Retired at 28 with $80K Passive Income from Property 💰🏠🔥

Christian Gilmour hit financial independence at 28 years old with $80,000 in passive income from his property portfolio — and he did it in just five years. 🎯💸

In this episode, Christian breaks down exactly how he went from a 23-year-old uni grad saving $70k on a $50k salary to owning a $5M portfolio, retiring young, and transitioning into commercial property for cash flow. 🏠📊

We cover:

• 🔥 His first deal in Crestmead, QLD: $308k → $675k (120% growth, never touched it)
• 🛠️ Why he pivoted from granny flats to pure capital growth strategy
• 🧠 The two investing fundamentals most people ignore: risk-adjusted return and opportunity cost
• 💰 How to sell down a growth portfolio and convert it into commercial assets for passive income
• 🏡 His plan to buy a $3M dream home with cash — then pull $2.4M equity to deploy into commercial property (and make the entire home loan tax-deductible)
• 🏢 Why he and his wife still rent-vest despite having over $1M in cash at one point
• 📈 The math behind retiring early: how much you need to save, how long it takes, and why property beats index funds for speed

Christian is one of the most strategic property investors I know. If you've ever wondered what it actually takes to replace your income and retire young, this episode is the blueprint. 💯🚀

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

You bought a property and it's done 120% growth in a four-year window and you sold it in bank profit.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

I'll be able to have a three million dollar acreage property plus another sort of seven, seven and a half million commercial property, and roughly capital. The entire loan against my dream home is then also tax deductible because it's used for investment purposes.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Christian Gilmore, mate, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for coming all the way from Melbourne this morning to come and tell us about your story. I'm so excited to have you in here because you are one of the few people I know who has done the thing that everyone wants to do, retire from property. By the age of 28, you retired on 80k passive income from your property portfolio. You spent years building it, strategizing. I've had many conversations about you strategizing your property portfolio. But I wanted to get you on here today to basically show the listeners and show people that it's possible. You did it in a five-year window. Unpack your story, unpack how you did it. But more than anything, I want to unpack. You've done it at a young age. You know, you started this property investing thing in your early 20s. What are the things that you learned and how did you change as an investor? And also a man. How did you change along the way? Right. So, man, thanks so much for coming in. Um, yeah, appreciate you coming in.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Good to see you, man. I'm I'd come up to Sydney anytime just to see you.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

I've been asking you to come up for years. It's the first time you've come up just for the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Well, now you've got a pretty office, so I gotta see the office.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Man, um, you've got a beautiful wife at home, uh, Beck, but she's a hard worker. Both you guys hard workers, you know. Uh Beck has been in her career what she works for a big accounting firm in Melbourne.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Yeah, consulting.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Consulting firm, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:37

And accounting, but yeah, she's on the consulting side.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

So um you I and even you, you did a law degree, for goodness sakes.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Not law degree. I ended up in the law side, but I actually studied psych and uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

Very well-educated couple, and you you don't pursue the academics route, and for some reason you get into property. But before you before all that, tell me like what was life like as a a young lad growing up in Melbourne, maybe as you met Beck and you guys are starting to mature and to start to make some decisions.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yeah, so I mean, there's it's my whole life, so I can cover it, I can cover it as much as you like. But uh look, I just early 20s. Yeah, look, I I basically I from the age of about 18, 19, I knew that I wanted to try and do something of a little bit more significance or a little bit different in my 20s. And particularly once Beck and I started dating, I was about 19 when we started dating and things were looking pretty serious. And I started uh particularly trying to work on myself a lot. And that involves listening to a lot of podcasts and things like that. Probably the main catalyst that led me along this path was um, I listened to a podcast by Tim Ferris where they actually talked to a guy who'd retired when he was like 28 or 30 years old over in the US. And he basically laid out the maths of how you can actually retire at a young age. And I'd never had anyone explain that before. I thought you just had to build a business and exit or get lucky in the stock market or something like that. And he was actually able to lay it out in a way where the average person could do it if they were just really disciplined with the way that they went about their finances.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

Oh man, isn't that a thing? Just for it's just the discipline, just stay on the course.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:27

Right. So many people, I feel like, jump into this property investing thing and they want to change here, they want to change here, or maybe I'll do cash flow deals, maybe I'll do growth assets. Yeah. It's like to stay the course and have a strategy, which I admire that you've done.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Yeah. 100%. I think you it's really important. Like I, my original strategy and what he talked about was just buying index funds, and that was basically it. Like you just treat it like a savings account almost. You just keep putting money in it every single month. You just live off as little as you can, invest as much as you can. And there's literally math that you can look at of if you save a certain percentage of your income and invest it, you can actually predict the number of years it will take you to retire. Yeah. To replace your income. And which we can go into if you want, if you want, because it somewhat relates to property as well. But what's I then just became completely obsessed with investing. Like I just got into everything. I and originally it was mainly just looking at index funds, how to save more money, that kind of stuff. But then slowly over time, I started learning a little bit more about property. And at the beginning, I was like, ah, nah, everyone in my family always said, you know, stay away from property.

SPEAKER_03 4:33

Really?

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Um, yeah, just get into shares. Um, yeah, don't do property. No one, particularly my dad, uh, he's a he was a pretty high-level management consultant, really switched-on business guy. And he was just like, don't, unless, unless it's your own home, just invest in shares.

SPEAKER_02 4:48

Isn't that great? The boomers hate it, man. The boomers, for whatever reason, they made the most amount of money on property and they all hate it.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Yeah. So just got really obsessed with it. And then I started realizing that even if you just compare the average returns in property versus the average returns in shares, you should be able to outperform shares using property, just average versus average. Yeah. And then the idea came to me, which was, well, if I can outperform shares just with average property investing, what if I learned ways to well above average? And then that's pretty much what I spent have spent the last 10 years learning is what are these little tips and tricks and little principles that you can apply that enables you to when you stack them all on top of each other, you are able to often reduce the risk of the type of investing you do, but then also increase the returns at the same time. When you combine both of those things, it was incredibly powerful because my original goal when I was 19, 20, after listening to that podcast, is I want to try and retire by 28. My goal was 50 to 70 grand a year passive. And smashed it. Um and uh, but I knew that even with the sort of index fund investing and all that projecting out the the model of how that was going to look, the best I could try and pull off was maybe 35 years old. So I knew that I had to find a way to speed up the process, and that's where property and this style of property investing.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

When was that, right? Like you're you're talking your you and Beck are locking lips at 18, 19, and now all of a sudden you're you're delving into the property space. How old are you when you're like, I'm not gonna go down the index funds route? Because we had Harley Giddings on the podcast, and he had a very similar story. Yeah. In his mid to late teens, it was all about shares and blah, blah, blah. He's reading the barefoot investor, just pumping money into index funds, whatever. And then there was a moment where it was just like, nah, it's property. What was that moment for you?

