They quit their jobs, took their kids out of school, and lived in a caravan for a year.

Not because they were escaping life, but because they'd built enough financial freedom to stop and ask what comes next.

Kelly and Ryan Dawson did the thing a lot of people dream about.

They pressed pause on work, packed up their lives, and spent 12 months traveling Australia as a family of four.

Oh, my gosh, we should do this.

And I was like, like what?

Like, buy a caravan like this?

He's like, no, we should go to Australia and we should travel around.

And it was like, okay.

Whoa, whoa.

Like, yeah.

So we just started to figure out what we needed to do to make it happen, really.

And they did it brick by brick, building enough financial independence to hit that pause, not stop forever, but still to take more breathing space than many people ever get the luxury of.

After that breathing space, they decided they were ready to make even bigger life changes.

They may have hit that reset once, but now they were ready to hit that reset button even harder to build the life that truly gives them meaning.

We had, like, a tiny amount of staff, and yet we're probably the, you know, the happiest we've ever been.

And so it made you sort of go, wow, do we need to have a big house?

Or, you know, all the extra things that you might think you need.

So after taking the risk to stop, zoom out, and ask what really mattered to their family, they came back with a very clear answer.

Not retirement forever, but more meaningful careers.

Being truly present with their kids, building an investment strategy that supported their life, not one that took it over.

So welcome to Making Sense.

It's the podcast people who want financial freedom without giving up their coffee.

I'm Francis Cook, a financial journalist and fellow financial freedom seeker who makes money simple for you because it's one thing to want to change direction and another to have the financial ability to actually do it.

So here's how they made it happen.

This episode of Making Sense is supported by Odoo.

The all in one solution to make running your business smoother and more affordable.

Go to odoo.com that's o d double o dot com for.

For more.

Welcome, Kelly, to the Pod.

It's so nice to have you on again because we talked yonks ago now.

You have actually not just been working towards financial freedom.

You've had a taste of it, went and lived in a caravan for a year.

The last time we talked, you were just about to do it, which is so exciting.

Now you've done it.

What sparked the idea for you that you first wanted to do that and actually thinking, not just you want to do it, but you can do it.

We kind of had this feeling post Covid that we were a bit burnt out and tired and we were looking for something different, so needed a change.

We'd both been working really hard right through Covid and alongside of that, building our property business.

So it had been sort of a pretty busy time, really, since we had our kids.

Yeah, we just had this feeling that there has to be something more.

And so one of the things we started doing was we started looking at ways we could improve our life at home.

So initially, the idea of traveling or going overseas or the whole caravan trip, it didn't start with that.

It just started with maybe having some more fun in our weekends.

And to do that, we looked at buying a caravan.

So that's kind of what sparked it off.

And then once we started looking, you know, as social media does, we started getting pages come up of people traveling around in Australia in caravans.

And I said to Ryan, like, oh, my gosh, these people have a really cool caravan.

Ryan took my phone off me and started scrolling through their Instagram and was like, oh, my gosh, we should do this.

And I was like, like what?

Like, buy a caravan like this?

He's like, no, we should go to Australia and we should travel around.

And it was like, okay, whoa, whoa, hang on a minute.

But then we started to look into it and we thought, no, that's something that's really cool.

And, yeah, so we just started to figure out what we needed to do to make it happen.

Really, I love that when you.

What's the old thing of, like, it's one of the most important financial decisions you'll make is who you partner up with, which is so true, but also just a life decision, because it's so fun to be like, hey, here's a cool thing I found, and you hand it over to your partner and they go, awesome.

How can we make this happen?

You know, just the enthusiasm to run with it.

That's quite invigorating, isn't it?

Yeah.

Well, let's start at the beginning then, because I think a lot of people talk about the idea of financial independence or financial freedom, and you are obviously living your version of it now, which I love, and we'll get into how you built it and all that good stuff.

But I want to start with what is financial freedom to you?

Because I think it can be quite different to different people.

Before we left, we kind of thought that it probably was more like what our experience was, traveling, where you're sort of full time, financially free, you know, you've got all your income coming in that can keep you on the road or keep you traveling and not working.

Whereas we realized partly through the traveling was that we're not the kind of people who can sit still for long periods of time.

Like, we're quite busy.

We like to be active, we like to be contributing.

And yes, I don't think we are the kind of people who could just stop working and sit under a palm tree.

So that was kind of something good to learn about ourselves.

I think for us, financial freedom is just having the option to not have to work and to be able to do what you want with your time, but also to be able to take time out like we did.

For us, it's not necessarily about not having a job or not working or not running a business.

It's about options.

Hundred percent.

And that's very similar to my version.

What's the old saying that don't retire from something, Retirement to something.

Yeah, yeah.

And I feel very much the same in that I'm not really.

I think I'd really enjoy laying on a beach for two weeks.

Yeah.

And then I'd be done.

Yeah, yeah.

I had someone comment on.

I'd made a passing comment on one of my social media posts the other day about posting it in my lunch break, and they were like, you don't have a lunch break.

