. And we're going to talk about the anxiousness, but what got you into the JOMP program? Like you said that you've been thinking about it for a while. Why did you want to do it?

Jenny: [00:01:24 ] Me and my husband have been thinking about this every so often. It's always in the back of our mind and it's more because for retirement. So every year come tax season, we look at our numbers and we're like, Do we have enough to survive in retirement? Is there anything else we should do to secure that? You know, we're comfortable and we can continue our current lifestyle or even have a little more, you know, because we're in retirement, we just want to chill. So a couple of years ago, we did think about it. And I don't know if you remember, but we did come in and ask Hey Syl, do you think it's doable for us? And at that time you said, well, maybe just have a financial analyst look at your numbers and see if there's other opportunities. So that's what we did. And then the financial advisor gave us the option goal. You know, the market's not too bad. Why don't we just try to invest in other products and see how it goes? So we did that for like three, four years, but things weren't progressing as we had hoped. And we know it's for long term and things usually eventually, hopefully will go up. But it wasn't going the way that we'd hoped. And we're like, okay, let's just give Phil a call to see if this investment property option is still open for us because we don't know, you know, do we make enough? We're not sure where the market is at. So that's when we decided to make the call to you and see what our other options are. And we also wanted to diversify our portfolio with what we already have. So we decided, okay, I'm going to book the appointment, make the call to Sylvia and see where it takes us. And this is where we're at now.

Sylvia Ho: [00:03:01 ] Okay, that's amazing. So the whole idea behind JOMP is for future retirement security, right? And just to diversify your retirement portfolio as well.

Jenny: [00:03:13 ] Right.

Sylvia Ho: [00:03:14 ] Okay, that's great. You had mentioned you are anxious. What are you anxious about?

Jenny: [00:03:21 ] Well, for me, I'm not familiar with all this whole investment property. I hear about it a lot and I don't actually pay attention to what's going on in the market. Yes, I know there's a lot of condos going up, but no idea of the pricing. So I didn't I'm anxious because I don't know what to expect next. But I think because I have my husband to go through it with me and also because we have you to help us, guide us through, and we have other friends who are going through it. It's kind of helping with that. It's making me more comfortable. I think the anxiety is more like I don't know what to expect and then how to deal with the negative of it.

Sylvia Ho: [00:04:03 ] Right? And then so basically your mind is like, okay, this is new territory for me. And it's just like now that I have this investment property, what are their next steps and how do I handle things that could happen in the future?

Jenny: [00:04:20 ] I would go on Google and like listen to other people's stories. And then usually when you do that, it's always the horror story that you find like, Oh my God, is that going to happen to us? Then what do we do? So that's part of it. But I just try to stay positive and my husband is like, okay, you know, we're already in it. Let's just keep going and we have good help on our side, so we'll be fine. So that's why I'm just focused on the positive and go with it.

Sylvia Ho: [00:04:51 ] Horror stories sell. Humans are attracted to like hearing these horror stories. Right? But we don't hear a lot of, like, the positive part of things, right? Yeah, there are horror stories, but it's not like it's the first bad thing that's going to happen to you like it's happened to other people. So we can learn from other people and what they've done.

Jenny: [00:05:12 ] Right? So that's kind of what I did too. So I was like, Oh, and I asked my friends who have investment properties, has this ever happened to you? What would you do if it did happen to you? So instead of just focusing on those horror stories. It's just like buying anything. Even when you buy something off Amazon, I would look at all the reviews and then decide, okay, if this were to happen, what would I do? If I do get a bad tenant, you know, what are my options? And then after I do enough research, okay, it's not all bad. And even if it is bad, there's a way to work it out, right? So that's why I'm, like, more comfortable, more confident about it.

Sylvia Ho: [00:05:49 ] Okay, wonderful. So now that you bought your first investment property, how did you decide on this particular property? How long did it take you to find it?

Jenny: [00:06:00 ] Actually, we were really lucky. We didn't really look at too many, but like I said, I hadn't really paid attention to the real estate market, so we weren't sure what location we'd want. But we decided to go in a location that we're familiar with, right, because it's hard to sell something that you're not familiar with or you don't know about the location. So we decided to buy where we did because it's kind of close to where we are. So if there's any problems, we figured we can get to the condo quickly and fix or see what, you know, go there and fix it or be there quickly, basically. So, and we also have a friend who's a real estate agent, and she helped us through it. She gave us options. And then we decided on the location based on the price. And we want to start small, obviously, and within our budget. So the main goal was try to stay within our budget and then in a location that we're familiar with. So we pick one weekend we went to see four condos. Actually three of them were in the same building.

Jenny: [00:07:07 ] So we were able to compare within this building what there was. There was a studio and then there was a slightly bigger studio. And then there was like one that was a little older, or you can see that it was lived in, but the view wasn't good. But we saw three different things and they all had their own characteristics. And then we thought, Hmm, would someone want to live here or even would I want to live here? I know in the back of my mind, or people keep telling me, Don't worry, you're not the one living it. But at the same time, I want them to be comfortable. So that's what I went through when I was looking at the different properties. And the one that we decided on was like, Actually, this is somewhere I would want to live. So even when I'm selling it, I have good things to say about it. And it's not like I wouldn't be ashamed to sell it to someone. Or have someone live in it, I was like, you'd be comfortable. I'd be comfortable, you know?

Sylvia Ho: [00:08:08 ] Excellent. I really love your thinking in regards to future planning as well. Right? Is that okay if I were to sell this condo ba