In fact, I think the stats are about 13% of the Australian population
are considered millionaires, meaning they've got a net worth over a million dollars. But
I would say almost all of them did it through property. And how
they did it was they bought a property many years ago and did nothing. Well,
they didn't do nothing. They didn't sell it, which is good. But the growth in the property from
the immigration and the lack of land supply created that million dollar net worth,
right? So I did it differently. I didn't do it with property. Back when I started, I
firstly, I knew that I had to underspend my
income. Without a doubt, that's the only way you can build wealth.
I don't know anyone that spent more than their income
and built wealth. This is not possible because there's a delta. There
has to be some money left over for you to then buy assets
or invest in a business or whatever it might be. So that's what I started to
do first. Rented a cheap car, rented out my rooms, room
shared. didn't go on lavish holidays, didn't buy lavish clothes,
and I just underspent my income to save money. I saved about $40,000 to
$50,000. I repatriated back to Australia, got into business with my dad in property. I
was selling houses, so I was making more money, but
it was still a job for me. It was six days a week, and of course, I continued to
underspend my income. And what I decided to do was that extra bit of money I
was saving, it allowed me to go into that new career without borrowing
any money. It allowed me to buy happiness, so to speak, and I talk about it in that book, Money
Buys Happiness. and I decided I need to put the
money away. So I could have bought real estate, but I didn't know where I was going
to live. I didn't want a mortgage to be anchored to. I
felt like it was going to corner me and hold me down,
having all that debt. And I don't like stress in my life. I don't like worry.
So I'm like, well, that's just going to create more of that. So I'm going to avoid that. What should I do is
I picked up this book by Warren Buffett, or it's actually by Alice Schroeder called
The Snowball, and it's about Warren Buffett's life. Fun fact, I'm going
to see Warren Buffett this week. I'm flying out Thursday to
go and see Warren Buffett. So that's cool. Anyway, I read this book and he was investing in
shares. And it really gave me this, like the penny dropped
for me that I understood that straight away. I was like, I get this concept. This makes sense for
me. Buying pieces of undervalued businesses. Ha ha, this is
better than buying a house. So I took some of that extra cash I was saving
from my job initially and then into the property game where I was marketing and
selling property, running a small business with my dad and I would always, if
I did a settlement or did a deal and got paid, I
would get paid about $10,000 or $12,000 back then each time I did a
real estate settlement and I'd take half of it and pay myself and
I'd take half and buy shares. And I did that, deal
in, deal out, deal in, deal out, deal in, deal out, deal
in, deal out. Every time I got paid, pay myself some, bought shares, pay
myself some, bought shares, pay myself some, bought shares. And
like I just played that game for quite a while, I still underspent
my income. So whilst my wife Alicia and I could go on holidays, she
was working full time as a paralegal, I was working six days a week. We
didn't go and buy Range Rovers. We still live in the same apartment
that we did 12 years ago. We still haven't left it. And there's a real secret
there with wealth creation, which is pretty much the sameness of sameness of
same. So the way that I invest my money
now is the same as what I did 15 years ago. The same place we live
in is the same we did 12 years ago. The same, the same. You would see
me in these episodes, I'm wearing the same t-shirts. The same cut, the
same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same. There's a lot of...
magic with wealth building, which is the same. Once
you figure out what works, why change it? And that's
what happens to people a lot. They'll change direction so
much. They just don't get any traction. And you see this in how many times
they shift where they live, what car they drive, what
clothes they're buying, what type of investments they're buying. They
do it over multiple businesses. Oh, there's another shiny business. I'll go there.
And they get no traction. So what happened to me when I was in the property industry and buying
these shares, I started to see my portfolio grow. And
my portfolio was probably at about $300,000 by then in 2014, maybe
$250,000. It wasn't massive because remember, I didn't buy a house. So I had the equity
that would have gone into a house and I was paying about $550 a week rent.
But I was also splitting it between my wife and her sister who was living with us at the time. So
my rent was like $200 a week. When you think about it, that's crazy low,
right? So I've always tried to keep my costs low It's just
the most effective way to almost guarantee you're
gonna get ahead It's easier to manage the
cost than it is to increase your income in my opinion. You have
more control over that and so 250,000 roughly
in the portfolio working six days a week in property and I
remember one day I sat down and thought oh I
want to become a millionaire. Now I want to do it. What
do I have to do? How long is it going to take me? And I remember sitting in the office at 7 o'clock
at night. I pulled up an Excel spreadsheet and I put in 250,000, whatever
the portfolio was. I'm saving 25 grand a year, buying stocks.
I have no debt. This is my income. I think it's probably going to stay very
similar. Hopefully it goes up if I can do more deals. And I
realized it was going to take me like 15 years to become a millionaire. And
at the time, I was probably about 30, 31. I was like, oh my god,
I want to be a millionaire at 45, 46. Like, what am I going to do?
And I realized, I can't cut them anymore. I
still want to have a reasonable life. But I was
like, well, I need to increase my income. So how was I going to do that? And
then my sister introduced me to a business model called network marketing, accidentally
fell into it. And I tried the products, got in shape, actually went on to win a
bodybuilding competition using the products, which is really life-changing for me. And then
I helped other people get the products and use them. And so
my wife and I with my sister built this network marketing business on the side with
the objective to increase my income by $25,000 a
year, which is, by the way, only 500 bucks a week. It's not like heaps.
It's like, what if we could keep doing my real estate deals six
days a week and then make an extra 500 bucks a week network
marketing and take the extra money and invest it into shares. And by doing that, I
was doubling my saving rate and doubling my investing rate, which means I was going to
cut the time in half. So I was going to be a millionaire when it's seven
and a half years instead of 15 years. It was simple math.
So I was like, this is going to be the strategy. This is my strategy. This is
it. So we got after it, right? I stayed working. I
didn't jump out of my job. I would do appointments in
the office and go downstairs and get on the phone, do network marketing, go back upstairs, do an
appointment, do network marketing. It's just boom, boom, boom. On weekends,
we'd drive and fly to Sydney to learn more about network marketing. We would do things
on the weekend. In the evenings, I'd pick Alicia up from work, go home, sit in the car, do
the work, do the work, do the work. And we did that for four
years from when we started in 2014, 2018. And in that
timeframe, we reinvested a lot back into building that business, but
what we developed is about $180,000 a year of extra money
on the side while we're in our jobs. And I realized at
that point, we were able to add about another half a million dollars to
the portfolio, maybe 400,000. And by the time
I left my job in the property business in 2018, the portfolio was at about 650,000. And
as I left that in 2018, by
the time 2020 rolled around, the portfolio had lifted from
650 to 700,000 up to a million dollars. So
I left my job, went full-time in a network marketing business in
2018. The portfolio was at about 650,000, was paying as passive income
from dividends, which is what allowed us to get out of our jobs as well. It wasn't just the side
hustle, it was a combination of that for me to pay my rent and everything, and
then also the side hustle of 180 grand a year. Alicia left her job.
So we're basically financially independent. And the portfolio then grew as
COVID hit. And I remember picking up my phone one day before I wrote this book. I
was like, I really want to write a book about how we did this. Because if you think
about it, we became financially free out of the rat race in
our 30s. completely free, which is
unbelievable, really, when you think about it. And back then, especially. And
I had a million-dollar portfolio. I was like, well, this is interesting. Didn't own any
property. I'd like to be able to get it to a million bucks before I write this book.
And I remember before we launched this book down in Corumban, I
looked at my phone, pulled up my portfolio, and it was like $998,000. It was
just sitting there. I was watching it.
I was watching it and watching it. I was like, oh my God, I want it to be a million bucks. I want it to be a
million bucks. I scrolled the phone down, hit the record button, and
I recorded. I'm sure if I pull up the recording now on my phone and go back
far enough, I could find it. And I recorded it as it clicked over
to a million bucks. And I remember sending the video to my little sister and saying, look at this, it's
a million dollars. And at that time, it's like you kind of, you
have this fantasy of what happens when you become a millionaire. You're like, oh, my life's going to change
and it's going to be amazing. And then the marching band never came
in. And I
was like, oh, we're millionaires. That's it.
No debt. Million dollar net worth. Free.
And then I wrote that book about it, about how other people
could do the same thing. And I've been helping people ever since to do the same thing, following
the same system, the same strategy as what we've done. And
it's in that book. And then beyond that, we do other things. We're
now multimillionaires. But what's interesting is the strategy really changes.
Underspend your income, find ways to add extra money with a side hustle
or business, invest the proceeds consistently into the same sort
of asset class that you understand, and be patient. And it will grow
over time. Those three steps of underspend your income, find
ways to make extra money, and invest in assets that you understand are the three components
and steps that I talk about in this book. And they're repeated in this book.
There's two extra steps in here for mindset and mentorship, which speeds things
up. But the concepts remain
the same. And that's where the sameness comes into
wealth building that people really underestimate that gets
them in a lot of trouble because they get bored. And one of the
things you got to do when you're trying to build wealth is keep the mundane exciting.
So all that stuff kind of compounds over time, but it started with
that decision to make the first million. But
you see when I did it, there was an actual measurable like,
shit, I need to increase my income here. Okay, now we need to invest it. Now
we need to not do anything else. And I think it's in the not doing anything else
and sticking to your knitting and focused on what's working and
repeating it, that's where the magic lies. That's the
story of how we became millionaires initially. That's a
real-life story. It's in our books. Thanks for listening to Money Grows on
Trees. If you enjoyed the episode, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts
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miss an episode. And if you're serious about building wealth, make sure to
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