Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Bushy and Sonya Martin on unifying to design your life

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

In another special episode of Get Invested, Bushy Martin is joined by his wife, Sonya, to talk about how they partner together in life and business to achieve their goals. Bushy has talked often about the power of 2, and his synergy with Sonya, where 1 plus 1 equals 11, not just 2. Bushy and Sonya talk about what it means to Live By Design, relationship dynamics, common values and their unified, evolving vision that has enabled them to realise their dreams and live their legacy.   This chat was first recorded on the popular Date Forever podcast, and we’re bringing it to you now, on Get Invested! Hour of power with Bushy: If you’d like an hour of power to talk with me personally on any questions, queries or issues you’d like to discuss about your investment strategy, finance or property portfolio delivery, whether you’re an aspiring investor or an experienced investor with a substantial property portfolio, just go here https://knowhowproperty.com.au/contact-us then click on the ‘Lets Zoom, DeepDive Meeting with Bushy’ 1 hour  option to book in your preferred time. For a small investment of just $295 you can ask me anything you want about property for a full 60 minutes.  For more free investment insights, join the Get Invested community: If you want to continue investing in your knowledge, join me and many other like minded investors in our Get Invested community right now. I send a free and exclusive monthly email full of practical ‘Self, Health and Wealth’ wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can’t wait to get each month. It’s full of investment and lifestyle tips, my personal book recommendations, apps I use to enhance life and so much more. Just visit bushymartin.com.au and sign up at the bottom of the page … because this is just the beginning! Get Invested is the leading weekly podcast for Australians who want to learn how to unlock their full ‘self, health and wealth’ potential. Hosted by Bushy Martin, an award winning property investor, founder, author and media commentator who is recognised as one of Australia’s most trusted experts in property, investment and lifestyle, Get Invested reveals the secrets of the high performers who invest for success in every aspect of their lives and the world around them. Remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you're enjoying the show please leave us a review. Find out more about Get Invested here https://bushymartin.com.au/get-invested-podcast/  Want to connect with Bushy? Get in touch here https://bushymartin.com.au/contact/  This show is produced by Apiro Media - http://apiropodcasts.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the Get Invested podcast with Bushy Martin. I'm Andrew Montessi, the producer of the show, kicking off another special episode where you'll get an incredible insight into how Bushy and his wife Sonia partner together in life and business. Bushy has talked often about the power of two and his synergy with Sonia, where one plus one equals eleven, not just two. This podcast is a special treat where not only will you hear from Bushy, but Sonia too also gets on the microphone to talk about what it means to live by design, relationship dynamics, common values, and their unified, evolving vision that has enabled them

to realize their dreams and live their legacy. This chat was first recorded on the popular Date Forever podcast, and we're bringing it to you now on Get Invested. Enjoy. Welcome to the Get Invested podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how and where they invest their time, their skills, and their money, and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every minute of every day, we're investing our time, our skills, our energy, and our money in something.

Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, and sometimes for no impact. get invested will help you to start living by design not by default i'm going to help you to make it happen not let it happen you'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more work less and leave a living legacy by investing now listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started make the most of your investment journey and ultimately to be living your dream not someone else's more episodes can be found on iTunes or at bussymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. Thanks for listening and now let's

get invested. In this week's episode, we're chatting about creating a grand vision for your life, living a life by design in line with your values and the money medicine worker and wealth builder strategy to lifestyle success. But before we jump into that, Sammy, what's been fueling you up this week my humming household fuel tank got some fuel over the weekend oh it certainly did didn't that yeah with a big extravaganza to ikea yeah we moved into our apartment like five six months ago yeah five months i think yeah yeah and we hadn't moved in like five six years maybe six seven years so we had a lot of furniture that wasn't quite fitting quite right in the new place and we've been living with it like oh that'll do and close enough we've done a

few rearrangers already and like bought a few little bits and pieces but there was still a lot that wasn't quite right was there yeah so last week i was like nah i've had enough of this this is not serving me there's little things that are driving me crazy and i'm gonna make change yeah so i made change it was really good i felt like i hadn't really carved out enough time to really nest here and make it our own so i took i took most of saturday to do that which was really really lovely and uh we got a new prime minister yeah we did yeah yeah i i you know this show isn't about politics this show isn't about any of that sort of stuff but i'm excited for change yeah what about you nath what fueled you up so mine was a little win that i had on friday

