Josh Cantwell: So, hey guys, welcome back. Hey, this is Josh Cantwell, your host of Accelerated Investor. And today, I have a fantastic guest for you. Her name is Jennifer Barner. Jennifer is a fantastic entrepreneur. She is the owner and syndicator of over 1,964 doors of which she’s also a sponsor of 900 doors. She also has a rental portfolio of single families and has flipped 44 homes. And she’s also the host of the Mastering Money for Moms podcast, where they discuss generational wealth, financial freedom, and raising a family. On that podcast, she aims to educate and inspire moms to take a very active role in their family’s financial quality.

And I really loved recording this episode with Jennifer. There’s a few things here that we’re going to talk about that you really need to pay attention to. And there’s actually five pieces of advice that Jennifer and I agree on that you must do with your real estate portfolio to be successful with it. So, we’re going to reveal these five pieces of advice that you need to follow.

Jennifer is also going to talk about her process of using real estate to pay for her daughter’s dream wedding in Italy. The engagement and the wedding were both held in Italy and how she used real estate to pay for that. And also, some of the things that she felt like she got right over the years as far as scaling her business, taking over the ownership of operations, and how important it is to follow your gut when taking out a new deal or taking out a new partner and taking ownership of that deal, especially for you moms out there.

My wife, being a mother of three crazy teenagers in my house right now, this episode really, I think, is a fantastic episode for you moms out there and moms like my wife. And so, take a listen here to this episode with Jennifer Barner. You’re going to love it. Here we go.

[INTERVIEW]

Josh Cantwell: So, Jennifer, hey, welcome back to the show. Thanks for jumping on. I’m so excited to talk money. I’m so excited to talk about multifamily real estate with you. So, thanks for carving out a few minutes for us on Accelerated Investor.

Jennifer Barner: Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s a joy and an honor to be here today.

Josh Cantwell: Oh, that makes me feel good that somebody else said it’s an honor to be on my show. All right. Let’s get the morning started in the right way. So, thanks for that. So, Jennifer, as we kind of get to know you a little bit, introduce you to the audience, I always love to speak about what’s going on today, what current events that you’re up to, what are you most passionate about in your life as a mom, as an entrepreneur? So, tell us a little bit about what you’re working on.

Jennifer Barner: Oh, well, that’s a loaded question right there. But I will say, from a personal standpoint, my second daughter just got married, so I’m super excited. And as my husband likes to say is we just got a pay increase, so.

Josh Cantwell: Nice.

Jennifer Barner: Yeah, yeah.

Josh Cantwell: Somebody else just got a pay decrease.

Jennifer Barner: Exactly, yeah.

Josh Cantwell: You tell us, the wedding, is it fun? How did it go? Are you super happy about the way it was all done? And did you say results were good?

Jennifer Barner: Amazing. I’ll share briefly that my new son-in-law proposed to my daughter in Italy and invited the parents to come over and witness it. And it was such a beautiful place last year. And as we’re drinking wine, we’re like, “We should do the wedding here. Sounds like a great idea.” Wines flow and really good. And it seemed like a brilliant idea. It actually came together beautifully. We put that, you know, you dream of these things, right? And you think, why not?

In real estate, what’s so fun is it causes you to think bigger. And we just said, “Why not have it in Italy? Let’s just do this.” And we did it. And it was beautiful. And we turned it into a vacation for the entire families to travel together. And it was just amazing. And it’s all because of real estate that we were able to do this.

Josh Cantwell: So, tell me about that. We’re going to get into the real estate stuff. I mean, that makes me wonder, like, how did real estate do that for you? So, just a real high level, tell us about that. Was it your investments, cash flow, like the freedom of it? What allowed real estate to kind of take care of the wedding?

Jennifer Barner: Yeah. So, over the past seven years, I’ve only been in real estate for seven to eight years. And so, we were looking for a way to make up for what we had lost in the market in 2008. And thankfully, real estate came to me from a friend inviting me to a Rich Dad class. So, I learned the power of buying one house and then buying another house and then getting the rental income coming in to where my IRA was slowly creeping up and allowing me to do more and more things, more and more investments.