SPEAKER_00 6:56

It's a good question. It was a slow burn. So initially, I came across it from actually listening to Bigger Pockets, which is a huge real estate podcast over in the US, and I saw what people were doing with property over there, and particularly this idea of you buy a property for less than what it's worth, you renovate it, you revalue it, you pull the equity, and then you buy the next one. Um, it's a little bit different over there, it's a little bit easier to scale a portfolio over there, and the cash flow is a lot better, so it's a different dynamic. But I wanted to try and figure out how to bring that strategy over to Australia, and there was basically no one doing it effectively over here. Took me years and years and years of basically listening to every single podcast I could and researching and everything like that to start to see that there were some professional investors doing a little bit of a similar strategy, and that's what sort of got me. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

So you was you're searching for a while. It seems like you had a lot of American influence. Yeah, you originally. Tim Ferris, this other person you're talking about. But and then you're you're looking at how okay, how does that apply to the Australian market? Uh, when do you do your first deal? And what were you and Beck doing? Were you guys working full time? Can you ballpark me some incomes?

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Yeah, so I it was I was 23 years old, and I just saved up my first 70 grand from just spending nothing through uni. Like I was living off, I think at one stage I was living off six grand a year. Like I was living at home, but I was living off six grand a year, including all my car costs, clothes, eating out, everything. So I just did nothing. Um but go to the gym. Romantic. In real fact, loved it. Um so uh so I was 23, just got a full-time job, making 50 grand a year. Um, and I went to try and use a buyer's agent for the first deal because I knew, although I knew a lot of the theory, I had never done it before. So I wanted to use a professional, and the idea of paying their fee was huge to me because that was like six months worth of saving for me at the time, just for their fee. Yeah. And that didn't go great. The buyer's agent that I engaged with, I didn't click with them at all.

SPEAKER_03 9:10

Um what do you mean you didn't click with them?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

They were very high pressure, very high pressure. Um, I was also a really painful client at the time. I realized looking back on it, I realized I was a pain in the neck. Um I was so fixated on the tiny little details, like stuff that really in the big picture didn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Like I was tiny's tiny, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Because some people say that some things are tiny, but I was fixated on things like I wanted a six percent gross rental yield. I didn't want 5.9, I wanted six. And it had to be above that. And um and I was looking for the best deal in the world. Like, and I had no understanding at the time that me waiting and waiting and waiting for this fan like one in a thousand deal was actually costing me so much as the market was growing at the time as well, that I was losing all this money by having to pay more and more for properties.

SPEAKER_03 10:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

And um, anyway, but I I lost some I lost some trust with that particular particular BA. And so I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna try and do this on my own. I already knew the area I was gonna buy in.

SPEAKER_03 10:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

And I pulled the trigger. Pull the trigger. What do you buy? I bought a three-bed, one-bathroom house on 604 square meters. Brick, weatherboard, brick. Real sort of basic but tidy.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Which area?

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Uh Crestmeade. Crestmeade, Queensland. This is this is a freaking Logan. Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

Is that early 2020s special?

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Yeah, I went under contract on Christmas Eve 2019. So I settled January 2020. Cracker, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

Uh, how much you pay?

SPEAKER_00 10:52

308.

SPEAKER_02 10:53

308, three bed, one bath, brick house, 600 square meters plus. What's it worth now?

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Uh I sold it, I sold it just over 12 months ago for 675.

SPEAKER_02 11:03

675.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Never did a dollar of work on it.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Nothing.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

Nothing.

unknown 11:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

So what's that? You're a you're a numbers guy. How much what type of return? What type of dollar numbers at? And what type of percentage returns that?

SPEAKER_00 11:15

I think it gone up. The actual property went up. I think it was 120%. And barely cost me any money to hold because at the time I didn't quite get the 6%. I got 5.9 on it. I was pretty mad about that at the time. Uh and so I mean, I only put in, I remember it was a 52 grand deposit. So what's that? So it's about $367,000 profit with a $52 grand. And I pulled, I pulled pretty much all the equity out within, I didn't fully understand at the time how to pull equity and do that, do that well. So I hadn't didn't pull the full deposit out until about 18 months after holding it.

SPEAKER_02 11:53

Man, so you've made well over 350 grand in what a four-year, yeah. In four years, and you've you've put the cash on cash return on that is something stupid. You're putting 50 grand, yeah, deposit closing costs, and you you're making 300.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

It's a 7x.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

7x on your cash. Bro, that's like uh crypto money. That's like crypto returns.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

Yeah, and that's not even taken into account the fact that I pulled equity out to then source other other deals with it.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Unreal, man. Unreal. And so you buy that 18 months later, what happens then? You said you you didn't quite figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

Yeah, at that point I started getting some traction. Um, and I started figuring things a little bit more out on the strategy side. So I pulled equity um and ended up buying another property in Crestmead just around the corner. Uh, and that one I did actually use a different BA for it. And it was quite funny because I I sort of met with them and they were like, Where did you buy? I'm like, Crestmeade. And they're like, Which street? This one. They're like, that's a really good spot. And then I realized that was exactly where they were sourcing at the time. So even though it was 18 months later, um, yeah, and that one was a granny deal. So I ended up building a granny flat on that, bought it for 324, spent about 175 grand on a granny flat on that one, a little bit of a reno.

SPEAKER_02 13:12

Yeah, okay. Um that's so funny. That's like you've you bought something 18 months later, you buy there again.