Yes, I do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, and I'm so lucky that I could start this business because I had a different level of financial freedom that I'd had before in my life.

And it's saying this business was risky and I had the financial means to do so, and I was so lucky on that.

But I still actually work quite hard now and I definitely have things like a lunch break because I enjoy it, because I find it energizing because I enjoy building something.

So is that sort of a similar sort of idea where you're at?

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, like, people talk about property as being passive income, and I think it's passive to a degree.

But we've worked really hard to build a property business and we kind of want to continue with building a property business and maybe a sort of a slightly different way to what we have in the past, but that is not going to be something that you can do sort of sitting under a palm tree.

Yeah, I agree.

I see a lot of advertising around the idea of property passive income.

And I'm always a bit like property can be an amazing investment.

Yeah.

We will get into how you've made that work because I think you've got some great strategies.

Um, but it's, it's definitely.

I wouldn't call it passive for 90% of cases.

Yeah, no, no, totally.

It's not passive in the sense that you just leave it alone and you make all this money.

I mean, it's been like a really.

At the outset, it's a hugely active strategy.

It's.

It can become almost like a full time job.

It's not like you can just sit and forget.

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.

Okay.

So to go back to that moment, you'd looked on your phone, you'd seen some people living the caravan life.

You knew you enjoyed it because you'd been doing it on weekends.

And your husband's into the idea.

So how do you get from this could be cool.

I think we have the finances that we could maybe make it work to going and living in a caravan for a year with the kids.

How much planning does that take?

A lot.

So I think it was probably about 18 months worth of planning for us, first of all, seeing if it was feasible financially, like, what would it cost to do it?

So we spent a lot of time with spreadsheets figuring out how much it would cost to buy a car and buy a caravan and how much we, like, we analyzed our spending and how much would it cost us for groceries each week and how much do we think petrol would cost us each week?

So we kind of got like a template going of how many kilometers we'd be roughly doing each week to figure out how much petrol would cost in the, you know.

Fantastically organized.

Yeah.

Ryan's a spreadsheets guy.

He runs everything.

So I'm not the spreadsheets person.

But thankfully he's got that all under control.

Every relationship needs one spreadsheets person.

It shall never be me, but you need one.

Yeah.

So he kind of modeled it all for us of what a year on the road would cost us.

And we had different scenarios.

What would six months look like?

What would 18 months look like if we did this?

And we kind of planned where we wanted to get to as well.

So we sort of came out as a year being about the right amount for us to see all the sites we wanted to see and then, you know, work out for us from a financial standpoint as well.

Plus also Ryan had the option to take a year off work, so.

And still keep his job.

So he was.

That was a factor too.

And then it gave us the security of coming back to New Zealand and knowing that one of us at least still had a job in place.

So.

So you go into this caravan life, got the two kids.

Are you comfortable saying their ages?

Yeah, 10 and 12.

So that's a really fun age with kids because you're not quite at that.

Super crunchy.

Oh, we're about to go to uni.

Can't do anything there.

But they're old enough to be somewhat sufficient.

Yeah.

And I think the year away has made them so much more confident and self sufficient than they were before.

They had to learn a whole bunch of new skills and interacting with complete strangers.

So doing something like this pushes you right out of your comfort zone.

You don't know anybody.

The kids didn't know anybody and they kind of learned strategies to make friends on the road.

And it was kind of cool to see them coming out of their shell and just going, oh.

Like it was quite funny.

They'd see another caravan and it would have bunks because you can tell by the window arrangement at the back of the caravan.

They're like, that caravan's got bunks in the back.

There must be kids there.

I see friends incoming.

Yeah.

So they'd be like, hi, do you guys want to play?

And yeah, I don't think they would have so much done that before with complete strangers.

So I think it was really good for.

For their confidence.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

That's so good.

Being able to spot it from the window arrangement.

That's how you know they're getting seasoned travelers.

What is it like to plan out this year of travel?

Because I imagine there's things you wanted to see.

Yes.

In a certain extent life would also continue with things like school, I would imagine.

And you probably had to sort of stay in touch a little bit for things like your investment properties.

So.

So what was that like in terms of the planning of here's what we want to do, here's the life continues?

Parts like, how did you plan all that?

The school was one of our primary considerations because we knew that they would have to be homeschooled on the road.

So we planned that out pretty well.

We worked with their school and sort of figured out what we really needed to make sure we covered.

School was really supportive.

They kind of thought, well, this is a fantastic opportunity for these kids to get out and see the world.

So I was, you know, quite.

Yeah, we were quite, I guess, kind of surprised that they.

You never know.

Yeah, I feel like it can go either way sometimes with some of those educational people.

Yeah.

In terms of managing other stuff.

So the property business, for.

On the day to day, we don't have to do an awful lot.

So we have property managers in place.

They manage the day to day of the property.

So we Airbnb our own house.

So that, again, we set that up with a property manager because we knew there would be times where we wouldn't be contactable, and so we had a very, very minimal role to play.

What about in terms of the things you went and saw, the things you did?

What were some highlights from the trip?

Swimming with the whale sharks in Western Australia was a real highlight.

