Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Peter Meek on investment abdication vs education

Starting point is 00:00:00 When I was obviously running businesses, you earn a pretty good, you know, you earn a great salary, actually, Bushy, but it takes up a lot of your time. And up until 2009, I pretty much, I would just abdicate responsibility for all this extra cash flow that we had to someone else to manage. And I think, I believe, trust but verify people. You know, I don't think you can't do everything on your own. So I think it was the right approach. I just hadn't done enough due diligence. And the due diligence was, one, to understand what I was being invested in. And two, you know, what the incentive was for me to invest in it and what the incentive was for other people for me to invest in it.

Starting point is 00:00:49 Welcome to the Get Invested Podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how and where they invest their time, their skills, and their money, and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every minute of every day, we're investing our time, our skills, our energy, and our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad and sometimes for no impact. Get invested will help you to start living by design, not by

Starting point is 00:01:24 default. I'm going to help you to make it happen, not let it happen. You'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more, work less, and leave a living legacy by investing now. Listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started, make the most of your investment journey and ultimately to be living your dream, not someone else's. More episodes can be found on iTunes or at bussymartin.com.au forward slash GetInvested.

Starting point is 00:01:54 Thanks for listening. And now, let's get invested. you Hi Freedom Fighters, how much do you focus on your work and how much do you understand and actually actively manage your investments? Many of us start out thinking that if we just invest everything in our work and careers and become successful in this one single area of our lives, then everything else will just fall into place

Starting point is 00:03:15 and fortune and fame will naturally follow. Just work hard, become good at what you do and everything else will just take care of itself. So we continue to put everything into the panacea of our professions with a kind of blind faith in our advisors that our unconscious investments will grow all by themselves. Let's take your superannuation as an example. Do you actually know what your current balance is?

Starting point is 00:03:36 And where is your hard-earned super actually being invested? And how has it performed last year and over the last 10 years? How is it likely to perform next year and the year after that? Do you have any idea or do you just leave it to the so-called experts, blindly trusting them and then casually glancing at your annual statement when you send it off to your accountant every year? I mean, you've got years before you retire, so you've got plenty of time, so you just don't have to worry about it, right?

Starting point is 00:04:01 Wrong. Unfortunately, I know from bitter personal experience many years ago that a preoccupation with work and a hands-off approach to your future investments is fraught with danger and a slow road to destruction. Blind faith and disinterested trust is a dangerous combination when it comes to securing your future. As I repeatedly say in my book The Freedom Formula, I can't emphasise enough how important it is to invest in your investment knowledge so that you understand where you or others are investing your hard-earned coin, so that you understand the risks as well as the rewards and then you need to actively manage your managers

Starting point is 00:04:37 to keep them accountable because at the end of the day the buck stops with you. And someone else who also understands these lessons intimately is today's special guest Peter Meek. As you're about to hear Peter's a highly accomplished CEO and company director who lost all of his wealth during the GFC and has successfully rebuilt it by becoming an active self-accountable international investor across multiple asset classes, so I can't wait to unpack his story and glean the lessons learned. So welcome, and let's get invested, Peter. Hey, Bushy. How are you? Awesome, mate. Really looking forward to digging into your journey today. I know it's going

Starting point is 00:05:16 to be of massive interest to myself and everyone else listening in. But before we get into that, mate, to state the bleeding obvious, who are you, what do you do, and most importantly, why do you do what you do? well i'm peter meek i'm first and foremost husband to joe i'm very lucky for it brother to two brothers in the uk rob and tony and son of my mum marlene uh who's also in the uk what i do probably the way i describe it now is i've got a portfolio career bushy i do lots of little things but all of them i'm sort of that i'm doing them because i want to do them i invest in property i've invested in some property startups i've got properties in the uk and

Starting point is 00:06:01 australia and i also do some coaching and mentoring to people particularly in the food industry because you know i've spent a lifetime working in that industry i've got a lot of knowledge and a lot of passion so i like helping those guys as well and the why is really about helping my family and other people you know be the best they can be yeah love it love it very fulfilling uh goals as far as that goes so let's sort of dig into your history bit then if we can and um almost like a reader's digest version and looking at both sort of a parallel look at both your professional uh journey as well as your personal investment journey and focus on where you've invested your time your energy your money over the years and

Starting point is 00:06:47 and what have you learned from it and how has this led to you where you are today well i think um i come from a family of uh small you know my mom and dad had their own business so up until sort of 16 i was very focused on just doing something for myself and actually back in 1982 that my dad uh went bankrupt you know made some poor decisions more importantly was let down by some people that he trusted but we pretty much lost everything and we had to start again and that really had quite a profound impact on me bushy because it made him really ill and i sort of said to myself well i can't follow that path i have to do something different so i i moved into the corporate world i i went and worked um for unilever um who were

