We love helping members of The Property Mentors purchase their first investment property. Even better, we thrive on helping them grow successful property portfolios. But more than anything, we take pride in helping them to set – and achieve – their individual lifelong goals.
And the best thing is that sharing member success stories can inspire potential investors who want to achieve similar results, but aren’t sure where to start!INTRODUCING TAHLIAWHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST OVERALL INVESTMENT GOAL?
"Our end goal is to have financial freedom, and one of the big things we love to do is travel. We want to be in the position where, let's say flights come up – and they're cheap to go over to London, or Europe or America – and we can just say, 'Yep, I'm gonna book them, and I'm gonna go.' It doesn't matter where we're at in our lives, we can just go and do it. That's a big one.
And from a work perspective, not having to be stuck in a position, because financially you have to be somewhere. We just want to be able to make the decision and say, 'Nope, financially, I'm fine, therefore I'm going to make whatever decisions I need to.'"WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO JOIN THE PROPERTY MENTORS?"We had a Dymocks store that had opened in Adelaide, in the city. It was supposed to be the biggest Dymocks store in Adelaide. So, after work one day, I decided to go and have a look at it, and because we were on this journey for investing, I had a look at the area where it had the investment books.
There were so many books on the shelf, but I picked up the Property Fit book…I mean, I did pick it up because I saw the bright pink cover. And I love pink! But I found that it just got to the point, it was very clear. It talks about the things that you need to look at even before you look at investing. And it didn't make things complicated. It just made sense. It just made a lot of sense.
But we wanted to get advice on how we go about the next steps, so, we decided to have a look at The Property Mentors webpage, and then we had our first discovery call and decided to go from there.
So, that's why we engaged with The Property Mentors!"
DID YOU HAVE ANY CONCERNS ABOUT INVESTING IN PROPERTY?
"I'm very risk averse, because for me, money is nothing to sneeze at. Every time something happened in the market, I was like 'What does this mean? Why is this happening?' And start freaking out about all the different changes with the rates, and the interest, and the changes in that space.
I also wanted to look at exit strategies. 'What happens if this doesn't work? How do we know this is going to happen...' There's an element of just going into it and taking some of that risk, but also getting knowledgeable enough to say that, 'Yes, there is risk, but here's how we can mitigate that risk.' And if we understand how this is going to look, or how we can play this out, then it's not as scary as you think it is."
ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 10, HOW WAS YOUR INVESTING KNOWLEDGE BEFORE JOINING THE PROPERTY MENTORS?
"Probably about a two. Definitely amateurs at that point! Our knowledge was very limited, we didn't really know a lot. We didn't know what to look out for. And we didn't really know where to start."
OF THE THREE TYPES OF INVESTOR READINESS, WHICH IS THE ONE YOU NEEDED THE MOST HELP WITH?Educational readiness
"It was definitely the knowledge readiness we needed help with.
Once I'm into something, I'm 1,000% into it. So it was about making sure we were 1,000% ready, and we understood where we were at before jumping into anything. I would spend my entire time trying to understand it, just trying to understand how this whole thing works, to reduce the fear level.
If you can dedicate your whole time and your whole existence to it, then maybe you can do it on your own. But, for people like us, we work full time, we have a life outside of this stuff. It's not something you want to spend 24/7 doing. You'd go a little bit insane, trying to understand everything at once, you can't do that."Emotional readiness
"So the other challenge for me was about trusting other people. We'd tried to do everything on our own, so that we didn't need other people to help. But I think once you realise that those other people are on your side, and what their experience is, you can trust a bit more. And that's a 'me' problem, I understand that. But that's probably one of the other things to say, we need to just put some faith into people. They're here for our best interest."
WHAT CHALLENGES DID THE PROPERTY MENTORS HELP YOU OVERCOME?
"We did have some goals in place. And we did have what we wanted to achieve in place. But when we were trying to get there, there were a lot of fears that we were having to battle through, like, 'If we jump in now, then what happens if the rate rises?'""And when you've got experts around you, who have done this before, and know what they're doing, you have to put a bit of faith in them, which is a little bit scary for me. But once you actually see what they can do, what they've done with their own investments, how they've been in the property market and their background, it makes it a lot easier. And if there are any issues, then we've got a team of people to help us through it!"
WHAT HAS BEEN THE BEST THING YOU’VE LEARNED ABOUT PROPERTY INVESTMENT?
"I think the biggest thing for us, in terms of learning, is probably about setting goals, and using your experts to get to that point.""Also, the readiness in terms of our educational readiness and trying to reduce our fears in this space, and to just go ahead and do it.
I always thought it was about 'when' to get into the property market, but it's actually not about that, it's about your 'what'. Looking at your goals, looking at what you're trying to achieve. And then looking at what we do to get to that point. There's no real 'when', it's about what strategy can we put in place to make sure this is going to work."
HOW IS YOUR PROPERTY JOURNEY GOING NOW?
"At this point, we own our principal house here in Adelaide, and we've put a deposit down for an apartment in Melbourne that's looking to settle in early 2023. At that point we'll rent it out, and we'll be able to start our investing journey in a bit more detail.
There's a plethora of things that we could still be learning, and there's always room to keep learning!
But thanks to The Property Mentors, we’ve had a light bulb moment, where you can say, 'Oh, yeah, I read about that. Now, this is how it applies.'"We hope you’ve enjoyed hearing from Tahlia and more importantly – particularly if you’re only just starting out – have taken inspiration from her learnings!
If you’d like to learn more about how to get started building long term wealth through Australian property, then take action and book in a discovery call with one of our specialist property mentors today, or – if you’re not quite ready – then why not purchase your own copy of Property Fit!
LIKE TO LEARN MORE?
Check out our Investor Intelligence podcast with Tahlia here:And if you’d like to hear from some of our other members, read more here:
Joshua Scott | Three properties by the age of 30
Peter Ward | What investment advice would you give you younger self?
