Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 1 - Why smart people stay broke with Max Phelps

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Smart people don’t stay broke because they lack intelligence, they stay stuck because their money behaviour is unconscious. As Get Invested moves from W for Why into E for Examine on Bushy’s annual Property W.E.A.L.T.H. Clock, this Rolled Gold conversation with author Max Phelps is your cue to pause, look under the hood, and get brutally honest about what your financial habits are really doing to your future. In this foundational E-stage episode, Bushy reframes wealth-building away from strategy and market timing, and back to where it actually starts: behaviour. Before you worry about suburbs, cycles or interest rates, this is about diagnosing the patterns that are either funding or sabotaging your long-term wealth. What’s covered: Why smart, capable people still feel financially stuck despite solid incomes The hidden concept of “money leakage” and how small daily habits quietly drain wealth The gap between intention and action and why knowing better doesn’t mean doing better How unconscious spending and autopilot decisions undermine long-term goals Why your bank statement tells the truth, even when your story doesn’t The role of awareness as the first step toward financial control and discipline Why sustainable investing success starts with behaviour, not strategy Key takeaways: Most people don’t have an income problem first, they have a behaviour problem Financial success begins with honest self-examination, not external tactics You can’t out-invest poor habits, behaviour compounds just like money Awareness precedes control: you can’t change what you don’t see Before you build wealth, you need to become someone who can direct money intentionally In a world of noise, hype and shortcuts, boring fundamentals beat flashy nonsense This episode marks the opening move in E for Examine, diagnose before you strategise. It’s not about guilt or restriction. It’s about clarity. Because until you understand what your daily money behaviour is really saying, every investment decision you make is built on shaky ground. If you’ve ever wondered where your money actually goes, or why progress feels slower than it should, this is the mirror moment, and the reset point, you’ve been avoiding. Take the next step with Bushy Personal Solutions Session Get clarity and personalised guidance: Book now Property W.E.A.L.T.H Program - live now! Be first to access discounts + free Module 1: Find out more https://courses.bushymartin.com.au/property-wealth Find your Freedom Formula Success in property starts with your 'why', and then the 'what' and 'how'. Let me, Bushy Martin, lead you through it! Sign up for my Freedom Formula program. The first session is absolutely free, and it only takes around an hour! Find out more https://bushymartin.com.au/freedom-formula-course 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 Get property investment and wealth resources, and book a Personal Solution Session with Bushy. All the links and info are 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. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube to get every Get Invested episode each week for free. For business enquiries, email [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi friend and fighters. Have you ever wondered why some very smart people earn good money, work hard, look successful and still never seem to get ahead? Why some people can talk a big game about investing, passive income and financial freedom, but their bank account keeps telling a very different story. And here's the kicker. What if the biggest thing stopping you from building wealth isn't the market, isn't interest rates, isn't your income, but the quiet little money habits that you repeat every day without even noticing. Because let's be honest, most people don't go broke with one big stupid decision. They go broke slowly. One tap, one swipe, one treat, one excuse, one I deserve it, one it's only small, one I'll sort it out later. Like a boat with a

hundred tiny lakes, it's not the ocean that sinks you. It's what's getting in that you keep ignoring. And that's exactly why we're now moving from the W for Y stage of this year's Get Invested Property Wealth Clock of Growth calendar into the E for Examine stage this week. Because once you're clear on the life that you want, your next questions are brutal but necessary. Where am I now, really? What can I actually do? And what are my habits, capacity, capability and symptoms all telling me? In other words, before you invest a dollar, can you actually trust yourself with money?

Now, this is where too many people want to skip ahead. They want the hotspot, the hack, the sexy strategy, the shiny object. But that's a bit like trying to win Bathurst when you haven't even yet learned to reverse the car out of the driveway without taking out the leather box. and in a world now full of flash production fomo headlines ai generated noise fake certainty and financial fluff get invested is your real human safe haven no smoke no mirrors no dancing monkeys just authentic intelligence with real world truths battle-tested lessons and the sort of insights that you generally only get after making expensive mistakes yourself and if you want help working out exactly where you are right now on your own money or property journey, feel

free to book in with me for a dedicated one-on-one property solution session via the link in the show notes. And today, I'm dipping into our Roll Gold Vault for my cracking conversation with Max Phelps on spending fast and slow. Because before you can become a successful investor, you first got to understand a person in the mirror who's making all the money decisions. And what Max unpacks here is pure gold. not because it's flashy, but because it's true.

