If you’re a real estate investor with children, you may face two significant challenges.
The first challenge is holding onto your rental property for as long as possible. You understand that the longer you own real estate, stocks, and other risk assets, the more likely you are to build wealth. However, as you grow older and wealthier, your tolerance for managing rental properties may decrease.
The second challenge builds on the first. As your wealth increases, so does the risk of raising spoiled and entitled children who aren’t motivated to work hard for their money. Raising able-bodied children who fail to launch into adulthood is one of the greatest disservices parents can do to them. By overprotecting them, you deprive them of independence, the opportunity to find love, and the satisfaction of achieving their own goals.
I’ve found that the best way to address both challenges is by involving your children in rental property maintenance.
The Value of Owning Rental Property Is Even Greater with Children
Owning rental property was a key factor in my early retirement in 2012. Another crucial element was negotiating a severance package that covered five years of living expenses.
The combination of rising rents and increasing property values over time is a powerful force for building wealth. No longer are you at the mercy of inflation; instead, you’re making inflation work for you. As you improve your skills in remodeling, expansion, negotiation, and marketing, you might further enhance the value of your real estate investments.
Since becoming a father in 2017, I’ve realized an additional value of owning rental property: using it as a tool to teach my children about property maintenance. Once I recognized the educational potential of rental property, the decision to hold onto it rather than sell became an easy one.
Rental Property as an Educational Tool
The main reason I began viewing rental property as an educational tool for my children was the pandemic. Four months after our son started preschool, we pulled him out when the lockdowns began in March 2020. With a four-month-old baby at home and both my wife and I without day jobs, we felt that homeschooling our son was the best option.
If he or our baby had become severely ill because we didn’t take the opportunity to care for them, we would have felt like failures. So, we made the rational decision to educate our son ourselves. The days were long, but we made the best of a challenging situation.
Eighteen months later, in the fall of 2022, we enrolled him back in regular school. After several months, I realized that homeschooling is about three times more efficient at imparting knowledge than traditional schooling. This makes sense given the daily one-on-one attention for hours from each parent.
Recognizing the significant difference in educational progress, we decided to provide supplemental education whenever possible. The longer he’s in school, the more he naturally reverts to the average pace of learning. We figured that if he has the capability to learn more, why not teach him more?
This is where rental property maintenance comes into play.
Specific Benefits Of Rental Property Maintenance Work
Instead of treating rental property maintenance as a chore, we decided to make it part of our son’s educational curriculum. Here are the benefits of teaching your children rental property maintenance:
- Self-Sufficiency: They learn to be more self-sufficient as adults by acquiring the skills to fix various things around the house.
- Employment Skills: Learning basic skills in painting, plumbing, construction, electrical work, and landscaping makes them more employable in these trades. They might even start businesses in these fields.
- Property Care: It teaches them the importance of caring for a property and understanding that everything degrades over time.
- Business Skills: They learn how to acquire tenants, provide a good product, treat people well, and negotiate effectively.
- Appreciation for Hard Work: They gain a better appreciation for the value of hard work.
- Role Modeling: Seeing their parents get their hands dirty with maintenance work helps eliminate any sense of entitlement.
- Investment Motivation: It encourages them to invest in real estate and generate semi-passive income for their future.
- Purpose and Satisfaction: They experience the sense of purpose and satisfaction that comes after completing a job well done.
- Understanding the Supply Chain: It teaches them about the supply chain and where to purchase materials.
Using rental properties as an educational tool is another advantage of owning real estate over stocks. Our kids might not appreciate a gifted stock portfolio, where no effort was needed, but with real estate, they can engage with a tangible asset that offers countless opportunities to get their hands dirty.
The Key To Eliminating Entitlement In Our Children
Wealth usually increases with age, but the problem with growing wealthier is that you can often become lazier. With more money, it’s easy to pay others to do everything for you—clean the house, mow the lawn, wash the car, and so on.
This can lead to buying your kids $600 Woom bikes instead of a rusty hand-me-down, just because their friends have them. For the next family vacation, you might take them on a $10,000-a-week Disney Cruise, where there are all-you-can-eat buffets and endless activities. After 18 years of living such a comfortable life, it’s hard for them not to develop an entitlement mentality!
To course-correct and help eliminate this mentality, you, as the parent, must also be willing to do the work. It doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO with a $10 million investment portfolio generating $400,000 a year in passive income. At home, get on your hands and knees and wipe the jam stains off the kitchen floor!
By seeing you in action, your children will be more motivated to put in the work as well. There’s no way they can object to your request when they see you working alongside them. Educating through action is far more effective than educating through instruction.
Rental Property Turnover Provides an Opportunity for Maintenance Work
In July 2024, two years and one month after my tenants moved in, they gave me their 35-day notice. For the most part, they were good tenants who paid on time electronically and took care of the house. Since they were only a family of three, the wear and tear was relatively minimal for a five-bedroom, four-bathroom house.
They gave their notice a couple of days before heading to Paris for a month and allowed me to show the property while they were away. Fortunately, I was able to secure another tenant during this period. The new tenants paid the deposit and the first month’s rent, starting on August 1, 2024.
