My why.

By Vena Jones-Cox

Long, navel-gazing post/manifesto ahead:

Anyone who’s started a business will tell you that you HAVE to have a really big “Why”–bigger than ‘the money’ or the desire to not work for someone else–if you’re going to get through all the hard work and disappointments and market cycles and fear.

For some people, it’s the desire to spend more time with their children, or to create generational wealth, or to give, financially or in terms of time, in a big way to a cause they’re passionate about.

Since I don’t have children, my big why sort of falls into the latter category, but in a weird way.

I love real estate—it’s interesting, fun, creative, and the learning just never stops (which my ADHD brain loves). It also provides the financial freedom to spend a humongous amount of time on much HARDER thing that’s my real “Why”.

If you haven’t gathered this from talking to me or reading my posts, I’m a huge believer in and advocate for freedom in all of its forms—financial, personal, political, social, whatever.

It’s hard for people to feel, or be, free, or to want real freedom for other people, when they’re struggling financially. There needs to be a base level of financial security before humans can even start to creep out of survival mode and into “Impact” mode and “Betterment” mode.

The way *I* know how to get there, and I know how to CONVEY how to get there, is through owning and providing housing.

Which leads me to the insanity of the REST of my work: education, running REIAs, and organizing conferences.

I say insanity, because people close to me are constantly calling the amount of time and effort I put into these things into question. They say things like, “If you’d stop [volunteering to do a public radio show…creating content that you then give away or sell too cheaply…spending your entire fall putting together a conference for a group you don’t own…], you’d be 5x as rich as you are, or you’d be able to work 10 hours a week and do whatever you wanted for the rest of the time.”

From a financial perspective, they’re right. The money is definitely in the time spent in real estate.

But from an IMPACT perspective, I (at least hope) they’ve got it all wrong.

Follow my ‘logic’ here…

I want freedom for as many people as want it for themselves.

The thing I know how to do and teach that has a real shot at providing that is real estate.

The way to share that on a big scale is provide platforms—communities, events, workshops, broadcasts, etc.—where people can learn, connect, get support, help, advice, resources, referrals and so on.

The way to maximize the number of people who can be impacted by all that available stuff is to work my butt off creating excellent platforms, and then work it off some more letting as many people as possible know that they exist, and that they can and should join in.

So I spend 80% of my working time doing exactly that: strategizing, planning, stressing over, implementing, and marketing things that create very little income relative to the time invested, but which are important to me because they’re the way I have at my disposal to leave a legacy.

It’s a tiny, unimportant dharma in the big scheme of things.

Two generations from now, it’s unlikely that my name will ever be spoken.

I won’t be anyone’s ancestor, I won’t be in anyone’s history book, and nothing I’ve said or written or thought will still exist.

My properties, and my money, will be long gone.

But there will, I hope, be people around who are living better, freer lives because I impacted THEIR ancestors in some small way today.

So what’s my why for real estate investing?

It’s to have the financial and time and personal freedom to work really hard on the thing that I NEED time and money and personal freedom to do: give others the opportunity to live out THEIR why’s.