Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Part 2 - Property Investor Q and A

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

We continue our deep dive into all of your practical and insightful property investment questions. We've got part two of our special this week, where Bushy Martin sat down with Jef Miles and Joe Tucker from Aus Property Investors, one of Australia’s largest Facebook communities dedicated to Property Investing.  This was a live stream recorded with the investor community, and in this part of the discussion Bushy gets very practical in outlining his approach, and views, on property investment. And if you want to join the Aus Property Investors Facebook group, click here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Auspropertyinvestorsgroup  NEW - Join the Property Hub community on Substack! Sign up to get Australian property news, opinion and episodes in your inbox: https://propertyhubau.substack.com/  Three easy ways to Get Invested right now: Subscribe to this podcast now, if you haven’t already, and get the inspiration delivered to your podcast feed each week Get a copy of my book, Get Invested, for FREE, and find out what it takes for you to invest in living more, working less. Go to: https://knowhowproperty.com.au/get-invested-free-ebook Join the Get Invested community. Each month Bushy sends a free and exclusive monthly email full of practical ‘Self, Health and Wealth’ wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can’t wait to get each month. Just visit bushymartin.com.au, scroll to the bottom of the page and sign up. 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 Google Podcasts 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 network DM Media.  For business enquiries, email [e-mail]. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. Welcome to Get Invested on the Property Hub podcast. I'm Andrew Montessi, the producer of the show. Now, today we're continuing our two-part series where Bushy Martin sat down with Jeff Miles

and Joe Tucker from Oz Property Investors. And as I mentioned last week, it is now one of Australia's largest Facebook communities dedicated to property investing. Now, we're going to jump straight back into the chat, which was recorded as a live stream with the investor community. get ready to take notes as there's plenty here for aspirational and experienced investors and remember you can request to join thousands of investors in the facebook group and the link is in the show notes enjoy uh so getting crystal clear on those numbers and and again part of that exercise that this accountant come financial planner come restaurateur uh at clarendon uh he he was he was really good actually when i think back on it was it was very fortuitous that he

happened to be be there at that time but he also did the old uh what we now call the do do nothing different projection and he said okay tell me you know how much super you got what do you got in chairs blah blah okay well if 15 years is where you want to be this is if you don't do anything differently this is where you're going to end up and we were going to end up surviving on about 32 grand a year and i was like okay that's that's motivating uh clearly we need to do something and and and to this day now the freedom forecaster that we've now developed around this whole process that's the first thing we do with with people that we talk to put some shape around well you may not need to invest if we project for based on your current asset base if that's going to give

you what you need then you don't need to do anything but if there's a gap between that where you want want to be what is that gap and then what do we need to do to bridge the gap and that tends to start driving the strategy so you know i hear a lot of people talking about property strategy But I think they're missing the point in the context that you've got to get your lifestyle strategy first, then complement that with your finance strategy to look at what your capacity is and your capability to bridge the gap to make that happen, and then the property strategy will fall out of the bottom of those two.

So life first, finance second. What do you say is your life? What forms part of the lifestyle strategy? Is that like do you want to go overseas twice a year? Do you want to upgrade your company? Is that what a lifestyle strategy is? Spot on. That's exactly it.

So we like to travel three months of the year. We do that. We couldn't do it during COVID, obviously, but we're back on that horse now. And that's a big part of it. I love to play hockey. I love to play piano. There's a whole bunch of stuff that Sonia and I,

we're mad about our Samoyed dog rescues, you know, that they're a big part of our life. You're what? We got Samoyed. We rescue Samoyed dogs. Dog rescues. Big, big slug balls. They are beautiful.

Google it, mate. They are the most beautiful dogs you are ever going to come across, mate. They are the best. What type of dog is it? Samoys. They're pure white. They've got permanent smiles on their face. Oh, yeah, it's those big fluffy things.

Yeah, Samoys. Samoys. They're Southern Russian, I think, by background. But we rescue them. We rescue old Samoys. The last two we got. Yeah, that's it. That's Samoys.

You got it. So they are absolutely drop-dead gorgeous and beautifully, beautiful nature. They just, you know, whenever I'm having a hard day or I've got it, my dog comes in and he smiles at me. Just can't be upset looking at that kind of dog. They are awesome. So, but I digress.

So, yeah, so coming back to that, it's getting crystal clear around exactly how you want to live. And I mean getting down to what's the perfect day, week, month, year look like. And this may change, by the way, because once you've done your freedom numbers, then the important thing from there is to use it as a magnet in terms of getting excited about where you're heading,

but also to use it as a measuring stick because you can check in every 12 to 18 months and see how you're progressing against it. Has it changed? Do you need to change the number? Has your portfolio progressing towards it when you project it out to make sure then you're actually tracking the performance

of what you're doing to where you want to be? So getting, again, getting crystal clear on that's really important. so so now now we've now we've painted the picture right so we know where we're going to go like how did you actually like make it a reality like that's it that's it the the the dream world to the real world perfect yeah exactly right so so now we're inspired now we're fired up we've got and i and i was one of those nutcases i've got the the vision boards there but i i recorded on the phone i used to listen to it in the shower because i remember i i was i was i was actually

clinically depressed when uh when my marriage went belly up I you know they had me on Prozac there for a period uh so you know I wasn't a very happy chap so I was looking for anything to get really motivated and inspired about it so I went overboard there's no question about it but but the number of people that I get to talk to when I ask the question so what's your ideal life look like I get crickets most of the time I get oh I've never really thought about that actually well if you're not clear on where you're heading you could end up anywhere that's that's the that's the challenge that's what the dallas which which path where do you want to go i don't know well any path will take you there that's exactly spot on guys spot on so so sort of uh now that we've

got the gps and i and it is a gps it's not a roadmap because because you tend to change direction but if you're still guiding towards where you want to be then then uh that really does lead you and the really good thing about that as well is that uh then means if you if you know where you're heading then every decision you're making day-to-day is based on is it taking me closer to that or further further away so you've got a you've got a basis that definitely changes the assets that you are buying you know and then all of a sudden this crypto exciting nft that's just been created well is that taking me closer to or is that taking me further away um super interesting absolutely and and the and the really critical thing there joe following on uh expanding

on what you're saying there is that uh what became crystal clear to us right from the get-go i mean we we had to uh remember we were we were looking to create a four million dollar income producing nest egg from day one well you know where our focus needed to be growth with nothing it had to be all about growth so capital growth 100 whatever we invested in had to be and and those three things income producing growth saleable uh so so we we had our template in our head pretty much and and we we started looking at the world through those glasses if you like uh so what do we do then and you're absolutely right so i remember we had very little capital at that point in time so what did i do i uh i uh cobbled together five grand and i went and spent it on a

