Meet Pedro and Mariana: A Growing Family Seeks Financial Flexibility

Pedro and Mariana met while attending high school together in Portugal. Flash forward a few years, and they had married, started a family, moved to the United States and secured jobs at a tech company (for Pedro) and a consulting firm (for Mariana) in California’s Bay Area.

With the hustle and bustle of growing careers and raising two young, active children, they began to look at their financial picture and realized they needed to create goals beyond the income from their jobs. They sought to attain financial independence to help reduce their reliance on their salaries. This desire for financial independence led them to real estate syndication through Madison Investing.

Watch Pedro and Mariana’s story of how they determined their financial goals and evaluated different investment vehicles like single-family properties and the stock market. Sign up for our free course, Blueprint for Passive Real Estate Investing, to learn more about how you can achieve financial wealth and receive the gift of time — your greatest asset.

House Shopping in Portugal Highlights the Challenges of Single-Family Investment

As their lives and careers took off in the United States, Pedro and Mariana welcomed two children two years apart: Arthur and Samantha. The growth of their family is what first sparked the motivation to seek asset classes that would help them attain their biggest life goal — financial freedom.

“Between taking care of them [our children], doing our jobs, and maybe having some time for ourselves, there are not enough hours in the day,” Mariana said. “That’s why we started investing and trying to create cash flow every month, to make sure that we start building this cushion to let us have more flexibility in terms of our work.”

“We were looking at our finances and savings, mostly 401ks and investments in the market,” Pedro adds. “At the end of the day, we had no cash flow coming in. As we read through how to get financial independence, it’s like you need a third income. That’s when we started looking at real estate options.”

Like so many prospective investors, Pedro and Mariana first explored buying and renting single-family homes. They targeted their home country of Portugal, thinking that they may want to move back someday. But their early property visits made them wary of being long-distance landlords.

“We did visit three of four properties. They were not bad deals, but they were in dubious areas,” said Mariana. “For me, I’m a risk-averse person. How do we make sure tenants are going to pay the rent? And how much work are we going to put in for this to actually generate income?”

Marina’s parents invested in real estate once upon a time, and things didn’t go well. The tenants stopped paying rent and vandalized the apartments, and it took months to officially evict them. In the end, Pedro and Mariana, for a number of reasons, decided against investing in single-family home properties.

But they still wanted to use real estate as an investment vehicle for putting their money to work and achieving financial wealth and flexibility.

The Search for ‘Financial Wealth & Freedom’ Leads to Real Estate Syndication

Rather than buying a single-family home in a foreign country and hoping for a small return in exchange for a lot of work, Pedro and Mariana started looking for something less time consuming, more convenient and more lucrative. That search for convenience, plus the potential for stronger returns, led them to Madison Investing.

“When we made our first investment, it was pretty scary,” Mariana said.

But Pedro and Mariana had done their due diligence before investing. They asked a lot of questions. They tested the assumptions of prospective deals. And they spent time speaking with Madison Investing Co-Founder and CEO Spencer Hilligoss about participating in real estate syndication, allowing them to place trust in the Madison Investing approach to syndications.

The answers to questions, the testing of assumptions, and the conversations about real estate syndication all put Pedro and Mariana at ease. Their decision to invest through real estate syndication has paid off.

“The experience has been amazing,” said Mariana. “We’re closer to our goals than we’ve ever been since investing with Madison, that’s for sure.”

Watch Pedro and Mariana tell their story below. And sign up for our free course, Your Blueprint for Passive Real Estate Investing, to take the next step.

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Testimonial disclaimer: Unique experiences and past performances do not guarantee future results. Testimonials herein are unsolicited and may be non-representative of all investors.