So this first part will help you spot the hidden spending habits, money stories and behavioural blind spots that quietly sabotage good people with good intentions. And trust me, if today's part one holds up a mirror, the upcoming part two next week will show you what to do once you finally see what's really going on. So don't just nibble around the edges on this one. listen closely because the quality of your future wealth will always be limited by the quality of

your current behavior. Or as I often say, what you do with the little things is what you'll do with the big things. So let's get invested with Max Felt. Welcome to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast channel, the leading weekly show for Australians who want to learn how to unlock their 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 to live by design. Subscribe now and join me and get invested in the life that you really want. Let's get started. Hi Freedom Fighters. How often do you find yourself wondering where all your money goes why is it that you just seem you just can't seem to

get ahead that your money's already spent before you even get it and regardless of how much you earn or your income increases you just never seem to have that bit extra to save or invest if this is you then you're not alone and despite what you keep hearing and constantly told it's not your fault now you can blame technology marketing society at large and even your own brain for this because they all try to keep you spending despite your best intentions and efforts in today's frantic world and where everything is just a quick plastic card tap tap tap away it's all way too easy to be swept away by consumerism instant gratification and invisible mounting debt and we increasingly feel like we're just not getting hit as fast as we should and

could be. Our money, like sand, just seems to slip straight through our fingers, leaving us wondering where it all went and how can we get things back under control. And none of this is surprising, given that we're also facing ever-increasing housing costs, whether we're renters or mortgage holders, and inflation just keeps pushing up the cost of just about everything else. As I quote in my book, The Freedom Formula, actor Will Smith once said that we spend money that we don't have on things that we don't need to impress people who just don't care so what can we do to stem the tide of ever-rising lifestyle inflation if you listen to most of the financial commentators in the media you can be forgiven for thinking that you're the problem and you simply

need to change your attitude to money following this line of thinking the obvious logical rational and overly simplistic solution to your money woes is just to spend less and save more to cut out unnecessary purchases and spend only on what's strictly necessary after searching out the best value. Now this sounds easy in theory so why doesn't it work for most of us? Now you'll be interested to hear that based on the experience of today's special guest only about 10% of us rationally behave rationally with money all day and every day and this shrinking minority are normally referred to as scrooges, tight asses, accountants or financial planners. Meanwhile the remaining 90% behave normally. They want stuff, they seem to have money, and the mass is too hard,

too boring, and too time-consuming to calculate the consequences of every single decision that we make. So where does that leave you if you're struggling to get ahead, if you find you're consistently missing your savings goals, or your credit card debt just isn't shrinking despite all of your best efforts? Well, today's guest and I don't believe that the solution is depriving yourself of life's pleasures or forcing yourself to live a miserly existence. Instead, it's about understanding the deep-rooted psychological factors that drive our spending money habits and learning how to harness them to create a life of financial stability and true abundance. As you're about to hear and enjoy, it's about slowing down your spending and setting up

structures that trigger you to think before you spend so that you can make better decisions each every day and ultimately to get more out of life. And to help you with all of this fellow mortgage broker and active property investor Max Phelps joins me to enjoy a great discussion on our shared vision of waking up and shaking up hard-working Aussies like yourself and thousands of others to get your money shit sorted and to get invested in your future. Now Max is also a money coach as well as a fellow author so after unpacking the nitty-gritties of his own personal professional and passive money in investing journey we're going to delve into his recently released new book spending fast and slow where he interviews you to a system that triggers you to

think before you spend so you can make better decisions every day and ultimately to get more out of life as we explore the fascinating intersection of psychology and money discovering how our brains are wired to approach financial decisions both large and small as he shares his tried and tested system to spend less save more and to stop worrying about money so i'm really looking forward to this great conversation so welcome and let's get invested max thanks so much for having got a great intro thanks bushy yeah my pleasure mate i really enjoy enjoyed just sort of i've only honestly skimmed through the book but there's some really great stuff in there that i know everyone's really going to uh enjoy so right off the bat i want to encourage people

to grab themselves a coffee but uh for those that don't know you max can you start off by giving us a bit of a rundown on what you do differently and as importantly why you do what you do yeah so in terms of what i do differently so yes i'm a mortgage broker like you are but um everything for me is about the long term it's about where do you want to take your life um and um why i do what i do is i want to help people get to where they want to go because i've been extremely fortunate in my life having grown up in the country like you did uh although with eight brothers and sisters which i don't think you had um my sister's one of 12 months i had similar understanding of what a big family is about yeah but you know you grew up in a big family with no

money out in the bush and you know the whole thing stuff we're talking about today is just pipe dream pie in the sky now i'm sitting here you know this is my home i'm i'm sitting as a backdrop here and i've got a great life i'm really happy and what makes me happiest now is actually sitting down with people helping them set their own goals and and have the life that they want that's that's what i that's why i go to work when i don't have to well absolutely love that well i'd love for you to unpack a bit of a reader's digest of your journey so far if you can and i want you to sort of take us through both personally professionally and and passively where you've invested your time and energy money over the years and why and how's this then led you to

where where you are and what you're doing today mate well when you grow up in a family with no money the first priority is not being poor and and that was the focus like how do i not be broke and i was lucky enough to get a a great job with a multinational company called unilever and uh was joined their sales and marketing team and a good salary was the answer so get a good job and you'll be fine that was lucky enough as well too when I came backpacking to Australia I met my wife when I was only 21 and we've been together 34 years now 34 years in two weeks time congratulations thank you but but initially it was just how do we not be poor by earning money and that was it I