technical share trading uh course to to trade in cfds we probably took the same course bushy i mean okay my my my manual's over there on the on the on the shelf and i haven't touched it i didn't well i i leapt into that i leapt into it in a big way because it's like how can i go from very little capital base to try and build one reasonably quickly and i jumped and see if these that their leverage is 100 to 1 i was i was trading the indices at that point highly high risk strategy guys it's you know when i look back on it don't try this at home kids no i i wouldn't wouldn't recommend anyone do it actually because it was a roller coaster ride there were uh times when i would lose 30 grand overnight just like that wow

yeah it's serious money it was it was a real roller coaster ride and i was having to spend what i hadn't uh worked out was i had to spend about four at least four hours a day doing because i was day trading effectively so a couple of hours before the open and a couple of hours after and around the close of where i was putting it and and it's not for me it's not my cup of tea because if you're staring at the screen that long you start wanting to make it happen and then you start making some really dumb decisions and the problem is a lot of it's a lot of us out here that that sort of thing a lot of it's out of your control like there's could be like a major news event or there's hundreds of different kind of news things that come out and

and any and that you can't predict what and you might not even know that that news event's happening so it's just spot on spot on yeah when i it's very volatile uh you know you can put all the guaranteed stop losses and everything else in place and still get burnt uh which is at some of the hard lessons i'll learn during that but i've managed to get through that with enough uh to get our first deposit on our first property because i've been yeah and then that's the biggest thing as well i think that is sometimes understated is like you have to get that that first nut you need that for however you get that first deposit is just hard graph there's no other way around it you have to just do some crazy stuff to be able to get that first thing and then you can start

leveraging into that before we I want to dig into that and understand that a little bit more before we do that we got to jump to our ad but after that let's unpack how do we actually achieve our how do we actually get to this number and what were your steps what did the steps look like for yeah i'll tell you what's impressive about um about tonight is there's like people are really rolled in because origin is on i mean scotty agate couldn't couldn't make the life tonight because we um he was watching the game which um yeah and please he's having a discount at the moment i see as well he's uh he's trying to get people in i've got an email about it so he's spamming me about that so could have got a lot lazy so we're out we're talking about a framework and yeah so let's

get into the the guts of the bc the the oh sorry the ad the after divorce exercise when i got serious about investing properly uh because uh so so after the c cfd exercise and we managed to cobble together enough to get into our first property uh then the other thing that i just want to mention with this one one of the things we realized uh early is that to achieve that sort of nest egg uh we also needed to have pretty good incomes uh up front so i've been an architect before uh i jumped on board with an executive recruiting group in adelaide and did some executive contracting for them uh back into government because i've done some work with government before and there was a really good income stream that came out of that uh sonia

worked our way through the ranks to run a recruitment business in Adelaide as well. So that was horsepowering. Now, we knew that we had to get reasonably sized incomes to be able to generate enough cash to try and build the base. But we also realised fairly early on, and this became an important part of our strategy as well, is that when you're both working solidly in your jobs,

there's not a lot of time to be able to dedicate to the wealth piece if you're trying to fit it in a couple of hours at night on the weekends then then that's a that's a risk in itself yeah i always say if you if like property investing and this is why jeff and i created this entire community you can do it if you put a full-time effort into this property game you can absolutely do it the challenge that people get into is when they put a part-time effort in and they expect a full-time result that's where you start to see people cutting corners and making mistakes and things like that you put a full-time effort into something you'll get a full-time result and and this is where your team comes in handy this is

why you need to create yourself a solid team that is thinking about you and that those team members need to be communicating together as well because your solicitor or conveyancer all they're thinking about is how do we de-risk the situation your accountant is thinking how do i reduce tax your mortgage broker is thinking how can we increase income which is kind of against the tax situation because if you're making income you're you're so then and then your buyer's agent's looking for something else and it's trying to get everyone together on the same page of like this is this you know on the same strategy piece um how do you do that how do you actually well and and and you're absolutely right and and i would uh reinforce everyone doing that being the

dumbest person in the room but knowing enough to be able to manage your managers is the key now back and you do have to don't outsource responsibility of your portfolio to someone else yeah and and what i mean by that is definitely have the best player in each position as part of your team but you must at least invest in enough knowledge to be able to understand what they're saying and what it means uh so so you have to do that work uh but but coming back to my situation at that point, given I'd been burnt badly in the property exercise, you can guess where I was. I didn't trust anyone. And I thought that I could do it better myself. So the conundrum we had was, well, how do we do this? So we actually, and it sort of evolved over time,

but we decided that one of us would be the worker and one would be the wealth builder. So we both wanted to have careers. And I wanted to spend a fair bit of time with my son for my first marriage at that stage because i was like the good time uncle uh for a fair period of time there in that situation so what we consciously constantly decided to do was that uh early on when i was day trading as sonja was going hard in the recruitment business and and doing very well uh once once we got to a point where we uh got into our first property uh then it was a couple properties actually uh yeah i'm going to weave this story because one of the frameworks that evolved from this and again reflection is easy so it's easier to see it now than what we were doing

then but because we did i i call it the money madison so uh you've probably seen that uh olympic bike race where there's a pair of riders riding against another pair of riders and one rider is up on the top of the track sort of taking it easy while the other one's going hell for leather for two laps and then the other guy is it's a what the kieran isn't it i think uh no it's a matter it's actually called the madison it's called the madison so they do this slingshot and then they change over the other guy has a rest while the other other rider goes hell for leather so so we've got this thought in our head that if one is is earning the income the other one's building the wealth so we've got the worker and the wealth builder uh then we've got the best of

both worlds we've got enough enough income that's generated but then we've actually got someone who's got the time to dedicate it so i my initial dedication on that was into the cfd stuff so i did that full time for a period uh and then then we kept switching over uh so because as we're horsepowering our property portfolio we both wanted to have a career but he also wanted to have have some time out so so i then went back uh into government and i managed the uh health portfolio for the south australian government and it was it was pretty good coin at that stage uh because at that point we realized again using that that template of passive income growth and saleable asset uh we decided to open our own uh property management business you know we we've

got free we've got free properties by then by the way so so let me now jump into what those three properties look like so you've got a sense of what what that is i never knew you were a property manager bus bushy how yeah no well i i'm a bad one but sonja is a brilliant one i i like i'll be honest i lasted one week in the chair in the property management exercise and being a project manager uh and i'm i used to i'd list tasks and i'd power my way through the tasks as a project manager first day in as a property manager sonja went to a conference in in melbourne so i said oh, it can't be that hard, I'll look after the fort. I had 110 tasks on my exercise in day one

and there was nightmare calls. We sort of inherited a pretty bad rent roll. It was about 50 properties with nightmare tenants and troublesome landlords. If we hadn't known what we were getting into, we would have done it. But I handed it back to her and said, you can have it, there's no way I'm doing that.

