Episode 3: The One Where We Shift Our Thoughts and Rethink Home Buying
Buying a home is often presented as a fairly predictable path: save for the down payment, find the house, get the mortgage, move in. But what if the possibilities are much bigger than that?
In this episode of the Femmenomics Podcast, Jen and Odessa explore the beliefs we carry about money, success, failure, and homeownership, including the ones we may have inherited without ever realizing it. Then they turn the traditional idea of buying a first home on its head, exploring house hacking, investment properties, rental income, land, and some wonderfully unconventional ways a property can begin creating wealth.
Sometimes the biggest shift isn’t finding a better answer. It’s realizing you were allowed to ask a completely different question.
Watch the episode here:
Whose Beliefs Are You Carrying?
Long before most of us ever think about buying a home, starting a business, investing, or building wealth, we have already absorbed an entire education about what is possible.
We hear what happened to our parents. We remember what Aunt Sally said about the condo she bought and regretted. We watch people around us struggle with money. We hear warnings about debt, risk, investing, failure, and all the things responsible people supposedly should and shouldn’t do.
Eventually, those stories can start sounding remarkably like our own thoughts.
I could never afford that.
That’s too risky.
People like me don’t do that.
What if it doesn’t work?
One of the most powerful practices we can develop is simply learning to notice those thoughts and ask:
Is this actually true for me?
Sometimes the answer is yes. But sometimes we discover we’ve been carrying somebody else’s experience around in our knapsack for twenty years.
Awareness alone can begin to loosen its grip.
You Don’t Have to Internalize Every Opinion
Doing something differently can also mean becoming comfortable with other people not understanding what you’re doing.
Odessa remembers being in her twenties, working at a grocery store while pursuing a side business after hours. She would change out of her work clothes, freshen up her makeup, put on heels, and head off to evening meetings.
But instead of proudly telling her coworkers where she was going, she made excuses.
She was reaching for something bigger while simultaneously feeling embarrassed that someone might judge her for reaching at all.
So many women know some version of that feeling.
We want to share the idea, the property, the business, the dream. Then someone we care about tells us why it won’t work. Often they genuinely believe they are protecting us.
But their fear does not have to become our instruction.
You can listen. You can consider. You can gather useful information.
And then you can decide for yourself.
“We do not have to internalize every shitty opinion that comes our way.”
What If Failure Is Just Data?
One of the reasons other people’s warnings can carry so much power is because many of us have been taught to fear failure.
But what if we changed the definition?
What if something not working wasn’t evidence that you shouldn’t have tried?
What if it was simply information?
You tried something. You learned something. Now you know more than you did before.
That’s data.
And perhaps the more useful skill isn’t learning how to avoid failure altogether. It’s learning how to pivot.
Receive. Try. Learn. Pivot. Release. Try again.
Confidence is often built exactly this way. We don’t necessarily become confident and then take the leap. We take a step, discover that we survived it, learn something from the experience, and become a little more willing to take the next one.
Eventually, the thing that once felt terrifying becomes something you simply know how to navigate.
“What if we normalized failure? What if we screamed our failures from the rooftops and said, ‘Look at all this data I gathered’?”
Your First Home Doesn’t Have to Be Your Forever Home
The same willingness to question old beliefs can completely change the way we think about homeownership.
For generations, the familiar story went something like this: buy a house, settle down, stay there for decades, eventually pay it off.
That can still be a beautiful path.
It just isn’t the only one.
Your first property might be a duplex where another tenant helps offset your housing costs. It might have an extra room, apartment, RV space, or piece of land capable of generating income. It might become a short-term, medium-term, or long-term rental.
Your first purchase might even be an investment property somewhere other than the place you currently live.
The point isn’t that everyone should become a landlord or start searching for a duplex tomorrow.
The point is to stop automatically eliminating possibilities simply because they don’t resemble the version of homeownership you grew up imagining.
What Else Could This Become?
When Jen bought five acres in California, she wasn’t initially dreaming about creating a rental business.
She wanted space.
After living through lockdown in a rental with a gravel backyard and a busy road out front, she wanted green. She wanted room for her daughter and dog to roam. She wanted trees, land, and breathing room.
The property happened to have an apartment above the garage, and initially she imagined that might become her house-hacking opportunity.
Then she noticed something else.
The previous owner had hosted large family gatherings, so the property already had water spigots, an outdoor bathroom, and infrastructure that made camping possible.
Jen experimented with renting a couple of campsites.
And those two campsites eventually generated enough seasonal income to cover her mortgage during the months she operated them.
She didn’t purchase the property because she had perfectly mapped out that income stream beforehand. She discovered it by looking at something she already had and asking a different question:
What else could this become?
That question can be surprisingly valuable.
Maybe you have an unused RV pad. A detached garage. A spare room. A piece of land. A property near a hospital that could work for traveling professionals. A space that could serve an entirely different purpose than the one you originally imagined.
Not every idea will make sense financially or legally, and local rules, financing, insurance, taxes, zoning, and rental regulations matter.
But before determining whether an idea works, you first have to allow yourself to imagine it.
Start Messy. Then Build.
There is another trap that can keep a potentially wonderful idea sitting untouched for years:
Waiting until everything is perfect.
Perfect furnishings. Perfect branding. Perfect landscaping. Perfect business plan. Perfect timing.
Jen’s philosophy is much simpler.
Start messy.
Begin with what you have. Learn from actual experience. Then, when something begins generating income, you can decide whether you want to reinvest some of that money into making it better.
There is enormous freedom in treating our ideas as experiments rather than permanent declarations about who we are.
You are allowed to try house hacking and discover you hate having people that close to you.
You are allowed to rent part of your property for a season and later decide you want your privacy back.
You are allowed to buy one kind of investment and realize the next one should look completely different.
You are allowed to evolve.
“You’re not married to the idea. You’re allowed to have fun with this and try things.”
Be Careful Who You Share Your Dreams With
There are people who will hear your wild idea and immediately give you seventeen reasons it cannot work.
There are people who will lovingly try to protect you from every possible disappointment.
And then there are the people who hear your idea and say:
Okay. What if we did this?
Those rooms matter.
Not because you need someone else to validate every decision you make, but because imagination expands differently when it is surrounded by curiosity instead of fear.
Find people who can help you ask better questions. Find experts when you need expertise. Find women who are willing to explore possibilities with you.
And then remember that ultimately, you are the one living your life.
“Be very, very careful who you share your dreams with.”
Journal Prompt:
What belief about money, homeownership, success, or what is “realistic” have I been carrying that may not actually belong to me? If I set that belief down for a moment, what new possibility can I see?
Come Join the Conversation
Big ideas have a way of coming to life when we share them with women who are willing to imagine alongside us.
The Femmenomics community is a space for honest conversations about money, real estate, business, mindset, reinvention, and all the beautifully unconventional ways we get to create lives on our own terms.
Bring your questions. Bring your ideas. Bring the thing you’re not quite sure is possible yet.
There’s room for it here.