Starting point is 00:07:45 making ice cream in the UK and I was basically doing product development which is probably one of the best jobs in the world right I got to eat ice cream every day but but I didn't have any qualifications then I didn't do a university degree and what I realized quite quickly is education is really important whatever path you take in life you've got to get educated so in the corporate world you know Unilever was a great company but it was a I'd describe it as a meritocracy for the elite and the elite were people that had you know uh degree educations so i basically went to night school did a levels and then went to university and got a degree thinking that that would be my my route to success and rejoined uh basically nestle which is another

Starting point is 00:08:35 big food organization and i did really well with nestle i worked there for quite a few years and And back in 2000, I was given the opportunity to say, Peter, there's two job opportunities with you for Nestle. One of them's in Croydon, which is like the backside of London, to describe it. And the other one's in Melbourne, selling ice cream to Australians. And I thought, oh, my God, selling ice creams to Australians in the CERN. This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. So he jumped on a plane. So he jumped on a plane.

Starting point is 00:09:10 you know worked really hard here worked with some great people at nest nestle peters they named the company after me which i thought was very good and ended up running that business um i was there for uh three years and i ended up running that business which to be candid was i was i started in marketing but i was you know i'm done sales but i ended up running that business very quickly and was probably out of my depth or in fact not probably i was definitely out of my depth and i really struggled with that job and in the end yeah i did that for three years the business up until that point had been doing really well and then the last 12 months it was a bit of a disaster and they basically gave me a choice they said look you can either you know step outside

Starting point is 00:09:59 nestle leave or we're going to send you to north africa which it's taken my wife six years to become accustomed to living in Australia there was no way she was going to North Africa so I stepped out and that was that was the first time I realized that I'd worked really hard there and I'd done the best I could but it wasn't enough yeah and so I had to firstly recover from that and say well what have what have I learned and I did learn a huge amount about how not to do things and can you share some of those with us I mean I think that's there's some gold right there Do you mind sort of unpacking those learnings? Yeah, look, the biggest learning was you can't do it on your own.

Starting point is 00:10:41 You know, you might be the director of that business, but you have to achieve through others. So you've got to get the right people with better skills than you in the functional areas and empower them. And I was trying to micromanage a little bit and fiddling in all the things that they were more skilled at than I was. and as a consequence the business slowed down you know we became more bureaucratic we made bad decisions and it cost the business quite a bit of momentum yeah and you know micromanaging a

Starting point is 00:11:15 business worth 300 million dollars with i think we had about 500 people that's a lot of micromanaging bushy it almost killed me i was working 90 hours a week and eating drinking sleeping the business And the funny thing was, what I learned was I got promoted into running that role because I'd done a fantastic job heading up marketing and we built the business. The brand had become number one. We brought some great innovation. And I'd made a link between my self-worth and how the business was performing. So when the business was performing, I felt a million dollars. now when the business didn't perform and and a fair part of that was because of me but some of

Starting point is 00:12:01 it was just bad luck yeah my link to who i was which was i'm company meek if the business is not performing then i'm not performing and that was a really tough lesson to learn because actually what i've learned subsequently is you've got to be able to know that you've done you've done the best job that you can but you've got to be able to disconnect and a friend of mine Gary used to say you can be a great player out of luck you can play the best game but still lose but you've got to look after yourself so you can play the next game and that was a big learning for me so I was still very passionate about running businesses but I also made sure that I was able to disconnect from the business and the paradox with it Bushy was it made me a better

Starting point is 00:12:48 leader yeah because i let people get on with stuff i didn't want to get involved in the detail so i just recruited really great people set the direction and let them get on with things and the business you know the next business that i i worked in was a you know that i ran was chobani yoga okay and that was a that was a basically a startup and you know went from nothing to market leader in five years and you know it couldn't have been a more different experience than the experience i had at peter's but you know the biggest difference was i you know i behaved very differently there you know i'd got a lot of things wrong i didn't make those mistakes twice yeah love it love it and learning from the lessons is uh is the first lesson actually so uh love that tell us