in that i went out for my first solo surf i mean you were there sammy but in over in a group of people but i was i was out there surfing by myself you did you've overtaken me in my own hobby oh it's not a competition no no it's not a competition but but it was the first time that i took out my new surfboard as well which is a bit exciting um and yeah went out and had a bit of a solo surf i can't say that i did all that great conditions are pretty shit but yeah it was just really nice to be out there and it was the first time i've gone for a surf before a work day as well so i think it might become a bit more of a habit i'm so jealous like like no i'm stoked that you've picked it up this quickly and this easily and that you're having this much fun because

i have a surf buddy now so i think this is really cool and it was really cool to see you out there doing your thing um you were definitely catching more way drowning no you were definitely catching more waves than me and i was out there with an instructor yeah yeah so later in this episode you will hear nathan and i talk about our annual game plan and i just want to give it a quick plug so we have a mini course called the annual game plan agenda and it is everything that you need to run a planning day with you and your person to set some intentions for the next 365 days there's some videos there's some templates there's some conversation guides there's the actual agenda for that day what you should be talking about and the question is to ask each other so that you can

review the year that was and make some plans and intentions not just for the year ahead but how that fits into your big vision and life too so you can get the annual game plan agenda for 27 and you'll find it at fuelcollective.com.au forward slash agp it's been a real game changer for us so we've gone from reactively just fumbling our way through each year to really proactively kind of planning out each year setting some real clear intentions and kicking some massive goals because of that and it's not something you just need to do at the beginning of the year you can do it any time of year so highly recommend everybody jumping in and grabbing this agenda but now here's this week's guests today we've got bushy and sonja joining us bushy is recognized as one of australia's

most trusted voices in lifestyle investment and property he is a man on a mission to create happy homes by working together with hard-working aussies to create happy homes and then great lifestyles by investing in homes his business know-how is a vehicle for helping those less fortunate also create happy homes by saving dollars we save lives he believes happy homes lead to happy lives and then create happy communities. Bushy is an author of award-winning book, The Freedom Formula, Get Invested, and a host of Realty Talk, Australia's longest running and most popular property show, and Get Invested podcast. Sonia is the go-to girl that makes things happen for everyone, where it's all about achieving your ideal lifestyle by helping others.

So you start by living by design, not by default. She's a business builder, integrator, and systems automation queen that leverages her expertise as a property management expert and active property investor. Together with her partner in all things, Bushy, their lifestyle business has helped thousands of Australians' families get to get invested. And Sonia is super passionate about taking it to another level for women all around Australia. Welcome to the show, you two. Awesome. We've been looking forward to joining you two for ages. It's great to have you here. I think like a little disclaimer before we get into this interview when date forever the show was just a concept these two helped us shape it and gave us

lots of insights and wisdom about running a podcast and whether or not it's something that we might like to do so really thank you so much for supporting us in our early seed stage when this was just a little blip now we love it and we love where you've taken it to the uh from where we were talking to where you've taken it it's awesome guys you've done a fantastic job it's It's just taken us two years to wrangle you here. So thank you. Thank you for being here. What that intro didn't really say, it did say that you're a partner in all things, but

you are also business partners, life partners, adventure partners. You two are just a dream team. And I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. But maybe let's go right back to the beginning. Where did it all start? How did you meet? Yeah, really interesting, actually. It was way back in the days when I was an architect, Sammy,

and I actually went away on a holiday and the guy that I left in charge of the office, we needed someone else on the team and when we came back, Sonia was part of the team, so we worked with each other for a period and then we went in separate directions. Sonia went to Darwin, I went to Perth and we reconnected in Adelaide sometime later and when we reconnected, we were both single again, we'd come out of our relationships

and there was sort of a chemistry there right from day one. It's harder to put into words or to describe it. It was just a mutual respect and a connection that really blossomed then when we got together in Adelaide some years later. Give us some timeline. When was this? This was back in the sort of mid-'90s-ish. When I was a little kid.