And she's done it beautifully. One, because we were pretty disappointed in the level of property management we were getting from those that were managing our properties at the time. So I thought, well, again, ignorance is bliss. If you knew what you knew once you got into it, you'd probably never do it. So what do these deals look like? Yeah, so let's do the deal. So deal number one was pretty basic because we didn't have much horsepower. So at that time, we were working in the city.

So initially we were going to buy the property to live in. That was the initial thinking. Then I bumped into an accountant who slapped me around, and he's still my accountant today, by the way. He's a legend. But he said, why you've got limited horsepower, why are you putting your energy into a home now? Why don't you continue to rent close to the city where you're working

and use your horsepower to put it into a property where the tenant, the tax office and capital growth is going to do the work for you? And he ran the numbers for us. And I was like, yeah, that's a no-brainer. So we ended up buying a property in the beautiful suburb of Aldinga Beach, south of Adelaide. I mean, it's become, everyone knows about it now, but no one did then.

I mean, it had the, when we bought this property, it was 1997. It was the highest number of unemployed lived in Aldinga Park in the state. So it gives you a bit of an idea of what the place was like. It was pretty average then, to be perfectly honest. It's a cracker. You can drive the car on the beach. I had a holiday down there ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper,

so I knew the place pretty well. And my parents had retired there. So part of the reason that we initially looked at it was, well, it's close enough to mum and dad because their health wasn't too good at the time. But the other thing we realised, and more by mistake than intent, was that they were building an expressway from Adelaide down to not far away from Old Bingo Beach.

And we sensed that that would really open the place up and they would go through the roof. And that actually proved to be the case. So we picked up the property for $84,000. It was a three-bed, one-bath place, a corner block, a decent block, just a bit over about 1,200 square metres or thereabouts. And it's in the scrub.

It's in the nicer part of Aldinga Beach. It's only 150 metres from the beach itself and the ramp down onto the beach. So it was a cracking spot. But the story about acquiring that one was a cracker because there was no internet. There was no way of doing any online research at that stage. We were literally walking the streets.

And we saw this place and we could tell it had been vacant for a fair while. It's like, hmm, there's got to be something to that. And it was a nice little place. it was a really nice little place so my wife Sonia being the beaver that she is she she just went through the yellow pages and and she found out a name of someone who was attached to the property and then she just rang everyone in the book uh and eventually uh struck the person they said oh I'm not that person but but uh I know the owner and he's actually in Vietnam so uh Sonia got

his number uh rang him in Vietnam and he said well it's funny you should call but because I was actually thinking of selling the place that's you know i haven't used it for years but him and his wife were going to retire on it but his wife got cancer and died so i've had some bad memories for him uh so so we ended up uh picking up that property for 84k uh we only bought it as uh joint tenants at that stage because we didn't understand the the you know the importance of entities uh at that point in time but that that property uh it's been an absolute cracker guys we've still got it uh yeah and and we did a major reno on it so we we gutted the kitchen gutted the bathrooms and the wet areas revitalized which we doubled the footprint of the home uh because again

with my architectural skills i could draw it and my brother-in-law is a chippy so we we spent some time in this worker worker wealth builder exercise i actually donned the the uh overalls and the nail bag and was the lackey, basically, for my brother-in-law as we did the extension. So we re-rendered the place. It's unrecognisable. You just cannot, you wouldn't know it's the same property. You know, it's so completely different.

We only spent, cumulatively, over a couple of stages, $130,000 on the progressive renos. That property now, at last valuation, is just shy of a million bucks. So it's done extremely well for us. And as part of our, I know I'm bouncing around everywhere, here but uh in in recent times we've converted that into an airbnb and because of sonja's property management skills she's she's just doing brilliantly with that property it's it's getting

really good yield but we've also got a property for because we block it out for us from times of the year where we actually go and enjoy the beach ourselves so it's we've it's got a really good investment returns but it's a place that we can actually still get to personally enjoy so what's What's the occupancy rate for Airbnb, like by the beach? For the property, what is it like? Yeah, well, we've been Airbnb-ing it now for about nine months. It's been vacant for one week. Oh, wow.

It's a nice little part of the world. But, and I'm not going to sugarcoat this, Sonia has worked really hard to make that happen. She's marketed it like hell. uh we've decked the place out we've we've we've used our skills to really uh you know the photos it looks magic you can have a look along the web it's called reflections on on uh airbnb check it out it's a it's a beautiful little property uh it's a great place to spend some time but but she's worked really hard but uh she did a lot of work and it's been going for about nine months

she spent nine months before getting it ready so she did an enormous amount of work so that when we pulled the trigger you know that we got some great photography done but the whole thing we ramped it right up went out to the database she's done a lot of activity to make sure and it it's a bit like running a hotel only it's only a three-bedroom home there's a lot of work brisbane's council rates have now gone up to treat airbnbs like a hotel council rate so yeah Looking at it now, it's amazing. Well, it needs that sort of work because, and again, I think I saw in the comments Ian Ugar had made a comment about,

yeah, yeah, yeah, he's got a lot of time for him with his co-living stuff, but he made a comment around how passive is the income, and he's absolutely right. It's not passive income. It's consistent income, but you need to work it, And particularly in that Airbnb space, if you're going to be serious about it, then it does, particularly early on while you're building its reputation, it requires a lot of work. It's not just going to whack it on Airbnb and then the money starts rolling in that application. So going back to your freedom number, how did you break it down?

Were you like, we need five properties or we need six properties or we need 10 properties? Yeah, perfect. Yeah, so at that stage, and again, this is back in the late 90s, we were basing it on about 200 grand per property at that stage. So in our head, we thought, well, we need seven properties. And this is the other thing. We needed four mil, but that was in 15 years' time. So if you roll that back to what we subtracted inflation from that number

to work out what is that in today's dollars effectively, again with the help of that account financial planner and that meant that uh we needed to really get there we needed to have 1.5 million dollars in assets then today right off the bat it's like holy hell so you know that was like wow we've really got to get on our bike here uh and effectively that's meant we've had a way to add more properties to it well again the number of properties i think is biggest dickest guys uh because it's it's it's not the number of properties accounts it's the quality of the properties and the performance of the properties yeah well exactly your old dingo one right if you move back five stops away from the beach 600 000 right you've

got a million dollar asset because you're all 500 meters away from the beach on a corner block with 1200 squares but if you oh you know what i'll just settle up here you're not going to get that 100%. Spot on. Absolutely spot on. So, I mean, at the time, there was a property around the corner on the Esplanade for 125 grand. I just couldn't get enough money to get that property.

Do you look at how much that's worth these days? Yeah, yes. Don't do it to yourself. It's not worth it. No, I've done it. I have done it. Every time I went down there, I'd walk past it. Two and a half million, is it?

