Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 1 - Daniel Walsh on how to retire younger and richer

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

What does it really mean to be 'rich'? It is less about money and more about time, says Daniel Walsh. True wealth is about the freedom of time and choice, being in a position where you have the freed...om of time to do what you want when you want, where you want with who you want, because your lifestyle income needs are being met without requiring much of your time to generate it. So how do you become a 'time billionaire'? Today’s guest Daniel Walsh is a living breathing example. As you are about to hear, he’s successfully transitioned from being a tradie at the age of 19 earning the princely sum of $34,000 a year to becoming a train driver, while investing and leveraging exponentially to build the money momentum required to create an impressive property portfolio that is now worth over $20 million while still aged in his 30s. Now he helps other hard working Aussies do the same. And in this episode he shares the details of his own personal property and investment journey, before revealing his success secrets from his new book ‘6 Principles To Retire Younger & Richer’ in next week's episode. Connect with Daniel Daniel's education courses: https://ypywmastery.com.au  Subscribe to Property Hub for free now on your favourite podcast player. Take the next step - connect, engage and get more insights with the Property Hub community at linktr.ee/propertyhubau Book a personal solutions session with Bushy to go deeper on your specific property needs or challenges Continue the discussion with likeminded investors and experts on The Property Hub Collective Facebook group Get a copy of Bushy's book, Get Invested, for FREE, and find out what it takes for you to invest in living more, working less Get all Property Hub info here linktr.ee/propertyhubau About Get Invested, a Property Hub show 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. Get Invested is part of the Property Hub podcast channel, your home for property investment insights, inspiration and stories from Australia’s top property experts, investors, leaders and analysts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube to get every Get Invested episode each week for free, and also get full access to RealtyTalk, Australia’s top online property show for red hot property investing news and insights direct from property industry leaders and influencers. Property Hub is a collaboration between Bushy Martin from KnowHow Property, Kevin Turner from Realty, show producer Andrew Montesi from Apiro Marketing and Apiro Media, and Australia’s largest independent podcast networkDM Media.  For business enquiries, email andrew@apiromarketing.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I think a lot of people these days talk about YOLO and, you know, you don't need money to be happy and all that sort of stuff. And for me, I had my mom very early. She had breast cancer and we almost lost everything over that, right? And it was the thing that saved us was my dad had a property to sell to come up with the money to be able to fund because the funding for the chemotherapy and the radiation and the surgeries and all the time off. And I think when you go through something traumatic, you never forget it. And that became my why. It was like, money is so important, right? People don't think about money being important. Well, you haven't had a loved one where money solves a problem, right? And sometimes, and it's the thing is, it's not about
Starting point is 00:00:42 the money, it's the problem that it solves. Welcome to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast channel, the leading weekly show to help you unlock your full self-health and wealth potential. I'm your host, Bushy Martin, and each week I go deep with the best investors, experts, leaders, and founders to find out what it takes to break free from the grind, discover freedom, and live by design. Subscribe now and join me and get invested in the life you really want. Let's get started. Hi, Freedom Fighters. Will you ever be rich? And what does being rich even mean? And what's investing really about?
Starting point is 00:01:24 Is it just about money and acquiring more stuff? Or is there more to it? Unfortunately, it's a sad fact that many hard-working Aussies are likely to wind up in exactly the same financial position they actually started off in, following in the footprints of their parents and grandparents generationally. And while it's far easier now for most Aussies to shift from the old traditional concept of working class to middle class, it can still be very difficult to make the leap from there to becoming truly wealthy. And being wealthy is very different from being rich. So let me explain.
Starting point is 00:02:00 By global standards, the great majority of Australians are rich. We enjoy a great standard of living and have the incomes to fund them. But if your job or your business ended today, how long could you afford to keep funding your current lifestyle? For most, it's days and weeks. For some, it stretches out to months. And for very few, it would last a year or more. The main reason for this is that most Aussies spend their lives trading their time for money, either as an employee or running their own hand-to-mouth small business, which leaves precious few hours in the day, let alone brain power, to learn about investing in the future and associated strategies or actually taking educated and insightful actions towards achieving real wealth. In addition, many never save enough money to take the first step and
Starting point is 00:02:50 invest in an asset at all or they secure the wrong type of asset to start off with which then prevents them from ever reaching a point where they can leverage it and really make money work for them rather than them work for money. And even those that do may struggle to do much more because they just don't have the mindset or the know-how to take things further and they limit their own potential by playing not to lose rather than playing to win, letting fear override their fortune. And this is what separates those that maybe income rich short term but never achieve wealth. Because true wealth is about time, the freedom of time and choice, about being in a position where you have the freedom of time to do what you want, when you want, where you went,
Starting point is 00:03:36 who you want, because your lifestyle income needs are being met without requiring much of your time to generate it. So today's guest and I are on a mutual mission to help you become time billionaires, a concept that I first heard about from Sahil Blue's blog about Graham Duncan's episode of the Tim Ferriss show. And the key point here is that time is our most precious and limited asset. Let me illustrate. A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is just over 31 years. By the age of 50, most of us only have about a billion seconds left. So most of us start life as multi-time billionaires, but we squander most of it worrying and working for someone else. and most of us fail to realize the true value of time until most of it's already gone. So
Starting point is 00:04:27 where are you investing yours? And how do you become a wealthy time buoy now where you enjoy the freedom of time to choose your own adventure each and every day? In simple terms it's just about embracing time as your biggest friend instead of treating it as your biggest enemy. By making the time now to invest your time, knowledge, energy and money to leverage the time you've got in order to exponentially grow your wealth-creating assets over time so that time is working for you while you're enjoying the journey, all in order to get your free time back. Now it all sounds simple when you say it like this, and in fact it is actually simple, but it's not easy to achieve because you need to embrace the courage to swim against the common
Starting point is 00:05:09 worker versus wealth builder tide and then have the patience, persistence and resilience to take the road less traveled and last the distance to achieve time freedom and become a true time billionaire on your terms. So how do you make the shift from being a work income independent and short-term income rich to becoming long-term time wealthy? A great place to start is to follow and emulate the example of others and in this regard today's special guest Daniel Walsh is a leaving breathing testimony to the wealth builder time billionaire approach and as you're about to hear he successfully transitioned from being a tradie at the age of 19 earning the princely sum of just $34,000 a year to becoming a train driver while investing and leveraging exponentially
Starting point is 00:05:56 to build the money momentum required to create a very impressive property portfolio that's now worth somewhere in the excess of $20 million and I think you're still in your 30s Daniel which has then enabled Daniel and his wife to found his award-winning buyer's agency, Your Property, Your Wealth, to help you and other hardworking Aussies to secure your financial freedom. So today he's going to share the nitty gritties of his own personal journey and how he did it before revealing his secret, his success secrets from his new book, Six Principles to Retire Younger and Richer in next week's episode. Now, I'm really looking forward to diving into all this. So welcome and let's get invested, Daniel.
Starting point is 00:06:36 thanks for having me mate it's uh what an intro well we we both the inspirations come from your book uh you know i i always read uh anyone who comes on the show and has taken the the very lengthy time to pen a book and and all of the distillation that goes with that uh i wouldn't be paying you much respect if i didn't read it and uh it always inspires me in terms of the sorts of things that you and I want to be communicating to people that we know we can help so look you're known to a lot of people around for what you've been doing over quite some years now but for those who don't know you I wouldn't mind you sort of starting with a a bit of a brief introduction of what you do differently Daniel and more importantly why do you do what you do?
Starting point is 00:07:26 yeah i mean i'll go from the very start and basically i was an auto electrician four years i'm sorry five years that i did that um apprentice auto electrician then i changed over to be a trained driver and then from there obviously starting my own business which is around 2016 2017 and the reason i i ended up uh falling into this business and as you know 2016 2017 was before anyone was buyer's agents. I remember having to call real estate agents in the first half an hour as explaining my job. So it was very different back then. But the reason I did it was because I had been able to find my way out of a job as a train driver and an auto electrician. And I've been able to find myself at a point where I was comfortable enough
Starting point is 00:08:15 with the assets that I had to be able to transition into something I wanted to do rather than something I had to do. And I then wanted to show other people how I did it because I felt like there was such a burning desire to teach people the right way, but also at the time, and I mean, it still is to today, a lot of property spruikers, a lot of people out there that are just trying to grab somebody's money. And I wanted to expose them back then. So back then it was just me talking about like, hey, that guy that wants to buy off the plan for you is probably not going to be the ideal candidate for you to build wealth. He's trying to build his wealth from you. So I think I had a bit of ambition back then to, I guess, get people on the right path of investing.
Starting point is 00:09:00 And as you know, since the early days of 2016, 17, and even earlier, a lot more podcasts, a lot more information has come out. So people are getting more educated. And back then it was left up to the spruikers to educate. So I think it's changed since then. Yeah, you make a very good point because it's almost gone from a drought to a deluge in relation to information now and there's almost too much information for people to go, what the hell does that actually mean and how do I make any sense out of it? So, yeah, I'd love you sharing that. I wouldn't mind going in a bit deeper in terms of your own journey by getting you to give us a bit of a read,
Starting point is 00:09:39 a digest, if you like, of where you have invested your time, energy and money over the years and go back as early as you'd like to because often our formative years with our family are very instructive in that regard. So you can sort of take us back through that and then talk about where you've invested your time,
Starting point is 00:09:55 energy and money during that period and how has it led you to where you are and what you're doing now? yeah so i mean i started off obviously you know i left school around just i was just about to turn 16 uh i wanted to go out in the workforce for me i i always thought to myself i'm never going to be the lawyer the doctor i'm never going to earn the massive money you know i'm a tradie i'm this is what i'm going to do so i always was like i want to transition from school into work as soon as i possibly could and then i was like and then i'm going to need as many assets as i possibly can
Starting point is 00:10:26 and I want to do it so early that by the time that I got to my 40s, the compounding effect had happened. So I left school at 16. I started working for my dad who was an auto electrical and I was an auto electrical apprentice at that point. So I started working for my dad. I just want to jump straight in there because what I'm hearing already, before you'd even left school, you've got the concept of owning assets and being in a business where you don't have to working 40 now most people don't they're thinking about girls cars and parties at this age of the game so where did that uh thinking come from that allowed you at a very early age to go hey i i know where i'm heading with this can you talk to us about that yeah i mean i spent most of my childhood
Starting point is 00:11:12 uh flipping properties with my parents so my parents were into you know anything they could do to make money and i remember my dad saying to me uh you know we've ran a business for i think at that stage, what, 30, 25 years, something like that. And we've made more money out of property than business. And that's why we focus on it. So I spent a lot of my weekends looking at properties, going around, dad thinking about how we could change the layout or how he could do something to renovate it. And we used to renovate them ourselves. So my childhood was already ingrained into that, which as we talk about, it's like a program. My parents were silently programming me for what I was about to become. So, they were doing that and I was
Starting point is 00:11:57 helping them renovate and probably getting more in the way at that point, but I was there to help. And then, yeah, for me, I just wanted to go down that path. By the age of about 15, 16, you probably would have known there was a couple of shows back then on Sky Business Channel and I watched them religiously. And I remember sitting there at about, I was 15 years old, school and i would watch them at night and i used to sit there thinking i have no idea what they're talking about like i i'm just but i'm gonna watch it until i understand exactly what they're thinking and what they're saying and how they're doing it because these guys that were in the in it you know building wealth themselves they were already you know in their mid 40s to 50s they had already done
Starting point is 00:12:40 it and i was super impressed on where they were in life and how they had done it and i thought myself why like i need to get into this as early as possible and i mean from a young age i always wanted to to be successful um i'd always had that desire and i think it comes back from where you grew up and how you grew up right i grew up with not very much and my parents through property had been able to create a fairly decent middle class uh sort of lifestyle and you know it wasn't uh you know we're in southwest sydney still so it wasn't like anything glamorous right but it was a decent lifestyle that i got to have growing up but when we started out it was like you know you're renting it was the same thing my mom and dad grinding it out in business grinding
Starting point is 00:13:26 it out and trying to make a dollar and i felt that pain my parents were very open with with my my um myself and my sister about just how tough it was right you know you know back in business you can't afford to to draw wages you know 2008 happened and everything like that and they'd almost lost everything so i guess it's you know most people don't see it because their parents don't talk about money my parents would always share the good things and the bad things so they were always prepared to say look we won on that property we made forty thousand dollars but they're also willing to share that they lost some money or they're also willing to share that you know business wasn't doing well at that point um so it allowed me to see everything essentially that's
Starting point is 00:14:10 Brilliant. They were way ahead of the times in doing that or very rare in that context because I picked up by osmosis really from my parents because they were active. The dad was an active investor as well and I just sort of, he was my role model so I always followed him. But it wasn't, we didn't get down to the nitty gritties if you like because it was the old, we were country folk and dad made the money and mum stayed in the kitchen. yeah that's pretty much how it rolled uh so i i love that and i i love your sharing the you know watching the the sky uh news shows because what you were effectively doing was learning a new language you know i often say that if you're going to be good at everything anything you need to learn
Starting point is 00:14:57 the language and understand that the concepts uh you don't expect to be brilliant overnight and just jump in and be an instant success. Learn the language, take the time, involve and invest in your knowledge as well as whatever you're investing in and you're going to be better off with that. So I love you sharing that. If we look back on then,
Starting point is 00:15:18 I picked up a bit of this in the book, Daniel. Can you talk to us about a challenging event in your life you think has brought about your greatest learnings and best changes as a consequence of your journey so far? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people these days talk about YOLO and, you know, you don't need money to be happy and all that sort of stuff. And I think it comes from the events that you've had to be able to draw on the experience of, you know, for me, I had my mom very early. She had breast cancer and we almost lost everything over that, right? And it was the thing that saved us was my dad had a property to sell, to come up with the money to be able to fund because the funding for the chemotherapy and the radiation and the surgeries and all the time off, you're in business, no one's paying you, right? So my mom worked in the business with my dad. so we had to we went through a few years of survival it was like it wasn't about making money at that point it was about how much money do we have to survive and and that hit home with
Starting point is 00:16:27 me because i was starting my career at that point i was working with my dad and i was an apprentice and i remember my dad just like walking away from the business and i'm just i'm second year in and i'm thinking what do i do you know like i i don't know what i'm doing and i remember my dad saying to be like you know uh you we want we want to make sure your mom survives this i'm willing to shut the business down and walk away but you know it's up to you if you want to make it work you can come in still and open the business up i'll still try to help you as much as i can yeah but i'm not i'm not in it anymore this is about survival now so i remember opening up the business and starting and it was the most challenging time both sides right emotionally and i'm also freaking out that
Starting point is 00:17:10 i'm opening up the doors to to bring business in to try and survive and i'm thinking the way i'm helping my parents at that point is i'm trying to bring some sort of revenue in i'm trying to bring something in to ease a financial burden because they can't work anymore and not only can they not work they're now pouring out money for all of this stuff and i think when you go through something traumatic you never forget it and that became my why it was like money is so important right people don't think about money being important well you haven't had a loved one where money solves a problem right and sometimes and it's and it's the thing is it's not about the money it's the problem that it solved at that point for me so i really attached my why
Starting point is 00:17:53 going forward to i never want to be in that situation again i don't want to be that person that goes oh geez something's happened in my family as i get older and now all of a sudden we don't have the money to be able to save that person uh thankfully my mom survived and she she's free of cancer so but that happened you know back when i was about 18 so it was i was quite young um and i think that you draw on those as your wife for the long term so for me i worked incredibly hard for the next decade to make sure that that would never happen throughout my entire family i wanted every generation in my family to be taken care of essentially I mean, you're right. In our Western world, money is the currency of choice. Because you don't have it, you don't have a choice. And thank heavens that your family were heavily invested in property because they had a war chest then that could cover their costs in the event that their income dried up when your mum had her issues.
Starting point is 00:18:53 So they're in a much better position than most families in the country as a result of that, but a very formative time for you to take that on board. And I can see why that's sort of driven the wire as far as... It's driven me, yeah, till today. It's driven me very far. And I mean, I've always been a person that takes a responsibility. I think because of those days back then, I've always taken the responsibility to protect the family around me
Starting point is 00:19:17 and to protect, okay, if something goes wrong, if i have the knowledge i can be the person that fixes it and i think that that that to to me was powerful right was like if i can seek this knowledge so at a very young age i was always like knowledge is power you solve problems with knowledge right and if not you live in fear you live in fear because you don't have the you don't have the knowledge to be able to make sure that the fears disappear so for me it was always if i have all the knowledge then i have no excuses i have to just work hard and i know that i need to do x y and z but if i work hard have knowledge there's no excuses why i can't have what i want yeah i love it love it now perfectly
Starting point is 00:20:00 said now uh just sort of moving forward then i i know again from reading the book you you went from the uh the apprenticeship exercise became a train driver before you then uh established the the buyer's agency piece and in parallel with that it's i often talk about the parallels between your passive life and your professional life in terms of what you're building on that score can you sort of take us through that a little bit in terms of why train driver what that allowed you to do how did that in influence and help your investment piece and and why did you then ultimately make the choice to make the change and do what you're doing now yeah i mean i obviously wanted a trade background. So, I didn't even want to be an auto electrician. I actually wanted to be
Starting point is 00:20:45 an electrician, household electrician. But at the time, I didn't have a license to be able to get anywhere. So, I had jobs lined up, but my dad said, there's no way I'm helping you out driving around and doing anything. I've got my own life to run. So, dad sort of said to me, there's two ways about it. You're either going to go to school again and finish year 12, or you're going to cover work for me so so for me i just went and worked for my dad um and yeah i did my four to five years and it didn't earn the money that i wanted it to earn you know you start off very low like any apprentice doesn't matter whether you started when i started or today you're starting off at very low wages i was on 254 a week and i remember thinking to myself my mate was a
Starting point is 00:21:30 concreter i was earning like triple that money and i'm like god i just want to why can't i like earn that money i used to be upset with my dad about like we i own such crap money and my dad used to say to me yeah the difference is this he started off on good money so he will never know how to save well he will never know how hard it was and he said you started off on bad money so what will happen is you will think about how that little bit of money you have and how far it's going to go in life so that when you do earn bigger money you know how to control it and i I know now that that's the case, but back then, you just think, I'm working the same amount of hours, getting less for it.
Starting point is 00:22:08 I became a tradesman. I got my certificate, and I had my dad's friend who got into the trains, and he was just telling me how good it was, and if you work really hard, you can earn good money and everything like that. At that stage, I'd already bought a property, and I was onto my second property, and I was to myself okay i need to get to a third one but i was stuck right like most people right as you build you're always going to get stuck i was stuck at that point and i'm like well what am i going to do i can't keep pushing the auto electrical it's going to take me a lot longer to get to where i
Starting point is 00:22:41 where i need to be the train driving job at that point was paying me the same money as me as a tradesman right so i was like well okay i understand it's the same money but i'm only starting this career i could grow so i i changed over i got that job luckily it's very hard job to get i think there was 10 000 or so applicants and there's like eight of us that got it like it was quite a i almost pretty much was a miracle that i got it because i know my my boss told me he's like to be honest we only take like 50 of the top resumes that are within the area and then then we start to sort of cull them down from there but he said most of them i don't even look at um so i think i was quite lucky in that respect but it was an industry for me to say if i work
Starting point is 00:23:24 hard i can continue to progress yeah if i do the hours i can progress yeah and one thing that it set me up to do which i didn't realize um you know at the time was driving trains is quite a boring exercise uh you go from a to b and you spend 12 hours on a train and there's not much to do so i was i was known on the trains as the guy like that just would be headphones in and just you know learning don't talk to me for 12 hours you know and everyone used to everyone used to oh yeah if you get with him he won't talk to you for like at least eight hours he might talk to you when he's having his lunch uh and people used to say what are you doing i said i'm i'm and i used to tell people i was very up front with them i'm here for 10 years and i'm out i'm not going to go
Starting point is 00:24:06 past 10 years i'm here to make my money i'm here to get out and again it was okay money it wasn't like fantastic money like i think that the peak of my career i was on 119 000 and that's me working every single night that was me doing you know i was we used to do shifts and it was 12 hours on seven hours off 12 hours on i used to do that back to back three times in a row um so it was long hours to make the money yeah um but because i had the free time while i was on there i used to just put it to work in education. And I was very aware early on that my education was the only thing that would ever separate me to be able to understand how to build wealth. And that even if an opportunity hits you in the face, if you don't have the education,
Starting point is 00:24:51 it goes straight by you because you don't have the education to see that it was an opportunity. And so I was always like, the more I learn, the more I know, the more I won't miss an opportunity going forward. I love it. One thing I'm picking up really clearly is that there's a very strong focus of attention with you. You've got very clear goals and very focused and then don't allow anything to get in the way of that. Is that something that's just inherent in you or is that something that has been nurtured through the family? Talk to us because it's something I think all good investors, it's a trait they all have. Is that something natural or something that you've honed with skill over time? It's funny because it's in my family that everyone says Daniel gets
Starting point is 00:25:40 obsessed and that's it. Once I get obsessed with something, I will spend my entire day, night, whatever it is, to be the best at it. I've done it in sports. I've done it in everything that I've ever done. I was growing up with, some people would say more ADHD, never stop. I wouldn't sit down and watch TV. I was always doing something and I felt guilty if I wasn't doing something. So for me, it was very controlled ADHD into something. If I had something that I knew I wanted, I could really hone it. If I didn't have that, I'm a mess. I'm all over the place. I've got 30 things running right so it was i think the the biggest thing was being able to control the energy and saying stop looking at 10 things start looking at one and i think the biggest thing is
Starting point is 00:26:34 with most people is they're trying to get rich quick it's crypto it's stocks it's dividends it's flipping real estate it's long-term in real estate it's commercial it's residential there's so much noise in the marketplace now, and everything's directed to quick. You can do it quick. This is how you do it to make money now. And I always subscribe to building wealth has to be something that's repeatable. It has to be something I can do long-term. It has to be something I understand. And I want to make sure that when I do something that I identify as that person, because I wanted to become wealthy i have to embody the identity of a wealthy person from a background of a middle class person very difficult to do right um and i used to envy the the the rich you know i used to
Starting point is 00:27:23 envy not rich wealthy i used to envy the wealthy right and i would see them we used to live southwest sydney and we would come once a year over to like you know your northern beaches eastern suburbs that type of thing would put our little tinny in and we'd go looking across and go fishing and would see the waterfront properties. And I used to envy those people thinking like, what do they do? How do they do it? And I used to envy the children of them. I used to think that not even if their parents gave them anything, but the knowledge that
Starting point is 00:27:51 they had, the confidence that they had, that they could be successful was crazy, right? That opportunity they had. And I was that person where I was like, I don't have the opportunity. I have no one surrounding me with money. You know, the best it got was, you know, you got a brand new, you know, SS Commodore. That was like, geez, that's the rich guy over here. So I was always envious of that. And that was probably why I got so obsessed with how do I get out of where I am?
Starting point is 00:28:19 How do I get my family out of where I am? And how do we get to the location we want to live? How do we get to our dream life? And I spent 15 years doing that. I love that focus and the drive that's necessary to do it. because despite what Insta might try and communicate, success comes with a lot of dedication and hard work. There's no question about it.
Starting point is 00:28:46 There's no getting around that. Not to be sustainable anyway. And again, that long-term approach that you spoke about, that's also a rarity. It's something that I also ascribe to. And I often say that good investors, whether it be property or whatever, actually have addictive personalities
Starting point is 00:29:03 because they want to know the insides and outs of it, but rather than turn to alcohol and drugs, we turn to property and other things to churn our activity into and then hone that skill and knowledge to actually benefit from it. But that long-term approach, again, is that something you infuse from family or is that something you picked up from your education and your learnings? Because not many people see the merits in that long-term sustainable approach.
Starting point is 00:29:28 Yeah, I think I picked that up from a couple of mentors that I would say were mentors at the time that were more, they didn't know me. I knew them very well, but they were on Sky Business Channel. And I remember them talking about it. Success is not going to come in a minute. It's going to take a decade. It's going to take two decades. It's the same. Overnight success took 20 years. I think I understood because I listened to older people. I was a young person listening to somebody that was in their mid-40s to mid-50s. And when you do that you get a lot of wisdom early and you start to realize that nothing's going to happen quickly and I always subscribe to that you know I knew that I wasn't going to be a millionaire in the
Starting point is 00:30:11 first two three years I knew it was going to be tough and you know I think that everyone that wants to become wealthy rich is different rich is quick wealthy is long right that's just two different things if you want to be rich go get a great income you can be rich if you want to be wealthy you have to transfer that great income into wealth and that takes many many years it doesn't matter how much money you make it's going to take many many years and that's why they talk about when they talk about wealth they talk about generational wealth they don't say generational rich because generational rich is not long lasting it's a it's active right and i wanted to say how do i change how do i change active into passive well that's going to take so long and i understood
Starting point is 00:30:55 very early i'm only going to live off five or six percent of my entire net worth so therefore i need to have a lot of net worth to be able to do that how do i do it well many years well i absolutely love that mate that absolute gold uh you've said right off the bat there well that's a great segue then i think into just laying that out for us and i i i don't want to dive too deep into the six principles because i know that they pretty much uh support and are the foundation for everything you've done, but talk to us a bit about your investment journey then to build that portfolio. I know it's not just about property, there's crypto and other bits and pieces in the mix. Can you talk us through what you did, why, what you learned from it? And also at the end of
Starting point is 00:31:41 that, what was your investment strategy when you started and how has it changed and evolved as your knowledge, comfort and clarity has increased over time? Because that's another thing that a lot of people don't quite get their head around um yeah so in terms of oh sorry go through can you discuss yeah that's a big question yeah yeah so just just take it i just want to answer it well yeah no no and you will uh take us through the investment journey at per se and i'm interested in how you did it rather than the nitty-gritties of what you did uh but i so let's start there and then i want to look at the what worked well what didn't work and what were the learnings from that. So take us on that journey. Yeah. I mean, how I did it in terms of investing was I pretty
Starting point is 00:32:28 much understood very early that I needed to leverage one property to the next. So equity was one thing. And then I understood that I needed income, which was another thing. So I think to me, I wanted to boil it down to be very simple. Income gets transferred to property. and when I get equity I release the equity and I go buy more property and I wanted to just keep it very simple and my methodology when I started was if I buy one property everyone used to tell me it will take you 30 years to pay off a property so if I buy the first property I'll then go buy the second property next door and then you told me they're going to double every 10 to 15 years so when it doubles I'll sell one property pay the other one off I never had to do anything
Starting point is 00:33:09 and I was able to pay off that property without me working hard. So that sort of was why and how I was starting the thesis. And then I was like, well, if I could do that on two properties, well, now I just need to figure out how to do that on 10 or 15 or 20 properties. So I wanted to buy more properties than needed so that I could just continue to replicate it. So I think the biggest thing was I wanted to simplify how to build wealth and I wanted to simplify the theory on how to do it. And then I would put it into action and be very practical about it. And I just kept running with the same theory. And what it allowed me to do is also take the risk out of it because I would say to myself, well, if I buy 10 properties and five of
Starting point is 00:33:53 them double and the other five just didn't grow, I could sell five, pay off the other five. And essentially I had a 50% strike rate on being right. And I still executed on the exact same strategy that i wanted to do so i think you know when you when you understand that you start to say oh i can relax a little bit i don't have to be 100 correct i could be 80 70 correct still execute on the exact same strategy still get to my wealth building exercise so i think the biggest thing was when i was building my wealth was understanding the thesis on how i was going to build wealth um i also was sort of hybriding meth my hybrid method was from two different people back in the day one was talking about equity one was just like i buy for equity i buy for growth
Starting point is 00:34:41 yeah screw cash flow i don't care about cash flow and then the other one was like cash flow everything and and the cat and the capital growth will come so there's your two different and i think today it's still very much there you two different sort of methodologies of investing so I hybrided them together and said, well, both are important. How do I get both of these? So I was thinking about, well, how am I going to retire as well off this? Well, my net worth is what I needed to be able to transfer into cashflow and I can't get cashflow without net worth. So therefore cashflow was important to hold a property and hold my wealth and be able to maintain it. But my net worth was important to be able to transfer into cashflow
Starting point is 00:35:24 later down the track. So I was always thinking about that. How do I build my net worth? How do I build my net worth? I'm going to buy properties, make sure I'm happy with the yield. And the thing is, when you think of it that way, it doesn't matter where the interest rates go up, down, sideways. I'm thinking about it as how do I cash flow a business? Things may get good, things may get bad, they may get tougher, but I need to have the emergency funds in place. I need to have my strategy in place so that I do not get shaken when interest rates go higher or when interest rates, if they go lower, I can obviously just capitalize on those things. So I was always very strict on my strategy the whole way through, which is what you talk about with concentration
Starting point is 00:36:06 and what I was doing. Yeah, brilliant. And I guess there'll be a lot of people out there listening to this and you're probably getting a lot of people asking you this question because I know I have in recent times. And the people say, it's all right for you, Bushy. In your day, it was easy to get more equity and to have income to get more borrowings. But now I'm capped out, I've got two or three properties and that's it, I'm done. What do you say to them in terms of being able to jump that hurdle and continue to build their portfolio if they need to? I would say every investor challenge has that same challenge. Every investor, regardless of when they invested they all have the same challenge now sometimes yes
Starting point is 00:36:46 you may not have a favorite time to be investing compared to say 10 years ago or five years ago or now landscape economically is going to change um you just have to deal with it right what are you going to do complain like who's going to listen and who's going to fix your problems at the end of the day you fix your own problems right so you can either complain and you can either say it's just it was tougher it's tougher now than it was back then but at the end of the day no one cares right you're the only person that can fix the problem so i used to identify it right i used to say to myself every time okay i hit a serviceability wall i can't buy any more property what's my problem right okay i have an income problem okay cool now i know what to fix that's
Starting point is 00:37:29 time to go fix my income problem i remember my uh i had my second mortgage broker very knowledgeable guy. He was a good mentor for me. And I think everyone has a mentor that they can outgrow and eventually change. But what I had was I had a mentor that said to me, Daniel, just be happy you got four properties now. You've done really well in life. I said, yeah, I don't want to know about that. What I want to know about is what problem do I have? And he would say, well, you can't buy any more property. You've got a serviceability issue. I said, okay, so how much do i need to be able to overcome it oh well if you punches it into his serviceability calculator well if you do x y and z then you'll be able to get your next property all right give me 12 months
Starting point is 00:38:12 and i would be back at it and i'll be like how do i figure it out now i think you know the biggest thing is you have a problem either whinge about it or identify it and change the problem right so i had to change careers three times um i had to keep chasing at one point i drove freight trains and ran a business i did both um identify the problem and fix it because i think that most people these days want to complain about something so that they can validate why they don't have to fix it right i think that's a big thing you know and i see it a lot i see it a lot people go i see people go oh it's really it's just too hard to buy a property next week you see them in europe well of course it's hard to buy i've never been to europe i've never been to america of course
Starting point is 00:38:50 it's hard to buy a property if you're spending 30 grand on holidays and you're not you have to be very laser focused. And I think what people don't think about is we are in a competitive capitalist society, right? It is that. And I don't care if somebody thinks it's right or wrong, it just is. And I think that people need to understand is everyone's competing. And when we talk about property, we talk about location, your desired place, where you want to live, what you want to do, you are competing against everyone else for that. And I think that you have to you know go well it is what it is am i willing to compete am i willing to spend the years because if i spend 10 years grinding it out to get to where i need to be remember there will be thousands
Starting point is 00:39:31 of others doing the same yeah right so i just think that yeah i don't know whether people are just getting a little bit weaker these days maybe i don't know yeah definitely possible today it's totally possible it's totally possible and and i think the the biggest challenge that uh uh you I'm probably showing my age a bit now to some degree, Daniel, but the creativity seems to have gone. I think people are so in tune with being entertained on every form of digital you can get your hands on. Their ability to use their own imagination dries up like an old vine.
Starting point is 00:40:09 I think sacrifice too. I think people aren't willing to sacrifice these days. I mean, if you go back and in my book it talks about it. I lived in a garage, which was converted into a granny flat at the time, and I lived in there until I was 28 years old. I actually had created my first million net worth at 25, and I was still living in a garage at 28, and the reason for it was I knew that every year that I lived in that garage, I'd bring forward my retirement five years.
Starting point is 00:40:38 Did I want to live in that garage? No, it was cold. It was very cold, right? I didn't want to live there. It was dark. but and i had a i had a house that i had built that was like three streets from me it was a four-bedroom home beautiful i could have lived in that but the cost to live in that was a lot higher than it was to live in uh you know someone's backyard so i was all about delay gratification
Starting point is 00:40:58 right and i think that people just need to work out what their priorities are in life you know the the biggest thing that i realized was as much as people say life's too short if you live a full life life is very long and i think that if you have uh you know if you party if you and and i think you can do everything to a degree right you can you can still balance it of course but if you go and party blow it all in your 20s and you know you're doing that because you're living with your parents or you're doing that because costs are really low you don't have a family just remember you won't get back that time and you will then have more responsibilities when you get into your 30s and 40s and then you will be wishing you took the opportunity in your 20s and that's what i
Starting point is 00:41:38 try to tell young people is what you earn now and what you save now, even though you might earn more money in 15 years time, you might be at the peak of your career. I guarantee you, you save less of it, right? Because it's a lot harder to save when you have a full family, you have mortgages, you have kids and everything going to schools. That's when life gets harder. So I think I knew that before it even happened, right? So I was like, I'm going to have a family in the future. Life's going to get tougher. And then when I get to my thirties, mid thirties, I have plenty of life left. So I wanted to make my time a lot easier when I had energy, right? I always talk about energy. Your twenties, you have the most energy. Thirties, you have energy. Forties, you kind of
Starting point is 00:42:24 start to get in the back end. Fifties, you have no energy. You want to retire, right? You start to lack the energy levels. And I understood that. I'm enthusiastic. I have the will to do it. I have the most energy now, why miss this opportunity? Because one day I won't have the energy and I don't want to be an Uber driver at 55. That's just how I saw it. Yeah. And just a great way to think about it and such a, sadly, a rarity amongst the current generation for all the reasons we've spoken about. One thing before I change lanes a little bit, I know you've been obviously invested heavily in property. You've also dipped into the crypto game. Talk to us a little bit about the differences between the two because there's a lot of people who like
Starting point is 00:43:14 to chase shiny new things and crypto certainly early on. If you're doing that, it's getting close to a critical mass now where it's being taken seriously across the board. But if you looked at those two asset classes uh and in the in the context of your overall strategy uh where did property fit into that strategy and where did crypto fit into that strategy and what were the differences in the two in terms of the way you manage that investment yeah so property for me is safety property for me is the hedge against inflation it was uh cash flow it was how i would retire uh crypto was the get rich you know in the next couple of years and i could see an opportunity in it. And I delved a lot of my time into informing myself whether it was a good
Starting point is 00:44:01 decision to get into or not. But my ultimate mindset of crypto was transfer that money straight out and put it back into property every time because safety, that's safety, right? Now, there's a camp that argues that Bitcoin is going to be the best thing since life spread and it's going to be, and it might be, it might be that, right? But at the end of the day, I'm not willing to risk what i've built for 15 years for it so i did put a quite a lot of money into it um i think it was roughly four or five hundred grand that i that i did put into it at one stage i took it up to 1.8 million within 11 months um and and it you know worked out to me for somewhat but i also have lost money big money in it as well and i've won and i've lost and i i think that the big thing was
Starting point is 00:44:49 the differences was uh crypto was a year of crypto is like 25 years of investing mentality was yeah the stress and i'm talking and when i said when i talk about that i'm not talking about investing five grand i'm talking about my portfolio could adjust two hundred thousand dollars in an hour yeah which so when people say that well it went from 400 to 1.8 that's great i remember having holiday and um and i was i was camping i had my caravan and i i undid the hitch and it went into the back of my ute and it was a disaster and my wife's like oh what's going on and i didn't tell her at the time but i think i was down 500 000 at one point um and i'm thinking to myself i can't think on this holiday yeah because i am just lost half a million dollars on this trade that i was
Starting point is 00:45:39 doing so it's like anything when you have high volatility you have high reward yeah but you need to know what you're doing and you have high risk you're right so the the property is low low volatility right but you still have high reward because of the leverage so the leverage is the key to high reward without the volatility yes but when i was looking at crypto crypto is i would no weigh in and he means leverage crypto but it is money that you're willing to lose yeah it's something that you're willing to make money on but you need to get out and i think this is what i truly think with crypto this is why my mentality was why i put you know four or five hundred grand into it if i'm going in i have to make big money yeah the reason for it is it's going to take the
Starting point is 00:46:28 same mental exhaustion that and it's going to take my energy for that i need to make such a big reward that if I put a small amount of money in like 20 grand, 30 grand, the reward isn't big enough for the energy output. What I find is a lot of people in the crypto space, they put 10 grand into it and then they think that's their lottery ticket. Well, it might go to 100 grand, but it's still not going to solve your problems. It might go to 200 grand, it's still not going to solve your problems. You're not going to retire. So what I was doing was I was understanding that there was a time in the market to make big money and then a time to try and get out of it. Unfortunately, I got out of that one, one of those ones where it was two weeks before I had a 50%
Starting point is 00:47:13 capital gains discount. And I had to wait. I was right on the last week. I was going to pull it at 1.8 and I ended up taking out 600K. So that could have wildly changed where I was. But that's just the game. That's the game you play. I still made money. I just didn't make as much money. And it's not your money until it's in your pocket and um i think that with cryptocurrency you do it once you've built wealth that's how i look at it right it's almost like gambling money it's okay right we've got the foundation that now can play a bit rather yeah well you know it's not getting cash flow either right like exactly yes you can get you know i know people will say yes you can stake it um but there's also a lot of coins that went to zero and there's a lot of people that put their
Starting point is 00:47:58 money in that never got it back out right we're still in the early journey where the risk is so high to get your money back out i had luna coin 200 grand went to zero in five minutes yeah i couldn't even get it out quicker than i could see it go down right so you have to understand that when you throw money into something like that and this is where this is where you've got to be careful too is why i don't advocate it too much is you're changing your mindset to think quick win i'm going to be rich because i did this um but again what did i talk about at the start it has to be repeatable if you want wealth it has to be repeatable i can't repeat that right no there's circumstantial not sustainable it's a very very different exercise and and you the whole mindset
Starting point is 00:48:42 the way you think the way you act your response times everything is is completely different so it's uh you know i just tried i tried cfds of which i'm done again showing my age but i i leveraged into equities uh to to upsize my position size and i got fried on occasion just like i said the stress. The mental anguish, it's like minute by minute. It's different. It's just different. Now, if I put 10 grand in there today, I would just walk away from it. I would never think about it. But when you're putting big money into it, you do have to think about it. I had a guy that used to drive freight trains. He'd be a very, very smart guy. He retired at like 27, 28. And he was, I think about 36, 37 when he came back to the trains. Now, he retired for that period of time.
Starting point is 00:49:29 never worked yeah um and i said to him well why are you back you know why are you here now and he's like well i was doing really really well and then the financial crisis happened um and i had leverage on same thing he had option trades and he said uh i lost it all and he said i was he said the funny thing was i had enough money to never have to work again and he said but because you think you're smarter than the market you keep going because you you've always been winning so i'm going to keep going so it's a form of gambling it's an educated gamble and he just kept going until he lost it all and he said the funny thing was i lost it in a matter of months yeah and he said because i thought i was better and i thought i was clever like more clever than
Starting point is 00:50:15 everyone else in the markets because i had been able to do it so well and that was something that always stuck with me that you were never more clever than everyone else, right? So when I go to property, it's a foolproof way over time to sustain wealth. But when I go into anything else, you are pretending that you're smarter than everyone else and you're just not. Yeah, I agree. There's a very fine line between ignorance and arrogance and they're closely linked when it comes to that exercise. Tell me, before I jump into the future briefly, Daniel, what do you still struggle with, if anything?
Starting point is 00:50:54 I think I talk about playing a game. Life is like playing a video game I always talk about. I think as you keep going forward, you will always struggle with your self-confidence because you're always trying to get to the next level that you haven't unlocked. So regardless of what somebody sees of me, they will say you have everything you should be the most confident person in doing everything
Starting point is 00:51:19 right building wealth all of that but when you are trying to get to the next level yes i could look back at all the levels i've achieved and i could say i could do all of them with confidence but when i'm unlocking a new level there's still self-doubt it'll always be there because you can't unlock a new level that you've never been you've never treaded on and then go i've got so much confidence because I've passed the previous 12 levels. So I think that was one thing that I still, I don't think struggle with, I recognize. And I think that the same thing with anxiety, I've struggled with anxiety and it's actually gotten worse in 15 years for me. I never even had it when I was younger. I never had it when I started investing and I've had more of it,
Starting point is 00:52:02 but I'm also have to understand I'm doing 20 times more than I used to. So the anxiety comes from understanding that you, you know, for one, you want more for yourself. You want better out of yourself, right? So for me, when I have anxiety, I recognize that maybe I'm not doing the actions that my anxiety is filling up with, right? So I might be taking a weekend off and then I might I have anxiety it's because I have tasks to complete that's why I have anxiety I just recognize that I have it and where it is and I think that everyone has it to a degree it's just when it flares up and why and I think if you want to get let's you know when you when you go to when you go up into you know becoming more and more successful it's like a pyramid right you build
Starting point is 00:52:48 a foundation and then you keep building upon it but the problem is the the higher you get in that pyramid, the steeper it gets and the more to the tip that you will become. And what happens is that point is you can fall off the tip so much easier than you could down at the foundation level. I make a mistake 10 years ago and I lose a thousand dollars. I make a mistake now. This is just an example. I'm negotiating personally on a $15 million building at the moment. I make a mistake, it's millions. That in itself has a level of complexity that takes some of my mental anguish and some of my anxiety to a new level because it's something i've never done and also even if i have done it it doesn't matter because the stakes are higher
Starting point is 00:53:34 yeah and it is and that's what happens yeah and i've beautifully said it's that life is never free from uh worry the way that you had don't have enough or when you when you've got a lot you're worried how am i going to hold on to it it's it never goes away it just changes shape and we always we always find stress um there's stress as human humans are always wanting to have not wanting that always have stress in some capacity right so for example as i am building up i might have stress of financial pressure once i have financial uh stability i'll have stress on being able to maintain that financial stability once i'm retired i then have stress that the postman delivered twice that day and not once right like you find stress even and what happens is when you
Starting point is 00:54:19 have no stress, you find the smallest amount of things to stress about. So you just have to understand that you're always going to have it in some capacity and that how do you manage it and identify it? Why is it happening? And then how do you keep moving forward beyond it? Yeah, love it. I want to jump into the future now. I'm a big advocate of living by design, not by default. So can you paint us a bit of a word picture of what your ideal life vision is to you and your wife, and then what's your ongoing strategy to both attain and then maintain that? Yeah, I mean, my ideal life, I think, in the last 12 months
Starting point is 00:54:58 has probably occurred now. I moved from the southwest Sydney, which is where I grew up, and I finally moved from there. I now live in the northern beaches on the water, have my boat out the front, 50-foot yacht, got the Lamborghini, got everything. So from an outside perspective, it's there. um doesn't mean it's fulfilling but it's there yeah i think that the life by design now is i
Starting point is 00:55:21 have what i have it has to be sustainable forever and the sustainability means that if i was to die tomorrow does my family sustain the same life i think that is now my driving force and and it's it's there but how far do you want to push and i think that um once you get to a certain level you get to a point of financial freedom and anything above that it unlocks more luxuries probably not more fulfillment but it does unlock more luxuries but the incremental happiness is very small right so yes i live in a six million dollar house here right the house across the road from me is worth 20 million and i've had people say well you're going to try and get to that next? Not really. Why? I live on the same street. I have the same views. I have the same
Starting point is 00:56:14 boat. Why would I want to stress for the 20? Now, if it comes naturally, I'll obviously take it because it doesn't have the stress and I've got the financial freedom, but I will not trade financial freedom for a $20 million house. Why would I do that? I've got financial freedom in a $6 million house. I don't have it over there. So, I think what happens is as you build up through your life you understand eventually what makes you happy what makes you fulfilled and what true financial freedom looks for you um and let's let's dive straight onto that what what is fulfillment to you i'd love your definition fulfillment is something that is if if you don't get paid for it would you still do it i think that's that's fulfillment for me yeah um fulfillment
Starting point is 00:56:57 for me is doing this right i like i like sharing my experiences i like sharing my knowledge um I do it for free on Instagram, social media, I do it in podcasts. I do that for free. And I think, you know, it's the same with the book. Two years to write a book, there's no, the fulfillment there, there's no monetary value behind it, but it's fulfillment. So I think now my fulfillment is in the form of legacy now. So it's in the form of, if I disappear tomorrow, is there enough content out there for people
Starting point is 00:57:28 to understand and listen to? so that they can gain an edge for their family and create generational wealth. The fulfillment is for somebody to come up to you and say, Daniel, you changed my life. That's fulfillment, and that's not to do with money. I might not have ever met that person, but I think that's fulfillment. Yeah, it's really interesting.
Starting point is 00:57:49 We're on parallel journeys, probably a different age timeframe because I had an early life crisis, which ground zeroed everything, and i had to start again and and got very focused at that point but my own definition of fulfillment similar to yours is giving freely to others without ever expecting anything in return and hopefully then not even knowing i'm doing it because there's just a sense of satisfaction that comes out of that you can't it's hard to describe it you can't put a dollar value on it on it but yeah the the uh peace and serenity and and the sense of satisfaction that comes out of it is yeah it's it's it's worth it's weight in gold when you give someone something that they
Starting point is 00:58:28 don't that they don't have to give you something back in return that's when you feel that fulfillment i think when i say to someone i'm going to teach you something and i'm not asking for anything then you feel that fulfillment because you're not expecting a return yeah yeah beautifully said if we uh circle back then and you were starting out again then daniel uh what if anything would you invest in differently um i invested heavily into my education when i was younger i probably would have went even deeper with it i think that i mean when i say heavy it was like heavy for the time right like when i look back now though i i think to myself if i'm gonna have a journey and the journey has a lot of landmines on it but the mentor that i had in place could tell me where
Starting point is 00:59:17 they all were yeah i would have been able to succeed a lot quicker so you know this is just an example i i pulled out of um probably three properties in sydney back in 2013 12 2012 for about 300 350 000 then all over a million dollars right yeah there's a lot of opportunity i lost because i was focusing more on the cost of mentorship that i did not see the opportunity cost of not knowing the information yes um and i think that the only separator in life between what where you are and what you want is knowledge right because if you have the knowledge then it's laziness if you don't have it right it's just you don't want to do it right like and that's okay not everyone wants to be successful and not everyone wants to create heaps of money
Starting point is 01:00:01 um or or you know do that and i just think for me it was just more so understanding that it's impossible to lose if you have the knowledge yeah absolutely and if you do lose it you can do it again but that's what once it's in build it's it's uh it's it's we take it away from me i'll do it it's funny because if you look at anyone that makes millions of dollars creates wealth and then loses it all they get it back the second time twice as quick they do it a third time it's three times as quick now the person that sees that hasn't done it says oh that's risky look he went bankrupt but look how quick he came back exactly it's knowledge that did it totally that's the only difference i love it talking about knowledge where i'm now going to give you a blindfold and
Starting point is 01:00:42 cigarette and jump straight into what i call the ambush round that we're at that you see old podcast fast four that people love to get your words of wisdom on that to kick that off what couple of books have changed your life the most i mean i think like anything right the perception of money which would be rich dad poor dad that's probably like a foundation um business would be a book called traction i really enjoyed that um but in saying that though i don't think i mean i like books i mean i've got a book out but i don't think that you need to read heaps of books to be able to get the information you need you just need to read a few and it's what area you don't want to read them in i think that which is why i didn't create a property book per se i created a book around
Starting point is 01:01:29 building wealth is because you've got to be careful that you're not results driven you've got to be you've got to understand the journey of it and i think that's that's the books that you want right um yeah yeah beautifully said uh if you could have a coffee with anyone either alive or dead or an historical figure who would you choose and why i'd probably go with someone current and the reason for it is they they are you they've experienced what's what's happening today right and they're adapting and i think our world is changing so much that you need to be adaptive i would probably pick someone like homozy because he is business orientated very smart guy and he is seeking from so many mentors that the knowledge he has is so great because he's been
Starting point is 01:02:16 able to regurgitate information from probably a hundred mentors compared to somebody that just has their material yeah i love that i love that uh what superpower do you wish you had and why uh i don't know i've never really thought about probably to be immortal i think to be able to see how things happen right like why wouldn't you i think that we all strive to live longer why wouldn't you want to live forever and see multiple generations of your family loins and be able to uh continue like for me it'd be like continue to educate and see where life could take you know it could take you your kids your grandchildren yeah i love that uh last one then uh again on books what would be the title of the book about you if i asked your wife or
Starting point is 01:03:03 your parents i think what i what it is six principles to try younger and richer i think that's what it would be right like um love it yeah i don't think it would change now that's good That's good to hear. Last question, then, before we close off on part one of our great conversation, what's the one question that you wish I'd asked you and how would you have answered it? Probably more about why does property go up in value? Okay, answer that. I think understanding, because that's the difference, right? Understanding why it happens. And I think that then comes back to more economical side of things, like looking at economics,
Starting point is 01:03:40 looking at, you know, I very much delve into economics and that sort of side of things. So understanding that, because you're in a vehicle of property, but why are you in the vehicle? Yes. I think that's a very, that's something that most people don't ask themselves. They're just like, property goes up in value, but why? Why? Is it going up in value, right?
Starting point is 01:03:59 And then when it doesn't go up in value, why is it going up in value? Understanding that, that comes back to economics. And for me, I understood very early that, I mean, I was even saying it five years ago on videos, why the middle class will get wiped out. and I'm a very big advocate of why the middle class will get wiped out. And it's because we are all swimming upstream while the printing presses keep happening and we keep getting devalued and it's becoming a little bit more well-known now, but it was something that was not well-known. And I knew this 15 years ago. I was like, every time they keep printing money,
Starting point is 01:04:32 they keep devaluing our middle class. They keep ruining what we have in terms of a good life. and it means that if we're in a river, the more they print money, the harder it is to swim up the river. And the wealthy person understands, I'm not going to swim up the river. I'm going to get a life raft with a motor behind it. And what the motor is, the motor is they're going to use the property and the debt, and they're going to buy those properties with debt because if you want to build wealth, you would... Sorry, if you want to maintain wealth, you acquire properties, right? But if you want to build wealth, you use leverage to acquire properties. That's building wealth. That's two different things. But what you're doing is you're recognizing that you're shorting the
Starting point is 01:05:18 dollar long-term and you're longing the property, the asset. Scarcity goes up in value over time because the currency lost value. And the currency is losing more value than ever before and people are starting to see it. They couldn't see it before. The silent tax that we had, 2%, 3%, they strive for us to lose money. They straddle it. And I think that that is something that has been a big driving force for me to make people wake up. Debt is good. Debt devalues. Debt is what makes you generational wealth. Go look at all of these billionaires. What do they do? They to create income taxes for themselves they they go leverage against their assets to go buy more assets in the form of debt because they don't have to pay taxes how do you get out of paying taxes
Starting point is 01:06:06 right if i go for example i'm trying to acquire a 15 million dollar building right now if i need a 3.7 million dollar loan sorry not loan deposit against that 15 million dollar building four million dollar so if i have to come up with four million dollars if i want to come up with that in income i need eight million yeah because i need to pay the taxes and everything along the way so i need eight million to come up with four million if i need to leverage it from property i just need four million exactly now i work out how to cash flow it right so i think that's that's such a superpower which is what i talk about phantom equity in the book that's such a superpower because if the person that is working hard loses like 40 to 50 percent of everything that they ever
Starting point is 01:06:50 earn. And I can acquire, yes, I still lose my money through my income, but it's not my focus. If I trade it over to this side and I'm buying and acquiring assets, now I can leverage tax-free money. And it means that I can build 10 times as quick because I'm compounding that every single time I do it. Double whammy exercise. I love that. Look, we're going to get into more of that in next week's episode when we dive into the book. So I really want to thank you for taking the time to share the ins and outs of your journey so far Daniel and while we're about it if anyone would like to keep the conversation going and get your questions answered by other like-minded investors and independent property professionals in a very safe relaxed and education-only environment feel
Starting point is 01:07:30 free to join us on the Property Hub Collective Facebook community by clicking the link in the show notes and we look forward to connecting more with you there. Alternatively if you're needing a more private and confidential personal solution session to help overcome any of your challenges feel free to catch up with me personally for an hour by hitting the book appointment button on the top of the knowhowproperty.com.au homepage or the link in the show notes and we now look forward to continuing our deep dive discussion next week daniel where we're going to unpack your great new book six principles to retire younger and richer so thanks again remember to always get invested and we look forward to chatting with you more thanks mate stay
Starting point is 01:08:08 Be sure with the part two of this interview next episode. Thanks for tuning in to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast channel, your home for property investment insights and inspiration. And don't leave yet until you've taken the next step towards living by design by getting my award-winning book, Get Invested, absolutely free when you sign up at knowhowproperty.com.au or bushymartin.com.au. And finally, make sure you subscribe to Property Hub to get your weekly dose of Get Invested inspiration, along with every episode of Realty Talk, Australia's leading property show for red-hot property investing news and insights, direct from industry leaders and influencers. Remember to always get invested in your knowledge, and I look forward to seeing you next time.

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