I wanted to invest in property. I played Monopoly as a kid. I wanted to do that sort of stuff, but it never seemed to be possible. And we had kids really, really straight away. I was 23 when I became a dad. And so you've got the pressures of family and a growing career and a wife taking mat leave back when mat leave was like two weeks, if you're lucky. and paternity leave it's like well if your wife's in labor you can take the day off mate we won't count it you know that was it um i love it i love the fact that people get paternity leave now i think it's amazing i would have loved to have done that but but yeah so for me it was um uh putting my time energy into my career and the multinational gave me great opportunities i worked for them in um in uk in sydney in brisbane back in sydney again bangkok ho chi minh and uh 15 years i spent um on the career path and and gave me a great foundation and you know i did quite well out of it but ultimately i was made redundant and um decided i wanted more out of

life than just working for money and so i decided to start investing in property and become a high school teacher interesting well i'm going to circle back to that because uh what i'd love to sort of break into a little bit because we're often uh you know an outcome from nature and nurture of our upbringing so how is your upbringing given that you're one of nine affected who you've become and your approach to money well um firstly two different facets here because i've got on the one hand my mum who was an amazing budgeter you know when you're raising you know my dad predominantly earned below minimum wage he was self-employed a lot of the time and earning below minimum wage and my mum managed to feed and clothe nine kids admittedly we did often wear

hand-me-down clothes and i and i was i'm big brother so i my hand-me-downs weren't my sister's clothes they were from a guy down the street you know um and in fact there was a guy that i was at school with and he refused to wear his older brother's clothes because there's like a seven eight year age gap because they were out of fashion and i wore his brother's out of fashion clothes. So I grew up, but my mum talked about money constantly. She was always going through a book. She wrote down everything. If there was five pence missing from a purse, she'd have all the kids lined up that were old enough to stand. Who's been in my purse and had the money? And we'd be panicking about, you know, I went to the shop and I paid for the papers or I got the loaf

of bread. I know that I've got that written down. That was this much. No, no, no. The price went up. oh i didn't get that and then she'd adjust the books and we'd be going again but every penny counted my mum used to say waste not want not and i never really understood that phrase properly until much much later waste not i understood you don't waste anything you eat everything you never leave it leave anything and i had a problem with food for many years because my attitude to food was if if someone's left something on their plate it's like oh you don't want that can i have it we're more similar than i thought because that expression waste not what not was exactly how i was brought up to that so where uh everything you're saying is resonating perfectly with my

but it was the one not bit i didn't understand properly and it was want not means don't want for things but it was something that came from the fact that we didn't expect lots of stuff at christmas we didn't expect stuff up you know birthdays were when you got new undies and i got thousands of hankies and i got and i i love football you'll call it soccer but you're wrong um which is a round ball so i i would i would get a football every birthday and every christmas i'd get one and by the next birthday or christmas it'd be punctured or lost or something and i'd have to get another one um and so that it is always i got a football that was a birthday for me football and a bit of chocolate but few clothes that's me um but it just meant that i then i got

in the habit of like i don't really need stuff i don't need it it's not important to me it's not valuable but i i am one of the tired asses i am one of the scrooges that that i don't like spending money it makes me feel uncomfortable um and so i do tend to you know do things on the cheap but my dad was very different to my mom my dad the best financial decision ever made was to say to my mom i'm no good with money when i get paid if i give you my money can you make sure everything gets taken care of and if i need some money to go to the pub just give me some money and i'll be fine best financial decision he ever made and he meant he couldn't ruin the family finances because money in his hand was gone he also talked about traveling and he wanted to travel when he

retired and to me that felt like an awful long way off and so that's why i i came backpacking to australia i traveled through asia i traveled through america when i was young because i wanted to to experience stuff before i got too old to do it and so i've got this dichotomy between spending money on travel but being a tight ass the rest of the time yeah i love that dichotomy actually because and some really good fundamentals that were baked in uh pretty clearly from your good mother uh you mentioned earlier that you you made the decision to jump off the the the corporate bus and then uh leap into property and into teaching which is a which is an interesting combo. I'd love for you to share why teaching and then jump into why property because

that's something that, as you know, Australians have a big love affair with, but there's only very few that go much beyond buying their own home. Can you take us through your thinking on both of those? Well, as part of my job in the last four years that I was with Unilever, I did a lot of training um i did a lot of sales training negotiation training and and also i had a very in vietnam i had a very big team i'd like 50 people through my team about 11 of them reporting directly to me so i did a lot of training a lot of mentoring people and i wanted to do that and i wanted to be able to travel and of course for me teaching was like well i can go and be a teacher and then i get my school holidays i can spend time with the kids go traveling but i know the