Kick myself, yeah. I'd kick myself. but that but i just didn't have the horsepower to do that at that stage so you know okay so so you've gone and acquired you've put sweat equity into it as well so you've you've manufactured the the growth then what happened what happened what's the next kind of acquisition yeah so so initially we didn't do it straight away though so we bought the property and we put tenants in because i just didn't have the uh the capital to be able to do the renos then but but but i knew that it was going to come because it needed it and it had the potential to do that so we

parked that one uh the the next property not not too long after this is about 1999 i reckon uh we bought catch that was a 322 uh we picked that up for 190 grand again this is part of the growth exercise again in reflection this is also in aldinga beach so this is backyard stuff so uh it it was good and that i knew that area really well yeah but but uh i'm starting to concentrate the investment too much. If I did it now, I would be spreading the eggs a bit further because I don't want to have them all in one location. That's a danger.

But with the limited knowledge I had at that point in time and we'd seen what had been happening to the property and the expressway was still coming. So we were wanting to get in there before that went through. So we picked up a catch for about $190,000. So, you know, that's a fair bit more than the first one. We brought that as tenants in common, again, because I've had some learnings from the accountant then on the benefits

of slanting the ownership to improve the cash flow because cash flow was pretty important to us at that stage of the game. And it was getting about $350 a week. So it's pretty good rent. Wow, that's amazing. $19.99, jeez. For $190,000, you get $350 a week. That's ridiculous.

There weren't many rentals in that area at this point in time. Again, it's a fairly scarce environment because it was traditionally a holiday exercise, so there wasn't a lot of... Yeah, a lot of shacks. Yeah, you got it. You got it. This was a little brick veneered tile roof. You know, it wasn't sexy, but it was a good permanent rental property.

Still got that one. That one's about 500K because it's a long way from the beach. It's near the shopping centre, this one. But it's been a reasonable performer. The next property we got in Byron, so we went orderless at this stage, and this was early on the place of 322, and that was a block that we could subdivide. So I was buying it for its potential then.

Again, the property was pretty cheap back then. When I look back on it now, man, that was really cheap. It's about $260,000. it cost us at that point in time. How does that work now? I haven't done a recent vow, but it's up there. It's up there. Yeah, no, it's pretty grunty now.

But we actually did carve off a block because it had the potential to subdivide. So that has been a cracker for us as well. We've turned that over. I'll get to this, but we're into the part of the thing that I realised is that investing in growth property is great for the capital growth, but you're never going to survive off of rent.

You're never going to be able to get enough rent, which a lot of investors think, right, I'll go for growth, I'll just pay off the debt and live off the rent. Well, when you actually do the numbers on that, it doesn't stack. So we fairly, once we got into this journey, we started to realise that, you know, this isn't going to be the philosophy. What are we going to do? So it's about transitioning the portfolio and starting

to move from growth to cash flow, which I'll talk about shortly. But, again, that was a pretty good property. That's when we started the property management business. So we wanted to get some under our belt while we had the employee income because it's much easier to borrow. And remembering here, this is in the days when you could borrow 97% plus lender's mortgage insurance. So it's basically 100% lend where you were paying for the stamps

and the on-cost. So we didn't have to have big deposits at this point in time. Can't do it anymore, but we certainly took advantage. And that was in the days when, you know, the low-doc lines were, you know, if you had a pulse, you could get money. It was virtually giving it away hand over fist at that stage of the game. Very different environment now, there's no question about it. But we started the property management business,

and Sonia really got cracking with that. So I was doing this government contract. I'd switched to the worker and she was the wealth builder at that stage. And then once the property management business got to the point where we were getting enough financials out of it to justify the borrowings, by that time I'd realised how important finance was to the whole equation. So I started a finance-broking business with two finance gurus. I knew nothing about finance, guys. I had no clue. And again, if you knew then what I knew now,

you'd probably go, why did I do it? But I just knew how important and fundamental the financing was to capacity, to cost and risk, that it was likely if I don't get into this. And again, using that template, the property management business and the broking business, the great thing about broking businesses is you build up a trial income,

which creates an income stream and it's a saleable asset. So it was ticking those three boxes. Same with the rent roll, right? Rent rolls, exactly the same. So, you know, we went completely in green with this, but we associated ourselves with people who were really good at it. So the two guys I went into the broking business were long-term bankers. They were guns.

They really knew their stuff. And I just pestered the hell out of them. They brought me on because of my property background, which actually wasn't worth much in the broking space, to be honest, but it became useful later on. But when I joined them, I just said, look, I'm going to hound you to death. I'll ask every question until I understand this and I don't have to ask you anymore. And that's exactly what I did.

I was just a pain in the backside. I would just ask and ask. And the way I got through the exercise early on was, you know, if someone asked me a question of dealing with a client I didn't know, I said, well, look, I'm going to have to get back to you on that because there's been some change in policy around that here. And then I just go and pester these guys and then ring it back and say, well, there's change in policy. but but but it turned out it's not untrue though i had to learn really quick i had to learn and because i had the backing of these two guys and they were exceptional in the space they really knew their stuff uh that was a great learning curve and it really opened up the arena in terms of opportunity uh for us as well because i then knew how to tap into the right sort of structure

to be able to secure the ongoing portfolio and at the same time what we then did uh was we built on effectively a project management arm because we started to recognise how good the new build space was in terms of reduced stamp duty, great depreciation to look at the cash flow affordability of the properties because, again, one of these learnings we were getting to was, well, gee, we're going to cap out here because the affordability of being able to hold some of these properties,

particularly a couple of the ones that were negatively geared early on, was going to create an issue. So, and given my project management and architectural background, we then built an arm that once we'd done the finance for clients, we would go out and find a block of land and negotiate a fixed build contract and then would have finishing trades go in and finish the property off for clients who just didn't have the time or knowledge to do it themselves. So that was an additional arm of the business, which leveraged off my skills and enabled us to do that. And as a consequence of that, we did some builds ourselves. So we did a build at Marston. Again, they were just little pocket rockers.

What in Queensland? No, no, we did one in Queensland and one in South Australia. So a little 422, that costs about $365 to build thereabouts. back when i mean this was this was about 2000 just before the gfc just before the gfc came so that's a lot like yeah these are pretty high spec they were we weren't building ship boxes and we were trying to get into areas that were fairly tightly held but they have a decent land content this wasn't this wasn't the greenfield crap that you see in a lot of these endless subdivisions that go forever and we were trying to be a little bit smart about it and give our

clients and ourselves a better product as a as a result of that so that that was pretty good learnings um the then the next move and this was a big move for us uh the gfc hit and the world was going to win as we know it uh you probably remember the times uh i'd been doing a shitload of reading by this stage and i knew that crises like this were golden once in a lifetime opportunities So what did we do? We jumped on a plane and went to the States. And we spent three months over there researching the place. We went up and down the east and west coast.

We ended up buying three properties over there. I had a self-managed super fund by that stage. So Sonia and I purchased the properties through the self-managed super fund and we used a really good accountant who structured it. And it was a really complicated ownership structure. There was hybrid trust and corporate entities attached to this thing so that we could separate the US tax regime from the Australian and avoid a double tax.