Were you born? Were you even born? yes we were both born we both snuck in the 80s just so we've been together for 25 20 yeah something like that years 20 24 years married yeah 24 years married this year september 11th actually it's the yeah it's a pretty um big date now after twin towers but we were pre that yeah and we would sort of knew had known each other four years prior to that It was your day first. So you alluded there that you'd both been jumping states and cities

and then reconnected in Adelaide. We know that the two of you do live a very intentional life by design and that you do live across multiple states and cities still. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, well, we're both gypsies at heart, I think, guys. That's the reality. And Sonia's a real gypsy because she's half Hungarian, so there's some real gypsy blood in that regard and I was very similar I was born in a tiny two

horse town in western Victoria but my father was a stock and station agent so we ended up every one to two years we were living in a different country town and it sort of I think it gets in our blood you sort of that curiosity and the learnings you get from going to new places it's just part of who we are and what we enjoy so when we got together it seemed like the obvious and logical thing to continue doing that we we based ourselves in adelaide for an extensive period so i'm probably the longest we've been anywhere anywhere individually all together and that was more around family so my family my father and mother were still alive at the time they now passed away and once they passed away it became evident that we weren't spending enough time with

sonia's family either so we made the conscious decision to i guess go backwards and forwards between adelaide and and the morning to peninsula which is where we're talking to you from now and COVID sort of made that morning peninsular exercise a little bit more permanent than it could be. But we've just spent another month back in Adelaide doing some renovations to some of our properties and now back on here. And we're pretty excited about the next leg of our journey,

which will be a road trip from Tasmania up the east coast, looking for our forever home, where we're just going to base ourselves in a location for a month uh suss it all out get a really good feel for it then move on to the next and and continue and and combine our love of travel with finding a home but also working on the road so we're pretty excited about all that yeah amazing so you've managed to have two home bases tell us a little bit about how you did that because nathan and i were like in our early 30s and we're like how do we get one house let alone like what are the logistics of having two and how did you do

that? Yeah, that's a really good thing. So an important part of our early journey was rent vesting and very deliberately rent vesting. We fell into it almost by accident in terms of, and let me explain what rent vesting is for those listeners that may be not aware of the concept, but it's about renting where you live to have access to lifestyle and investing in properties that are growing in value and giving you an income. So the early days when Sonia and I got together we were second time rounders so we'd both been in relationships before it was pretty much a ground zero moment for us when we got together we literally had nothing we didn't have two cents to rub together when we when we got together and I guess one of the important things

we did early because both of us had learned some pretty interesting mistakes from our first relationships and we're both absolutely determined not to make the same mistakes again and given that I was an architect for nearly 20 years where you spend your whole life designing something, you get very clear on what the end game needs to look like and then you break it down to what am I doing today that's going to get me from here to there, that became a pretty natural thinking process for us.

So when we got together, we spent a lot of time developing our mutual vision and making sure our values were aligned and then how to get there, it became fairly evident that being able to rent Vest and have our income and our wealth growing from properties that we didn't actually live in but had invested in, and it was very tax-effective to do that. So the properties looked after themselves. It had no negative impact on our lifestyles, our salary, our savings.

And we had the freedom then to rent in locations that we wanted to be in and we've continued the same exercise so we've got a property in south australia which is still still a base we've rent vested here in mornington so we lease this property so yeah currently leasing the property that we're in and that's a very again a very deliberate thing because we don't necessarily want to be here long term but we've created an asset base that fuels that exercise from an income perspective and therefore allows us pretty much to live anywhere so it sort of accommodates that passion that we both have for travel so it's it it's worked well it will continue to work well and and we'll continue to do that until such time as we find the forever

location and build the house on the hill looking looking down the valley to the water below i bet that must be pretty exciting for you as an architect as well to be able to yeah i'm really excited about it nath it's uh the uh creative by by nature and uh the opportunity to bring it all together and we we've been having lots of conversations around it and talking about what we do and don't want and it's an exciting process for us so to give your book a little plug here so your book is the freedom formula live more work less and leave a legacy with property so just a little disclaimer there that like these two this is what they do for a living they help people to do this so if this is sounding like oh this is interesting please reach out and

get hold of the book and have a chat. But I would love to know, before we kind of dig a little bit more into where you're at now and where you're going, you both mentioned that you'd come from a core relationship when you first got together. I would love to know how you feel that's impacted your relationship from now, because obviously you said you wanted to learn from some of those mistakes and move forward. What were some of the mistakes and what can couples learn from what the two of you have been through? Yeah, I'll kick this off because we'll probably have different views on this. In my first marriage, never really put any time into thinking about it, to be perfectly honest. And it was the old story. I had an unexplained