That was something that's kind of like a bucket list experience.

Ticked off.

So that was fantastic.

The boat picks you up, they take you out.

You go quite far out.

You go beyond the reef.

So it's quite.

It was quite rough the day we were out there.

You have to leap off the boat into the open ocean, and the boat just goes off.

And then the whale sharks, they drop you near the whale sharks.

They've got a spotter plane out that spots where they are, so they know roughly where the shark is going to be.

And then they just dump you in the ocean and the boat pulls away.

Oh, my gosh.

Yes, it is a little scary.

It was scarier than I expected.

You kind of imagined as being quite serene and it was a little bit.

Yeah.

Nerve wracking doing it.

And then, yeah, they drop you near the whale shark.

The whale shark sort of swims past you and you watch go by and, yeah, it's a pretty neat experience because there's so many.

So huge and so beautiful.

Yeah.

And it was like.

The boys just loved it.

Like, they became such confidence in us while we were away.

So they were allowed to go as well.

Yeah, they were.

Some of the cruisers will take kids.

I think it depends on their age and their swimming ability because they do definitely need to be very confident in the water.

But there were some quite young kids, like, I would say probably maybe six or seven in the water with us.

Yeah.

So kids can definitely do it.

The whole.

I mean, Western Australia is incredible.

I think that people spend.

Especially from New Zealand, we travel to the east coast a lot.

Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane.

But a lot of us don't get over to the west coast, and it's just the most incredible place.

There's so much beautiful scenery, particularly if you get off the beaten track a little bit.

The Ngalu coast was one of our favorites.

Just like incredible snorkeling, getting to snorkel with turtles.

And you Know, corals and amazing scenery.

Some of the hikes and things we did just.

Yeah, absolutely stunning.

Just so different to New Zealand.

And, yeah, I think that the west is really the.

The part to see.

So I guess, you know, if a Kiwis wanted to travel, I reckon that's it.

That's the spot to get to.

What an amazing experience to get at that stage in your life.

I mean, I still remember because my mum's British, my dad is a New Zealander, so the first bit of my life, I was in England and we had quite a few trips out to New Zealand and we got to swim with dolphins at one stage.

And I still remember that as like a very formative memory of this really incredible experience I had when I was really young.

And it really opened my eyes to, like, there's.

There's these amazing.

I mean, imagine a kid from England.

Yeah.

Very different.

Yeah.

And it really opened my eyes to.

There's.

There's so many different parts of the world.

There's so many different things I want to see, want to do.

And to have that happen at a young age, I think, really then makes you more attuned to other things happening around you that you might have missed just being a kid.

There's a lot happening and to be able to offer that to your kids, to the other kids that were on that trip.

Have you noticed much of a difference in your kids after that?

You did say they've become more confident.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I mean, I think that they're more curious and more open to exploring opportunities like this.

So I think that it'll affect them in the long run as they get older.

I mean, they're still young, but I think it's like you're older, they'll probably be more willing to experience things, trying things that are different to the normal.

I suppose.

I think that they will be prepared to sort of challenge some of those norms around what you should do as a family, because it can be kind of scary to do those things.

But they've had that basic experience and I think they'll build upon that as they get older as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

What about the flip side of things?

Was it ever tricky?

Because a caravan's quite a small space?

Yes, but to have four of you and especially sort of pretty preteens, I'm sure they're lovely children, but I'm not lovely all the time.

I don't expect everyone to be lovely all the time.

Being in close quarters like that for a year and traveling and pushing out of comfort zones.

Were there down times?

Yes.

Go on, hit me.

We had some moments so like we, we had a really clear idea of what we wanted to see.

And there's some amazing things like national parks and hikes and, and views you want to see and sunsets you want to watch and sunrises you want to watch and kids don't always want to do those things with you.

So we had to be realistic.

I was like, I really want to walk this, you know, 12 kilometer hike.

And then they're like no, I'm not doing that.

So you have to be prepared to sort of move with it.

I mean we got them to do a lot of hikes so they were really good.

But like there was one.

To get to the southernmost point of Australia we would have had to do this huge hike.

I think it was about 20Ks and you could stay overnight.

But I hadn't.

Well, wasn't that organised.

So we realized like once we checked it out and we had all the details that we were.

There was just no way so we were going to get them to walk 20 kilometres in a day.

We had to accept that the most southern point of Australia wasn't going to.

Of the mainland anyway.

Wasn't going to be, you know, for

us for the next trip.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe when they're a bit older or we're a bit more organized.

When you're having your empty nesta trip that the kids have left, you'll be like right now.

Yeah, yeah.

So there was stuff like that.

I mean school wasn't always easy.

So it's hard when you're on the road because you have to fit it in around all the amazing things you want to do.

And sometimes it means doing it in the car, which isn't fun.

Or sometimes it means like you're at a caravan park and there's other kids out playing or there's people in the pool.

It's just near the caravan and the kids are like we want to go play in the pool.

So.

Well, hang on.

Because we did this thing this morning, we now have to sit down and do our schoolwork or whatever.

And so that can be really challenging as well.

