[00:00:19] Emma: [00:00:00] I was 18 years old. I was living with my sister and her brand new husband. Not very awkward at all. And one of the things that you might know about me, because you've been listening to the podcast, is that I have been through some interesting home spaces. I lived with some friends. I didn't have a house.
I rented with my mom, et cetera, et cetera, I landed at my sister's place. and her husband were dead against me renting anywhere. And so we started down this track of thinking about what I could do as an 18-year-old to find somewhere to live that felt secure and stable. We lived opposite [00:01:00] this beautiful park and every day we'd go walking around this beautiful estate and we noticed that there was packets of land for sale.
Now. This was a long time ago. So we are talking Western Australia, 30 something years ago
and there was packets of land near the airport and my sister said to me, wouldn't it be great if you could build a house? And I thought to myself. I'm 18, man, how is that actually going to happen? she started doing the research.
Now anyone that knows me knows I now work with Serena. She's my business manager and she's the researcher, she's the patient one, she's the bomb. And she started researching house and land packages and what it would take and all the bits and pieces. And I thought, could I actually do this? Could I actually save enough cash that I have my own thing?
Anyway, fast forward a couple of months and I put in a beautiful offer [00:02:00] for a land and house package, and the house was a three bedroom, two bathroom, brand new house. Now, 30 years ago, that didn't cost a lot of money, but I was still only 18 and my grandmother had in the previous year had passed away from breast cancer.
And my grandfather was probably 80 and I was telling pop about, my desire to have my own place. And at the same time, pop was kind of deciding what he should do now that Nan had gone and we kind of. I talked through some options, and then we came up with this really bright idea. Why don't I get the house and land package and pop contribute a little bit so I could get the deposit together and then pop come and live with me?
Wouldn't that be fun? Now, I don't know many 18 year olds who wanna live with their grandfather, but my grandfather. Was awesome. He also lived to the ripe old age of [00:03:00] 105, so, we embarked on this adventure together. It was very exciting. he was there from the very beginning, and we lived that way for a few years.
And it was beautiful. It was beautiful time, beautiful memories. And then pop. Turned to me one day and he said, oh, I think I might go and live with Anne. And I'm like, okay. now what you need to know about my pop is he was a good Baptist fellow. Him and my nan had been married for 65 years or 60 years, and uh, he wanted to go and live with the person that was my nan's bridesmaid.
At their wedding because her husband had also passed away. And I thought, okay, cool, you go do that. And I made the decision to move to Melbourne, but I also decided to keep the house. So we decided to rent the house out. Pop would go and live with Anne, and I would cheer off to Melbourne. So I arrived in Melbourne.
This is um, now I was probably 20 or 22 and and I started renting and I was just like, dead [00:04:00] money. Dead money, dead money. So I. Bought a house as you do. It was a beautiful, big property in the suburbs, which I loved. And then I bought another house. Maybe a couple years later I bought another house.
It was a beautiful townhouse and I loved that house. And then I bought one more house. Now I know I sound like I'm collecting houses, but what you need to know is I'm collecting mortgages. I'm not collecting houses, I'm collecting mortgages. And the reason that I was so intent on this property strategy, we didn't know enough about shares back then.
We didn't know enough about how else to invest. All I knew is that stability meant me buying something. Making sure that I could stay there and no one else could upset that plan. I wouldn't be kicked out because I'm a renter. I owned my own house. I could do as I please, et cetera, et cetera. I hazard a guess that I also might be, that I need to be in control, that small issue as well.
[00:05:00] Anyway, I had four houses, three houses, however many houses, four houses before the age of 30. Financial security was clearly very important to me. And if you've heard any of the other episodes of our podcast, go back a couple. You'll understand why financial security is important to me. Financial security should also be important really to many of us.
And now it's so hard to get into the property market. It's so hard. Prices are crazy. And, um, I just allowed my properties to sit there. I managed them and made sure that I could pay the mortgages every single month and some months. That was hard. I was like, holy crap, what have I done here? I've got four mortgages to my name.
I'm a single woman. If something happens to me, I'm in dire straits here. But you know what? I'm also a risk taker. So I went, I'm gonna wear that. I'm gonna wear that, and I'm going to make sure that I am in control of my destiny and then I'm in control of where I live, who I wanna hang [00:06:00] out with, how I pay these mortgages, whether to get rid of them or not, et cetera, et cetera.
So probably for a good. Eight years to 10 years, I held on to four mortgages, and actually quite smart, but also by accident the WA market just went through the roof, and so that paid dividends. When I eventually sold, one of the things about having four houses is that I didn't tell anyone about the four houses.
I did not tell a soul. people knew that I lived in a certain house. And that I had a mortgage and that was it. I didn't tell anyone about it. I wasn't proud about it. I didn't celebrate it. It was just literally my thing that I owned for my own sanity peace of mind, financial security, knowing that at any point if I needed to, I could sell the houses and get out.
Some would say I rely a little too heavily on myself. And if you've listened to one of our other episodes, which was, you know, I woke up at 30 [00:07:00] and without a husband. I think as I look back in hindsight, I was literally just future proofing my life in case I didn't find a husband or I didn't find a partner, or things didn't pan out the way I had fully expected them from my teenage self.
I also am very much the person that has the strategy, and I know that if I am very clear about what it is that I want, that I can just go out and get that thing. Yes, it might take years, and how I've explained it to you is kind of linear, but obviously there was some choices that I needed to make and trade offs that we needed to make.
Just as we do in business. And just because I had four mortgages did not make me rich. It actually made me quite poor but it did put me on a certain path to financial security. And that is, as I've discovered as the years have gone on, quite important to me and it should be to you. And one of the things when I jumped into my own business eight years ago that I was really concerned [00:08:00] about is
Is this decision too risky
for my risk appetite?
Because I like financial security, and so I had to think long and hard about that. But I also knew that I had a marriage strategy, I had a financial strategy. I had clarity about where I wanted to go, and when you have those things in place, it's not just a wish and a spit.
I'm not just manifesting the next thing. I knew if I did the work and had the plan and had the clarity that I would be able to pull it off. Which I'm very pleased to say here I am eight years later and it's all good. So if you are sitting there thinking, I'm far away from that, you know what? Just get clear on the next thing that you need to do.
Whatever the next steps are, get your plan out to the minuscule detail, minuscule detail, map it out and get going. Because otherwise we just sit there in indecision and that's not nice either. [00:09:00] So. What I wanna say is this,
financial security is hard won.
It's not handed to you on a silver platter. It's not necessarily given to you at any moment.
You have to work hard for that stuff, but you have to make sure that you have some plans in play so that you are financially secure. I will also say that my heavy reliance on myself. It's not always advised. I think sometimes I can be quite stubborn and set in my ways because I've got a certain way I think it should turn out and that doesn't always serve me.
There you go. Said it. You heard it here first. I wanna say this, once you have one house, it's really easy to leverage that house to get another house. Yeah, you still need to be able to pay the mortgage. And at the time I was working full-time, I've always been an entrepreneur, so I've always had some kind of side hustle going on, so I was working full-time and also had a little side hustle going on the first house, the very first house in Western Australia was [00:10:00] paying for itself.
And so the next house. The next three houses. After that, I had to contribute a little bit, but a lot of them were rented out. Now, this is when you could do it and it worked for you and all the things, but you need to know these. Some months I had to contribute a lot of money just because that's how the chips fell that month, which meant I didn't go out.
I didn't go out to eat. I didn't catch up with friends. I literally ate noodles. Actually, I did live in a very nice apartment at one point, and my neighbors who were beautiful would bring me dinner every night, and that was quite nice too. But that's a side story for another day. So what I had to do was sometimes I had to sacrifice.
Sometimes you just have to sacrifice for the things that you really want. I really wanted financial security until I didn't.
At one point I woke up and went, is this the right strategy for me? No, I know I'm four houses deep in, and I'm like, no. but was that the [00:11:00] right strategy? Having four houses and who knows, right? But. I had this epiphany where you hear of people who stack up the houses, stack up the shares, stack up the investments, and then they retire and they sell it all, and they go back to one house.
And you think to yourself, that feels so much simpler. so that is not what happened to me, but it got me thinking about when is enough enough and how happy am I with my financial security? Now, I wanna fast forward a few years. I am now married and with child. Evie's in my belly and I thought to myself, do you know what I, I'm not sure I wanna manage these mortgages anymore.
I'm not sure I want this complicated a life. And so we made the decision, mark and I together, that we would sell everything and pay off one mortgage and live a life that was very simple and that was awesome. Because that's still [00:12:00] financial security and I've still felt like a success. And I still felt like the choices, my 18-year-old self made, still made sense when I was, I don't know, 34 or something like that.
And so sometimes you have beautiful hindsight. Sometimes you just get hit in the face with Epiphany, what the heck am I doing? And sometimes you go, no, this is how life was meant to be, and I feel like this is how life was meant to be. But wouldn't I feel like that I'm mis optimistic and I always feel like things are gonna work out.
I'm like a cat with nine lives just saying,
So I hope you found this episode helpful. if you have a plan and you have clarity around your plan, and you can take really intentional steps, oh my goodness, you will get there
If you've liked this episode, just share it with one person who knows. They might get inspired to.
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