expectation that life would be just like it was for mum and dad. So mum and dad's model was the male works, the female looks after the home pretty much. And I went in with that expectation. Didn't really work out that way we didn't really ever have hard conversations or or honest conversations about anything we just went in with this assumption land and as we all know assumptions get you in a lot of trouble and became fairly self-evident after a few years that there were big issues and I hid in work I'm a workaholic anyway by nature I just I just absorb it just love getting into it and that became a bit of an escape exercise for me which is not not the right way to do things clearly. So when the relationship came to grief, it was like, okay, I'm absolutely not going to go

there again. And I'd spent more time in counselling after our relationship went west than I did before, actually, because I was determined to work out, well, what is it in me that's created these issues? And what things do I need to do differently a second time around? And I guess one of the key things for us was having really open, robust conversations about anything and everything pretty early in the piece and I was a pretty gun shy second time around I carried a bit of baggage with me in that regard I wasn't going to be told what to do and I reacted overreacted pretty early in the piece thankfully Sonia as an empath is very good at being able to accommodate and understand that and help me to see what I was doing I think part of the beauty of the synergy

between Sonia and I is that she's my conscience to a big degree and she has a really special way of being able to say, to get me to see myself, and it's a pretty rare skill. Most people stay in their own corners, whereas Sonia was able to get me to see what impact my thoughts and actions were having and what I might need to do to start changing that to make it better for both of us. That's something that a couple of people have shared on the show

is this idea of how can you build the ability or the skill to not point at your partner's wounds and flaws and opportunities for growth, but how can you learn to hold up a mirror so that they can see it for themselves? I think that's such a valuable skill that the two of you have been able to deliver and receive. So thank you for sharing that. I think the learnings were more about, I was just too immature the first time around and it was easier to leave than stay so if i worked at anything it was going to be that i'm going to commit myself then i need to commit myself and i find out that's prevalent today every it's just a disposable society everything is disposable so i think that's coming full circle

though so for us it was more about we do a lot of independent counseling rather than together because it starts with you you can only control your behavior and that goes a long way and in maintaining and developing and nurturing a relationship so you know and we've said to each other well maybe you need to go see someone about that and it's not about us then it's about the person own personal growth yeah absolutely and i think that's so i don't know if there's a delicate way to say this so i'm just going to come out with it but i think often when couples are heading to therapy or counseling together they're pointing at their partner yeah and saying like they've got to fix this. They've got to do this. They've got to whatever. And that removes ownership,

responsibility, accountability of the individual. And if it's outside of yourself and your control and your influence, how can you possibly change anything? And you definitely can't create better and feel collective. Our whole ethos here is about adding fuel to your relationship so that it can be better. But if you've given up all ability of influence to your partner and they've given it all up as well then you're both up shit creek yes so i yeah so i just want to acknowledge and appreciate like how it really does it starts with you and your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship that you have so more therapy for everyone totally there's a there's still to some degree a perception that there must be a problem if you're

having therapy i totally disagree with that hey it's a different form of holding up the mirror And if you're serious about your own personal development and wanting to continuously improve, then that can only add to the relationship and strengthen the relationship as a result of that. And we all know, we've often said that there's actually three sides to every story. There's my side, your side, and the truth. And the reason I say that is that our perceptions and our expectations and our beliefs tend to color how we see things. and in between my view and your view there is an objective view and if you're able to constantly sharpen the sword by putting yourself in front of someone who's totally unrelated and independent of the exercise you can start to see things for what they really are so and that's been really

beneficial to both of us constantly along the journey yeah definitely so bushy i want to go back to something you touched on earlier and you said that like in kind of the early stages of your relationship you got really aligned on your values and and what you really wanted out of life and i understand that you've got a bit of an annual process for doing that check-in as well so can you just give us a little bit of a rundown on i guess how you first got that alignment and then how you keep that alignment yeah yeah it comes from my architectural background because you're constantly designing things and without me knowing it it becomes an innate part of how you approach everything it's it's a way to solve problems actually so and i'm a very by nature a very