Did you pretty much have to use cash to buy those as well? Because trying to get a loan, I imagine. Yeah, we didn't get a loan. We didn't borrow money. We didn't borrow money. But let's put some perspective around this, guys. We bought a property in Maryland, a property in Washington, and a property in Michigan.

They varied from about $30,000 up to about $60,000 in cost. And these properties, these are two-storey, three-bed, double-bath properties with a double garage in a really nice area. They didn't buy Detroit. Not in Detroit, Mr. Ian. No, no, no, no. Shit, no.

No, there was nightmares over there. There was people getting killed in that part of the world. But, again, on paper, really good. In reality, pain in the backside because the capital cold hard reality the thing that we hadn't really understood uh because this is where desktop stuff can get yourself in trouble is that the quality of the professionalism uh of the players in the space over there is not a touch on what we enjoy here in australia so the number of late night phone calls and and whatnot to be talking to property managers and and maintenance guys and

everything else it was horrific we ended up having to we end up employing an independent project manager over there to be our our eyes and ears to keep an eye on uh the the people who are supposedly looking after our property to make sure that what they were saying they were doing they were actually doing so uh so while the numbers are great i mean that the the rental yields on those properties around between 25 to 28 percent uh but but in when you're paying that low amount of money this is a relative of course uh and the other the other uh again more by good luck and good management i think the australian dollar was a dollar four to the usd at that stage uh you know the the we've we've sold these properties uh during the height of the exercise

beginning of last year we got rid of them uh but uh because the the forex exchange had built in 20 or 30 percent of of fat right there and then because the aussie dollars was back at 70 cents when we offloaded them. So in terms of just the Forex exchange, they've ended up doing all right, but we bought ourselves a late-night job with those properties. Again, I wouldn't do it if I had known what we were getting ourselves into in terms of the time that we needed to spend to do that. But we've come out of it all right, but it needed a fair bit

of rut work to make that happen. so yeah i mean a lot of what i'm hearing is like this journey is not this is not a passive we you know we started the show with uh 200 000 passive income it's passive income is not passive i call it residual like passive yeah it is it is and that's exactly right that's exactly right i i i think a passive income is a bit of a furphy uh in reality i think anything you do because our investments are as much a business as our businesses are so the property management business we have the breaking business in our properties they're all businesses in their own right and you need to you should be treating them that way by the way

they need that level of care to make sure that you're really optimizing the performance no question so okay so i guess like well i mean in terms of story like i'm just kind of thinking thinking time wise it'd be great to get some to some questions so if anyone has any questions about what Bushy's story or... There's been a few, yeah. Throw them in the comments. I want to close the story here because... Yeah, yeah.

Just circling back to what I was talking about before, the growing realisation as we're going on this journey was that just pouring our money in the properties, we were never going to be able to live off the rent. It's not going to be sufficient to do that. So we started to understand that we needed to rationalise the portfolio and that's exactly what we've done.

So to get in that position where we're now getting much less time-based income from the exercise, we've got rid of the US properties. That land banking exercise that I spoke about, the vacant dirt. 158. Yeah, we solved that progressively 2021, 22. At the heart of the boom, it was like, okay, this is a one-off. We're not going to see times like that.

Without regional access, everyone wanted to buy big blocks of dirt. So we had 10 hectare lots that we could harm off as hobby farm lots. And a great location there on the crest of the hill, looking down the plains there on the edge of Adelaide. So, you know, I thought this was a dog when Dad suggested that myself and my brothers get into this, by the way. I was very reluctant. It's been an absolute boon because we sold the mosque progressively

and it's the sale of that plus a couple of the other properties in the US has enabled us to utilise the debt and the properties we've held onto are high yielding so they're giving us a really good income stream and we've got the other money sitting in index funds and whatnot that are giving us a good yield as well. So the learnings that I want people to take from that are, yes, you've got to go for growth but you're going to have

to convert it to cash flow at some point in time. now we were very fortunate again uh that that that land that we bought we bought it in 1984 capital capital gains tax came in in 1985 so we didn't have to pay capital gains tax well on the land yeah no it's because a pretty pretty 85 asset so exactly so and again that that was more by good luck than good management it just happened to be that that was the time that we did that so that's perfect i mean that's i mean that's got to be hundreds thousands if not millions of dollars of of capital of capital gains tax no not yeah yeah it would have been it would have been so that that's been a very fortuitous uh purchase and

and i i can't uh take uh any any great responsibility for that because uh it was my father who shoehorned me into doing it reluctantly at the time but it's proved to be a as a legacy piece effectively from my dad's advice that that's been a sensational uh performer and that's put us in a really good position so so we're you know we're sort of in a debt-free situation now and and we as i think i've said to you joe we're taste testing we're the the gypsy spirit still alive and what we're doing we're actually living on the bellarine peninsula where we are we're taste testing this opportunity uh before we decide where we're going to live we we spent some time in the morning peninsula uh we we've done spent some time in northwest tassie uh and we we're

probably going to spend northwest tassie yeah yeah nothing in northwest tassie you've been there you've been it's beautiful i'm a country boy remember i'm a country boy so i love and i love the cold i've got a dodgy thyroid so i can't do humidity or heat oh i hate the i hate the cold give me i love the cold i'm one of those odd bods who loves to rug up so uh so so we're in the privileged position now we're able to taste test different locations because as you repeatedly say joe it's boots on the ground that that really tells you how good a location is we've done our desktop research and said well these look good let's actually spend some time living there and And once we're confident around the spot we actually want to enjoy,

then we're actually going to get the forever home for the next 10 years. So that's the end of the journey. That's a bloody wild ride, that's for sure. I feel like this could have been our four-hour session or something, Joe. I feel like we've shortcutted the back part of the story, but that's okay.

Yeah. so well i guess like this is super interesting because it's so it took so it took so long and it's just kind of a proof like because i speak to people that that that have like i've got a client right now and they've got 15 properties and it's like holy crap you're you know you're at this position and then i wind back they're like yeah that but that's over 15 years you know we've been doing this and then we build up kind of plans and it's like oh people have five properties they're like yeah but it's been over five it's been over seven years to get to this point and it's cool to because you can start to like map it out and say oh well you're actually in five years

you'll look here and it's like well that's where they are and then in 15 years it's like well that's that's where these guys are so you can it you can do it you just be very conservative with your numbers and you can and you can make it happen what's this comment i just wanted to bring because some somebody said um yasmin said um she said it's exhausting um tim tim's question um and she said it's not the rule i'm lacking but i know that i'm not an architect nor handyman would like to know slow build must admit kudos to him so i would say though yasmin this this has happened over 30 years has it a bushy like yeah yeah so we started in yeah so we we started our our journey the uh ad portion of our journey uh we started in the 90s yeah mid mid 90s so what are we now