SPEAKER_03 13:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:20

Did you have any qualms with buying there again? Because so many times people hit us up and they're like they they want to diversify. There's like, oh, you know, I bought in Regional Vic already, or I bought in Darwin already. Can I can I buy somewhere else? But it's like, I've always thought if a market's running and it's hot, you know, these markets are normally growing for anywhere from three to seven years. You know, on average, they've got a good five-year growth center. It's it's had 12 months worth of growth, it's had 18 months worth of growth. Why don't you just jump back in and let it go for another three years? Did you ever think that?

unknown 13:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:51

So I thought it was-Cause it sounds like you're a bit of a um analyzer.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

You know me. I overanalyze everything. Uh yeah, so I thought very deeply about that. I the conclusion I came to was that when you just look at your portfolio as it stands, then it looks like a lot of concentration risk if you buy your first two properties in one area. But I knew that my plan was to own five, six or more properties. So when you look at it within the context of the portfolio that you're building, and if you plan to build it over a relatively short period of time, which I knew that I wanted to do, then it then actually only becomes about one-third of your portfolio. And then the concentration risk within that context isn't is actually quite heavily diminished. And so I felt comfortable buying there again, and particularly because the way that I go about buying property is I'm trying to buy in the best possible areas I can. So unless I'm buying in the area that I think is best in Australia, then it would take a lot to convince me to buy somewhere else purely because of diversification. In some instances, like a diversification 100% needs to be taken into account. 100%. But you don't want to buy an inferior asset in an inferior location just to sprinkle a little bit of diversification in early on.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

100% agree, man. And I think what you mentioned before of when you if you zoom out to the portfolio that you're building, not that you what you've got right now, but the diversification is coming. And you that that happens with the maturity of the portfolio, maturity of you an investor, and also the maturity of the markets. Right. So how many properties are you holding now?

SPEAKER_00 15:38

I've sold a lot. Uh at the moment I've got one two million dollar commercial and I did some investing with a with a partner, which we bought nine together. We've got we've sold four. Just got another one under contract. So we've got another, I've got an uh taking into account my share, I've got another sort of two or three ready stuff left.

SPEAKER_02 16:01

But throughout when you're going through acquisition stage, right? What how many did you hold to then sell down to buy the commercial? Because that I feel like that's where your cash flow comes from.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

I peaked at about nine properties. Total value was at its peak, it was about five million. But I've done a lot of selling over the last 14 months.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

What do you say when the boomers tell you I don't sell? You should always hold. Just buy and hold. What do you say to that?

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Oh, it's a long that's a long topic. I've got a lot to say on that. So look, the short answer is that you want your money to work for you as hard as you can. And I think the view that you should never sell comes from the assumption that pretty much all investments are roughly equal. So all properties, you know, the idea of property doubles in Australia every 10 years. And when that's an assumption and it's it's sort of applied to all property across Australia, then if that plays out and that's true, and every property just doubles every 10 years, why would you ever sell? Because there's transaction costs, you're gonna just gonna just gonna put it into another property that's gonna get you the same return, but it's just cost you tax and stamp duty and all that kind of stuff. That's not that's not yet. Okay, oh maybe I did the wrong thing. No, uh, but like when you look at it within the broader context of what actually practically plays out, if you invest well, you should be able to buy early within a growth cycle, ride that growth cycle, and then often plateaus. In some cases, it can actually pull back for a period. And if your goal is to get your money to work as hard for you as possible and invest as efficiently as possible, then often there is actually an opportunity cost created by keeping your borrowing capacity and your capital tied up in a market that's going to underperform or perform average moving forward.

SPEAKER_02 18:06

100%. I'm getting you to break it down because I think that people don't quite understand that, right? You've even mentioned casually in this conversation that you bought a property and it's done 120% plus growth in a four-year window and you sold it in bank profit. Like, I don't even think some people can comprehend that in a four-year window that people can get a hundred and twenty percent return on a property. So can you explain? Because I really want the listeners to walk away with this. What was your strategy? You've mentioned granny deals. You've bought a place, you know, in Crestmead. Um, you've also mentioned a commercial asset that you hold. You've all you've mentioned the sell down. Can you just give us a what your strategy looked like and how that played out over the last five years for you to get to your 80 grand a year passive?

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Yeah, it it evolved over time as I learned more and more about investing and finance and returns and got a bit more sophisticated. So my original plan was when I bought the first property, I'm just gonna buy a property and just see what happens. And I'll just hold it forever, right? That was my plan. And then I started learning about the granny flat strategy, and then I went really hard on that. So my first four properties were actually all granny flat properties.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

So even my first one I found out later on. Could granny, perfect granny size. So I had some principles I that I learned at the time that I used to buy that property that I knew it would potentially open up the doors for some stuff. But um, yeah, it turns out I could do a granny on it. And so that's why I built the granny on the second property, third and fourth property. I bought everything with the plan of just building four or five grannies, just retiring off that. But the issue that I found, and it particularly as the price of the granny flat builds went up, they went up significantly.

SPEAKER_02 19:51

What was it when you started? What was it at the end?

SPEAKER_00 19:53

It's about 170. And I think these days it's like 220, 250 to build them. And I realized that it was actually quite an inefficient use of capital. And I realized that whenever you build one, it really can slow down your progression of building the portfolio because you've suddenly got this building loan and a lot of capital's going towards it, and high interest rate and that kind of stuff. So it's it slows down your progress in many ways. And it just clicked with me one day that you also impact the growth of the asset. Like my second property, same area as my first, bought it for all in for about 500, including the granny field granny flat build, sold it for 882, still a fantastic outcome. Yeah. But the percentage growth was a lot lower. Yeah. Because I've added this depreciating dwelling. I haven't added land to the asset. And so I realized just fundamentally, no matter which way you I mean, I've know people that have tried doing rooming houses and you know, that's all the rate.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

The amount of people that have told me about rooming houses in the last two months, yeah, man, I I would at least have $10. Like there's a it's almost your next deposit. No, but honestly, the rooming houses is all the rates at the moment, and there's some great stories about some rooming houses. I think if you it's I feel like there's every strategy under the sun works in this space, like in property. I've got a mate of mine who's flipping stuff in the in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, buys a site, strips it, brand new internal fit out. Like he he wants to buy the granny's house, and then he just like their old you know, crap, boom, spruces it new kitchen, new bathroom, floors, paints, downlights, everything, on sells it, makes a mill profit, boom, moves on. And he's doing one of those a year that's repeatable. He knows the market, he can price it, bam. That's a great strategy for him, but the the rooming houses are grannies. Would you do a rooming house right now in the portfolio? What you know?

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Personally, no, but to give a little bit more nuance to that, I think you can make money doing all of these strategies. And particularly things like development, house flipping, everything like that. There are people out there that make a killing. The challenge with that is it's not very accessible.