teaching doesn't pay well enough so I need something else that pays better and so I remember years and years ago I was on a course and I don't remember who the guy was but he used to say do the job that you love but find a way to make the money that you need and so for me property was the way to make the money that you need and I think it's a great philosophy which is you know do what you love because doing what you love is what you it's what you wake up to do every single day and so teaching i thought i'd probably enjoy it and i did i loved it i did i did two years of high school math teacher teaching sweaty teenagers how to do pythagoras and whatever um you know and i love the challenge of it every single hour of it was just you know on your feet like how can you

get this get this into the kid's head and they're just not getting it and then how can you get them to remember the stuff that you did last time i love that challenge and i totally enjoyed doing that. Yeah, I love that. I'm going to spring this one on you, Max, but what's something unique or interesting about you and your background that you've never shared publicly before? Well, you see, I mentioned my wife a couple of times. So we met when I was 21 and we've been married now for almost 32 years, together for 34. And now she is a shopaholic. She's much more like my dad with money she can't be doing with money uh and i can't change her i can't i can't make her stop buying stuff i can put in place structures that help her understand what she's doing and

that's what the book spending fast and slow is really all about um but something that that i've never really talked about is the fact that i actually um i left her uh in just before a 10th wedding anniversary boxing day of um what would have been 19 uh i can't i can't remember what year 90 yeah 2000 and 2001 it would have been i think yeah yeah and i left her because i thought there was someone else that was more interesting um and it's that being tempted by something but you know what i made an the best decision that i made at the time you know what we're always always going to be tempted anyone in a long-term relationship somewhere along the way someone's going to you know bat their eyelids in the right way and make you feel a bit special and feel like

you need to do something else and the best thing i did was instead of acting directly on that and going ahead and and sleeping with someone else i said you know what i'm going to move out of home take a step back and then i know that that i need to make a decision either come back home or or go ahead with someone else and i was very open about it with both my wife and also my girlfriend at the time crazy that that was the case um but i did that and three weeks later was our 10th wedding anniversary and my wife um uh i guess seduced me again and reminded me what it is to be married and uh and now we've been together for yeah 30 odd years but most people think oh you've been together you know wonderful relationship it's like yeah but we're all tempted

and every relationship has those challenges there's no doubt about it i i've got to say you know i want to thank you for being uh open about that because not many people would and great respect for the fact that you've you know sort of recognized the opportunity and done the hard work which it always is every relationship is hard work and that that's where the satisfaction comes out of it uh do you reckon that's been the most challenging you've been in your life uh so far i reckon it's probably one of the most challenging there was another one that we we got hit with later on um i mean coming back to england after training as a teacher in england um i was told i couldn't teach because the qualification was no good and that was kind of tough and i fell

into mortgage broking as kind of a fill-in um to kind of until i could teach again but i went with franchise organization and then three years in they went belly up and and they gave me the choice between staying with them and as you know as mortgage brokers we get paid a trailing income you stay with them and keep your trail and you'll be sold on to someone else or leave and walk away from three years of um of building up the business which way did you go well i started golden eggs uh straight away um so golden eggs was actually born in november 2011 uh they went belly up they went they went to administration in uh october the 17th um 2011 and two weeks later i gave them my two weeks notice and then i waited until the end

of the two weeks lotus started up golden eggs and that's my business and i've been trading under that name ever since, but it then allowed me to then focus more on investors and focus more on doing things my way rather than doing things the way that they wanted me to. Yeah, I love that. Before we get into that whole arena, I want to sort of drill into your property journey in a fair bit of detail if we can. And so just by the way on that, Bushy, you also know that when you're a mortgage broker, there's a huge lag between when you're paid, when you do the work and when you get paid.

when the administrators stepped in they said we're not paying for anything prior to today so they're not only do they stop our trail they stopped every single deal that we had so i had to go for i had to go on zero income for three months until i could get things back on track again that would have been uh financially extremely challenging at the time wife and three kids the support my wife working in the business with me that was our sole source of income good great if i look at that combination of the the challenges with your relationship and the challenges you had around that that business exercise what were the uh the greatest learnings and best changes that came out of that do you think yeah it's funny that it's committing to

something is a is a powerful thing to do an incredibly powerful thing to do whether it's committing to a relationship or committing to a business it's just going you know what i'm in i'm going to do this it's a very powerful thing and then you have to make it work and things don't always work out the way you think they're going to at the start but when you make that commitment then you've got to do the work to make to make it happen um and and for a lot of people i know and i know i was this for 15 years i i didn't make a big commitment to do anything much at all and the problem if you don't make a commitment to do anything much at all then guess what you do not much at all and you chase the next shiny thing that comes across the across the horizon

