Introduction
My road to financial freedom
How life shaped me to be a successful property investor.

It’s true that I had enough income from my property portfolio to retire by the age of 38, and I did just that at the age of 40, but I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I was 28 when I bought my first property. At that time I had a successful career as a musician and music teacher, but I wasn’t earning a lot of money.

How did I become a financially independent property investor within 10 years? I’d say it all started with who I was brought up to be. In this introduction I’ll share with you something of my journey and the essential qualities and roles, both personal and professional, that helped me create the life I enjoy today.

Resilience

I grew up on a 100-acre (40-hectare) property surrounded by bushland on the outskirts of Orange in Central West NSW. My dad, Jack, ran a truck springs and chassis repair business he inherited from his father, who had started out repairing wagons and horse-drawn carts. My mother, Barbara, had a side business breeding chickens, Murray Grey cattle and Palomino horses.

We were a very happy family. My younger brother Robert and I spent much of our time riding horses and motorbikes. If I wanted to go camping with my friends, we’d take a tent out the back paddock.

Mum and Dad never had any investment properties. Their only properties were the ones they lived in. Dad sold his house in town to Mum’s parents at way under market value, when he moved in with her on the stud farm we grew up on.

Back then you could buy a house for $20 000 — and Mum and Dad were of the mindset that if you couldn’t afford to pay the $20 000 in cash, you couldn’t afford that house. There’s no lending in my family, and they never had any debt.

We were brought up to work hard and save. My first business venture was a pizza shop, which Dad built for me on the farm. Mum bought the ingredients, then I made and sold the pizzas to my parents for three bucks each: 100 per cent profit! I was eight years old!

Around that time, I was knocked unconscious by a cricket bat at a Scouts meeting. I began to suffer from chronic migraines during which I couldn’t walk or talk; overcome by nausea, I was paralytic. Mum and Dad spent a fortune on doctors. The migraines happened nearly every day until I was put on medication, and even then I still got them every couple of weeks.

I soon realised this was going to be a part of my life, and I’ve managed it as best I can ever since. Sure, there have been times in my life when I’ve been depressed about it, but I haven’t let it get me down too much because as soon as I get over being sick, I’m happy and back at it again. I inherited this resilience and love of life from both parents.

A competitor

When I was nine I joined the local band, playing the baritone, a brass instrument like a small tuba. Despite experiencing a migraine after every band practice, I loved music. Harry, my teacher, started to enter me in local eisteddfods, then regional eisteddfods. But I didn’t start winning until I really began to practise. Before the first state championship I entered I practised for hours each day, and sure enough I won. I was 13 years old when I learned that if I worked hard enough at something, I would be successful at it.

This was a valuable lesson indeed, because in fact nothing I have achieved in my life has come naturally or easily to me, and I have never succeeded at any venture at the start. But whenever I have persisted, developed the passion and worked on the goals, I have won.

Through high school and beyond I won several state and national solo competitions, playing trombone, euphonium and baritone. I sometimes helped my music teacher by mentoring some of his younger students, and I enjoyed that as well.

I also played golf competitively while in high school. I was a member of all three local golf clubs and regularly won Saturday morning competitions around Orange, touring to compete in Bathurst, Wellington and Dubbo. I played off a handicap of 12 by the time I was 15 and I thought about becoming a professional golfer, but I gave it all up because of the migraines and decided to focus on music.

At high school, economics was actually my best subject, but I had my heart set on getting into the prestigious Sydney Conservatorium of Music. I did well in the HSC and in my audition, but I only got a place in the Bachelor of Education program, as ‘the Con’ didn’t accept euphonium players in its Performance course.

Teaching was not my goal, so I went elsewhere. I studied at the ANU School of Music in Canberra and the Illawarra Institute in Goulburn, where I could play my euphonium and work on the trombone. Two years later I reapplied for the Con and got into the Bachelor of Music (Performance) program, majoring in the trombone. I’d auditioned for several other music universities around the country and was offered a place in all of them. My hard work had paid off again!

At last I moved to Sydney to study music. I was living close to the water and, as a country boy, I appreciated the convenience of walking to the shops. I would go to see orchestras play at the Sydney Opera House and walk around Circular Quay, soaking up the atmosphere. Several of my classmates at the Con were former ‘rivals’ from music competitions I’d entered growing up, so it was a lot of fun, and we had excellent teachers and mentors.

At university, funds were tight. I often lived in share accommodation with several other students. I was on limited fortnightly AusStudy payments from Centrelink. Once I had paid my rent, electricity, train fares and maybe a little petrol for my car — a lovely old petrol-guzzling 1979 Ford Falcon with more kilometres on the clock than I spend on a property these days — I didn’t have a lot left over.

Sometimes my old flatmates, who are now very successful musicians, like to remind me of those times, back in the day, when all I could afford was a 30-cent ice-cream cone from McDonald’s for lunch and I often had to go without dinner. I guess I have come a fair way in the past 25 years!

I was loving life though, but then in 1995, while in my first year at the Con, my dad got cancer. I knew he was 26 years older than Mum — he’d fought in World War II — but I was young, and I still believed my parents were going to be there forever.

The day my father died Mum came down to Sydney to watch me play in a recital. She broke the news to me afterwards. It hit me hard. I was devastated. I had to take time off my studies and repeat a couple of subjects as I’d slipped so far behind.

A teacher

At last I graduated from the Con and was playing professionally in bands and orchestras: the Sydney Brass Ensemble, the Sydney Youth Orchestra and the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra. I even played at the Sydney Opera House quite a few times over the years.

I was very happy as a musician but the work was inconsistent, so I started picking up some instrumental teaching jobs. I loved helping the students play the best they could on their instruments, the way I had done when I helped Harry back in high school. That’s when I realised that teaching was actually something I would enjoy, and I started to love teaching more than playing.

Even now I can’t stop teaching. A desire to educate people about property is the reason I wrote this book. So my passion for teaching has never died.

A saver

As soon as I was earning money, I started to save as much as I could. I was renting in poorer areas of Sydney because that’s what I could afford. I never had a credit card, I didn’t go overseas on a ‘gap year’ holiday and I still drove old cars. I just put my money away for the future.

I am still very frugal. My wife Renee often urges me to buy new clothes. We have a running joke between us that I’ll spend hundreds of thousands on an investment but won’t fork out $20 for a new shirt from Kmart. The way I see it, that shirt will not yield a financial return so it’s not a good investment!

A homeowner

I was fortunate to be teaching at schools in quite wealthy areas on Sydney’s North Shore and in the Eastern Suburbs. I’d go around to give a kid a private music tutorial at their harbourfront home with their parents’ BMW convertibles parked in the driveway and I’d think, geez, how do these people afford to live like this? I’m a struggling musician here, renting a cheap unit. How I’d love to be in this position one day!

In 2003 my grandma passed away, and my mother moved off the farm and into the house in Orange that originally belonged to my dad’s parents almost 100 years ago. She gave the farm to my brother and me as ‘a start’. Rob bought out my share; he’s still got the farm and lives there to this day.

With this small family inheritance and the money I’d been saving, I had a good deposit to buy my own property. But how was I going to get a mortgage, as a self-employed music teacher earning less than $50 000 a year?

I found a very good mortgage broker who got me a ‘low-doc’ (low-documentation) home loan from a non-bank lender, where I didn’t need to produce payslips. I would have struggled without that first loan, so I was lucky.

With my...