Starting point is 00:13:41 a bit more about your time at uh tabani uh in terms of the things that um uh really assisted you in in your outlook on life while you were there well i think the biggest thing bushy was the guy that owned the business uh an entrepreneur called hamdi ulukaya you know amazing story in the u.s turkish immigrant went to the u.s only really knew how to make cheese and yogurt so so that's what he did and went from nothing to a billion dollars in five years and basically delivering amazing food at really good value you know and really looking after his community you know his people and his community were as important as his consumers and his customers and getting that balance and that was that was liberating for me because i'd always felt that big corporations

Starting point is 00:14:36 are often just driven by one dimension yeah which is you know shareholder value yeah and don't get me wrong businesses have to make a profit because profit's a bit like breathing if you can't breathe you don't survive very long but it's no purpose for an organization and working for someone like Hamdi who said look I want we're going to build the number one brand in Australia just tell me what you need and it was a how-to challenge rather than can we and and but doing that through people you know recruiting really good people empowering people being really clear about where we were going and what was important to us having very strong values in the organization so that people knew if something wasn't right they could speak up and that that was really really powerful and

Starting point is 00:15:27 And and what's really interesting is if you've got a very strong culture in an organization and other other people, other organizations see that. So when we go and talk to Coles and Woolies, those guys were really tough to deal with. But they could see that we were a business on a mission and they wanted to partner with us and we made life fun for them. You know, we we we were prepared to do things that some of the other guys weren't prepared to do. and you know we knew that we'd get most things wrong but we would learn fast and we we'd redo it better than the first time so it was just a it was and still is a very dynamic organization that has its people and its community at the center of it and as a consequence is really successful and really profitable because you know they're the engine room of the business

Starting point is 00:16:18 Yeah, totally agree. I know that you sort of shared with me offline something that was a little bit unique and I certainly haven't seen any other CEOs do a similar exercise and that is to sort of look at every email consumer inquiry that came in. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and how and why that was so powerful? i think what what i what i learned was i wanted to i didn't want to be in the detail of the business but i wanted to hear what people were saying it was so sort of trust and sort of verifying and the feedback that consumers would write in both good and bad was really important because it gave you it gave you sentiment as to how people felt about the organization and we would get you know we would get the next door neighbor contact us we'd get consumers contact us we get customers contacted so it was a real it was a real thermometer of what was happening in the business and the other thing that was really important was you have a real opportunity when

Starting point is 00:17:23 someone reaches out to you how you respond to them can make all the difference you know you literally can turn a complaint into an adoring fan by how you treat them and with respect understand their problem and engage with them in a meaningful way and so quite often it was a bit of a surprise you know that they'd write a note and then get a phone call from the ceo which to understand what had gone wrong with their yogurt but that was really important it was important for me and it was important for them and we we always shared the feedback from our customers and our consumers with the whole organization because it was everyone's job to put that right but i found that if you can if you can connect with all the stakeholders that

Starting point is 00:18:11 are interacting with your business even at a slight level then you have a really good feel for what's happening and you know where you can let let you know empower more but also you can quite quickly work out well i need to spend a bit more time on this and it's not to micromanage just to make sure that that area had the resources the tools and the equipment that they needed to do the job and that made a big difference and i always knew literally the complaints per million units we sold at any given point in time on some weeks bushy we literally had no complaints and we would have donuts for donuts weeks then everyone in the factory got crispy cream donuts all they could eat because we achieved donuts in terms of customer complaints and often getting lots of

Starting point is 00:18:56 compliments love that i love the way you're linking the customer experience back to everyone in the organization uh so it's it's such a a simple method and you know unfortunately yeah you know a lot of us get caught up in the hype of the power of the position that we're in and and lose touch with what's actually happening on the ground i love the way you were able to really tap into the pulse of what what was going on and then relate it in a way that was meaningful both to those that who'd you know taken the time to either compliment or otherwise but then then sort of integrate that back into each and every member of the of the organization so that they can all see how they're contributing to the whole that's that's very powerful mate very powerful love it now mate um

Starting point is 00:19:42 what i'd love to do as well but given that you were you know for a fair period of time they're putting 90 hours a week plus into into your career i'd love to look at the parallel with that in terms of your investment journey and at some of the highs and lows that you might have experienced along that journey before taking an active role in what you're now doing can you sort of talk us through some of that so so when i was obviously running businesses you earn a pretty good you know you earn a great salary actually bushy but it takes up a lot of your time and up until 2009 i'd pretty much i would just abdicate responsibility for all this extra of cash flow that we had to someone else to manage and you know and I think I believe trust but