And then just the, I mean dynamics of having to be the teacher is.

Can be hard at times.

I mean anyone who homeschooled through Covid will understand that you getting your kids to do their schoolwork isn't always easy.

Yeah, I mean this is something we were talking about before we sat down because my mum was a teacher and she would sometimes she was a maths teacher.

So it was very easy to mark homeworks.

Teachers are going to hate me for saying that.

Very easy for me to know which was the correct answer.

Teachers don't come for me.

And so she would sometimes get me to help her with her marking.

And I have so much respect for teachers because the amount of work that goes on to try and teach someone properly and check the work and make sure it's all going on is.

Yeah, no, that's hard.

I also imagine there's an interesting dynamic.

You know, you mentioned the dynamic of having to, you know, be the teacher, which would be quite interesting.

Dynamic shift.

But the dynamic of being in each other's pockets constantly.

Pros and cons, surely it was better

than I expected, I think.

But I mean we have two boys who fight and that didn't stop.

So just because you're on the road they don't stop fighting.

They still poke each other in the back of the car.

And on some of the long road journeys we like did start to go a little bit nuts.

Cause we were going, come on guys, just leave each other alone.

We have to do the six hour drive to get where we need to go if we wanna see this thing.

Please just stop touching each other.

What's the classic mum line like?

I don't care who started it, I'm gonna finish it.

Yeah, pretty much.

So there were good days and bad days.

There were definite where we.

Especially at the start.

The adjustment at the start is quite hard.

I think that's something that we didn't quite expect is that you sort of think it's going to be like this really great experience and they're going to be really grateful for this, you know, travel and getting to spend all this quality time with you.

But the first probably six or eight weeks they were like, what have you done?

We're in a.

You're like we're missing our friends, we're missing our cousins, you know, we're missing our grandparents, you know, like we want to go home.

And we knew like we'd seen other people who had traveled, you know, on social media, said the same thing, that it would take a little while to settle in.

But that was a little bit harder than we thought.

The adjusting to van life I suppose and that close space that you don't have your own bedroom.

Everybody's sleeping in a caravan.

The boys had bunks so that was sort of.

Their bunk was their personal space.

So I guess that took a bit of adjusting as well for them.

Oh bet.

So as you went through the trip what do you think has been the big.

Has what.

Has there been a big change or takeaway for either yourself or as a family from this experience?

It makes you reassess your whole life and what you want and, you know, how you want to spend your days.

And also, you know, financially, it makes a huge change into your perspectives as well, because we.

One of the things that I guess kind of surprised us was living in a caravan.

You can't have much stuff, so you're limited by weight.

You can only have so many kilos of weight in your caravan to legally be able to tow the thing around.

So it means that you can't take very much in the way of personal belongings with you because you've got your food and your water and your.

All your essential supplies.

You have to have your clothes.

But even then, we probably lived on sort of one.

One bag, roughly, of personal belongings each, and we were, you know, it was probably one of our best years ever, like, in terms of being happy.

We had, like, a tiny amount of stuff, and yet we're probably the, you know, the happiest we've ever been.

And so it made you sort of go, wow, we're living in a, you know, caravan.

It's tiny.

It's not like.

It's like one bedroom, you know, and we have one bag of stuff each, and we are incredibly happy.

So it makes you reflect on, you know, do we need to have a big house or, you know, all the extra things that you might think you need.

It gives you an opportunity to reflect on that.

And one thing I realized when I came home and unpacked all my clothes, I was like, why do I have so many clothes?

Because I've had one bag of clothes for the whole year and, you know, like, a couple of pairs of shoes.

And I. I've unpacked all these boxes of stuff, and I'm like, what am I gonna do with all this stuff?

I don't.

I don't really need it.

So as you came back to normal life, then, was there anything you changed?

Um, I think we're in the process of changing it.

I mean, we've only been back four months, and so we are reassessing.

Like, we've taken some time just to adjust, and, yeah, we're still figuring out exactly what it is we want to do from here on out.

Before we left, we were contemplating building a new family home, a much larger home, and now we're sort of like, do we really want to make that financial commitment?

Because that's going to stop Us, maybe from doing more experiences like this, so.

But definitely being more aware of what we spend.

It's probably like a bad thing to say on a financial podcast, but I love it.

We haven't been the best with.

We've had a budget, but we haven't closely tracked it in the past.

But going to Australia and traveling, obviously you have a limited budget.

Like, we.

Neither of us were.

We had to manage that really carefully to ensure we could get around Australia for a year, and we didn't run out of money.

So we had a budget in place.

We had a app that we were using to track our spending every single week.

And that made us much more conscious about what we're spending.

And we've continued with that.

We've reset our budget now that we've come home, and we're actually following that much more strictly than we have done in the past.

And that's kind of been a big factor.

I think that'll help us moving forward to be more aware overall of our spending.

I'm so with you, though, because sometimes those, like, basics, like, to be honest, but, like, they're so easy to neglect.

I catch myself doing it all the time.

I hit reset on this stuff all the time, where I'm just like, I have no idea what's going on with my daily budget.