On August 1, 2024, I met with their relocation specialist for the walk-through. My new tenants were relocating from overseas to attend a nearby school.
The relocation specialist spent two hours inspecting my property, and to be honest, it was quite extreme. She placed blue tape everywhere there were imperfections. However, her thoroughness taught me to be more meticulous during future pre-move-in and post-move-out walkthroughs.
Doing Maintenance Work With My Kids Over The Next Two Weeks
Due to all the blue tape around the rental property, I was able to easily identify and fix various issues. Some of the items had been bothering me for a while, including chipped countertops caused by previous tenants.
Here’s a list of tasks my kids and I completed before our new tenants moved in on August 14, 2024:
- Epoxied and sanded chips and cracks in the kitchen counter (3 spots) and one in the laundry room counter.
- Touched up the black hand railing with matching oil paint on the stairs, both upstairs and downstairs.
- Touched up some of the wall trim between the dining and living rooms.
- Touched up the trim and fireplace in the living room.
- Touched up the main bedroom wall where there were some scrapes from the furniture.
- Touched up the bookshelf in the top-floor corner office, as well as any light spots.
- Touched up the corner of the flower bed at the top floor near the stairs.
- Tightened and caulked the loose bathroom toilet paper holders on the main floor and top floor.
- Tightened and caulked the loose tub faucet in the upstairs bathroom.Touched up the front gate and entryway wall.
- Installed a missing window crank in the main floor bedroom nearest the bathroom.
- Removed carpet stains from the stairwell and main floor that were missed by the move-out cleaners.
- Tightened the two loose shower handles on the sliding doors in the main bathroom on both the top floor and main level.
- Watered the front and side yards and finished trimming the plants.
- Landscaped the side yard by installing weed blockers, covering the ground with black mulch, removing a dead small tree, and planting three succulents.
- Enclosed the backyard with a new fence at the very bottom.
- Fixed the hinges on the side wooden fence door and installed a new wood plank to secure the loose wood panels.
- Replaced an old exterior pipe, connected it to the vertical roof drain, added a filter, and rootered the pipe to ensure proper drainage during the next rainstorm.
- Watered the young magnolia trees outside given the tenants never did
- Changed the main furnace filter and left three additional filters in the garage.
- Replaced the garage door spring and two side cables that broke in the first week of August 2024.
- Sealed and painted the side of the house electrical junction box using tape, as a hexagonal case had been installed instead of a circular one, to prevent water from entering.
- Touched up and painted the exterior back wall and side wall of the house.
- Filled a hole in the living room with wood filler and sanded it.
- Cut a loose cable protruding from the living room floor trim, spackled the hole, sanded it, and painted the trim.
- Added a new sink drain filter for the main floor bathroom sink.
Holy moly! That was a lot of rental property maintenance work. In the past, before I had kids or thought about using my rental property as an educational tool, I would have been annoyed by all this work.
However, almost every day after camp, I’d pick up the kids and take them to the empty rental property to get them involved. These activities also provided an extra 1.5 hours of childcare help for my wife.
10+ Years Of Rental Maintenance Work Should Create Expertise And Appreciation
I started involving my children in maintaining rental properties in 2023, when they helped landscape the front yard of a rental property at just three and six years old.
My hope is that by continuing to involve them in rental property maintenance every summer or whenever there is turnover, they will gain the knowledge and skills needed to maintain these properties themselves. After all, they might one day inherit these properties—if they show appreciation.
The three biggest impediments to financial success I see are:
- Laziness: Some able-bodied people work less than 40 hours a week and then wonder why they can’t get ahead.
- Entitlement: Some adults who attended private schools their entire lives choose to study English in college for $100,000 a year and then complain about low pay.
- Pride: Some people who grew up wealthy are unwilling to work minimum wage service jobs, preferring instead to rely on the Bank of Mom & Dad to support them.
By encouraging your children to do rental property maintenance work with you, you may significantly reduce these three impediments, helping them become independent.
More Peace Of Mind As A Parent As Well
Additionally, there’s a psychological benefit for you, the parent, in teaching your children to be appreciative and hard-working. If you raise well-adjusted kids, you can feel satisfied knowing you did your best as a parent.
Instead of raising kids who go out at night to shoplift, break into cars, deal drugs, and mug people, you raise kids who are willing to contribute to society. That means a lot, especially if you’re a full-time parent for 18 years.
You can rest easier knowing that once they’re adults, your kids will be able to navigate life on their own, allowing you to enjoy the remaining years of your life with the utmost joy.
I say this type of peace of mind is worth a lot in exchange for painting some walls with your kids don’t you think?
Reader Questions And Suggestions
Do you do any rental property maintenance work with your kids? If not, what are some other things you do with your children to help them build work ethic and appreciation for money? As you get older and wealthier, what are some other strategies you use to help you hold onto your rental properties for longer?
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I’ve personally invested over $275,000 in Fundrise to earn more passive real estate income and diversify into artificial intelligence. The older and wealthier you get, the less you’ll like volatility. Fundrise is a long-time sponsor of Financial Samurai.