Starting point is 00:20:36 verify people you know I don't think you you you can't do everything on your own so I think it was the right approach I just hadn't done enough due diligence and the due diligence was one to understand what I was being invested in and two you know what what you know what the incentive was for me to invest in it and what the incentive was for other people for me to invest in it and and you know we lost literally having had a very successful corporate career found ourselves after the gfc basically in negative equity because we'd over invested in things that were a lot higher risk as it turns out than we understood i didn't understand them because i i just didn't have the time or the capacity to educate myself around them and you know literally lost everything and

Starting point is 00:21:31 and now I look back it was actually it wasn't didn't feel it at the time but it was actually a gift because the gift was I said well if it's going to be it's up to me I need to if I'm going to make investments outside of my job I need to understand enough about those investments so that i can either do it myself or more likely given you know how busy my job was i could find others and manage them to do the job for me yeah and and that was that was a real tipping point for for me and we decided that property was the platform for us yeah let me dive in there why property mate there's a number of different uh sort of vehicles or avenues you could have gone down what was appealing about property as you saw it well the first and foremost is what we

Starting point is 00:22:23 perceived it as being the low risk you know it's safe as bricks and mortar bushy i've heard that phrase growing up and i believe it to be true and so and it's there were lots of people doing it bushy so it was easier to learn than perhaps some of the other things in terms of how to become a good you know share trader option trader and time leverage you know you they're big lumpy assets but once you bought them you know it doesn't take a lot of your time so you know we thought it was low risk we thought it was easier to educate ourselves and we thought it would be very efficient for our time so that's why we invested in property and from basically from 2009 we we literally sold our our house to to clear all of our debts and give us a bit of seed capital um

Starting point is 00:23:17 but from sort of 2011 we basically bought uh eight properties in nine years just one a year you know that was the plan love it yep love that uh you do you mind sort of breaking down what sort of properties you bought and why and what was the strategy that you were pursuing at time so um we were buying it was basically i was very lucky that as part of the education i met jane slack smith and her trident strategy made a lot of sense to me buy below market value renovate you know to add value and then refinance and repeat so it was fundamentally that strategy for the first few um so we bought um we bought a property up in in brisbane up in murray which was you know good house good land value didn't actually need a lot of work but we did a little

Starting point is 00:24:16 bit of a you know cosmetic renovation and drew some money out of that property we we basically bought our home in mount martha and turned the house that we were living in which was a townhouse in brighton east into an investment property but the house in mount martha needed quite a lot of work and we we sunk quite a bit of money into that but we were able to access that money and more because the we added a lot of value we we probably added we spent about 120 000 on that house and probably added almost 300 000 of value which we were able to access to to buy more assets and literally just recycling the capital for the first couple of years and then after about year three or four we'd seen a little bit of um capital growth so we were able to refinance and and draw money

Starting point is 00:25:10 out of the investment properties that we'd had so that was that was our strategy it's it's evolved a little bit now bushy because we've we've created enough equity so we're now in the stage where We're sort of pivoting a little bit more towards cash flow so that we don't really want to sell down all of our assets to free up that money. We want to sell some of our assets to buy more cash flowing assets. We're doing that primarily in the UK because it's actually much easier to find higher gross margin assets over there. It's nice to get the capital growth, but we need cash flow now to live on. And so that's been our pivot, and that's happened in the last sort of two years. I love that you've been smart enough to work out that transition, mate,

Starting point is 00:25:59 because I talk to a lot of investors about the fact that residential property in Australia is a great vehicle to actually grow your nest egg, but you're never going to survive off the rent. So there definitely needs to be a transition in what I call the capital growth to cash flow curve, where you invest initially in growth, and then when you're getting to a point where the nest egg's at a size that it needs to be to fund your ongoing lifestyle, then transition that portfolio into a much stronger cash flow yield proposition, again, with assets that don't create a second job for you, so you're putting your time and energy into things that are important to you.

Starting point is 00:26:37 So I love the way that you've sort of working through that. Is that something you just picked up by osmosis, or where did that recognition come from? so so our original plan bushy was you know i'd done 10 years at chubani i decided that i was going to take uh 12 months to 18 months off early 2000 and go traveling and spend time with my mom back in the uk so covid got in the way of that but so we got to the uk and we were we were doing some traveling and we were exploring the country but when covid sort of locked down i thought well what am i going to do now for the next 12 months i can't come back to australia yeah what what can i do and we we'd already worked out what our security number in terms of cash flow was and

Starting point is 00:27:28 what our independence number was so we said okay let's start working let's start working on those in the uk and we we did some property education so we we learned how to you know rent out houses by the room, which is what they call houses of multiple occupation or boarding houses here. So we bought some of those. And also how to rent out a house by the day. So we're doing holiday lets in York, which is a beautiful tourist destination. And both of those strategies means that we're probably getting at least 50 and probably almost double the cash flow from the same asset so and you know the plan is to rinse and repeat and what's interesting in the uk and unlike in australia is if you can find a good enough deal with enough margin then you can

Starting point is 00:28:23 get finance it's not capped at what your income is so for me as someone who now doesn't want to i don't want to do the corporate 90 hours a week and earn a big salary i want to do a lot less hours, I can still invest in the UK because I can find assets that generate good cash flow. Yeah, I love it. And as you say, a lot easier to fund as a consequence and not by the sounds of things as restrictive as what it has become here in Australia in recent times. Yeah, I'd love for it.