visual person so i like to think in pictures because they're much more magnetic and attractive if you've you've spent a lot of time actually visualizing what things look like so i remember we uh one sunday afternoon we're talking about okay let's let's plan out our lives so we uh we found this beautiful little restaurant in clarendon where we had the homestead for quite some time we we actually ended up there completely unrelated but we sat down and we planned out our perfect day our perfect week our perfect month our perfect year we we wrote it down we did it independently and then we came together and and then said okay well let's look at how this thing can thread the needle and quite uh by accident really the owner of the restaurant was an ex

accountant and he was sort of interested he was sort of what are these two weirdos doing sitting over their bottle of wine drawing and sketching yeah and then sort of threading all out and once we explained what we're doing he said i can help you monetize that i can work out what that lifestyle costs and that process now has become an integral part of what we do to help others so we got really clear on exactly how we wanted to live and vivid i mean vivid with that and in fact on the wall behind us you can see the original vision board the vision board yeah And I still carry it everywhere because it's just that subliminal reinforcement of the things that are important

to you and being visual. If I see a picture of it, it just embeds in the subconscious much more easily. We did affirmations around it. I recorded our perfect day on my iPhone and replayed it every morning when I was in the shower. It was just this sort of subtle reinforcement. I got excited about that because it was a really engaging vision

of exactly how we wanted to live. and it's amazing how magnetic that becomes if you keep doing it and it also not only magnetic but it becomes a compass because it meant then that every decision we were making day to day was around is this taking us closer towards that ultimate lifestyle or further away so it becomes this guiding like a gps i guess in a sense because you've been making sure you're on track and then once we did that every year we go away we like to travel for three months of the year when we can we obviously haven't in the last couple of years with COVID, but most recently we went to Fiji in January. And we, over sort of three or four days, we revisit the plan and we do a top down

and a bottom up. And what I mean by that is we, at the top level, it's okay, let's revisit how exactly do we want to live? And at the bottom up, it's okay, what are the specific things that we need to be doing this year that's going to take us closer towards that exercise? And it's a really fun exercise for me i generally write my perfect day sonja wrote a letter to a mum in 10 years time and detailed what the day and her life looked like at that point and then we bring those together and that becomes the the common vision but i think the the underpinning exercise of both of us is the shared values piece and we actually spent a fair bit of time actually uh breaking down what our values are and what our common values are and our our common values now become our values for

our business. So we call them our gold values. And if you break gold down, then the G is for generosity. So we're very generous with our time and sharing and helping others. The O is for openness. So we're very open and vulnerable and honest about what we communicate and not scared to have the hard conversations and very robust conversations at times to really flesh out what each party thinks and then then decide on where we're going the l is for leadership so we believe in leading from the bottom up so leading in a way that helps others to lead their way is pretty much the way we and create a circle of safety that enables that to happen and each individual to blossom so that works really well in our relationship because we're not static as people

we evolve we're dynamic we're constantly changing but if we've got a framework that actually celebrates that and allows that and it's not threatened by those changes then all of a sudden there's no major hiccups that you have in a relationship as a result and then the the d is for diversity so we celebrate the differences and whereas in a lot of relationships the differences become the problem we actually celebrate those because it's bringing new energy and a new activity into the relationship constantly so as we change as individuals we also change as a couple and actually enjoy that evolution. I love that.

That's such a great, and is this yours? Is gold yours? Did you create this? Yes. Yeah, I love that. Have you got it somewhere up in the house? Yeah, well, every week even at our teammates, we have a weekly teammate with our crew and we go through

how we demonstrated our gold values this week. I love this. And we individually talk about how we do that. So it's a really good thing and it really inculcates whole case that are approached to life and approach to business and everything we do as a result of that so it's been really good yeah and that and that you've just modeled that life by design it's like we've set the gold standard totally fun totally intentional and then you're living towards it and then you're talking about it regularly and like infusing it into your life

at a granular level i think that's so amazing and bushy like you said like that first marriage that you kind of you had a default idea of how it was going to be a default plan that it was going to be the same as mum and dad's and I'm sure your partner probably had a default perception of how things were going to be and you hadn't had those conversations to unearth that maybe these two default plans are not very compatible and your map of the world is maybe not as compatible as you wanted it to be so when we talk about that life by design not by default I think it's not about ending up living in two states it's about creating that design that works for you we're not saying one is right and one is wrong it's just what's a right fit for you and what's a wrong fit