SPEAKER_03 22:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

It is really hard to become one of those few people that are able to kill it in that. And even then, I've met some of these people who've done really well out of this through an investment partner of mine who knew an absolute killer developer. And when you look at the return on your money in a lot of these, for the level of work and expertise that's required to go in, they're actually getting somewhat similar returns, in some cases, less returns than what you and I get on our properties. When you actually break it down, like what we do, uh buying the properties a little bit of work, doing loan docs, and then managing the property. You get the odd tenant issue or whatever, but it is not like having a two-year development project. True. I know some guys that have gone into legal battles over big development projects. Like it's uh, huh? So you can definitely do it, but I've the reason why I've continued with this residential style of investing and now sort of help other people do it as well, is I've yet to find a better strategy.

SPEAKER_02 23:27

I was I interrupted you because I I you were talking about your strategy around how you got to it. You're you're acquiring a bunch of growth assets that you at the time you didn't think were growth assets, you wanted them all to be granny deals. Granny deal, granny deal, granny deal. What changes for you to pivot and be like, because it seems like to me, you're chasing cash flow off the bat if you're doing all these granny deals.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

I wanted a little bit of both. That's why I bought them in the locations I did and the sort of assets that I did. I just wanted to chuck on the granny strategy on top. And I just realized that residential investment is fantastic for growth and building wealth. Yeah. Not efficient for cash flow. Even when you pay them off and everything like that, once again, very inefficient use of capital. You'd be better off pretty much investing in shares, in my opinion, to get that outcome. So that's where I've always actually had a huge interest in commercial property. My first property that I bought, I was actually intending to get a commercial initially. I was gonna actually start in that space. But I've realized that I the way to go is you build wealth through this style of high growth residential investing. Build yourself a fantastic portfolio, build yourself some wealth, and then can when the time comes, convert that wealth into very cash flow efficient assets.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

So you're buying you're buying you said at the peak your property portfolio was nine properties, right? I want to come back to that in a minute. So you you're acquiring properties, buy in the right area, rinse the equity, go again, buy the right property, rinse, go again. You do that nine times, yes, you're then you go through a sell-down stage and buy a two million dollar commercial asset. Where was that?

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Uh Ipswich.

SPEAKER_02 25:12

In Ipswich. So you're still in Bruzzi. Um like, how does when when do you change? When do you like, all right, yep, it's time to sell up and we're going commercial?

SPEAKER_00 25:24

It's a good question. So I should caveat it by saying what I have done isn't necessarily the most efficient way to do it. To be honest, I probably made the transition to cash flow too early.

SPEAKER_02 25:37

But you should still be building.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

I should really still be building. I should still really be focusing on growing my net worth because I'm so young. Like I'm still only 29 years old. The reason why I started going into commercial, uh, just for transparency, is number one, Beck and I are looking to probably start to have kids in the next year or two. And so I needed to replace her income. And for the last two or three years, I basically have been doing stuff that has not produced an income for me. So I wanted to create a bit of a buffer there through passive income. And then the other thing is commercial has fascinated me for many, many years, and I see it playing a really important role in people's portfolios. So I'm actually trying to upskill on commercial to then actually add it as something I can help other people purchase.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

Man, I think it's noble what you're doing. Like, I I think we do all of this stuff, proper investing, to give us more options and to have a life that we want, really, right? Yeah, you can man, so many times at the freaking kids soccer soccer on the weekend, I speak to some daddies like, oh man, you know, we we sold this place here, and you know, we ended up buying our owner-occupy house, and it's like, oh, we know we that's a wrong decision, we know we should have kept investing, and it's not a good use of our capital, but like, man, you just bought a family home for yourself, it's a great place, great area. You got a spot for you and your kids for the rest of your life. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. But sometimes as property investors, we get so hyped um about just only investing for the investment numbers, but there's a big lifestyle factor in that. I mean, you you invest time in a family soon. I think that's probably way more important than investment decisions. But that's just my own, I don't know, like uh I I've always wanted to invest to have a better life for me and my family. And I think that's my the rule. And I see you doing the same thing. I think it's admirable.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

100%. Like it's and I knew that, and this is what I often tell to people when I talk to them about this stuff is I've spent so much time learning over the last 10 years, putting in the 10,000 hours to learn all the investment stuff. But when it comes to personal finance, I'm good on the finance side and I can explain to you the finance side, but in personal finance is personal for a reason. You need to filter it through your own personal situation. So I'll tell you what's possible, but you need to then feel filter it through with what you're comfortable with. So what you're able to do, because if you're looking at, I think a lot in terms of return on investment, return on equity, return on time, the most efficient use of capital, things like that. That's what how I filter a lot of my decisions. But return on your money in a financial sense isn't the only potential return you can get. You can also get lifestyle return. You can get emotional return, you can get memory return. So when you think about the most efficient deployment of your capital, it isn't always just an investment return. Sometimes it could be an experience return or lifestyle return. Ah, bro. That's the way I try I try and think about it more holistically.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

You're giving me chills talking about that. Because honestly, I think about that a lot of the time. Like to me, the experience return is massive. For me, for me and the girls to go away and experience something over the Christmas break, what we're planning to do. It's like, what's that worth? Would I pay 10 grand for it, 50 grand for it? Would I what would I pay to have a lifetime memory with these three girls?

SPEAKER_03 29:03

Right?

SPEAKER_02 29:04

Prices. It is. And okay, what am how many of those do I want? Do I want it just to be one time we go away and have an experience? Um, so I admire that about you, man. And that is so big. And it is personal, right? You like what type of life do you want? I found in property investing, we become the deeper you go into it, the more you have to, or the more you get to analyze your life. What life do I want? 80 grand a year passive is possible in a five-year window. Well then what can I do? What what do I want to do? Do I want 80? Do I want 60? How hard am I willing to push? We've been mates for about five years now, a bit over five years. I remember early stages, you always be like, bro, you should go harder, you should go harder, you should go harder. And I and I was trying, I was trying to go as hard as I could, but your your energy and your and then now you're you're saying, like, oh, you know, I'm playing a bit more defensive, I'm trying to position my portfolio to give me cash flow. Things change, life changes. That's unreal, you know. But before we move on, like you you've I appreciate you sharing about your your street, your strategy, your portfolio, and why you've even done it, because I think that's important for listeners to hear. What is your plan now? All right, other than the babies.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

Other than the babies. At the moment, uh the main focus is I am obviously trying to build up the business. Yeah, that's the that's what's taking up a vast majority of my time at the moment. All the stuff, all of the late nights thinking about how to continue building the portfolio and thinking about how to pull equity here, move to this bank over there. That's all been replaced by how do I best serve people? Because that's my focus now. Nice. Because fundamentally, I mean, you you know me, I don't spend much. I don't need much to be content. So I've realized a couple of years ago at least that my capacity to produce money is greater than my appetite for it. Yep. So now I'm trying to optimize a little bit more for more meaning, more purpose in my work. Yep. So how do I best sort of pass on what I know to other people and help them do something similar to what I've done for me and Beck?