And then I started using life insurance policies to buy in and invest in deals. And pretty soon, it became this compounding snowball, and then I learned how to flip properties. And pretty soon, I’m flipping one after another after another. And again, it’s just snowballing to the point where I put our kids through college debt-free and then we had amassed a certain amount of cash that allowed us to plan our daughter’s wedding in Italy and take our entire family.

And yeah, again, when I say it’s because of real estate, it’s because all of it combined, it wasn’t one thing. It was a number of different things. And that’s what I love about real estate is you can take so many different paths and make them work for you. So, when the market’s changing, like it is today, you pivot and you learn a new skill and you adapt and you stay fluid. And because we were able to stay fluid, we were just able to take advantage of the different opportunities that arose.

Josh Cantwell: Oh, that’s fantastic. Who wouldn’t, out of our audience, love to have– if you’re not already there because a lot of our guys are in a similar situation, but if you’re not, who wouldn’t love to have that similar path going forward, following what Jennifer has done? So, let’s talk a little bit more about that.

So, the wedding was very recent. How about from an investment perspective or from a financial perspective, again, what are you working on now that gets you going? You mentioned the market’s changed. Tell us a little more about that and how that’s working for you.

Jennifer Barner: Yeah. So, we have pivoted over into multifamily over the last five years. And we bought during COVID and we were able to get fixed debt on many of our projects. However, last year, we also bought a couple projects that we use bridge debt for. So, it’s really a pressing chore right now for us to keep this profitable. Expenses went up tremendously. Finding good labor has been a challenge.

So, the mortgage has really climbed in such a way that nobody could’ve anticipated the increases. So, that’s our biggest challenge right now, looking at every line item and seeing, okay, what can we be doing better to keep our profits as high as possible so we can meet our mortgage and our debt-service coverage ratio?

So, to say that that makes me excited, it doesn’t make me excited to be in this period of challenge, right? But there’s always growth. And I’m just hoping that if we can thrive to 2025 instead of survive, that there’s going to be a reward on the other end. I’m an optimistic person by nature, but to say it’s not rough waters right now, I’d be lying.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, sure, sure. I guess one piece of advice that I’ll pass along my father gave to me. So, I’m a pancreatic cancer survivor. I was diagnosed, 35. And my father said, “Josh, after you make it through this, on the other end, you’re going to learn a lot if you pay attention.” And he said, “If you don’t and you just get through it, then you’ll not be any different. You’ll not be changed. You’ll not be any different. You won’t have grown at all. But if you look at this as an opportunity to learn a lot about yourself and a lot about your business and a lot about your family, in a short amount of time, this could be the one thing that really propels you into the next phase of your life.” So, my dad encouraged me to use that very chaotic time in my life as the ultimate time in my life when I would learn the most.

And he was right. I learned the most about myself. I learned about what I did wrong. I learned about what I really wanted out of the next chapter of my life, the next phase of my life. And then my dad would remind me and he would say, after I survived, pancreatic cancer has a 7% survival rate, I’m one of the seven. So, my dad said to me, he’s like, “Son, now, in the next chapter of your life, you have to figure out why you were spared. You were spared for a reason.” And then it became another discovery part of my life to figure out why I was spared and what did that mean for me and what was I going to do with the next chapter of my life.

And so, Jennifer, I would just encourage you, for my father, it’s not my advice, it’s Dad’s advice, and pass it along to you. So, this is probably an incredible time of uncertainty, but also an incredible time where you’ll learn a lot, and then it’s going to come from two, three years from now, we’re like, “Okay, what did we learn that we’re going to apply to our business and you’re going to be such a better investor, bigger, smarter, faster investor five years from now?” That’s how I feel about being diagnosed with cancer.

And now, at 47 years old, I feel like I’m a totally different human in all aspects of my life. And so, my dad passed away a couple of years ago. I think that’s one of my dad’s legacies in my life is to allow me to pass that advice along to others. And so, do with that what you will, but that’s Dad’s legacy. So, I hope that’s helpful.