I need to have a proper look at this.

Check the subscriptions, check the power bill, check what's going on with this stuff, and is everything going the place I want it to get?

It's so easy to get out of touch on that stuff.

But I do think once you've had that experience of seeing how powerful it can be, just keeping those basics on lock, that then let you to do very unbasic things with your life, get you to do really fun things going and swimming with whale sharks.

You know, you see the real tangible benefit, and it brings you back into that more disciplined frame, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

I imagine having that space and doing such a big adventure.

Do you come back to life and have a little bit of a change, a little bit of a pivot in your financial life as well?

You've talked about some of the things you change in terms of, I don't need this much stuff.

But what about the financial side of things?

Are you changing that too?

Yeah, I guess a little bit.

I mean, every dollar you spend on something like this is what coming home and looking at all the stuff we were taking out of boxes, I'm like, this used to be.

And this could have been an experience, and now we're very conscious about those experiences because those feelings of being able to swim with the turtles or swim with the whale sharks, you can't.

Those things just can't compare to those kind of feelings.

So I think definitely a lot more consciousness about that, but also probably more of a shift to being able to fast track our financial freedom.

So figuring out ways that we can create other forms of income or expand upon the income sources we already have to be able to have more of those options and to be able to, you know, maybe not necessarily take a whole year off, but to be able to create more of those kinds of experiences.

This episode of Making sense is supported by Odoo because they're all about making business smarter, easier to manage and more affordable.

Odoo is a software platform that gives you access to over 70 apps to help you manage your website, accounting and invoicing, sales, inventory and way more.

But instead of death by a thousand cuts, where you pay for all of those apps individually, it's just one affordable subscription which starts from $34.40 Aussie dollars per user per month.

It's not just about the cost either.

It's having all of those apps in one integrated dashboard to make your business or side hustle possible.

Let your software work for you so you can handle the important stuff.

Try Odoo for free for 15 days, no card details required.

That's O D double O dot com for more.

Okay, let's dive into the money a bit.

Yeah.

So you like property investment.

That is your main financial freedom engine.

It is, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so run me through that leading up to.

Because I know that you have a slightly.

A pivot in strategy, slightly, shall we say?

So leading up to the trip, what was the strategy?

What, what level of financial freedom as well, had you achieved through property investment

to take it back sort of almost to the beginning, I suppose, is that when we started investing in property, our primary focus was to invest for a secure retirement.

So we kind of hadn't really thought about like financial freedom or retiring early.

Really.

We thought we might retire a few years early, but we hadn't really thought about early retirement as being something that might happen in our 40s that kind of wasn't really on our radar.

So we had set out to build a property portfolio that would enable us to have an extra income when we retired, maybe in our 60s or, you know, if we were lucky, maybe our 50s.

So we started investing in property when we were in our late 20s.

And over time we built up to have six properties with seven income streams.

So one of them's got two, two units on it.

Building that enabled us to have some options that you don't normally have.

And then we also own our own home so that I know people don't sort of think of it as an investment, but we've used our home as leverage to be able to build the investment property portfolio.

And while we were away, when that

happens, I do think of it as an investment because I'll say, I have gone on record before saying your home isn't an investment.

Yeah.

In that moment when you use it to build investments.

Yes, it is.

Yeah.

It's just that most people don't.

Yeah, exactly.

And so using that home was, you know, has been a big part of the, the strategy for us.

And again, I mean, when we bought it, that wasn't sort of really the plan, but we had.

Our plan was to try and pay off that home as quickly as humanly possible so that we could have, you know, have more options, particularly to have time off when our kids are born and that kind of thing.

So the house kind of formed the basis for the wider property investment strategy.

And in terms of financial freedom, so at the moment it doesn't really give us an awful lot of passive income.

Like our focus has been on paying off the debt.

So we, you know, with the longer term goal in mind.

So we have.

Our investments are on principal and interest so that we can pay down the debt.

So basically the majority of the income from the properties has gone back into paying off debt so that in the future we could have, you know, a, a larger income from them.

So we do have some income from the property, but not a huge amount of income at the moment.

But we do have the option that if we sold a couple of them, we could generate a fairly decent income from the properties.

So, yeah, that's kind of where we're at with that, that strategy.

Yeah.

And walk me through how it worked, building that up, because six properties, seven incomes, as you say, it's a split number there, but you know, in that number.

And you did that.

Tell me if I'm wrong here.

No big inheritance.

No, you know, help out on that sort of front.

It was just getting your salary, turning it into investments, building it up.

So walk me through how you managed to do that, because I think for a lot of people, they see property prices and just feel so overwhelmed by the idea of doing it.

I'm not saying it's easy, but it's doable, right?

Oh, absolutely.

So we started, you know, obviously with the first house.

We put a lot of effort into renovating that house.

So when we bought it, we bought what we could afford.

It wasn't fancy.

It was an old bungalow that needed work.

And so we spent the first few years after that, after buying that, just renovating it and making it more livable, but also adding value to it.

So we did.

And.

And during that time, actually also we did do property coaching.