Starting point is 00:28:54 Let's dig into that a little bit because having, similar to me, my wife and I have got properties in the US and in Australia, and the learnings have been really worthwhile because of the differences and the similarities. Can you sort of paint a bit of a picture then of both the similarities and the differences in a bit more detail with the differences between the UK and investing in property in Australia? Well, I think the similarities, firstly, property to an Englishman and property to an Australian is really important.

Starting point is 00:29:29 You know, it's it's everyone's aspiration to own their own house. And and, you know, so the market in that regard is is very similar. It's also similar in as much as if you go to London, then it's a bit like investing in Sydney or Melbourne. The growth yields are very, very low, but you're hoping, and in many cases, in most cases, in fact, over time, you get significant capital growth because it's a global city. There are lots of high-paying jobs there, so the market has grown. But outside of London, it's – the biggest difference is – well, I suppose, you know, outside of London, the rest of the U.K. is more like regional Australia where the yields are much higher. And some of the areas where we're looking at potentially investing, the gross yield is 10%. Wow. For a buy to let.

Starting point is 00:30:24 Well, I don't know – I'm sure there are places in Australia that you can do that. But this is three quarters of an hour from Manchester, which is one of the biggest cities in the UK. You know, this isn't in the middle of nowhere. So that's that's that link to the fact that we can get finance over there is, you know, that's a I'd say that those are the biggest differences. It's easier to get better cash flow and it's easier to get finance over there. Yeah, that's very interesting. Let's delve into some of the prop tech startups that you've invested in. I'd love to get your feelings on why you've gone in that direction

Starting point is 00:31:05 and how does that fit into your investment strategy as you say it? Well, look, firstly, part of our strategy is I'll never invest more than 5% of our equity in any deal. So, you know, I've invested in two property tech startups, but it's only 10% of our wealth but I think that they're both businesses with huge potential the first one is with Pete Wardgen who I have a huge amount of time for he's a guy who I know like and trust and I think he he's very passionate about what he does as a buyer's agent and the business is called buyersbuyers.com.au and really what that is is about making using a

Starting point is 00:31:49 professional buyer's agent much more affordable and attainable and i you know we bought four properties in queensland we would have bought no properties in queensland without a buyer's agent so i i know the value that a buyer's agent brings to the table yeah uh and particularly if you're a working professional you've got no time you want to make those decisions if if you get a buyer's agent you take action now the challenge with buyers agents is that they they spend a lot of their time recruiting people and that's expensive so the fees that they have to charge are a lot higher what buyers buyers does is it's almost a marketplace for people that want to buy property we can connect you through to a brilliant buyers agent experienced buyers agent at a lower price

Starting point is 00:32:38 because the recruitment cost of the buyers agent is much lower so i think it's a really good model And currently, I think it's about 3% of people use a buyer's agent to buy property. And when I look at the marketplace, if a real estate agent sells one house a week and you buy one house every seven years, then he's got 350 times more experience than you have in this transaction. There's only going to be one winner in that negotiation. You've got to have an expert on your side. um but you know so i think that that's a really great business and in markets like the us having someone on the buyer side is quite common so just want to help people not make mistakes i think good advice is a right not a privilege and if we can make it cheaper then people can access it and

Starting point is 00:33:30 buyers buyers have actually got some amazing free tools on their website so if you want to do it yourself there's a lot of help there but if you want if you want some help with any part of the yeah the process they can help you so that that's buyers buyers and the other business that i invested in was actually a business that i used in the uk called crowd property so it's crowdproperty.com.au and so what that is is it's a marketplace for investors to invest money on property projects with a first charge security uh and they help small small investor of small developers do projects so i think it's sort of capped at three or five million dollars in australia and the challenge if you're a small developer in australia the