yeah spot on uh no and and i guess that you know that my take home from reading that is that that long-term commitment whether it be to your business your finances and the relationship is ultimately the exercise that will uh strengthen your character and resilience and ultimately get you to the whatever you'd like to call sustainable success so i love you sharing that i want to circle back a little bit there and and get you to talk about what does money mean to you max it's just a tool that's all it is it's a tool it's a tool to do a job um we need money to pay our bills we need money to do the stuff that we like but it's just a tool it's not the be all and end all i used to be interested in chasing it there's a lot of people in our profession and

that's all they do is chase the commissions chase the deals um but it's just a tool and if if once you understand your own self better and you know what you want then you go well how much money do I need to do what I need and I don't need really all that much you know I'm happy to buy cheap t-shirts and you know I love where I live and this costs us a lot of money to live here but it's just a tool and we use it to get the things that we want and if we need to make more we make more but obviously it's much better for me you know we hit the point a while ago to get our passive income up if you can get your passive income up so you don't have to work if you don't want to then you can choose to chase the dollars um actually one of my favorite quotes

um is is from uh i always forget his name is it tom heller the guy that wrote um cash 22 oh yeah yeah so the guy that wrote cash for 22 was was in the in a at a party for the wolf of wall street guy jordan belford whatever his name was yes yeah and at that stage you know cash 22 had been a multinational bestseller for multiple years been made into a movie they've since made into a tv series and done a whole lot of stuff so the guy had done quite well and uh and somebody at this party said to him he said do you realize that jordan made more money last week than you've made in 20 years of royalties from catch 22 and he turned around and said yeah but i've got one thing with money that he will never have when the guy's gone what he said enough

and that's what for him he had enough he was fine he was happy but but jordan didn't have enough he had to keep chasing more dollars he had a business bringing 25 million dollars a year passive income but kept chasing more and ended up in jail it's spot on and i think the real prize is time the money it's yeah i'm in choice to do the things that are important to you and and that's a really good segue i'd love for you to share your vision of what your ideal lifestyle looks like because you're probably living it right now from what you just yeah i am yeah with this so what does that look like and and what have you invested in to help make that happen um yeah so i mean the ideal lifestyle is is you know living in a place with

with amazing views you know you know one of my favorite things to do is is wake up in the morning and open up the blinds and just look outside and just see the water and it's just phenomenal and when you've grown up in out in some you know crappy little place in the bush and you're suddenly looking at this amazing view it makes you feel good already to start the day um i walk to work so i i live six kilometers from my office i'm in the office now this is just a home backdrop but um it's six kilometers and i walk some days and i cycle some days it means i get my exercise it means i'm out in the open and uh i don't set an alarm uh is one of my you know one of my things i don't have an alarm i wake up when i wake up i walk to work if i take an hour to walk to work

that's fine if i take an hour and a half because i stop and do a workout or make some videos on the way that's totally fine um you know i'll stop and have a cup of coffee but i love doing the job that i do so i come to the office every almost every day some days i take i take days off you might call them the weekend um but but i don't take my every weekend off and i don't take every day off on every weekend i normally work because i like it i come in and i can spend time with someone try to help them and if you've got the time and if when you've got time and energy to help other people that's worth so much more than than fancy cars fancy clothes you know it's a hollow feeling of just chasing the next thing as opposed to you just made an impact on someone's

life someone just went wow i i understand something i didn't understand before and that's both with the clients that i help and also that you know if i make more money now it goes straight back into the business i'll hire another staff member train another person that means another person can help more people and and on we go yeah I love it and then the holidays you've got to take breaks of course and I know travel is a big part uh to you and Kelly as it is for my wife uh Sonia and I yeah there's no greater learning opportunity to work out who you are and and what's really important to you than and going somewhere else uh but I and and I agree with you Max I think true fulfillment comes from giving freely to others without ever expecting anything in return

and the level of satisfaction that comes out of it you just can't put a dollar against it quite frankly but to have the freedom to do that is a is a wonderful gift in itself but i know that to help make that happen not only have you got your money shit together but you've all also invested quite heavily in property over the years so i'd love it love for you to start i have i was a late bloomer to the investment game and i missed more opportunities than i than i took um you know i'll never forget sitting down in my living room um 20 something years ago and having some and the guy was a property spruiker that one of these people that tries to sell you some off the plan stuff yeah um and i knew full well that his stuff was priced you know he was 40 grand more expensive

than than a unit down the road and i remember well and true this is in dullard chill in sydney which is about you know eight kilometers out from the city and it was a two-bedroom apartment at two hundred and twenty thousand dollars but i knew that i could get one for 180 if i bought an established one so i didn't go ahead with him but i didn't buy the other one either i didn't do anything i just know and that's a pretty common exercise as well because it's It's always- It's hundreds of thousands they're worth now, 800. It wouldn't have mattered when I paid 220 or 180, it's worth 800.

Well, let's dive in there because I'd love for you to unpack for us the nitty gritties of your property journey. But I want to start with why did you decide to invest in property at all? And were there any initial fears or concerns that you had before you took the leap? You know, apart from playing Monopoly as a kid, I wasn't a reader. The only books I read were the ones I was made to read in high school. and then on my 32nd birthday my wife gave me uh rich dad poor dad yeah um fantastic book read it cover to cover in a couple of hours and then she got me the whole rich dad series and i started

reading other stuff and i was and i thought this is i've got to do this i've got to get into property but it was another what six or seven years before i did anything um and so i saw like i say saw lots of stuff and thought about lots of stuff and didn't act on any any of it what held you back what what held you from pulling the trigger do you think it was it was the fear of getting it wrong it was like i say that you know you don't want to get ripped off by someone so you don't do when you know someone's trying to rip you off you just don't do it but i but i didn't i didn't bother getting myself educated i didn't speak to a mortgage broker i didn't even know such a thing existed and to be quite honest it probably didn't exist very much back then you know mortgage

brokers were kind of a very niche thing. And even then, even now, 80% of brokers are just interested in getting you the loan. They won't sit down and take the time and understand what you're trying to do with your life and try and help you get there. So if I'd have met someone like me, and that's what drives me more than anything now, is that if I'd have met someone like me when I was 32, I would have bought that bloody property. I'd have bought the 180 grand property down the road or an even better one because I'd have known how. And I didn't know how i didn't know that i could just you know use the equity in my home to do stuff that that my income was going to be enough to make it work and that rent was going to cover the mortgage

i didn't know how to do it um yeah well take us through the nitty-gritty i've got a degree in economics so you know it's like i'm not a dumbass or anything i just but i still didn't know how to do it yeah and that and that that fear is is the big hurdle for for a lot of people because that's what you you know you just don't know what you don't know therefore the the default position is to do nothing uh because you think it's safe at doing nothing but when you and i know and by the way that's part of our human nature is is is like stay in the safety bubble of what we know and what we understand and don't step out into the unknown world um and you know so i didn't do anything until i was probably 38 39 before i finally went and you know i got made redundant

and i went right part of this is i need to supplement if i want to be a teacher i can't living i can't support a family five as the main breadwin breadwinner in the household um i can't support a family of uh five on a teacher's wage um especially not a trainee teacher's wage i need to make some money and so i'd managed to save up um we'd started saving the good thing i did start do at 32 was we started saving money we'd never saved money yeah we bought a property but we never save money we didn't even save the deposit we bought our first time on a credit card we put the deposit on a credit card a five percent deposit on a credit card yeah yeah um so unless you got started though that's that's the key bit you got on the ladder i got on the ladder but i

really got on the ladder because it was i was trying to game the system because unilever moved me up to brizzy and they had a rule that was if they moved you then they would subsidize your your your housing costs well i knew sydney was a lot cheaper than brissy but i knew if they were moving me to brisbane i'd have to come back and if i bought a house in brisbane they'd have to subsidize my move back to sydney so so i knew i had to kind of act act then so i was acting for all the wrong reasons but that's what i did and so i got me my first property um and then my but that was a home and then we had to sell that to move to sydney and we got we got the upgrade from the company and then the investment i i then had i was like i was now i've got it i need the money i need the

income and so i started buying cash positive investment properties um in the north of england that made more money i still got mortgages because i was working there but but they were very cash positive and so it was able to supplement my income yeah take us from there so you did a few of those by the sounds of things can you sort of thread the needle on on what you see the funny thing is once i once i bought the first one the thing is like it's almost like the floodgates open it's almost like my brain's we can do this oh my god oh you can finance your property i did one i did one in january i did another one in july and by then i'd left the uk we'd moved back to australia but i was still getting paid a teacher salary up until the end of august because there's

summer holidays in the in the july august period and uh and i was literally uh on my way back to australia we stopped up in vietnam where we used to live to catch up with friends and i was in a bar going to the bar to order drinks for my wife um and saw a message saying he's saying that there's another property available and i went oh like that and i bought this property via text message from a bar and so by from from like taking no action at all for like years and years and years like and text messages i don't know one of those just like playing monopoly max exactly right just so sport you know and i thought oh i can use my teacher's salary still because still getting paid in the bank account yeah it'd be fine um got myself the loan bought

another property um but then we moved back to australia and sort of had to start again with the whole you know became a mortgage broker you don't get paid for six months um and the big thing for us then was that and this is something else i learned on the way is that often we make mistakes with property because even on the property we live in because our family needs change and and we had teenagers in the household and when you're living in a household which has got enough bedrooms but only one bathroom you need another bathroom and you typically need another living space to cope with teenage kids so we didn't really like the the area that we were living in as much as we we didn't want to end up in the area we wanted a place with a bit more space

but it was going to cost us so much more money that we thought you know we're going to sell the house put that money into property and in and start renting and so we've been we've been rent vesting since 2010 so that's 13 years ago my life sold the family home and then had to buy and went to buy property and america was where it was happening at the time their market was in the toilet property prices had fallen 75 percent not seven and a half percent not 25%. They had fallen 75%. I couldn't get a mortgage, but you didn't need one. So we just went and took the cash. We still had a sizable mortgage back then, but we took the cash, put that into a property in America, bought 11 units. So three blocks of

like two fours and a three, 11 units in Phoenix and Arizona. And that pretty much set us up. We went from having three investment properties to 14 in the space of about six weeks. yeah i love that i did the same thing yeah my wife and i jumped on a plane as soon as the gfc here we thought this is a once in a generational opportunity uh given how far prices had fallen and uh we we spent three months over there uh having a really good look around along the east coast once before we bought a bunch of properties but i must say it it has been a little bit challenging uh because while the yields were incredible and and the growth in value just just going back to what the long-term average was you didn't make big money and it was great

exchange on the the aussie dollar and yeah it was not it was personal then yeah it was and so you know dropping back to 75 cents as you you've built in 25 percent increase in in equity straight off the bat but i must say yeah the uh the quality of professionalism in the states versus australia is like chalk and cheese so well you didn't get burned like a property manager as well did you oh how many how many oh my god they ripped me off yep six months i was with a property manager 11 units guess how much rent i received on 11 units with no mortgage on in six months not only did i not receive a dollar they reckon i owed him 10 grand yeah that's yeah that's the that's the uh hard part of it but but again useful warnings and

and what it reinforced to us is just how how good we've got it here in this country uh from the worst property manager in australia is still amazing by u.s standards i totally agree so if if you look at your your property journey uh and and it sounds like your initial property investments were cash flow driven uh yeah has your strategy changed at all oh yeah yeah i mean those problems those first properties are bought in the uk were as it turned out garbage one of them i i've just i've actually just sold um one of them was a house i bought great like eight percent yield so you know and back when mortgages were five percent and dropping down to two percent and eight percent yield was phenomenal wow 15 years i've owned that property for it's got up

in value from 75 000 pounds to 105 000 pounds so 30 000 pound not even a 50 growth in 15 years out um so i i you know just i would never do it again like the pure cash flow um so so now what we do is um we look for places we think are where the area is fundamentally undervalued so we think there's a bit of upside there and then we we do a small lot subdivision but buy buy a house with a big enough block of land you put another house on there and then you know you'll make money just on the build and then you'll also make money if you ride the wave because the property prices were fundamentally undervalued in the area yeah and i love that if you look back on your property journey so far what do you believe are the keys to

being successful both with both money and investment and why max well firstly you ought to manage the money properly to start with um you know you can't invest in property if you don't build up some equity or have some savings um and so that's where we went wrong for the first 12 years um but uh secondly get find some good people i mean it's not hard nowadays to find a good mortgage broker um and and they're a great start you know especially if it's someone like you know yourself or myself where we care more about the client's outcome than than lighting our own pockets and it's all about well what do i know that i can share with someone that will help them feel like they've got the confidence to do what they need to do to make stuff happen

um and then just doing stuff because sitting on the sidelines is is a poor man's game and and we we regret we don't regret the things i bought i might have bought that property up in grimsby in the north of england even sounds like a terrible place grimsby sounds grim doesn't it but i still made 30,000 pounds on that place, which is about $50,000 on it. I still made rent every year on that property, even though relatively speaking, it was a bad investment compared to what I could have done instead. Whereas the $220,000 unit in Dulwich Hill that I didn't buy, I know how much I lost on that one. That's like $600,000. That's what I'm liked by on that one. I just didn't do it. I just sat there. I love that. So you've had a chance to rub shoulders with a lot of people

over the years and with your own journey. What qualities and character traits do you think separate great money managers and investors from the rest then, Max? Yeah. So there's two slightly different things there. Managing money is a different thing and it's a learned skill as investing is a learned skill, but certainly the great money managers accept the fact that they're never going to be very good with money. Don't try and change yourself to be good with money. It's not going to work. You can't change your own psychology. That's what the book's about. So accept that and then put in place structures to make it difficult for you to spend your own money the second thing is then invest invest in something if shares is your bag go

invest in shares and buy something but buy it for the long run don't buy it and go oh i'm going to buy some shares this week and then sell them next week because they went down in value um there's a great book actually called the ulysses um yes contract great book um which which is all about you know set your course you know we talked earlier on set your course stick to that course if it turns out was wrong figure it out in five or ten years time don't just think it's wrong because it doesn't look great today or tomorrow or next week or the week after you know you've you've done the course you only the only way it's going to work is if you stay the course um and so that's what great investors do and is chart a course and then stick to it most people

don't start that first step of actually even charting a course they don't set themselves any goals and if you don't set any goals well what are you hitting anything and everything and the next thing exactly right not yeah yeah beautifully said if you are sort of reflecting back then max if you were starting out again would you invest it any differently or or done anything differently with money on your journey earlier i mean the first property investment i looked at i was still at uni and i didn't know how money worked me and a mate walked into a bank and said we've seen a house we were renting as students and he had a bit of money behind him and his family and we could have probably bought a place together if we'd have understood how things worked a bit better

and if mortgage brokers were a thing back then um and we could have bought a house for 12 000 pounds in in in an inner city area where they would be worth you know in pounds obviously probably 250 50 000 pounds today but we didn't do that so so start get assume you don't know and talk to people get a good mortgage broker buys agents i didn't even know buys agents for a thing in america you can't buy probably without a buyer's agent i didn't even see them yeah but you find the buyer's agent and they go oh we'll show you this one we'll show you this one i don't want to buy that one so why don't i want that one oh let me show you why you don't want that one it's like oh god i would have bought that one if you hadn't said anything i would have bought it um but you know buyers

agents are amazing in in property um accountants can be worth their weight in gold um you know but but we assume you know and i'm terrible for this assuming i can do it i know how to do this i'm smart enough i can do this myself it's only when you talk to somebody who really knows their stuff think oh god what an idiot i was yeah you're like an idiot but well there's no yeah that's exactly and there's a lot of aussies who uh just don't trust anyone particularly when it comes to their money and that that becomes a hurdle as well because if you don't trust anyone you don't do anything which comes back to what you mentioned and that's like that you know go go go back i didn't trust that spruiker i knew he was selling me some overpriced crap you know the fact is i

would have made money but the fact is i could have also lost a lot of money and i could have been in in a difficult situation because that guy was there to sell me stuff and this those people exist in australia today you want to find out where are you getting paid how are you getting paid um whoever you're talking to how are they earning their money and why are they doing what they're doing um and if you understand why they're doing what they're doing you understand how they're getting paid and you're prepared to pay the cost or or you know do whatever then then you know learn from other people there's so much more available in books and podcasts and all that sort of stuff available today that just simply you know it probably was there but it was so much harder to

find 20 30 years ago it was you had to really make the effort and and and it's almost flipped the lid now there's almost too much information so you get totally confused with the complexity that's associated with it but the the fundamentals haven't changed and if we go back to the you know i had my own kiyosaki moment in the in the 90s and that that completely flipped the lid on my my thinking and actions from that day forward yeah it really yeah it was a paradigm shift in the way i i saw everything from that point on but uh you know i'd really appreciated you you uh sharing all that uh before we go to a break and then uh get ready for uh the next episode where we're going to deep dive into your fantastic new book is there anything that we

haven't covered that you want to say uh before we do that yeah i i'm not quite sure we've done a fair bit uh a fair bit so far um there any money management uh tips or hacks that you've personally picked up and you know what and sort of researching you your mother's uh ability to put things in little brown paper bags uh exactly so my mother put everything in little purses so But like I say, the best decision my dad made was going, you have the money. Because money in your pocket makes no sense. And that's what one of the driving forces behind the book is that most of us manage money in an awful way at the moment. Go back to when we got paid cash.

People knew you had to take the cash home and hide it. Now, we open up a bank account. when we get our first job we have a debit card linked to that bank account we have a pay going into that bank account and from there on in we never make the change away from that stupid habit but we're now managing money according to our employer's pay cycle which doesn't make sense to a human being and also whatever we do after that we've given ourselves access to all of our money just like as if my dad put his whole pay pack in his back pocket and it doesn't make any sense take the money home hide the money home walk out the door with a little bit how do we

mimic that in the modern world that's the driving force behind spending fast and slow and and hopefully we'll get more into that later but it's it's the nuts and credit cards credit cards i could you know there's not enough pairs of scissors in the world to cut them all up they've got to get got to go they're awful things they mess with your heads and people don't understand why and the psychology tells us why they don't understand why it's because they believe that they're a sane sober rational human being and therefore they make sane sober rational decisions when they use a credit card and all of the studies show that they don't their losses to poverty there's no great and then we're really going to dive into all of that and the psychology around

the the you know money in our our minds and when we break down your book but i really want to thank you for taking the time to share the ins and outs of your own personal journey max and if anyone would like to ask any further questions or leave comments about this i want you to just join and jump into our recently launched property hub collective interactive facebook community which you can click on the link in the show notes where you can keep the conversation going with other like-minded hard-working aussies so we're we now look forward to continuing the conversation in part two of our great discussion max where we're going to deep dive into your great new book spending fast and slow so thanks again for joining us today thank you so much it's been a blast

thanks for tuning in to get invested on the property hub podcast channel your home for property investment insights and inspiration make sure you subscribe to property hub for free get your weekly dose of get invested inspiration along with every episode of realty talk australia's online property show for red hot property investing news and insights direct from industry leaders and influencers. And finally, I'll see you next time.