SPEAKER_03 31:13

Love it.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

But in terms of the portfolio, the current plan that I've got, it's not super complicated. I'm just starting to big deal with larger dollar amounts now in terms of deposits. So I'm starting to buy primarily large commercial assets, at least for a period of time. I should be able to hit about a hundred grand passive by the time I'm 30, I think. And then what, 12, 18 months? It's seven, yeah, well, technically seven to about you know, 15 months or roughly, depending on how you measure it. But yeah, I'll by the time I like before I turn 31, I'd like to hit 100 grand.

SPEAKER_02 31:51

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

And at that point, I think there'll be a good enough base of passive income that I'll then start to optimize again for primarily net worth growth. Yeah. So that I think there'll, I mean, my favorite asset is still residential property. Like the returns I can get in that is just phenomenal, even compared to commercial. Um, there's some advantages that commercial has at scale over residential, but small scale, and when I say small scale, like sort of five to ten million portfolio or less, it's really hard to beat residential. The return you get on your money is phenomenal.

SPEAKER_02 32:28

Can you explain that quickly to people when you're talking return on your money? Because you've also worked in the like private, like building uh someone's private wealth. Like, what was that? You know, and your your understanding around opportunity costs and return on funds is you've taught me so much about that.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

This might turn into a finance lecturer. You need to be careful, and I'm not I'm not a finance lecturer, but uh I'll I'll do my best to explain it without putting people to sleep.

SPEAKER_02 32:59

Maybe just return on investment, like the start with the bare basic simples of like buying a 500 grand property, like how much you're putting into the return you're getting.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

Yeah. So just for a little bit of context, the way that I started really thinking about this was through working with the family that you just mentioned. So I after being a professional buyer's agent for a while there, took six months off, went around Europe with Beck, and um ended up getting introduced to these guys that are phenomenal business people and investors in their own right. And I got to spend 18 months just investing with them and doing some joint venture stuff. And yeah, I learned so much from them. And uh one thing that they taught me was they view everything through opportunity cost. And so what I mean by that is they know how to make money. So what they actually measure themselves against, what the wealthiest people measure themselves against, is what option is going to make me more. So in if they don't go with that second option that could have made them more, there's actually an opportunity cost that's been created. Because they can afford that like when once you get good enough with money, you can start to afford whatever you want over a period of time. Yeah. So it's then about how do you maximize it. And so that you can then put that towards giving or improving your lifestyle or whatever it might be. It's having impact, whatever it is that your goal is. And so I, from working with them, I started understanding that when you put 52 grand into my first property as a deposit, and then I make, you know, 350 or so out of it, people in the property space view that as a, you know, basically a 7x, right? But unfortunately, the property space is very simplistic. If you learn about how people measure things in business and in, you know, the share market, the bond market, that whole space, you they use completely different metrics. So I won't, I won't go on to the city.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

So we're just talking about return on capital. You put 50 in, you get 350 out, 7x.

SPEAKER_00 34:57

7x. But you need to take into account that the 52 grand I originally put in were 50 to about 50 grand of equity. The year after that was about 100 grand of equity. And then there was the after a year in year two, the property went up by a certain percentage then. And in that year two, you shouldn't think about it in terms of, you know, let's just say year two, it went up by another 100 grand. It's like, man, my 50 grand then went up by another 100. That's another, you know, 2x return on my original investment. Whereas the way sophisticated investors view it is they view it as return on equity, not return on investment. So the 52 grand might have been my original investment, but at the end of the first year, I might have had 100 grand in the property in terms of equity, my original deposit plus a bit of growth. So in the second year, when it went up by 100 grand, it wasn't a 2x return. Yeah. It was actually just a doubling of my equity. Yep. And when I started viewing things that way, I realized that strategy is so much more important than people give it credit to. Everyone thinks about, oh, you know, I've got this portfolio and and made all this money.

SPEAKER_03 36:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

But there's a reason why you often see people, even in our space, they'll often stagnate at around a three or so million dollar portfolio and they struggle to grow it from there. Is because they look at how much they've made, they don't start to think, how do I most, and they're often thinking, how can I most efficiently build that initial portfolio? But they don't think, how can I then efficiently scale it from there?

SPEAKER_02 36:29

This is exactly what I wanted to get into. You learning this stuff, right? What what is the difference that you know now to what you wish you knew when you started as a property investor?

SPEAKER_00 36:43

It's probably two things. I wish I knew more about the fundamentals of investing rather than just kind of getting lost in the source of property, right? I mean, it worked out well, but I wish at the beginning, and I wish more people were taught that the essence of investing is all about risk-adjusted return. It is about what is the likely return I'm gonna get and how likely am I gonna get that return. That is what all investing comes down to, fundamentally. And so whether you look at crypto or you look at bonds or you look at shares or you look at whatever it is, property, business, whatever it is, there is no best investment necessarily. Every single asset class has different pros and cons and a different role to play within a broader portfolio. Now, I've been extremely heavy in property because so far, the style of residential property investing and then combining that with commercial, I cannot find a better risk-adjusted return. Now, as my wealth grows, I'm probably going to start to diversify more into things like shares and things like that, particularly with is as I have larger and larger cash buffers as my portfolio gets bigger and bigger. I don't want two, three, four hundred grand sitting around in a bank account earning three or four percent. So I look at the overall portfolio and how to minimize risk as well as maximizing return on my entire net worth. Not just one deposit on one property. I want to look at my entire financial situation, understand how can I maximize it moving forward. That's number one. The other one is I really wish I properly understood the idea of opportunity cost. Because once you realize that everything is risk-adjusted return, that's the essence of all investing, and that property is just another asset class, then by by understanding opportunity cost, you're able to adequately compare different investments. Some people go, oh, you know, bought two buy and holds. Now I want to start flipping houses, or now I want to do a bit of crypto, or now a bit of shares.