for you so i really love this and it's something that nate and i do like we've been doing our our version of our annual game plan probably for like five six years now so yeah and the first five or six years fumbly very hurdly and tripping over each other and a bit directionless so it's so nice to hear from a couple who have been doing it and living it and embodying it longer than us so thank you for leading the way for us well it's a fun thing i think that that's the exercise that if you allow your imagination to run and really have some fun with that it's actually an exciting process and it's actually a reinvigorating process in it and of itself so we actually look forward to where every year we get together and the wall is covered in post-it notes because

we yeah and then we assemble it in a format and then it all comes together and then we prioritize it and then we're really clear on what the next year is going to look like so we're and then we again both personally and as a business we utilize and this is not our idea it's something we've adapted from somewhere else but we do a regular keep stop start exercise where it's okay uh sammy i want you to keep doing this i want you to uh stop doing that and i want you to start doing this and we can have those conversations around that and it's it's it's we do that with our team as well by the way you know a total 360 exercise and and it's surprising because you you get so lost in what you're doing yourself that you don't see yourself when you have a series of people

say well bussy we we want you to keep doing this but we really want you to stop doing that because that's it's it's it's creating everyone a little bit crazy yep and it's like okay when seven people are telling you that you sort of go okay i better start paying attention probably got a blind spot there yeah exactly time to look in the mirror i love that you've shared that because i think the pursuit of better you need to be able to receive feedback because if you can't receive that feedback and you can't give that feedback there's you've got no hope of being able to pursue better because you're not looking for the next thing that you can work on to be better but it also takes so much humility to be like all right i'm gonna receive it i'm gonna hear it i

might not like it i might need to process it a little bit but it is i think it's a practice skill to it both in the workplace and in your relationship because I know like it was something that Nathan and I were not very good at in the early days of like actively giving each other constructive meaningful feedback I like it when you do this I don't like it so much when you do that that really annoyed me when you did that and those things would build and then they wouldn't explode and it doesn't have to be like that at all if you can have a constructive meaningful feedback giving and receiving conversation so the two of you very ambitious humans but living a life by design and not default how have you navigated your two conflicting or competing or collaborating

careers yeah well it's a good question because hindsight's an easy thing because i've reflected on this a fair bit and i actually spoke about this a couple of years ago to a conference exercise and we talked about the power of two again this is not original but you know one plus one in our case equals 11 not not two and it's that synergy that comes from that but one of the things that we consciously decided because there's often a battle between the parties in terms of who wants the career and then who's who's stuck at home or and it creates tensions when one feels like they're compromising and the other is pursuing and and one party might be going hard on the career but they're missing time with the with the kids and the others stuck with the kids and

feeling like they've given up their career so we sort of consciously made a decision and what i've affectionately referred to it now is the is the madison so you're probably familiar with that bike race where there's two riders uh one's going flat chat around the the velodrome and the other is just sort of cruising it up on the top of the rise and then they come down and they do a tag team and propel the other rider into the race and the other has a has a breather well we sort of adopted that approach very much with our careers early on and we we split it into the what i call the the worker and the wealth builder so one party would earn the income to pay the bills while the other party then invested that in things that we're going to build the nest egg that

we then fund our lifestyle long term and we became what we call passive aggressive about that when we first got together uh we had been quite career minded we had what i call our kiyosaki moment we went to robert kiyosaki conference in adelaide and the big passive income penny dropped in the rich dad poor dad you got it yeah absolutely but it was a real penny drop moment and everything that we did that was very early in our relationship everything we did from that point had to have a passive income and in such a way that our income was generated without relying on us to do it so and that led us down the the business path so to give you a bit of color around that when we first got together we ended up getting into recruitment at different companies

and then we decided we needed to start a business and we had started investing in property at that stage because we could see that as the vehicle and we weren't that happy with how our properties were being managed so we decided we would do it better and and set up a property management business so Sonia jumped headlong into that property management business and I actually took a role with government project managing the health department's portfolio for a period to pay the bills to allow Sonia to build that once Sonia had got the property management business to that point I then jumped in and started our finance breaking business so Sonia was effectively paying the bills while I built out that business. And then with the ultimate goal that we would

come together. So we ended up selling the property management business. I was in a partnership with the finance business. We got out of that partnership and then we came together in what is now KnowHow, which kicked off back in 2015. And that then brought everything into one place. So we live together, we work together, we play together. We really do enjoy each other's company and we're almost Siamese twins, I guess, in the fact that it's almost joined at the hip to some degree. We're always a fall for each other and we're bouncing things off each other. We operate in separate rooms, clearly.