So we signed up for a property education course and educated ourself about property investment, which was kind of what we learned about the idea of being able to leverage off that house to buy investment.

So, like, one of the things I always talk about with people is like, educate yourself on property investment, because it can be so you can make huge mistakes, and we feel like it was well worth our while.

How do you find good education, though?

Because there's a lot of people selling courses, some of them extremely expensive and I think huge varieties in quality for one.

Make sure it's somebody who's actually doing it themselves, has built the kind of investment portfolio that you want to have, because then, you know, like, they're the real deal.

But I also think that you should be really careful about things that are like heaps of the ones.

We went to see the free seminars for when we were interested in learning about property investment.

They were selling something, so they would be selling apartments off the plans or certain types of investment buildings or houses, and they stood to make money out of it.

So that was kind of where it's like, it's packaged up as being property coaching.

But actually it's somebody who has an interest in selling you a particular type of property investment.

And I think we quite quickly realized that that wasn't a track we wanted to go down.

And it is expensive.

Ours was expensive, but we.

We feel like it was well worth the investment to really understand.

Like, we, we before we did their training, like, we were looking at buying investment properties, and we realized once we'd done the training, like, we could have made big mistakes that would have cost us a lot more than what we ended up investing in coaching.

So it's a bit like what they say with accountants.

Right?

Like a good accountant should save you more than they cost.

Yeah, yeah.

You mention about you did some renovations.

Yes.

So the.

The strategies that I've picked up from you so far is a.

You know, when you've got your own home and you can sort of use debt from your own home, as you say, leverage into an investment and then also spotting those houses for maybe, you know, there's A little bit of value.

You can add sweat equity.

Yes.

Renovating, making it better, which I also think works out for everyone to improve our housing stock.

God, some of our housing stock is bad, so love when people come into this and adding value because it needs doing.

And if there's a financial incentive.

Cool.

Great.

How do you spot the sort of property that could make for a good renovation versus one that could be an expensive disaster?

Because I have heard some disaster stories.

To be able to grow a portfolio, we basically had to buy, like, houses that were run down and needed renovation so that we could add value and then be able to increase the value of that property, revalue it, pull the deposit funds back out again, and then use that money to buy and renovate another property.

So we were looking for effectively, like, worst house on the street, classic.

And.

But having said that, we also weren't looking for ones that had structural issues.

So we would go for a house that was structurally sound but cosmetically bad.

So you could.

You'd find houses like people.

People get really easily put off buying houses that look bad.

People want houses that are nice and tidy that the work's already done on, but you make money on houses that need the work to be done on them.

And so we would go and find a house that.

It didn't really bother us too much what it was like.

It could have holes in the walls, the carpets could be destroyed, the bathroom light.

If the house is structurally sound, like, if the bathroom is horrible and the kitchen's horrible.

Those are all just cosmetic things.

You can just rip that out and put a new one in, and it just transforms the house.

So, yeah, the key thing, I think, from our perspective, was structurally sound, but cosmetically messy.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

It's funny, isn't it?

Because you often do need, especially if you're keeping it as a rental or something.

You do need stuff in there that's quite hard wearing.

So it actually can turn into, I think, sometimes a pro, where you're getting to turn it into exactly what you want it to be and make sure it's exactly what you need.

And yet it also works out financially as well.

So win, win.

Right.

But it is work.

How much time do you think it would take on those sorts of Renault for on average?

Oh, gosh.

I mean, it would depend.

It depends on the house, you know, so we did two.

We did two houses at one stage.

We did two at the same time.

The core part of the time.

Ryan took six weeks of annual leave, and we did the full renovation Ourselves and that was us full time really.

I mean Ryan was working sort of like 12 hours plus seven days a week for that six weeks period.

And I was helping, yeah, I was helping him when I could.

We had a one year old so it was kind of, you know, helping between taking care of him and farming him out to the grandparents wherever we could.

I was gonna say how mobile was the one year old?

Cause that they can be very different levels of mobility and that makes a lot of difference to how much you can bring them round.

Yeah, well, we kind of pulled out all stops and had help with him and also we just had like a porticot as part of our, as our renovation kit was a porticot.

So he would come with us sometimes and just nap on, on site and yeah, we just made.

Come and see how hard mum and dad work to build this life.

Yeah, and they still do, they still do come with us.

And now, now it's like sometimes it's a little bit harder but they, they, you know, we'll do jobs and we'll give them pocket money for helping us out.

But also they get to see how the whole business works, really.

Like they've met our tenants and they've got to come and fix things with us at the houses and they sort of get an idea for how our whole business works.

And we're quite open with them sort of about the whole purpose of it, to sort of help fund our lifestyles.

So I think they're starting to get a bit of an understanding and they still don't like coming out and having to do work.

But

what's the old thing?

You'll thank me someday.

Yeah, I do think it's really useful for kids to see, see how parents help build their life and to include them in those things.

You know, I, I'm, I'm in such two minds it for my own life because running my own business and working from home.

I really like to make sure that when I'm with the kids, I'm with the kids.

Yeah, I try to be like in my zone of wherever I am is where I am.