SPEAKER_02 39:02

And you sound like so many people I talk to.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

And the reason why they're doing that, I I think this is my this is my theory, but they don't understand what each of those investments, what the outcome is that it's going to produce. So they tend to chase the shiny thing rather than finding the thing that's going to get them a fantastic risk-adjusted return, sticking with it as long as they possibly can and doing it as safely as possible. And then as their portfolio grows and change, it matures to the point where you actually need to start looking at some different asset classes and different different strategies. And the best way to compare those two is know what you're going to get if you go into shares, know what you're going to get if you get into property, know what you're going to get if you get into bonds. Yeah. And then compare which is which, what those outcomes, and go with the one that's going to produce the best outcome for you in your situation. Because if you go with those others, it's going to create a huge opportunity cost for you in the future.

SPEAKER_02 40:03

I mean, I I love the way that you look at things. Me and you look couldn't look at things any more different, right? We couldn't look at things any more different. But I think that the one thing that we're relying on values-wise is um creating building wealth to create a lifestyle that we both want. Right. And that's what I love talking to you about and learning these things from you. But I appreciate you sharing that because that that would that gives a lot of context for people that are um maybe stuck in analysis paralysis. I think if I could have my opinion, when you're looking at risk-rate return, property in the resi capital growth space is it it wins out so much at the early stages of building your wealth. Like it is the asset, it is the asset base for people in this country to start having levers to pull to generate something. You can't get ahead with your nine to five job. Like if you're just earning a decent income, 120, 150 grand each, you got a 250, 300 grand household income. You jump into the property portfolio, building a property portfolio first, two, three, four, five capital growth assets. Now all of a sudden you let those mature. Now all of a sudden you're you're talking about playing with close to uh 1.2 to maybe $2 million worth of capital. You got to assess how you deploy that, very different to how you deploy a 200 grand deposit for the first deal and then repeck it out, you know, nine to twelve months later.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

100%. Because people in the residential space are restricted by borrowing capacity and their capacity, their cash flow capacity, meaning like how much property can they actually safely hold. So it's some, so when you in that scenario you just described, if someone's got a million, million two of capital that they've they've achieved after tax, after selling part of their portfolio, all their portfolio down, then it doesn't maybe they started with three or four properties and now they've got enough capital for what is probably, you know, 10 properties, right? They've got enough cash for that, but they don't have the borrowing capacity or the cash flow capacity to actually buy those 10. So if they were to deploy all of that money into the same type of residential properties, they're gonna have a huge chunk of lazy equity sitting around in these properties. So they need to think about how do they maximize that. I mean, still great. They've for someone like that, probably they will still buy another four, five, six properties. But then what do they do with the leftover half mil? Yep.

SPEAKER_02 42:34

Man, we've got some great clients at the moment. They they literally come to us, um, local people from the Shire, two pilots, and it the conversation almost went like we've paid off our mortgage and we got no kids at the moment. And what do we do with all this cash? It was just she like we paid off our mortgage, like they've got a great place. Um and they paid off the mortgage, and like, but we've still got cash piling up, you know, like just lazy equity. It's like the the opportunity costs of not deploying that earlier into is wild. But um, I'm saying that to say, like, I feel like there's so many people out there that aren't even thinking about these two fundamentals you're talking about: risk, adjusted return, and opportunity costs. Um, that is like two amazing principles. We could talk about this for ages because if I keep probing you, you're gonna keep going deeper into finance. But I want to come back to some like maybe like a base level. What's your plan now? You kind of mentioned that already. And surely people in your position talking about having the babies. You've already got some passive income. The owner the owner occupy a house. Are you guys renting at the moment? You guys own it? What where do you guys live? Probably the biggest two things that I hear when I talk to people is well, the biggest two goals I have here is we want to replace income either for the wife so that we can have babies and you. She doesn't have to work anymore. Or we want to build a massive growth portfolio, sell down and buy a mad you know house around here in Cornell's 3 mil. Those are the two most common things. You're in the situation where you've got the cash flow portfolio happening. What are you doing now?

SPEAKER_00 44:17

So yeah, we've rent vested this whole time. We've had the opportunity to buy a place to live in multiple times over the years. Uh, especially when I saw down those first four properties, the two I had in Brisbane, two I had in Perth. After tax, at one point we had sort of uh over a mil just sitting in a bank account. And I was like, we were living in Mornington in Victoria at the time, and living in a place that was renting for sort of $6.50 a week, just basic house. And just down the street in a spot that I really like, a really nice house, I was like, I could buy that with cash right now if I wanted to. And that was before I bought the commercial. And I decided to keep going down the investment route because I feel that if I was to go and buy the house to live in, once again, I know I sound like a broken record, but it would not be the most efficient deployment of capital. And Beck and I are in a position at the moment where we don't, we're not really itching to own the place we live in. We'd love to, but we're still happy to keep optimizing for finances for the time being.

SPEAKER_03 45:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:22

And so we're about to move back to back to Bayside where we where we grew up and move into a bit of a nicer rental. Um, because with rent vesting, the nicer the property is and the more that you pay in rent, the more it actually makes sense to rent the property rather than own it. Yeah. And so, but one day, what the goal is, is at some point when we have a bit of a windfall from the portfolio, is I would love to buy an acreage property down the Mornington Peninsula or something like that. It'll probably be three to five mil or something like that. And my goal is to buy it with cash at some point. And then pretty much immediately after settlement or soon after settlement, I'll probably take out an 80% LVR loan against it, assuming I can service it. And so let's just say it was a three mil property, I take out 2.4 million, if my maths is right, as an equity release loan. And I'm gonna then use that $2.4 million probably as a deposit on some commercial property. Because with commercial property, you can get a lease stock loan, meaning you don't need to use your own income to be able to service the loan. So I can take that $2.4 and it should be able to buy about $7.5 million of commercial property just with that. And the commercial property versus the interest rate, it should mean that roughly it will pay off, it will pay for the entire mortgage. So I'll be able to have the $3 million acreage property plus another sort of seven, seven and a half million of commercial property and roughly cash flow neutral.

SPEAKER_02 46:53

Unreal.