Totally. So we've actually got some space because we're both quite loud and vocal when it comes to communicating. But that Madison has allowed us to follow that pathway and each of us have a career and each of us have some time out but it all revolves around that really clear vision of where we wanted to end up and and how we were going to make that happen does that make sense yeah that's amazing so i know that we were reading a book called the 100 year life and what this was

talking about was that when life was shorter and you were only living for 50 60 years or something like that that you would exit school have your career for kind of 20 years and then live in retirement for 10 15 years or whatever that might be whereas with this 100 year life now we really do have to kind of reinvent ourselves multiple times throughout our kind of career phase and i really love that idea that you've put together of running that medicine so that while one of you is kind of reinventing that career phase and yes and building the wealth and the other one is kind of the stability i guess that's holding the unit together yeah exactly and and the i think the challenge that a lot of have where they're either both working really hard uh is that they get caught

on the rat race and just don't have any time to do anything else, whereas, you know, we're big believers in the exponential growth and the magic of compounding. And the only way we could do that was to say, okay, well, one of us has to build the wealth or one of us has to pay the bills. So this worker and wealth builder exercise sort

of almost happened by osmosis to some degree. But once it started to work, it was like, okay, this is doing really well. and it's i think if we stop and prop on because we with work and life we just fall into the either what happened with our family or what's expected in society without stepping back and going well how do we really want to do this and consciously taking time to have those discussions and have that thought process but it all does all comes back to that having a very clear vision of how you want to live your life and again we in our business now we help people do this and the number

of times i've you know they'll come to us because we're known for property but property is just the means to an end it's just the vehicle that's going to help you get there the first question we ask people is so what's your perfect lifestyle look like and 99 of those people go oh no idea never thought about that before it's like interesting so nathan i have distilled hours and we want to work four days a week 40 weeks a year earning can I say this yes definitely yeah 400k yeah so we did a similar exercise where we figured out well what does our lifestyle cost now and what would we like it to cost what would be the toys that we would like to acquire what are the holidays we would like to take if we were honest about how we would like to celebrate our birthdays and our anniversaries

and the milestone moments in not just our lives but like for my mum's 70th birthday wouldn't it be cool if like those kind of bigger things like wouldn't it be great if we could take our whole family away and what would that look like amazing what would we actually need to create to do that and it was quite an eye-opening exercise because I don't know it had sounded so lofty of like oh we probably need millions and millions and millions of dollars to do that and then you go hold on a second we don't really if we can know that exactly um and work out what we need between now and then yeah i love that the magic of fours i'm hearing a lot of fours in the yeah it's my favorite number two that's awesome it's so good that you've you don't know how rare that is guys

there's so few people who take the time to do exactly that and what you've described to me immediately connected with me i could remember that so it would become an easy part of what i'm doing day to day and guiding those decisions that's the otherwise you're just at the whim of the next person you talk to or the next thing you see on tv and most a lot of aussies let life happen to them they they use business busyness as an excuse for why they can't take control they become very reactive and all of a sudden you're 55 or 60 staring down the barrel and going where's my life gone and holy hell i'm not going to be able to do what i thought i was going to do and they either give up or they just work until they drop.

Yeah, a big part of that vision for us too is about being location agnostic. So we might choose to stay somewhere for a period of time but we would like to not have to be. Yeah, or we might have a home base but then have the ability to move around and live where we want to live. And then, yeah, those 40 weeks. Yeah, and then those other 12 that we can do with what we like.

but i i also think like i want this to be sustainable for us like i i can't imagine that nathan i would be filled with joy and meaning and purpose if we weren't working either or we weren't contribute when i say working i mean like we contribute to fuel collective and the date for a podcast and this looks like work but it also is fun and meaningful and we are contributing to a conversation that is really important to us so if everyone could go and have these conversations i just wonder like what would the world be like like if we had people who were really fulfilled by the life that they designed not the life that they'd like fallen into so I totally encourage go and stalk Bushy's book come and check out our annual game plan and we can probably help you with

a few of these conversations but what I would love to know is to kind of round out this conversation is what are the things that the two of you do now in your daily weekly monthly quarterly annual practice to keep your relationship fueled up maybe one from each of you yeah I think the and this is something that Sonia instigated quite some time ago and we we're not absolutely religious with us but we do do it pretty often that is from the the moment we wake up we start with thank you so and it's thank you for our relationship just a really good start to even you know you haven't lifted your head off the pillow at this stage and it's just and then on on a number of occasions we'll verbalise that.