Jennifer Barner: Well, let me just say, he was a very wise man, and congratulations to you.

Josh Cantwell: Thank you.

Jennifer Barner: I will share that I was adopted. And I’ve always wondered why I was spared and why I was given the gift of life. So, everything that I’ve approached in my life, I’ve always felt like, okay, I’m supposed to be doing more. What else am I supposed to be doing? And so, I approach, I guess, life and every day with, okay, if I’m not growing, I’m not fulfilling my purpose and whatever God designed me to be. So, what else is out there? And so, I can tell you, I am looking back at what signs did we miss? Should we have done things differently? Should we have even done those loans, to begin with? There’s a whole host of questions that have come up.

And thankfully, I’m on a team that isn’t pointing fingers. We’re working towards solutions and trying to figure out, okay, how do we survive this? How do we keep afloat? What are we doing? What’s the next step? We’re doing daily calls now and we’re planning to be there on site to help streamline whatever we can. But yeah, it is a growth opportunity. And your dad was a very, very wise man. I love that. Sounds like he was a great mentor in your life.

Josh Cantwell: He was, he was. He was an entrepreneur. My dad started an employee benefits company while my brothers were in college and I was in private high school. So, it takes a lot of guts to start a business and grow that thing while putting kids through college and stuff like that. And he did an amazing job of it. So, he’s got an amazing legacy.

And so, if you think about now, the deals that you did that allowed you to pay for this amazing wedding and the things that you’ve learned along the way, what are the things that you think you got right? What are the things that are working in your business today? For me, for example, one of the things that I do that I think has become the core of who I am as an operator and as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, is I’m onsite at my properties a lot. You mentioned being onsite.

I every Monday secret shop my buildings. I show up unannounced. I go to different properties. The property managers know I’m coming on Monday. They just don’t know which property I’m coming to. And I see things with my own two eyes. And I think that’s allowed me to really take what people say, whether it’s a property manager, a regional manager, a leasing agent, and be able to put it into context because I saw it versus just hearing it from someone else because what they say and what I hear could be very different, right?

So, help me understand that for you, from the deals that you did, that went really well, that helped you pay for the wedding, what are some of the things that you think are must-dos, things that you think you did right? And I’m sure you’re going to learn along the way with some of these things that have this bridged that as well, but tell us a little bit more about that.

Jennifer Barner: Yeah. So, a couple of things I got right is when I buy a house, whether it’s going to be a– well, let’s start with a rental property. I rehab it at the very beginning so that I don’t get tenants calling me that they’re complaining that this is happening or that’s happening. And it also makes my turns very easy when they decide they’re ready to move out and move on to their next season or chapter of life. So, I feel like that’s something that’s very easy for people to do, but they’ve got to have the funds set aside and they have to anticipate and figure out what those costs are.

So, showing up and doing your very first flip and being hands-on is really important. So, you learn the cost of materials out of the gate, you learn how long things take, how long contractors are going to take to do a certain project. I think it’s really important to show up at those real estate groups so that you meet different vendors, you get a whole list of different painters and electricians and plumbers. So, if one doesn’t show up, you’ve got somebody else on standby ready to go.

Project management is huge when you’re flipping properties. So, one of the things I got right is I read The 12 Week Year. If you haven’t read it, oh my gosh, it teaches you to thinking, okay, what can I just do right? What can I do in the next 12 weeks, right? So, I had said, I want to buy a home. And I bought a home and I was like, well, that was easy. I did that in three weeks. Now, can I flip this home in three weeks or six weeks? What does that look like? And I did that, and then pretty soon, I was like, well, gosh, that’s only six weeks now out of that 12 weeks. What else? Can I buy another home?

So, then I was like, oh, I can buy another home and I just need to think through the funds and the project management. Do I need more than one team working? Could I have two or three teams going? And so, you start thinking bigger as you’re– so project management is really, really critical to my success. And that one year that I read 12 Week Year, I did 28 homes that year.

Josh Cantwell: Wow.

Jennifer Barner: So, talk about driving around to the properties, I would drive those properties regularly on Mondays, and again, on Thursdays to see where we’re at. The crews always knew I was coming. They made sure that they’re there and things are happening. We do a walkthrough and have a punch list. We’d talk through whatever’s coming up for the following week. They knew my expectations. So, not every project went well. During COVID, windows took five months to get. I mean, that was ridiculous.

And so, I pulled back on flipping homes, and maybe I actually went to a higher-end home during those periods because I knew I was going to be taking longer. And so, you just kind of, again, have to adapt a little bit. But project management is absolutely key on protecting your dollar and then your investment and making sure they go smoothly.

Josh Cantwell: No question.

Jennifer Barner: I didn’t get into changing the structure of the home because then, you’re getting the city involved in licensing and inspections from there. That slows down your process and you’re taking dollars out of your own pockets every time you have to have something inspected by the city. So, I made sure I operated in areas that were cosmetic in nature, that I could do updates that didn’t require inspections. I could do it on my timeline. And I just made sure I had as many contractors in the property as at one time so that I could keep the project going as fast as possible.

Josh Cantwell: Yeah, there’s so much there that correlates and mirrors what we do. So, there’s a couple of things our audience hears from that. One is that actually, things got probably easier as you scaled, like doing one or two or your first five deals was probably harder. But you got to 28 because you scaled and then you were able to give those contractors more work, so they were there more often with you, the same vendors, more work. You were buying the same materials. You probably got them delivered. You got priority pricing and priority treatment because you were buying and doing more.

We do the same thing, which means like, because we’re at scale and we’re turning hundreds and hundreds of units a year, we’re kind of a medium value-add company. And so, like last year, we spent $6 million on capital improvements in all apartments. So, those are like $5,000 turns to $10,000 turns at a time and $6 million worth, right? So, we got priority pricing because we were at scale. That’s exactly what you said. Going to the meetings, meeting vendors, that’s critical. You mentioned that. We believe in that. Making sure that you secret shop your properties or have times where you’re on site every Monday, Thursday. We do the same thing.

I’m a CEO of a company that has a $300 million portfolio. Most of my other property managers are like, we never see the CEO. Like, that’s why they’re not as profitable as we are because I have a personal conviction that that is the secret sauce. If I see it, I can intelligently talk about it. I’m not taking somebody else’s advice for it.

The other thing you mention, which I just had a call on this yesterday with my mastermind group and I was explaining about not manufacturing a crisis but manufacturing deadlines. And sometimes, deadlines create crisis that you have to meet, you have to match. You have to be there. And so, I love creating deadlines that are firm. So, I’ll host events at my buildings just so our team knows the building has to be in perfect condition because there’s a bunch of people coming. Or I’ll tell my team I’m bringing an investor onto this property on this date. So, all this other CapEx stuff or all these lease-ups that we have to do has to be done by that date because this person’s coming to look at it, right?

And so, I feel like these mini-deadlines, whether it’s quarterly, I believe in one major quarterly project and two or three mini-initiatives per quarter. And a lot of those are based around deadlines for properties. And that works so well to make sure because look, the team that’s in the dirt– like I’m not in the dirt, I’m in the clouds, the team that’s in the dirt is going to kind of get a little bored, a little sick of doing the same thing over and over. But if they have some sort of deadline to match and then I can tell them, “Hey, great job. We did that. We did an amazing job of that.”

And then, like you also said, last thing I’ll comment on, which I firmly agree with is you rehab your properties upfront. We buy our apartment buildings, we force people out, we force vacancies so we could turn more units so that within 24 months, we’re done and out of there. We might spend $2 million on CapEx. We want to spend that $2 million in two years. We don’t want it to bleed over a three to five-year period.

There’s so much that Jennifer mentioned that I believe in, that our audience, you guys need to write that crackdown and do it. Okay. Write that sh*t down, like grandma would say, it’s okay. Sh*t, damn, and hell are not swear words, you guys know that. Write that down and do that. Jennifer believes it and she’s doing it, so are we. Fantastic stuff, Jennifer.