Starting point is 00:34:17 challenge is the banks are just it's just too hard yeah they talk about a slow no so you'll find an opportunity and you'll work with the bank for nine months and you'll get a no well that opportunity is probably passed by then yeah so what great property does is you know it looks at those deals you know if it's a really good deal it'll fund it'll fund it but one of the things i really love about this business is if it's not a good deal they will say why so the the property developer actually gets feedback say oh look here's you know your bill costs are too high or your your margins too low yeah they'll they'll help pinpoint why it's not a deal that they want to invest in so it helps educate the developer to become a better developer and as in it so i've

Starting point is 00:35:08 invested in this the actual startup of that business but i'm also an investor in projects so i get seven or eight percent return on any lazy cash that i've got lying around for six or 12 months most of the projects are between 6 and 18 months so it's just a good way of of getting a return on your money and with inflation rising you don't you want to be sat on enough cash so you're safe but not so much cash that it's being eroded by inflation so those are the two businesses um and yeah i'm really enjoying sort of supporting mainly the buyers buyers thing but david ingram at krab at krab property is a terrific guy and i think they're going to do amazing things yeah i love it i love the fact that you're investing in

Starting point is 00:35:52 opportunity but but also minimizing the exposure i'd say way too many people particularly in recent years where they basically sold the farm and chucked everything into crypto and chasing the you know the the golden spoon and the the massive rewards but had no attention to risk and one of the things i'm sort of picking up from uh your own learnings is the recognition of risk and and therefore uh investing in in such a way that minimizes that on your way through so uh very interesting but if we if we look back on so you've had a you know a fair spread of uh investments uh over the years can you sort of give us a feel for what's been your best and worst investment and what you've learned from both of them well my worst investment is quite easy it's a thing

Starting point is 00:36:43 called great southern tree plantations bushy and i remember i say this is a great way pete you're going to save a fortune on tax and that was easily my worst investment um my best investment it's probably been in building my networks and my education so that i had the confidence to do the property investing bushy you know and whilst i still use the use the buyer's agent to buy most of the properties I understood the process and I understood what I was looking for which which I think has really helped us and and I think once you've got that knowledge Bushy it's really reassuring because you no one can take that away from you whatever happens you know you've got the skills to rebuild so I'd say that the education that I've got and I've got that through I've paid

Starting point is 00:37:36 for training courses i've paid for mentors i've had you know mentors who've just helped me along the way i've listened to podcasts like yours and you know lots of other ones and last and definitely not least lots of networking you know who do you know who do you know who's a bit further ahead of you on the journey and reach out and people are very kind and generous and will help and likewise you do the same for other people i always say i always believe send the elevator back down bushy you know so if someone reaches out for you know a bit of a discussion or i'm thinking about this i'm thinking about that just sort of share your your experience you can't give them advice but you can share your experience and perhaps help them with the questions that they should

Starting point is 00:38:25 be asking themselves and and other people and that's definitely been the best investment you Investing in my knowledge, investing in my network, and therefore I've got great properties. Yeah, I love it. Absolutely love it. If we sort of sum up then, what does fulfillment and freedom look like to you? Freedom is just freedom to work with who I want to work with, pushy, where I want to do that work, so be it in the UK or Australia.

Starting point is 00:38:57 Freedom not to worry about money. You know, once you've got a passive income that, you know, you know all that your bills are covered without working or what I perceive is working, you know, for someone else, that is freedom. And it's a joyous place, to be honest, because then you want to try and help other people get to the same place that you've got to because you've got time. Time is the key bit for me. I often say it's all about time. because if you've if you've created a vehicle that doesn't rely on you that that funds your lifestyle and you can then put your energy into things that are important to you then suddenly life becomes extremely fulfilling and and helping others is just a you know an awesome way to do

Starting point is 00:39:47 that so i'd love for you to sort of take that a bit further then and paint us a picture of what your ideal lifestyle and your life vision looks like and make it as a vivid as you can if if possible so lots of lots of travel bushy we we love doing house sits so we go and look after other people we love dogs so the only time we're happy to leave our dog is we're going to have to look after someone else's dog so what sort of dog uh pip we've got one at the moment pip she's a gray hand she's she sat in on this interview she hasn't made a murmur that's her um i love it but But it's being able to, you know, we did house sits before COVID all over the UK, met loads of people, met some beautiful dogs, explored some great places. We love doing that.

Starting point is 00:40:36 And it's a really cool way of exploring because you walk in someone else's shoes. So you get to experience the area. You also get to know the neighbor, the milkman, you know, because they brief you on all this stuff. And it's really cool to live someone else's life, even if it's only for a few weeks. Yeah, love it. Yeah, Sonia and I are exactly the same, mate. We've done quite a few house swaps and house sits over the years. And for that very reason, you're really getting into the true local culture

Starting point is 00:41:05 rather than sort of a vacuum traveller motel experience, which are vanilla on the same everywhere you go. That's so true. Yeah, I absolutely love it, mate. And share your love for dogs, of course, because we've got a couple of rescued Samoids that keep us smiling every minute of the day. so where you can't can't beat the companion of a of a good dog mate there's just something about

Starting point is 00:41:27 them isn't there well they they keep you in the present bushy you know they if you they're one of the best things in the world is to watch a dog stretch and they they just the joy on their face of living in the present and they're such great teachers you know pip and all the dogs that we've had have taught us so much about living in the present and the joys of that and i think yes they they make they're not your whole life but they make your life whole for sure yeah that beautifully said i uh often if i'm having a a troubled day uh i just gotta look under the desk and there's the dog smiling back at me i'm going what the hell am i worried about i love it mate i absolutely love that so tell me uh if we look back on your journey you've

Starting point is 00:42:17 touched on some of these but uh what investment mistakes have you made and and what mistakes do you see other investors making i think the a couple of mistakes abdicating responsibility you ultimately have to make the call um and to do that you need to educate yourself about what you're investing in so that's a i think that's a big mistake that i made uh early on um and the the other big one is not starting early enough you know we started investing in property when i was 43 i think so we were no spring chickens um but if you've got if you've got 20 years then you can take a lot less risk than if you've got two years and i think start early you know get yourself educated find people that you know like and trust who've already done what you want to do

Starting point is 00:43:17 and spend time with them you know pay pay i think it's okay to pay for education or mentorship but you know there's also loads of free resource but whatever you do you've just got to take action and you know for us the buyer's agent was we we spent two years talking about property we'd educated ourselves it wasn't until we had a buyer's agent that we pulled the pin in brisbane so find people that can execute for you because if you're a busy professional you won't you you won't have the time and you rightly prioritize you know or you'll prioritize your family and friends and and all that stuff's really important but you can't let it you can't let it more be to your future because that's what you're doing if you're not taking action now then you're yeah

Starting point is 00:44:04 There's going to be a debt on your future that you'll have to pay and you won't want to pay it. I love it. That's a great way of looking at mortgaging your future, mate. That's an awesome expression. Slightly different tack on the same thing. If you were starting out again, what would you invest in differently? I would definitely invest in property.

Starting point is 00:44:27 I would invest in my education. I would invest in having more work experiences. i worked for certainly early on in my career for the same companies for a long time and i could have learned so much more by jumping around a bit more but i think the most important thing is i would be investing in having multiple streams of income you know one someone once described to me a job is just over broke because once that job stops if you run out of money then you're in so you you develop multiple streams of income be that a business a side hustle property it almost doesn't matter what but that's really important and i wish i'd started that 15 years earlier

Starting point is 00:45:11 yeah never too late to start though man and you've actually done something about it so a lot of a lot of people as you've mentioned a couple of times talk about a lot but they actually don't get around ever taking any action so we're now some some great learnings there um if we sort of summed up your belief and what the keys to successful investment are then what would they be it's the most important thing bushy is taking guided action and that guide is either going to be your education or someone who's got the experience to guide you but take action and And I always think, you know, success is a stairway, not a doorway, right? And you've got to keep moving.

Starting point is 00:45:55 And if you don't take action, then you just don't move forward. So it's having people around you that can help you take action is really important. Yeah, yeah. You've made some awesome points there, mate. But I'm going to sort of shift gears a little bit now and move into what I like to refer as the Ambush Fast 4, the podcast special where you sort of get peppered with some questions in quick fashion. So I'd like to start off with what's your favourite quote and why?

Starting point is 00:46:29 I love quotes, but I would say your ziggliger, your attitude ultimately determines your altitude. And if you believe things are possible, then they probably are. If you're optimistic about the future, then it'll probably be a good future. And so your attitude determines your altitude is my favourite one. But I've got loads. I've got almost a book on it, I suspect.

Starting point is 00:46:52 Yeah, I've done the same, mate. I love collecting them and I've actually peppered them right through my own book for the same reason because it's amazing how a very simple quote can just sort of instantly capture your imagination and send you in a different direction. On the literary front then, what's the top book that you'd recommend people read and why? i think it's a seminal book of rich dad poor dad right yeah and this insight that don't work for money get money working for you that was a that really was a light bulb moment uh for me and i've gifted that book to so many people um and most of them have done nothing with it bushy but

Starting point is 00:47:32 if it if it lights a fire in one in a hundred people then i'm happy to keep gifting that book Yeah, same with me, Matt. I had my Kiyosaki moment back in the 90s, and it was an absolute penny drop moment for me, absolutely. And I was lucky enough to go and see him. He came to a conference in Adelaide and got to see him firsthand, and it really inspired me, actually. I had what I call a passive-aggressive moment.