what's that 96 yeah it's getting on 20 odd years 25 yeah yeah and then that is that is the a couple of the key take-home messages here i think uh that uh because we've made this this has become our life uh so we've invested we've put energy into all of this all of the stuff we're doing business wise is still still around the whole property piece and the one thing that i i would say to people is that um if you don't know the knowledge uh and if you if you're using those those three the template of uh residual income growing value and resellable asset just because you haven't done something doesn't mean that you can't do it you just need to surround yourself with people or as you said earlier joey uh make sure you're rubbing shoulders

with with uh independent professionals in each of the key positions that can help you do it for you and teach you along the way yeah because i would want to i'd want to hit on some of this stuff that you've you've said here as my i'm not an architect nor a handyman that's a bit of a limiting belief around like well you don't i'm not an architect i'm not a jeff as jeff have you ever picked up a hammer um i i did when i was free and i whacked myself on the head so i haven't picked up one since and you don't you don't need to you don't need to have those type of skills and i think actually we actually uh bushy you're on the session we're talking about value add um last week the the jong live event and a lot of it was you can have you just have professional teams like

you like i'm doing a renovation right now and we need flooring we need a new air conditioner we need to paint it we need to do all this stuff to it it's going to cost fifteen thousand dollars but all that is is five trades that are going to come in one's going to come in and do this this one's going to do this then that one's going to paint it and then it's like that's it i didn't pick up anything i'm my you know you don't have to be an expert the the architect thing i think has actually been more of a hamstring than a help to be honest because if you if you look at that first first venture into the property game that was a disaster because i thought i knew it as an architect the i've i've virtually had to pull my heart out as an architect as a property investor because

it's about the numbers not about how good the property looks which is what architecture is generally about and and our ventures into property management and finance breaking i knew nothing but the the thing that that I was keen to do is learn and learn from good people so we built both of those business by hard graft but also rubbing shoulders with really good players in each of those spaces and and we we with it both Sonia and I are not scared to ask questions you've you've seen me in action Joe I I I will you've you've sat on the get invested in the realty talk exercise and i and i would just ask away because if i ask enough questions i'm going to get the answers i need and then i can if i can't do it i'll find someone who can exactly what jen

lee's saying here is with the internet youtube today anyone can access free education anyone can become a handyman a designer through self-education and so it's an awesome it's an awesome point um again having said that i yeah um before you get to this comment i just want to say thanks thanks for raising it yasmin because it's the kind of thing that everybody's thinking like it's the i mean i don't know if it's the elephant in the room but it's it's kind of yeah because it's like oh great every like bushy's an architect he's a he's a handyman he's all this or handy handy woman whoever yeah but it's like oh i can't do that it's these these people and like i think it's it's for it and anybody can like even joe and i like i've been we've been going to these

i've been going to these seminars and i've been going to property seminars since the early 2010s And when I first went to them, I thought the same thing. I was like, you know, I can't – like these people are all like way above me. And over time, you just start to build – put the Lego blocks together. Don't want to win the architectural awards. Don't win architectural awards. They don't. They don't want to win.

That is exactly – that's a great comment. If you've won an architectural award, you've done something wrong as an investor. I can tell you right now. That's good. That's good. well um let's get to some some more of these comments i am just cautious of wanting to cut it off for two two hours you want to go to sleep um given inflation is higher interest rates are higher best of us to go through serviceability which most are facing um yeah yeah yeah so i i

want to tackle this from a few different aspects i guess uh because uh the it's fair to say uh that a lot of people that that we get to see uh particularly from the financing perspective and and the the financing piece is a major component of your capacity there's no question about it uh we get to see a lot of people who are structured the wrong way uh they've generally got their portfolio with one bank and and that's a major uh problem for a number of reasons uh which we probably haven't got time to go into right now but uh you know we we had our portfolio spread across a bunch of banks all standalone uh there are banks out there right now everyone keeps going on about the three percent buffer and that they're being serviced at nine or ten percent well if you

dig hard there are still banks that uh don't have the buffer on it uh you can lock in if your need is to get into a property uh there are banks that will offer you fixed rates that are still in the fives and don't don't put a buffer on top that are giving you a much better capacity than just sticking with the majors and sticking it all under under one hat so so and the rate the rate as well isn't isn't ridiculously high like you're not talking you don't have to necessarily pay 10 percent um for those kind of second tier second or third tier no well i'm there's one lender i I know I was talking to my broking team today saying, hey, I'm talking tonight, bring me up to speed.

Well, I know there's a lender that you can get at 5.67%, no 3% buffer. They'll also take on all of the variable income, bonuses, overtime, which a lot of the major banks won't. So there are options out there to still optimise your opportunity. One of the things I want to touch on, and there's a word of caution around this as well, because I'm hearing a lot of some accountants and some other players that are shouting from the rooftops the idea of pursuing special purpose vehicles and independent trusts for those people who want to basically create unlimited buying capacity. there are some precautions that i will suggest around that because yes you can do it yes yes you can set up a scenario where providing a property is totally positive cash flow

and that means that after all costs and that the the trust itself is in a positive cash flow position then you because if it's in a trust or a company it falls outside of the normal consumer credit code in double cp yeah national yep uh then there you have the potential ability to be able to then leverage up your buying capacity but i'm i want to caution because uh just because you can do it doesn't necessarily mean you should do it and why why do i say that because unless you're doing worst-case scenarios around this exercise, and we mightn't be at worst-case yet, we don't know, and that goes belly up,

you could significantly put yourself in financial danger. So there's a word of caution for me around that because there's a reason why, well, I think it's gone too far with the 3% buffer. There's a reason why there is some scrutiny around borrowing at the moment because the government doesn't want people to overextend and put themselves in a dangerous position. So, you know, if we had the worst-case scenario

and we had a GFC on our hands that occurred in the States, and it's very unlikely to happen, but my approach to life is plan for the worst and then expect the best and you're going to be okay, then those avenues are out there. You know, I'm happy to talk to people about their specific situation or my breaking team can talk to them about that situation to see whether that's a fit for them. But we will be putting some scrutiny around that because, as I say, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

So there are avenues around that piece. And then beyond that, in terms of the exercise, one of the questions that I often ask investors, if they're really extended to the max, then, and depending on the size of their portfolio, there's a question mark to me around the performance of the quality of the properties they've already got. So sometimes, you know, if you do a cost-benefit analysis on the performance of a property and they might have a property in the portfolio but it's actually from an opportunity cost perspective it's dragging them down, then it's a good time to have a really good look and say, well, is this the property I actually want to hold for the next 15 years?