So when I'm the kids are, you know, off at school or whatever, I am in business mode and I am focused on that.

And then I try, I'm not always perfect at it, but when the kids are there I try to be like, focus on the kids at the same time to be having business conversations around them for them to sometimes see me proofing through videos or responding to contractors or people that I've got a business relationship.

With.

And the four year old now is at a point where he's interested in things and he'll ask me about stuff and I'll say, well, Mum talks about money and teaches people about it online.

And so here's a thing that I need to do in order to make that happen.

And he's.

Well, at least he appears interested.

I don't know, he might just be kissing my butt a little bit because he does love hanging out with mum and he'll pretend being interested about anything.

But I think it's useful for them to get that exposure of.

My life isn't just hanging out on a playground with you, kidlet, it's all this other stuff that I do so that when you score a goal in soccer, I can go and get you a Hot Wheels to say congrats.

And it's.

I think it's really useful for them to get that taste of real life too, from quite a young age.

Yeah, I think, I think so.

Mm.

And you mentioned, and very much in passing, that you might be changing your property strategy a bit as well.

Yeah.

To give you a bit more time.

Talk me through that.

In the past we've been kind of a bit anxious about selling the property.

So we built a portfolio and then once you've got it, it's kind of scary to let it go.

And so we did a few years ago look at maybe selling some of the properties to, well, free up some equity and that would either enable us to pay off debt and increase passive income or also maybe to go into a strategy of property trading.

So that's sort of all flipping, you know, buy, renovate, sell.

We actually enjoy renovating houses, so we, we kind of wanted to maybe explore that as an option as well.

So not just having the buy and holds, but to, you know, buy, renovate, sell.

Then obviously the aim is to make a profit on the properties you sell and we can use that to pay off debt against the other properties and, you know, just again, incre that income that's coming in to get us close to that financial freedom goal.

Okay, so that's in the future now.

Yeah.

So we're just working with our mortgage broker at the moment to try and do a bit of a restructure and very much a work in progress at the moment.

But I think it's just the having been on the trip, it's given us the motivation to now get over our fear of selling and take the action to.

To, you know, make that happen.

Yeah.

And you also had a bit of a career rethink because like you mentioned, I love the wording.

You used a bit of a glitch.

Been there.

We can have glitches in the old career.

So I had a bit of a glitch.

Had this great timing, frankly, of heading away.

Yeah.

So something that I always wanted to do and was kind of my motivation.

I don't know if I told you before previously, but I went to law school and one of my motivations of going to law school was that I wanted to eventually get into politics.

So I studied law and politics again.

It was one of those moments where something came up online.

So Ryan was looking online and an ad came up for local body election campaigning.

And so they were looking for people to apply for local body positions.

Yeah, saw the ad, decided, yeah, actually now is a good time.

You know, just want to change careers.

And politics is something I wanted to do.

And I kind of sort of thought, well, if I can get into that now, you know, it works quite well.

And being in the local body space, it also fits in quite nicely with our, you know, wanting to be there when the kids are little.

I mean, it's a local position rather than taking up a position or trying to go for a position in Wellington where, you know, you have to be away from home a lot, Being able to do something in the local community stood out as a good, you know, option for me.

So, yeah, I also feel like, as well, like, obviously, I feel like this is the same for everyone.

Politics often comes up in daily life now far more than it used to.

There's a lot happening.

Yeah.

And whenever people are talking to me about things and then feeling depressed about the state of the world or worried about things, I'm often like, well, A, did you vote in your local elections?

Because a lot of people didn't, but B, can you?

You don't necessarily have to stand for the local body politics, but just to be involved in any way.

I think for.

For just being a single person, just an individual in the world, we can often have far more impact if we say, what is happening in my local area and how can I change that?

You can have quite a big impact if you focus on that and it really stops that sort of spiral feeling of, oh, God, it's all going hell in a hand basket.

You know, you're doing something, you feel empowered and you actually.

It's not just the feeling of doing something.

You often actually are.

You can achieve quite big changes in that area.

I mean, I think local politics is underrated.

What about you?

Yeah, I agree.

I Think there is an opportunity to have a big impact in your local community.

The local boards have quite a decent budget to spend on doing things locally and it's often the little things that make communities communities.

I think that's one of the things that I feel like, as time's gone, particularly post Covid, is that we have to a certain extent, lost a bit of a sense of community and that having being in one of those positions gives you the opportunity to kind of bring back some of those things that can bring people together and, you know, have community events and, you know, support local businesses and local schools and all of those kind of places that are central to our communities.

So I think it's.

It is a really powerful position to be in.

I think politics is amazing.

I had a little bit of time in the Beehive and I remember quite clearly thinking, I'm very happy to be on the journalist side of this.

Not that I'm necessarily like the most sympathetic to politicians in many ways, but I don't think I'd want the job at least of like that sort of central politician.

And it's quite a tough gig and it takes a lot to get there.

It can be quite a lot of time, quite a lot of resource.

You don't really get to focus on other things.

How much do you think the financial freedom that you've built up to this point has made it possible to say?