So, Jennifer, tell us a little bit more about your start. How did you get going in this business? You mention you went to a Rich Dad event. You started doing single-family homes, flips, things like that. You’re 28 in a year. And then you kind of restarted with multifamily. Everybody likes to hear the start. So, what was good? What hurt? What didn’t work? What worked? Why did you start to begin with? How did that go for you?

Jennifer Barner: Yeah. So, at the very beginning, I connected with a gentleman at one of these meetups and he actually came to my property, my very first rental property. Day one, I had three guys out of college move into my little single-family home, and they sent me a video and said, “Hey, Jennifer, the basement is raining.” I’m like, “What do you mean the basement is raining?” I don’t even understand how that’s even possible. How do you get your mind around that?

He takes a video and he’s like, “There’s water coming in and it’s just coming over the seal and it’s flowing in, it’s like a rainfall.” I was like, “Wow.” Okay, so one of these guys that I met at a meetup, he meets me over there and he’s like, “Yeah, it’s coming down from the bay, or your backyard sloped a little bit and the water’s coming in. It’s going right over the seal and going right into your basement.

Josh Cantwell: Oh, man.

Jennifer Barner: We’ve just got to get some French drains put in. We got to make sure your gutters are taking the rain away from your home. So, he helped me, and I was like, “Man, this guy is so good. I like this guy.” So, he’s like, “I can do foundations, I can do whatever you need me to do. You find a home and let’s split the profits.” And I’m like, “This is great. Oh, my gosh. I found my first business partner. This is awesome.”

So, we buy a home, and he goes in there and he just jacks up the entire home. And he’s going to work on a demo. Demo day is always fun, right? Well, then his truck breaks down and it’s up on in a shop. And he’s like, “Listen, my truck broke down. I don’t know when I’m going to get there.” And then his dog died.

Josh Cantwell: Literally?

Jennifer Barner: Literally. I am telling you what, for six weeks, we are supposed to have the house completely done in six weeks, like he was just going to live on property and just get it done. He never showed back up. I had to call an attorney and figure out, what do I do here? I am tied up, right? You’re going to have to pay this guy off to make them go away because he will hold you up in court. And so, I had to pay him a check for $17,000. But you know what? I still made money on that job.

Josh Cantwell: And how much did you learn? That’s the big key, right? By doing, you can’t replace doing the business versus listening to it. I love doing podcasts. And I’m glad we have a great audience, I mean, listen, but they also know they have to do. And so, learn and then do, learn and then do, not learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, right? So, you learning, great. Got started, but you did something, you know it didn’t really work out, how much did you learn from that? A lot more than listening to a show or jumping on a webinar, right?

Jennifer Barner: Absolutely.

Josh Cantwell: It’s all about doing the business. I tell people, look, you’re going to fail fast in this business. You’re going to fail, you’re going to screw up, things are going to go wrong. But the person who’s going to be most successful is the person that fails the fastest and doesn’t get sunk, like doesn’t get sunk to the point where they’re bankrupt or out of the business. So, how can you fail fast but stay in the fight to the point where now you failed so much that you learn so much that now you become profitable and things are going really well? So, it sounds like that’s an early failure of yours. Like, how fast can I fail so that everything else becomes more successful, right?

Jennifer Barner: Yeah. And again, it’s your mindset. And thankfully, in real estate, we’re taught to read a lot of books about mindset and staying in the game. And I’ll tell you, when I transitioned to multifamily, I hired a mentor and it was, “Hey, you can buy a building in 90 days.” Well, my 90 days came and went and then a year came and went and then another year. And I was like, “Hey, I haven’t made a dollar in 18 months. Help me out here. What do I do?” And he said, “Go back to doing what you do and go back to flipping until you find your deal.”

So, I went back. It took me three years to find my first multifamily property. It was 72 doors. And it’s been a home run of a property. I didn’t get anxious. I just went back to doing– that’s why I love real estate. You just go back to doing what you can do or stay in your W-2 until you find that deal, but you don’t give up, right?

Josh Cantwell: So, don’t give up. I would add one more thing. So, in our business, we have swim lanes, we call them. Everyone has a department, and somebody needs to be responsible for acquisitions and underwriting because you can’t get a deal until you underwrite review and offer on a lot of buildings and do site tours and walk buildings and talk to a lot of brokers. And you can take an acquisition fee, and maybe that person who is responsible for acquisitions gets a chunk of that acquisition fee. And so, you’ve got to have some person on your team that does that.

And so, a lot of the people that I’ve networked with or consulted with or coached over the years, they’re coming from residential and that’s the main mistake that they make, is they try to take the resi team and pivot into commercial multifamily. I say, don’t take from your previous team. Add one person, add one teammate, give them some equity or give them part of the deal or make them a partner, whatever it takes, pay them part of the acquisition fee, and don’t stop what you’re doing because you need that income and you want to keep that going. You don’t want to sacrifice what you were doing that was successful just to jump into commercial multifamily. Add an acquisitions person that all they do is network with brokers, network with wholesalers, go to events, do direct-to-seller marketing, all those kind of things.

And if you’re the CEO, then your job should then be to double-check all their numbers, review their underwriting, raise all the capital because nobody’s going to really invest in a deal. They invest in you. So, you need to be the one that’s out there networking with private investors and limited partners. Let somebody else because you’ve got to, again, turn over a lot of rocks, kick through a bunch of doors to get that first deal.

And Jennifer, that sounds like that’s what you did. And again, for my audience, that’s what I would advise all of you to do. Keep doing what you’re doing, not successful, whether it’s private lending, owning a portfolio, flipping houses, wholesaling, whatever. But if you want to make the pivot into commercial multifamily, find that one extra body, that one extra partner that can go review a lot of deals with you, underwrite network, and you’re going to be getting into the business a lot faster than if you try to split your time up because you only have so much time. You only have so much time. So, that’s my advice back to our audience.

Jennifer. I have to ask you before we wrap up here about advice. Now that you’ve done this successfully, you paid for your daughter’s wedding, financially, taking care of things in that respect. You pivot into commercial multifamily. There are some things about that that you’re trying to kind of course-correct with those bridge loans. You flip these houses. You had a house that was raining in the basement. You have this successful podcast that you’ve launched.

If you were to look back and think of two or three things that you think were the biggest learning lessons of your journey, things that really are changing your life or changing the way you look at this business, what are those one or two or three experiences? What is the advice that you would give our audience that you took away from that?

Jennifer Barner: Yeah, all of my lessons, I would say there was a hunch in my stomach, I call it a sign or a cue that I should have followed. There were some deals I did that I probably shouldn’t have done and I knew it. I knew there was something off, but I trusted other people that I deemed smarter, had more wisdom, more knowledge, and I trusted them instead of trusting my own self.

Josh Cantwell: Oh, that’s so good.

Jennifer Barner: Yeah. And then the other thing is motive. Now, when somebody brings me a deal or wants to do a deal, I always look at, why are you doing this deal?

Josh Cantwell: That’s good.

Jennifer Barner: Because we all have different motives for doing deals. And I recently learned that one of my own business partners, they want to have a billion dollars asset under management. Well, that’s different than my motivation, right? And then my other partner has a different motivation.

So, when you’re putting a deal together and if you have that sense of this doesn’t feel right to me, you probably need to acknowledge it for what it is because everybody has a different motivation for doing a deal. And the sooner you hone into that and trust it and don’t get caught up in FOMO, fear of missing out, you will be way better off, you’ll be just in alignment with who you are, what you’re supposed to be doing, and the path that was designed for you instead of fighting it and trying to be where you think everybody else needs you to be, right?

Josh Cantwell: Yeah. I think that’s so accurate. That’s so good that you have to have a certain amount, not a certain amount but a lot of self-awareness. I have one of our coaching students, a guy that I consult named Tony. His motivation was to retire his wife. He only really needed to buy 70 to 75 units. He had a 1031 exchange coming out of some condos that he owned. He did that 1031 exchange, bought that building, retired his wife. That’s a lot different than a guy that’s like, “I want to have a billion dollars under management. Well, why? Why? What’s the billion dollars represent? What does that represent in income or cash flow or financial freedom?

Like, I would much rather be Tony, who had a very specific reason for his wanting to do these 70 to 75 units than this kind of pie-in-the-sky, airy, weird, very nonspecific goal. I want a billion dollars under management. If you just want a billion dollars under management, there’s no reason that when some sh*t goes wrong, you’re not going to be in the fight to fix it. Or when something goes right, it’s just another step versus like Tony’s, like he’s celebrating, he accomplished something so profound in his life. That to me is much more important than I have all these units, right?

Jennifer Barner: Right.

Josh Cantwell: You get to the point where maybe you have an institutional business, a billion dollars is more of an institutional business, and that for some people, that’s where they want to go. But to me, it’s more about the feeling, the result of what does it do for us, right? And that sounds like that’s the route that you’ve taken is what’s it going to do for me. Is this going to help me pay for my daughter’s wedding in Italy? I’d rather be focused on that than just having a massive portfolio.

So, for our audience, got some great pieces of advice here coming out of Jennifer. Jennifer, thank you so much for that. Jennifer, tell us a little bit more about your podcast, and also, any other things that we could do to follow you on social media, follow you on the Internet? Tell us about it.

Jennifer Barner: Yeah. Thank you. So, yes, I launched Mastering Money for Moms podcast last year with the intent of educating women and giving them motivation, inspiration, and aspiration to go out there and do possibly whatever their heart has always wanted to do, and they never felt empowered to do it and not think that money should be scary.

There’s something a good friend of mine told me a long time ago that money isn’t hard. It doesn’t have to be hard. It’s an education process, just like anything else. So, we make it hard by choosing to put our heads in the sand. And so, Mastering Money for Moms is really about, hey, let’s all look at this together. It doesn’t have to be hard. We can all make money and we should know about the things our husbands have invested in and how can we take a role in that? How can we be the financial managers of our household so that in the event our husband passes away before us, we’re not left in the dark wondering, what am I left with? What am I doing?

And it also creates a sense of accomplishment and confidence when you take that on yourself to learn about the things that your husband may be invested in, or maybe the real estate portfolio you want to build or short-term rentals or whatever. It’s out there to encourage women to take control of their finances and help them unleash a new way of life for themselves that they may have not had otherwise.

Josh Cantwell: I love it. I love it. And I love the fact that it’s really what resonates with me of what you said is confidence, right? It’s the confidence that you’ll have in understanding the money side of your life. It’s one piece of your life. But I can only imagine the insecurity or the lack of confidence of not knowing those investments and the money and what it’s doing and what interest is it earning and where is the risk. And instead of putting your head in the sand, just really taking some ownership of learning that, knowing it.

And so, for all of our moms and our audience, please subscribe to Jennifer’s podcast. Follow her online. Take ownership of that. That would make me feel so good to know that all of you have more confidence in your financial lives as well.

So, Jennifer, listen, we’ll put all that stuff in the show notes. Fantastic stuff. We’ll put Jennifer’s social media contacts in the show notes as well. Jennifer, thanks so much for carving out some time today for us on Accelerated Investor.

Jennifer Barner: Oh, thank you so much. Again, it was such a pleasure to meet you firsthand. And I hope you have a blessed day. Thank you.

Josh Cantwell: You too. Thank you so much.

Jennifer Barner: Bye-bye.

[CLOSING]

Josh Cantwell: Well, there you go, guys. There you have it. Listen, fantastic pieces of advice there from Jennifer. So glad that she was open and honest about the properties that she bought with bridge loans and how challenging that can be. And I think that goes back to the advice that I tried to give you guys all the time, which is buy properties with fixed-rate financing and things that have long-term debt, long term being five years or more. It’s really kind of midterm, but at least five years. That’s going to help you get through any market cycle.

If you enjoyed this episode, rate, review, like, and subscribe. Don’t forget to also rate, review, like, and subscribe to Jennifer’s podcast called Mastering Money for Moms. I appreciate all of you guys being here. And we’ll see you next time on Accelerated Investor.