Why I Don’t Own Any Investment Properties (Ep205)

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Here is my story as to why I don’t own and investment properties yet and why I can’t stop talking about property.

Hey guys ryan here from onproperty your daily dose of your daily dose of property in education and inspiration and today I want to answer a reader question that I’ve been asked many different times and that is why don’t I own any investment properties . So I’m going to talk about my story and what has happened with me and why at this time point in time I actually don’t own any investment properties

So let’s go back all the way to when I was a teenager. I worked many years as a paper boy and I saved up quite a great deal of money. In fact when I was younger my mom has this thing where she decided that whatever me or my sister saved that she would double it. She would match it into our savings account. Well I kind of got on to that and I was earning about $100, $150 a week and so I would earn all that money and it would all go into the bank account. So it only took a couple of weeks for my mom to renege on that offer of doubling our money. I was just too good a saver when I was young but my parents provide a lot for me so I had my extra cash I could just save. I had saved about $16,000 by the time I was 16 and that’s when I started getting serious about looking into property, started researching properties going on road trips with my dad, talking to real estate agents, talking to mortgage brokers. I had a part time job by the time I was 18 and looking, getting loans and stuff like that. But then what happened was I had spent $6,500 on online teaching by a guy called Robert J Allen which taught you how to make money through real estate but also how to make money through other means like how to make money online, how to make money in the stock market, so I pay out $6,500 into that, which obviously cut my savings down quite significantly.

I then spent a bit of it on living money because I was now out of school and had more things to pay for and I actually ended up giving about $7,000 to the youth group and the church that I was a part of at the time. Don’t ask me if that was a good decision or not cause I still don’t know if I made a big mistake in giving that much money away or if I’m actually grateful for it but I’m definitely more leaning on the side that again that was a lot of money to give away maybe I shouldn’t have gone so extreme but you definitely see the fruits of a generosity  lot so I’m not so worried about that $7,000 but basically everything was gone so I saved $16,000 and then by the time I was 20 it was gone and I was so poor that when it came time to propose to my wife I had to sell I like everything I own in order to buy the ring. I had to sell my computer, I had to sell all my gadgets and stuff like that.

So starting from scratch when I was 20 and I got married when I was 20 so basically starting from scratch at the age of 20 we racked up quite a bit of debt, so my wife had a $10,000 car debt, then we got a debt from our honeymoon which I ended up in Phuket hospital, but that’s another story and a bunch of credit card debt and others stuff like that. So basically starting at 20, we’re about $20,000 in debt and starting completely from scratch. At 20 I decided that I wanted to run my own business doing online marketing and so I started that and I ran that for about a year or so not making much money at all; had my first kid at 22 and that’s when I really went into my first full time job earning about $30,000 a year so it wasn’t a great deal of money had my second child at 23 so as you can see things are moving pretty quickly between 20 and 23 I was running my own business I had a kid followed up very quickly by a second child at 23 and by then I had got the new job with a pharmaceutical company. By the time I was 24 I got an internal promotion and relocated my entire family from Sydney to Newcastle then we ended up on the very north of the Central Coast so now was commuting  into Newcastle working in there.

So a lot had happened in that time children, relocation basically in the space of about 18 months or two years I tripled my income from $30,000 up to over $100,000.  So I was doing pretty well, we paid off our debt, we had saved over $10,000 as well. I think is around $12,000 that we had saved so we have paid off your debts save $12,000,  probably about two more commissions away from having our full deposit and the amount of money we needed for Stan and Judy so you’re looking at about for the 6 month period that We would have had in order to purchase a house. So one of those commissions came in and that was when we decided to move to the Gold Coast.

So we decided that I would leave my high paying pharmaceutical role and the business that I’ve been doing on the side which was internet marketing that was making enough money that we are willing to take a punt on it and go out on my own for a year and move to Queensland. So we relocated to Queensland in October 2013 and I went back into business for myself. So really I tell all of that story to say that there was a lot of times in my life where I wanted to buy property and there were a lot of times where I plan to buy property or we started saving to buy property. Well the truth was property for me is all about creating the lifestyle that you want. It’s all about getting that financial freedom so that you can do what you want with your life and truthfully a lot of those times maybe when I was younger and I had that $16,000 then I lost it all but I probably put that down ignorance , youth and youthfulness. But then later in life leaving a high paying pharmaceutical role where we were almost ready to purchase a house had spoken to mortgage brokers, could have easily get an approval for a loan, we were about to buy a house in Toukley which is on the north of the central coast. We’re looking at a two bedroom or 3 bedroom houses there, really  cheap maybe around 250 to 350 mark and then decided to leave all that and go to the Gold Coast. But the biggest thing for us is that we’re young we had kids young but we want to live our lives. We don’t want to spend our lives working in a job that we hate and truthfully I was so burned out from my job I was hating it at the time. I was very good at my job it was a great job but also I was so burnt out I just work myself to death almost.

And for us to choose life style and postpone property is exactly what we decided to do. But yet I still talk about property and I think it’s very important that I continue to talk about property and I do it in an open and honest way. I’m not trying to hide fact that I don’t own any property. I’m not pretending to be a guru or something like that but when I was doing all my research into properties there were so many holes in terms of the information you can find on properties and the help that you can receive. And if you go to onproperty.com.au/plus at the moment I’ve got a video on there, which kind of talks about my journey which talks about the fact that when I looked out there to try and find a service or an information product that would help me in an affordable way become a confident and successful investor it just didn’t really exist.

So for me. I’m not leaving the property game because this is something I’m so passionate about and just because I don’t own property now doesn’t mean I’m not trying to own property or I won’t own property down the track. The fact of the matter is I know so much, I feel like I have an obligation to fill the holes in the market that when people are googling stuff and they’re not getting answers to their questions because the content doesn’t exist online yet and the only way you could find it is calling an accountant and asking them or calling a mortgage broker and asking them or I don’t know how else you would find it. The service that I offer is trying to fill those holes then. I’ve gotten so many emails of people appreciating what I do, appreciating the podcasts, the videos, the blogs posts, everything like that and I just love the feedback that I get from you guys. I really appreciate everyone who watches this show or reads the blog and I will keep going into the future and I’m not going to give up. I’m even more excited, I looked today and we have almost 100 members inside onproperty plus so I’m pretty pumped about how that’s going and how we’re helping people over there with our tools and our property listings and stuff like that.

Yeah so that’s my journey, that’s where I’m at the moment because I have started a new business. It’s going to be at least, I need two financial years of data before I can even have hope of getting a loan and my first year, as the first year of any business is pretty slow so probably I’m going to need another two financial years after that. So lots happening, I’m pretty excited, I’m living the lifestyle that I want, I’m working for myself, living on the Gold Coast, walk to the beach, go surfing, take my kids swimming in the morning and that day I’ll just work late that night. So I’m already achieving     in a way the lifestyle that I wanted to achieve through owning property and I just want to leave you with that thought. Property is a way to achieve something, it’s a means to an end, and it’s not the end goal in or of itself. So what is your end goal and yes property could be a great way to get there but is it the only way? Alright guys that’s it for today and that’s it for my story. If you want to check out the full blog post about this just got to go onproperty.com.au/why and you can check that out there and until tomorrow remember that your long-term success is only achieved. one day at a time