Is it ticking all the boxes in terms of the ongoing growth opportunity? Because let's be honest, guys, given what's happened with the property boom that happened post-COVID, there are a lot of areas around the country, given the tide floated all ships, that aren't likely to see much growth in the short to medium term because we've brought forward anywhere between three to six years worth of capital growth. so unless a property in a location is is experiencing new growth drives in terms of new infrastructure new industry and strong and growing incomes then a lot of properties are going to flatline for a considerable period of time so i think a big big part of the focus at the moment needs to be on having a really good look at the quality of your actual existing portfolio to make sure you've got top performers in there and if you don't have the capacity to take it much further then it might be an opportunity to turn some of that stuff over to put it into

something that's going to perform better what sort of um what sort of questions do you how do you assess whether something's a top performer or not yeah okay good so uh all comes back to strategy so uh the approach we do is we will look at an individual's freedom numbers and again we can run the the freedom forecast for clients to get them a bit of a roadmap and once we understand what the timeline is and what the goalposts are as far as the equity growth, then once we start to analyse properties, most people are in the growth phase of their exercise,

then we would normally suggest doing what we call a top-down macro, micro, micro analysis of that area. And that area, as you guys would know, a big chunk of the growth comes from the location, not from the specific property itself. So we're looking for leading indicators of future growth in that spot, and a lot of that information is serviced from council and government websites to look

at committed infrastructure that's going into it, committed new industries that are going to happen in that location, so that we're looking at a location in terms of what it's going to look like in 10 to 15 years' time, not what it looks like now. Yeah, and also proposed does not mean it's going to come. There are some councils that propose all these amazing, spectacular deals and this new thing on the water

and this new thing here and this new thing here. And then you're like, oh, this has been proposed for 10 years now. Oh, okay. Oh, this one's seven years, this one's six years. Oh, so it's not coming, is it? No, it's not coming. And I've got to emphasise committed infrastructure must be committed if you're going to be serious.

It's not a politician making an announcement to try and win some votes. There was a great question about, oh, no, sorry, Jeff. There was one about this day and age. It was about like. Oh, yeah, yeah. I got it, yeah. How do we compare from the 1980s era where the average mortgage is less than 200K with 10% interest rates, properties used to double in seven years if you bought properly,

whereas now the average mortgage is 700K with 5% interest rate, properties will double in 13 to 15 years or shall we say the baby booners had the best time in their life and live with the facts well what do you think if you bought um if you bought in some places in 2020 you could you could have doubled my property could have doubled in two or three years but that also hadn't seen growth in seven or eight years though so yeah yeah yeah that's an interesting comment uh uh because i always think that uh looking back's okay uh but we've got to play the the hand that we've been dealt and uh there are still ways of doing it we've just we've just got to uh while it was probably and it was if i look look back on on some of my journey you

know back in the days when i could get 97 percent lend plus lmi that was you know that was pretty easy exercise in terms of being able to secure the property because i didn't need much equity but we just need to be more creative now and there's ways of doing it and and i think the underlying comment from from uh what that uh member said uh is i think they're right i think it is a 15-year journey i you know i've done my own maths on this so if you're going in expecting to get amazing results in under 15 years you're probably kidding yourself you might get like it we might have a pandemic where you know what happened in the pandemic is the second time in the 230 year history of the country that we saw property values rise so much across the board we

saw anywhere between 20 to 50 percent increases in values over that time and that that's only the second time it's ever happened in australia so yeah i mean this is this is the property market is just like the share market you put money into it it's going to grow the government printed billions of dollars which flowed through of people's bank accounts into the property market so it is of course going to go up and this is where everyone's getting well i think where everyone should be a little bit more uh precautious of where they're buying everything is not going to rise like it did so be very careful of the areas that you're investing and make sure that the fundamentals are still there because um actually this is coming up to a great question that johnsy

put on in case of diversification is it better to spread the portfolio even if you think the fundamentals of the second area are not as strong as the first area that you've already invested in what are your what are your kind of thoughts to that um yeah okay that's a really good question and and again my my response to that will be depends where you're at on your journey so uh my my feeling is early on if the spot is an absolute cracker jack and you're not exceeding the land tax threshold so you're going to get whacked by that then early on in your portfolio then having that concentration, providing you're really confident around the performance of that ongoing, then why not?

Once your portfolio starts to grow, though, for land tax and the cross-correlation benefits of spreading it across a wider audience into different states with different exercises, I think it's a safe way to protect your portfolio. So, again, I don't think there's any hard rules with any of this. It's about what is appropriate to that particular investor's portfolio based on their goals at that particular point in time. Yeah, I totally agree.

Because, for example, if somebody says, oh, look, I bought a property in Sydney in, what, 2010 or 2012, whatever, and they paid, I don't know, like half a million dollars. Now to say, oh, look, they're getting around to buying their third or fourth property, you're going to buy in that same area in Sydney, you're going to have to drop a million or just a touch over a million or just, like, is that really rational? not rational but is that the the best decision to it and the yield is probably three three and a

half percent maybe yeah and nothing is harder than going to an area and buying it in the 300s to then go back and buy it at the 700s like nothing's harder um but my answer to that question is especially for first-time investors you put so much time energy effort resources if you're doing this by yourself into an area and you're so confident you know that this area is going to do incredibly well don't buy one buy two buy three but just don't put your entire portfolio in that area because you've done the hard and then what will happen is you're like oh god i've now got to go ahead and do all that energy resources into you know townsville or wedonga or wherever the hell it's going to be and it's like well no you already know this is a good area go ahead and do

it and what you'll start to see like it's be in an area and deals will come up like that that's it It's just, it's not actually about, it's not actually, it's just, where is that? Is that a deal? Yep, that's a deal. I know it's a deal. Boom, jump on that one. Go another one. It's a good area.

You look at sort of, you spend sort of, you spend a hundred hours on looking at properties and you're like, you basically know what the value of the area should be. And then if something's a little bit cheaper, then you sort of, your ears will prick up and say, well, okay, what's actually wrong with this? Or is there nothing wrong with it? They just need to sell, maybe. If there is something wrong with it, then maybe look again. No, it's a good call.

It'll get to the point where it's almost intuitive. I mean, I call it property porn. I'm scrolling through a property every day, domain and real estate. I enjoy it. It's fun. I wait for the new listeners to come online. It's a little scary. I think I have a problem.