SPEAKER_00 46:54

And then the entire loan against my own home, my dream home, is then also tax deductible because it was used for investment purposes. So when we're talking about strategy and the importance of strategy, minimizing opportunity cost, maximizing the efficient use of capital, for me, that outcome sounds a lot nicer to me rather than buying, you know, a little bit more of a still a nice property I'd love to live in. Now I'd prefer to still just rent and produce that outcome down the line.

SPEAKER_01 47:21

I can hear people saying, oh, but you um you got to pay tax on that money for the sell down. And um look, you've got so much debt. Oh, look at look, you you've got a family and got all that debt. Like, aren't you gonna be stressed?

SPEAKER_00 47:35

Yeah, 100%. I wouldn't recommend everyone do that. I'm I'm fortunate enough that I've been doing this for a while now and I've learnt enough that I know how to adequately manage that amount of debt and that size of a portfolio. And to be honest, like the short answer is if you have enough cash sitting in a bank account or in some sort of liquid asset that you can access at any time, you could like you can hold a lot of property and hold a lot of debt. Because I say to people, because I I was chatting to a guy the other day who um I won't give all of his specific details, but he's worth a lot of money and he doesn't know how to invest. And he's very, very risk adverse and very adverse to the idea of using debt. And what I said to him was, I actually don't like debt. I've never had a credit card, I've never like taken out any kind of personal loan, anything like that. The only debt I've ever had was hex and and mortgages against property.

SPEAKER_03 48:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:41

So even though I've done what I've done, I'm actually quite risk adverse, hence why I've mentioned risk and risk management so much on this episode. I think about it a lot. But I said to him, because he was just planning the idea of just taking a little bit of equity out of his Sydney home and using it to buy uh a pretty cheap investment property and just doing one of them just to sort of dip his toe in the water. And he said, Yeah, but it's it's a lot of debt. I don't know if I'm really that comfortable with it. I just said, if you had a big enough cash buffer, let's just say you had a $200,000 cash buffer or a $500,000 cash buffer, how comfortable do you think you would be in holding that property? And he said, Yeah, probably a lot more comfortable. I said, the more cash you hold in proportion, you don't want it to have too much cash that it's then starts to impact your overall position. But you want enough risk adjusted return.

SPEAKER_02 49:33

Man, I'm learning here.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

But you want probably a little bit more, particularly once you've got an established portfolio and a good net worth, you probably want a little bit more cash than what feels comfortable.

SPEAKER_02 49:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:45

Just because you want enough to account for situations that might pop up, but you also want to account for a little bit more of things that you might not see coming.

SPEAKER_02 49:54

Man, when I'm always talking to like let's say young upstarts or young families, and they're like, what is that cash buffer? I always say three to six months worth of pure living costs. If you're just living the way you want to live, you you're getting Uber Eats, you're going to Mimis, you're doing whatever you want to do, and what does that cost per month? Okay, that costs 15 grand a month, 15 grand a month, times three or times six. That is your like if you've got that cash buffer, you're always operating out of a place of do I love this? Yes, I do. Great, I'm gonna do it. Like, is this do I love building a property portfolio for my family to have better options in my future? Yes, great, but that's what I'm gonna do. I never want I try and encourage people to never make a decision out of I'm afraid that this is going to happen. Like, I'm afraid that this, so I'm gonna do this. And like you're operating out of scarcity, and then that's like bad. That from what from what I see. What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 50:48

I've got a slightly different take. So challenging me. The the way that I think about it and the way I handle my own finances is I split all these things up. So I I split my personal finances from the investment portfolio, and I then also split it from the business. But let's just focus on investment and personal for now. And what I'll think to myself is on the personal side, what am I actually trying to protect against? So for me and Beck, while we're building the portfolio, there was a couple of times we pretty much used all of the capital, like all of our cash in our bank account to buy a property, which I know you did. And we were okay with that because we were pretty much living off at the time, we're pretty much living just off Beck's income. And I had the higher income.

SPEAKER_03 51:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:33

So even if one of us lost our job, we would still be able to live. And we also, if we didn't lose our jobs, because our jobs were quite secure, were very secure actually at the time, we had enough cash flow coming in just from our income that we could fix a vast majority of problems. So earlier on, we didn't really need that much of a cash buffer.

SPEAKER_03 51:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:53

But then once the portfolio got to a certain size and it sort of became proportionately big, you needed cash buffers. We needed more, more cash buffers. But so just to come back to the idea of splitting the two.

SPEAKER_02 52:03

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 52:04

Was I just knew at the time that we maybe only needed about three months of personal expenses, probably even less than that, because I knew that we could survive off one income. And whereas on the investment side, I was thinking, I actually modeled all of this out. Um, and I I encourage people to actually stress test their portfolio on a model and learn how to do it, which is what happens if I have a vacancy? What happens if um one of my properties has like, you know, a flood, a flood happen or some freak, freak event happen and it can't be rented out for a period of time. And it takes a while for the insurance to kick in? Uh, or what if I have a roof that needs to be replaced? And I thought about all this kind of stuff and worked out roughly how much they cost. And this is one beautiful thing about building a larger portfolio is you're actually more diversified. So if one tenant stops paying their rent, it's actually only like one fifth or one-sixth of your portfolio rather than your entire portfolio. Yeah. So I just worked out what it was I was actually trying to protect against. I would put it in a spreadsheet and work out how much it actually costs to be able to weather that storm.

SPEAKER_02 53:11

Is that a per year thing, or is that just like overall?

SPEAKER_00 53:13

I was just the way I thought about it, it's like, for example, I thought, well, if I had to replace a roof, it's probably gonna be, you know, 15, 20 grand one of my properties. So I'd probably want at least roughly 10, 15 grand or so somewhere at some time, right? If one of my properties has that.

SPEAKER_02 53:28

But you've got, let's say, five properties in the portfolio. Do you do you have 50 grand, one roof each?