So what do you think for today, Sonia? And I'll do the same and then we'll talk about what our day is going to look like and envision it going really well and then we round that off with smile time with our dogs. So the first thing we do, we roll out of bed and we just cuddle, we collectively cuddle the dogs because we've got these smiling Samoans that are just, it's just a blessing to have them in our lives and it really magnetises the day

and gives it the energy to kick it off with a smile on your face. That's probably the rewarding ritual that I think is really meaningful to me and keeps us on track. What about you, Sonia? Recently, so it evolves. I like things to change quite a bit in our relationship. I'm not one for routine, pinning me down is hard. But we agreed that last year we would start,

we would rename Friday to Free Day. And so we go for lunch somewhere new every Friday and we pretty much take the afternoon off if we can and it's not about the date it's about the dialogue about the conversation that happens at the table and it's often insightful and we walk away with a lot more clarity and work may come into it a bit or not but it's just or bushy definitely feels more connected after that activity and we get crystal clear and it's a good place to check in with really are you really happy with what you're doing like bushy's very head based i'm very heart based so he gets on the treadmill of the whole podcast world of everything

and i try and pull him out of that space and say all right where you had to write out 10 how's happiness rating we love our friday free days for lots of reasons so that keeps us pretty fueled up yeah i love that that's hey shooting us shooting for our four day a week yeah yeah i love it love it love it love it so thank you so much for joining us today to say thank you we have made a contribution via our giving partner buy one give one to build some classrooms so the project that we've contributed to is with classroom of hope and what they do is they collect plastic waste and then they compress that and turn it into bricks and then they use those bricks to build classrooms so it's a multi-impact project and we love what they do and they're building some

schools in indonesia at the moment so thank you so much for making that possible and thank you for being here thank you for having us it's been awesome uh any excuse to talk to you guys we love your energy we love what you're doing so we feel quite humbled to come and join you on the podcast guys oh thank you so bushy and sonia if you want to connect with you or learn a little bit more about designing their life or a little bit more about what you do how should they do that yeah the designing the life thing there's i've actually dedicated a whole chapter in the freedom formula to exactly that chapter 14 and you can get the yeah that's the freedom formula there you can get the first part of the book which we've i've split out called get invested you can get that for free

and so if you just jump on our website www.knowhowproperty.com.au and then scroll down the home page is a there's a link you just click the link and you can get a free download of the book or you can get a hard copy of the book you just need to pay for the postage to do that but that'll whet your appetite to decide whether this is something that's of interest to you or not so that's probably the best and then if you want to have a listen to what we're doing in that space because i talk a lot about living by design on our podcast which is also called get invested to keep them consistent then feel free to jump on and have a listen to that as well Awesome.

So to round this out, what's on the cards for you next? What's on the horizon? What are you working towards at the moment? Well, that road trip is coming up pretty quickly. So end of May, we're out of here. Everything goes into storage. We've got the two cars and the two dogs. We're not sure whether we'll start up the east coast

or whether we'll start in Tasmania, but we're going to spend somewhere between sort of three and six months just indulging our passion in travel and spending time in new places. and we'll get an Airbnb for a month and we'll base ourselves and we'll have a really good look around that location to decide whether that's something that we'd want to spend more time in and then we'll sort of follow the Gypsy Trail right up the east coast.

We might even end up in the west as well, actually, at some point in time, I think. We've done a lot of South Australia and we've done a lot of Victoria. We've done very little of New South and Queensland or Tassie and areas in WA we want to do the same thing. And so we're really taking that gypsy experiment to the next level, guys. Sounds amazing. Thank you.

Thank you. It's been awesome. Thanks. To get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes, just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au. That's H-E-L-L-O at khgroup.com.au. or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash GetInvested.

I look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the GetInvested podcast. So thanks for listening. And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow.