The #1 Way to Destroy Your Wealth

Life by Design

Jessilyn and Brian Persson have spoken about how to earn and increase wealth in previous episodes, but what advice do they have for avoiding the loss of wealth? In this episode, they examine the number one way that couples can destroy their wealth: divorce. Divorce is a sure-fire way to half your wealth at best, and probably lose more. Conversely, though, the number one cause of divorce is money issues. So how can this costly failure be avoided? Jessilyn and Brian have three takeaways to solidify your relationship and your wealth partnership.

1. Start the conversation
2. Define what wealth means to you, your partner, and each other
3. Design a path to get to wealth

Conversation and communication have been a through-line in every episode of Life By Design. Jessilyn and Brian lay out the foundational elements for forging a solid partnership in the first episodes which include ways to start healthy communication habits that benefit relationships long-term. In the instance of finance, their advice is to talk to each other about wealth and wealth goals. Define what you want, what wealth means, and how you would prefer to get that wealth. This episode encourages doing the hard work early to avoid the even harder work of salvaging things later. Once you can communicate clearly about financial goals, you have a path on which to embark together. Take it from Jessilyn and Brian, who have walked this same path and are now here to guide you.

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Transcript

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:09] Welcome to the Life by Design podcast with your hosts, Jessilyn and Brian Persson. We support couples in achieving their wealth goals by sharing our journey of overcoming barriers to build our financial empire.

Brian Persson: [00:00:20] With our extensive personal experience and increasing demand for couples seeking alignment to invest confidently in real estate, we created the Riches, Relationships and Real Estate program to help you achieve your goals.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:00:32] Today's topic is the number one way to destroy your wealth. In our podcast we talk a lot about how to create wealth, but we never talked about how to preserve wealth. So in this episode, we're going to discuss the number one way you can destroy your wealth.

Brian Persson: [00:00:47] Mhm. And the number one way to destroy your wealth is divorce. And interestingly enough, the number one reason for divorce is disagreements over money. So I'm going to start right in with a story that came from a real estate conference that we went to, and we met a billionaire there, he was one of the speakers, and he got divorced. And his number one piece of advice was choose your partners wisely, because half of a billion is not a billion.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:16] That's right.

Brian Persson: [00:01:17] Yeah. So divorce effectively leaves you with an absolute maximum of half of what you had. And it's probably going to leave you with less. So.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:01:27] Correct. So if you're a millionaire and you get divorced, you are no longer a millionaire.

Brian Persson: [00:01:32] Mhm. And I looked up some statistics from StatCan and StatCan indicates that your income, most divorcees their income drops by up to 30% after divorce. So a very, very substantial hit to your bottom line. And couples, interestingly, they also showed that couples that are wealthy and have money have significantly lower divorce rates. So money, whether you like it or not, plays a huge part in your relationship and literally can make your relationship a happy relationship or an unhappy relationship. Mhm. Interestingly, StatCan also talks about how you can be too poor to divorce and you really just can't have the money to separate from a potentially not good situation. So money is very, very important for you in the health of your relationship. And it's very important for you to build your wealth inside of that.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:29] So with your future hinging on a strong functioning relationship, can you afford not to be wealthy?

Brian Persson: [00:02:37] Exactly, yeah. Can you afford not to be wealthy? Interesting. Interesting thing to think about.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:02:42] Yeah. So we'll roll into our first takeaway which is start the conversation.

Brian Persson: [00:02:47] Mhm. Every relationship and every way to build wealth always starts with a conversation. And if you can't start that conversation, then you're already in rocky waters right from the start.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:03:01] Yeah. We've had, we talk about this in many of our podcasts, but communication. Communication is key to everything you want. So if your wealth isn't where you want it to be, or you have ideas on how you want to build your wealth bigger than what it is, you need to have that conversation with your partner. And as we've mentioned in another podcast, if your partner isn't maybe open to hearing that conversation at the time, then you need to find other methods to introduce your partner to that. So maybe that's friends who have done what you want to do, like real estate, for example, or getting your partner into a networking room where they can actually see the potential of what you're looking at, but maybe from a different view.

Brian Persson: [00:03:45] Mhm. Yeah. And I mean it goes for them not even being interested at all. And we see that in a lot of relationships where generally, very generally, the man is the one who is trying to generate the wealth and the woman is largely uninvolved and uninterested in generating the wealth. And from an outside perspective, looking into that relationship, you can see how the relationship is just not performing as well as it should, and their wealth is not performing as well as it should. And that's primarily because there's only one person working towards that goal, and no conversations are being had inside of that conversation, inside of that relationship.

Jessilyn Persson: [00:04:26] Yeah. And I've heard many stories, you know, of, you're right, women not really part of the conversation. And I think part of it is they just, they rely or they depend on their husband to take care of it. And so they just think it's taken care of. But unfortunately for those who end up either losing their partner, whether it be death or divorce, then they're stuck scrambling because they have no idea what's going on. They don't know how to manage it. They might not even know where to find it. So I always encourage, I mean everyone in general, but women especially get to know your finances, what you have, where it is, where your partner wants to take it. I mean, if you are uncomfortable because maybe you can't speak the lang...