SPEAKER_00 53:33

Well, not necessarily. So, but I what I started looking at was um probably want a little bit for if some bigger ticket item came up. But even with a roof, I was like, I knew I could wait three or four or five months. So I really had to to sort of drag it out until I had to do the roof. Because not usually a roof doesn't just suddenly collapse in on you, you know, if it's suddenly bad. It takes a while for it to deteriorate. Um, more so what I was trying to protect against was interest rate rises. Because if interest rates rise, not only does it increase the negative cash flow of your portfolio, but actually reduces your borrowing capacity. So when it reduces your borrowing capacity, then you can actually get to the point where you're tapped out. Whereas previously, let's just say you've got four properties. This is what happened to me. I had four properties at the time. I left my full-time employment, took six months off, went around Europe, became a full-time investor. I wasn't earning an income during this time. So I had just under 1.5 million in debt against these four properties. And then interest rates went up 12 times, 13 times during this period. So I modeled all this out and I went, okay, what happens if interest rates get to 8%, 9%, 10%, 11%? And I looked at how much that was going to impact the negative, what my negative cash flow was going to be. But the other thing I took into account was all of my loans at the time were interest only. Yeah. And they eventually tick over to principal and interest. Yeah. So I wasn't just assessing interest only cost. I was assessing what if I'm stuck, I can't refinance, and I then have to start paying principal and interest at those higher rates. And so I actually worked out how much that cost. And I wanted to be able to run for at least sort of nine to 12 months because if things got really bad, I knew I developed a plan of okay, I'll just sell one property, pocket this much capital, I'll have this much cash after tax. Create, add more to the buffer. So I had a plan to tackle it. Now that was an extreme situation. 1.5 million debt, 25 years old, one income. Like it was a bit of a bit of an extreme one. But we got through because before I left my role, I was just about to buy two more, two more deals. And so, and that didn't that didn't happen. And so I had like 180 grand just sitting in a bank account that I pulled against the portfolio and against my own savings. So that 180 grand made us through, you know, two, three years. Unreal. Of just holding costs, lifestyle, all that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 55:51

Man, very like the way that how deep you think is on another level. But I what I'm going to summarize from it is you compartmentalize personal funds, investment funds, and you have buffer for your personal life, and you have a buffer for your portfolio, and you have a buffer for your business.

SPEAKER_00 56:07

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 56:08

I like that. Last piece of the puzzle, um, and I'm it's kind of touching back to that the piece before with the owner ock, right? Um I find that in this day and age, a lot of I'll speak for guys in their mid-thirties. There is this immense amount of pressure to have the house for one, and to be able to provide a big enough income to fund a lot. Car, holidays, um really labels, like all of this stuff. Um how do you and Beck uh stay out of that um to keep staying the course? Because you guys have stayed the course uh really strong for the last few years. Last like a long time, like six, seven years.

SPEAKER_00 56:57

We understand what the ramification would be if we if we could sort of succumb to it, like like if we fell for the trap and started trying to keep up with the drones. We know that once you start increasing your lifestyle, it's really hard to then reduce it. It's much harder to reduce it. And we also understand, particularly with the sort of investing that we're able to do, we understand the sort of return that I can get over time. And it sounds so boring, but we still think in terms of opportunity cost, if if we buy this car, that means that's X amount less that's going towards investing, and we really don't need it right now. And I think, and this is why I like talking a lot about the finance side of things, risk adjusted return cost, um, you know, opportunity cost is because if people really understood what it was costing them, I think it'll be a lot easier for them to say no to the car or no to the house. Yeah. And like I was chatting to, I've got a good good mate of mine that I was chatting to the other day, and he's got an 18-year-old son. And I've had a couple of chats with him about man, if you get into investing now, you have no idea how big of an impact it's gonna have. I was chatting to his dad a little bit about a situation, how to sort of motivate his 18-year-old son into this. Because I helped him, they sort of split a first property together. So he is getting into the property market that I sourced for them. And I said, I said to his dad, I pulled up a compound interest calculator and I said, because he's really into cars. So he's spending money on cars. And I said, he doesn't understand that a dollar now is not worth a dollar. And I said, just at 10% return per year, from the age to the age of 65, one dollar to him at 18 years old would actually be about 108 dollars at 65. So one dollar to him now is actually like him spending $108.

SPEAKER_02 58:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:55

And I said, and that's just at a 10% return. As soon as you change it to a 12% return, it went from $108 to $178. And when I showed that to him, he's just like, I need to get on him about saving money. Like this is crazy. But there's there's two ways to look at that. It's you don't want to fall in the trap also of just investing, and that's all you ever do.

SPEAKER_03 59:18

I was gonna be my follow-up.

SPEAKER_00 59:19

Lifestyle is so important. You need to balance the personal and the finance. But for him, he doesn't need, he lives at home, expenses are low, earning decent income, saving a lot of his money. If he just invested a small amount at the beginning, he he would hit retirement so much faster.

SPEAKER_02 59:37

That's why I wanted to get you on here, man, because I honestly started investing at the age of 29. You're 29 now, right? And you're talking about having a hundred grand passive by the time I've done my second deal, you know, in your life. And I I met you like six years ago, you know? And so I I look at what you're doing. I was like, man, I wish I did that. And I why didn't I? I kind of knew, but I just couldn't see the path. It was honestly as simple as that. I couldn't see the path to get there. You toiled and you researched and you listened to stuff from the US and try to find people and read like that. That's what I admire about you. That you've you could kind of see a path, but then you really try to light it up to so your steps became clear. I waited, I feel like, too long, you know, and I feel like I've done okay. And I'm like, man, you started so young, like it's incredible. Harley Giddings was on here recently, you know, and he also started so young. And I'm like, you guys, when you're in your late 30s, like me, are gonna be monsters when it comes to your understanding about property because you guys are gonna be dealing with way more capital and what you can do. But man, I'm I'm I could talk to you for hours, and every time we catch up, it seems like we're on the phone or talking for so long. But tell me um, your Gilmore advocacy, your buyers agency, what are you doing? What do you what's something that you could tell us that you want to let us know before we wrap the episode?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:00

Look, fundamentally, all I do now is do exactly what I've done for me and Beck, just for other people.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:06

So that's in essence what the business is. I help on the strategy side. I source only properties that I'd personally buy myself. Same strategy, just helping other people do it and suiting it to their specific situation.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:19

Unreal, mate. You your your level of detail and your level of strategy is um superior to a lot of people I've met. Uh, but very thank you so much for coming on here. I'm looking forward for us to go out for dinner and stuff tonight. So thank you so much. Thanks, Chase. Thanks so much for listening to the Moves to Momentum podcast. If you got any value out of this episode, please give us a like or subscribe. Or if you think this is relevant to any one of your friends or family, please flick it to them so they can have a listen.