I continue to iterate as I consider my future as a real estate investor.
In the culmination of a 3-part series, I'd concluded that a viable next step after I depart medicine would be directly investing in real estate. In that post, I laid out my careful plan: invest in and self-manage multifamily properties, obtain Real Estate Professional Status, claim bonus depreciation, shelter our W2 income and perform Roth conversions.
I even stress tested the idea with my mirror friend, a trusted mentor who poked and prodded to find weak spots in my argument. He concluded that my plan appeared to be sound.
What works for an individual, however, does not always work for a family.
When I laid out my careful plan to the mirror that matters most - my wife - she raised some very reasonable concerns. The most resonant was that I would be exchanging one job for another with comparable hours (750 a year) if I intended to obtain Real Estate Professional Status.
If our objective in pursuing financial independence was to stop exchanging time for money, why would I put myself in a position to continue this exchange?
Additional concerns revolved around our longstanding plans for extended slow travel, during summers when the kids are out of school and additionally during our early empty nest years if health permits.
If I needed to target a set number of hours per day to demonstrate material involvement in managing the properties, how would I maintain the schedule flexibility so essential to travel? Might my requirements restrict our ability to travel much as my career in medicine had done for so many years? Worse, would I travel only to work remotely in such a manner that I was not present for my family while we were away?
Our discussion gave me significant food for thought, and my wife was extremely patient. I am not the easiest person to dissuade from a good deal. In fact, the optimizer in me who wants bragging rights was excited to pull of this feat simply because it could be done.
I decided to bounce the idea off another friend with a similar enthusiasm for real estate, fellow blogger The Darwinian Doctor. We'd met for coffee over a year ago to discuss ideas for our budding ambitions to incorporate real estate into our plans.
Being earlier in his career (and acknowledging his costlier lifestyle), he had enrolled in a real estate course designed for physicians and was plowing ahead in acquiring a real estate empire of cash-flowing, out-of-state rental properties.
Since we'd been newbies at comparable stages at our last get-together, and he was now more seasoned than I, I sought his advice on my idea. With surgical clarity, he cut to the chase: You could achieve REPS status, he told me, but do you need to in order to reach your goals?
He and my wife were right. I'd almost let the possible sideline me from the important.