I've always wanted to make a difference.

I think I can make a difference this way and I'm actually going to go for it.

How much does that financial foundation under you make it possible?

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely an element.

Being able to actually have flexibility from a financial standpoint, to be able to do something like that.

I think, yeah, I think it is a big factor in being able to do it and probably a factor in why I haven't sort of pursued it in the past is that, you know, when you, until you get to a certain point is that you, you know, you need to have an income to pay your mortgage, et cetera.

If someone's listened to this conversation and thought, well, that all sounds great, but I could never make that happen.

Is there anything you'd want to say to people who might like the idea of what you've managed to make happen and they don't feel there yet?

Well, I mean, we started from nothing.

We were a couple of teenagers when we met.

We had no money.

You know, actually we went backwards to study.

So it's just having that drive and having that, that passion to want to make a better life and then acting upon it because it's really nothing happens.

You can read all the books and do all the courses, and unless you throw yourself at it and are prepared to take some to be able to make it happen, I kind of believe that if we can do it, just a couple of normal kiwis, that other people can do it too.

And it's not easy, but it's doable.

So I think that the biggest thing is taking action.

And it can be really little things.

I think, like you said, there's a lot of little steps to get to financial freedom.

So it could just be making an appointment with your bank or making an appointment with a mortgage broker, like little things.

But those things all move you one step closer to achieving your big financial goals.

So, yeah, I think action is key to everything.

Yeah.

If you had to start over now from scratch again, is there anything, I mean, what would you say was the good thing that you would definitely repeat?

Is there anything that you wouldn't repeat?

A good thing, a bad thing?

The property investment definitely has been sort of the key to our success.

So I would definitely do that, but I would do it with financial freedom as being the goal from the outset.

So I guess that's one of our regrets is that we worked really hard and really fast to build a portfolio to support us in retirement at an older age and not immediately.

So if we had, I mean, we didn't really grasp that it was something that you could create so, so much younger.

Like, we set a goal in.

Of financial freedom by 40 at, you know, at one point in our journey.

And so we didn't get to financial freedom by 40, but had we realized that that was even an option for us, we would have started from a different perspective and a different.

And used different strategies.

And so we probably would have started the property trading earlier or, you know, bought different types of property or maybe, you know, before we could even get into property, maybe we would have invested in shares.

You know, there's just so many things that you would change looking back in hindsight to be able to hit that financial freedom target earlier.

And so having that goal from the outset would have made a big difference and we wouldn't have had to have done a restructure now.

We wouldn't.

Wouldn't have had to have gotten over those fears of, you know, kind of going.

Feeling like you're going backwards to go forwards.

Like getting really, really clear on what your actual goal is is the thing.

And for us, we didn't realize that once we had, once our kids got to a certain point that we would not really want to work as much.

We sort of assumed we would continue with our careers.

And then you have a family and you go, huh, okay, it's a bit different.

So I think if we had have known at the outset that that would have been what we wanted, things would have been quite different now.

Even though you mentioned, you know, the financial freedom of 40 didn't hit.

Yeah, I love a big goal that you fail at.

Yeah, I'm honest.

I love being like, right, here's a really big goal.

And even if I'm shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you land among the stars.

But, you know, it is true.

It's twee as it is, where it gives you that spurring that speed of like, I want to hit this big thing and it's going to take a lot to get there.

So let's go.

I heard something recently and I cannot remember where I heard it now.

So if anyone knows where this came from, hit me in the comments.

But they said the strategy that you want is a B, Z.

So A is you need to know where you are and to be really clear about that, Z is you need to know where you want to get to and be really clear about that.

No lying to yourself on either one of those, which is a big part of the problem.

But that's for another podcast.

And then B is just knowing the next step.

Because to get from A to Z, there's a whole bunch there, obviously.

But if you just know the next step, you don't need to know what's entailed on step G. You'll probably learn that as you go through the steps on the way there.

But if you know step B, get that done and then onto the next.

And that just really clarified things for me.

I was like, that is such a good way to put it.

Just need to know where I am, where I'm going, and what's the next step.

And I think to set a big goal like financial freedom by 40.

Okay, you didn't hit it at 40.

You still went on this amazing big caravan trip.

That still looks pretty close to financial freedom to me.

That looks really good.

And I bet you wouldn't have hit it if you hadn't set that big goal.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I think you have to have the big goals, and the big goals help sort of push you towards, towards, you know, financial freedom.

So even if you don't get there, you make a whole heap more progress than what you would do if you hadn't started working in that direction.

Well, if people want to keep following along with you and as you continue with this amazing journey, where can they find you?

We're now we've changed our handle recently, so we're at the free life plan on Instagram and Facebook and our website's the FreelifePlan.com.

i love that.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Kelly Dawson.

I love that.

Now if you, of course, wherever you are listening to Making Sense, first of all, hit some subscribe.

But secondly, send this episode to a friend if it was helpful to you so we can all level up our money together.

Until next time, have a great day.

This podcast can only give you general information about how things work in most situations.

It's not individual financial advice.

If you're after that, a financial advisor is always the best bet.