Sure...
At 21, I was just over a year out of an IT degree, with a nice consulting job with a small global consulting company, earning around 70k. But as you do, I bought a nice sports car, had a place at Bondi Beach overlooking the beach, etc etc. I was going NOWHERE in terms of money. Then one our family friends gave me a book called "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and things just CLICKED into place. I foudn this forum and started reading books like crazy. About one a week about property. Then I went to a Dolf De Roos intro seminar (freebie) and bought his book "Real Estate Riches". And decided to follow the formula of buy, renovate and keep.
I borrowed 40k from F&F to buy my first house. Spent about 10k renovating (used a handy man, I am totally useless at these things) and revalued to give me another 60k I think. 6 months later, I found a great little unit in St Kilda East and bought that using the LOC (I became friendly with a broker, who I've been using for the last 4 years and highly recommend!). This one was a gold mine (you can search through some of my older posts for penny by penny detail) but I spent 6k on reno which gave me a 130k increase in value!!!!
Then I moved to Brisbane to work on a cleint site and really wanted to buy a place there. I saw a GREAT penthouse overlooking the city on the river street at Kangaroo point... could have had it for just over 400k!!! Damn! Worth 2m+ now.
But in any case, I got tipped off that Townsville would be a good buy. So I bought a block of flats there. I went back to the original house I bought and revaluedt hat, which allowed me to buy another duplex in Townsville. Then I also bought (but had not settled yet) two more blocks of flats there. Somehwere in there, a financial advisor suggested that I get geared equities to offset my growing salary (90k by that stage, at 23). I starta-titled my block and revalued it, giving me an increase of 100% on purchase price. It was also returning 13% on purchase price. So GREAT deal
Then I got invited to this place in Sydney to meet these guys who were setting up a buisiness that looked really good. They invited me to join, but said that I would need to put money in, only about 50k, to get in as I was last one in. Stupidly I agreed, and quit my job. A week before settlement on those two blocks, the bank called my employer for a checkup... it didn't go down well that I quit. I lost 4 loans that day, and had to scrable for a lo-doc alternative and could't settle 2 properties. WHich resulted in all sorts of ****.
On teh buisness side, it went downhill veyr quickly, and I ended up pouring around 200k into it, and because it brought no money in, I basically had CC debts accumilating and all sorts of **** going wrong (taxes, etc). With no income, I had to get into the business I am in now (IT services consulting) to try to build up some money.
The funny thing about debt and all that is that when you're going downhill... it's like a snowball. It ALL goes so wrong, you don't know where you're gonna get hit from! So stress, breakdowns, etc piled on like you wouldn't believe. So 2 years, no income, no money, HUGE debts ... that's how you end up with 197k of personal debt. BUt I worked very hard on the business and in 2 years built it up to a $1m+ business, which has given me a salary that I can live on, and as pointed out in a previous post, pay off my debts.
The lessons I learnt are:
* don't run too fast, you can really hurt yourself.
* create a plan and stick to it. I had a plan to have 5m of property by 24, and I was SO close to it, but I deviated from the plan, and screwed up.
* build a GREAT team (accountant, solicitor, fin. planner and broker) whi you can TRUST
* don't get into business with peopel you don't know or haven't worked with in the past
* Don't be the only schmuk putting money into a biz. You'd be amazed how people treat the biz if they didn't put a cent in!
* turst you gut feel (if you can hear it, if you can' tlearn how to listen to it!)
* experiment, and don' tbe afraid of failing. It's part of the game. I nearly bought a block of 32 flats in Auckland when I was 22, but stuffed up, but learnt A GREAT deal.
* read books, but don't fall into paralysis of analysis
* stay focused on the goal - no matter how hard it gets, keep your eye on the ball! A great phrase I read once is "Obstacles are those things we see when we take our eye off the goal"
* have fun doing it. don't take life too seriously
* there are people out there with problems 100000 times worse than yours, so don't bitch and moan!
I guess that's the main thing. I hope it's helpful...