Starting point is 00:48:04 Everything we've done since that time has been aggressively passive. so if it's not giving us an income it's not growing in value when it's not an assailable asset we're not interested that's about as simple as it gets for us now so i love that now back on the subject of investment advice what's the both the worst and the best piece of investment advice that you've ever received today um investing great so that was the worst and the best was investing yourself you know because you can never lose that bushy if you've got knowledge experience networks connections that you can never lose that so invest in yourself yeah beautifully said now i always believe that it's our happy habits rewarding rituals or daily

Starting point is 00:48:52 disciplines that contribute most of it to our long-term achievements so what would be one of those that you think has been a big assistance to your journey i started meditating after i after i had the disaster at peter's ice cream and i've done i pretty much had the guided meditation every week and i meditate most days for about 10 minutes and it just grounds me bushy and i it helps with my clarity it helps with my gratitude about what's great about my life and i i think it helps with the energy that you emit then you know you just give off this calm energy and And that helps a lot of people, but especially yourself. Yeah, I love it.

Starting point is 00:49:36 And that calm energy comes through in everything that emanates from you, mate. I feel totally relaxed just sitting here listening to your wise words. Mate, so I sort of bring the whole exercise to a nice, neat conclusion. If you reflect back on our great conversation today, can you summarise your key takeaways for our audience of investors? yeah get educated get started build your network and you know just keep taking action and you'll never get it perfectly right but as long as you you either earn or you learn if you get it wrong then course correct and take more action yeah beautifully and very simply said mate that's

Starting point is 00:50:19 some real words of wisdom there but i yeah what's uh next for you and joe and the dogs so we we just uh we've just settled on another uh hmo in manchester um which is exciting with our jv partner we've just literally sold i've been back in australia two weeks and i've sold two houses bushy so i'm on fire i've got freeing up quite a lot of capital to reinvest in these higher cash flowing assets and joe's due back in in a couple of weeks and we're going to take a bit of time and spend a lot of time with Pip the dog and lots of lots of walks and just being present with her I love it I guess the one of the big advantages given the the fact that different countries are out of sync is that we're giving the boom times that we're going through a great time

Starting point is 00:51:07 to offload some property assets here and then put them back into high yielding cash flow assets in the uk it's a it's a perfect mix yeah well the property that we've just sold in chermside west was yielding three percent and the money that you know we can invest a fifth of that money and get the same cash return in the uk because the hmo is 15 so massive that's a chalk and cheese isn't it but but again you've been smart enough to educate yourself in a couple of markets so there's built in an inherent diversification in exactly what you've done there so i love the way you've put that together mate and uh you've been extremely generous and open with your time and experience today mate i really know that our freedom finders are going to gain a lot from this enormously

Starting point is 00:51:56 and i want to thank you for taking the time to spend that and share that with us on the show today you're more than welcome bushy and thanks for all the stuff that you do it's really inspiring and I love listening to all the content and all the guests. It's really great. Thanks, mate. We'll stay in touch and I'll be talking to you about HMOs in the UK, mate, because that's exactly where we're heading. Awesome, mate.

Starting point is 00:52:19 Good night, mate. Cheers, Bushy. Bye, mate. Well, what a great conversation with a very humble and generous living legend. Peter's message on investing in yourself and your knowledge before you invest in other things will be critical to your ongoing success. and if you'll fight up about investing in your education and taking your property investment to the next level no matter where you're at whether you're a beginner or a seasoned investor that's

Starting point is 00:52:45 struggling with your portfolio come and join me on our unique property freedom formula fight program where i'll personally guide you through our proven process for property investment success and or complete a review of your current portfolio to see how you can improve it how can reduce your costs and how you can increase your property purchasing power to book your free ticket or to find out more just go to knowhowproperty.com.au forward slash freedom fighters that's more food for thought have a great week remember to always get invested in your future and i look forward to sharing with you again very soon you get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes, just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au. That's H-E-L-L-O at khgroup.com.au. Or check us

Starting point is 00:53:38 out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash Get Invested. I look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the Get Invested podcast. So thanks for listening. And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow. Thank you.

Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Peter Meek on investment abdication vs education

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