Okay, well, I think we should end on this question because I feel like it might be a bit of a curly one that might go on for a little bit. But Bushy, if you were to restart again today in today's environment, so let's go back to architect Bushy back in the day, you're starting all over again, you're 33 years old, what would you do? How would you kind of start this journey in this process? It wouldn't be a whole lot different, to be perfectly honest, because again, the reason why I wanted to talk about the holistic overall journey in terms of what we're doing personally, professionally and and property wise is that they are all interrelated so part of our decision making wasn't all property based it was right we know we need to get really good incomes to be

able to have the horsepower to stick it stick into the property so so they weren't uh totally separate decisions what what we did at that point like i come out of architecture had went into the executive contracting around it because i knew there was good coin in that so that that coin could then feed my portfolio so you i think you need to look at this as an overall exercise not just put property up to one side and then then ignore the rest and just keep doing what you're doing if you need to change your job and you need to change your occupation and your career then the only thing stopping you from doing that is the knowledge and taking the action to make that happen and you know the decisions we made around jumping into the professions that we knew

nothing about uh but we were going to we were going to run hard and and run early and and believe you me we worked damn hard early to get our skills up so that we could horsepower the exercise is a key part so uh easy for me to sit here and say that now by the way because i've been through all that pain but i i do encourage people to if you're serious here it's in this little it's just a bible yeah exactly right you know it's a slab it's it's got thud value mate there's no doubt about it but uh yeah and i encourage you to really look holistically if you're serious about really putting yourself in a position where you're going to generate an income stream that allows you to do and live the way you want then it then don't separate what you

do from what you invest in because they all need to come together as part of the overall plan yeah that's great advice i see a lot of people doing that where they're like well no i'm just going to work you know do an uber and i'm going to do these little side hustles it's like yeah but that doesn't fundamentally solve the challenge like getting that extra bit of income isn't actually going to help your serviceability as much because you're not you got to do it for a number of years like you know starting a new business right i'm going to start this new business well that that means you can't borrow for two years um so you need to like factor in your entire life search i i saw someone actually it was someone posting the group was like hey

should i work these two side hustles because i'm going to make more money but i'm not really going to learn and get any more skills or should i focus in on this one skill so i can get better and you know after reading it he pretty much after writing it he pretty much made realized himself what why would i be doing two shit jobs when i could be doing one good job and building upon my skills to be able to build out my wealth and empire. And I know I've said this a number of times, but if you're serious about financial freedom, then everything you do should be built around those three key principles,

and that is get into something that's going to give you a residual income and an asset that's growing in value that you can eventually sell. And that applies as much to the physical assets as well as what you're doing as an occupation. So part of the big drive is for Sonia and I to start a property management business from scratch and not knowing what we're doing and a finance-breaking business

because they tick those boxes. And we knew that they were all complementing our skills and knowledge of how property works so we can in turn then do it better. Yeah, 100%, 100%. I want to answer this one. Great last question. I've got it during the ad break, Brian.

Question, when does Jeff Miles get a fresh stubby from the fridge? You've just been sitting on it extremely long. It's got a massive case in there. He just pops a new one in every time. Yeah. But I suppose I wanted to, because it's great to mention your, like I sort of think that whilst it's important, whilst financial freedom is probably imperative,

you need to absolutely commit to it. I think you need to enjoy it because if you're not, if you're just solely focused and at the detriment of everything else i think you you're going to get there and you're going to be at the mountaintop and you're going to be lonely i think it's important to to still nurture your health and and your and your family your friends as well you're going to you're going to get yeah sorry go no no i i you make a really good point jeff i it's taken me a long time to realize this but i think sustainable success lies at the intersection of self health and wealth and self is what's between our ears and how we

think our outlook uh approaches and expectations our health is the daily disciplines and happy habits that we develop and if you've got both of those two right and they're balanced then then you'll achieve the wealth that you're looking for if you just go for wealth at the expense of uh your mental health and your physical health then uh it ain't going to be a very enjoyable ride what was that comment then you said bushy you can come back to us property first 24 hour live session this is like a new charity session it's like the treadmill race where people i hope i haven't bought them to death so um because i as you can tell i'm very passionate about this subject i yeah definitely i'm very keen to help as many people as i can to

enjoy the exercise because it's there in front of us and anyone can do this. It's the whole reason we, well, it's the whole reason I sort of took on Joe's challenge to start this group freeing a bit years ago to sort of, because I knew it was going to be an undertaking, so

but no, I think it's great to be able to get that message out there and hopefully help some people. Bushy, how can we learn more about you, mate? Like, how do we get more bushy in our lives? How do we get bushy in our ear balls as well well in three simple ways because education is is the the entry point to

everything so uh just like the great information you guys share uh we if you google search the property hub then i host the realty talk show which the living legend kevin turner has been running for about 15 years and just every living legend in the property space uh has uh come onto that show so there's some brilliant learnings that come out of that uh and you're also so yes bushymartin.com.au uh jump on there and you'll you'll see the podcast run the other thing that that would be uh worth diving into if you're not a reader uh and and let's face it the the freedom formula is a bit of a slab uh there's you know i've condensed my lifetime's work for work work into that but to make it easy for those who want to stick it in their earbuds uh we've also created

the Property Wealth Bootcamp, which is a free podcast series. Again, knowhowproperty.com.au forward slash propertywealth. If you plug that in, there's a seven-part series there that goes through in a bit more detail the stuff that I've actually covered off tonight. So you can put a meat around the exercise as far as that goes. So I've just downloaded all that for people who just physically can't sit down and read a book.

So take advantage of that exercise as the key thing. And if it's those that just want to look at their own freedom forecast or to look at alternative avenues in terms of increasing their capacity, then I'm very biased, but the investment savvy mortgage breakers we have on the team are second to none. So the know-how property team, if you just reach out and have a chat, then we can start to put some shape around that if that's of any use to you. Love that.

Yeah, Stuart said, yeah, this is Stuart. Stuart was at last Wednesday's event as well. Oh, yeah. Hey, Stuart. Great to see you again, mate. Stuart Goring. Goring. Awesome.

Love it. Well, mate, this has been an unreal session. Thank you very much, Bushy. Always, always amazing frameworks. And it's cool to unpack your story as well. I actually learned a lot through it. And it's just keep doing it, right? Like, it's just keep plugging along and doing the right thing,

building the right team and making the smart the smart choices and you'll uh you'll get there remember that quote at the start that ends the deal warren buffett's i'm a big big fan uh wealth is a transfer of money from the inpatient to the patient so uh just stick at it it's not going to happen quickly property is a get rich slow wealth by stealth approach so uh do that and uh again full marks everything you guys are doing you've created a fantastic community guys uh anything that i can do at any time to help you uh you yell out uh very keen to get the message out there i can't wait to get you on the podcast jeff good luck getting jeff on a podcast i have been on a couple i do go on them i just i don't know i'm already busy enough and i

just feel that if i go on these things people are gonna i feel bad when i can't respond to people so that's what that's what i can make it easy for you i can give you all the questions and you can prepare it so you never put on the spot mate oh no i don't worry about that i love i'll answer pretty much most questions this is more about actually then people saying oh i've seen jeff on an interview i've got to send a message and yeah here we go everybody the love is coming and i'm glad i did not watch origin i was getting belted how bad are we Who won the game? Is it over?

We know that Maroon's on the blue. 20-0 up at halftime. Absolutely. 20-0 up. Oh, God. Yeah. It's a slaughter. We get the cricket and then we don't get the football.

Let's go and request that deal then, guys. Go buy a property. See you guys later. See you guys. 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 knowhow

property.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.