These days you need to be so careful about what your kids are up to, while trying not to become ‘helicopter parents’. It's still early days for us as parents, and we recognise it will get more difficult to protect them from things like the influence of social media as they're growing up.
I can already appreciate the pressures on a lot of parents who feel they have to ‘keep up’ with other parents. Some spend thousands on kids' toys and clothes, even when they're struggling to pay the mortgage. Some kids wear these really nice clothes to day care, while Riley rocks up in his old workaday clothes. He may look a bit daggy, but he's just going to get paint and mud on them anyway!
People know we have a nice house and drive nice cars, but Caelen is still happy to play with a box. Riley's favourite toy is a five-dollar plastic lawnmower we bought second-hand on Facebook.
There's a front room on the second level at our place overlooking the Port Hacking estuary. Riley has his breakfast there because there's a cheap little table set up perfectly for him, and he loves that; in fact he insists on eating there. Of course, he has little to compare it with yet.
I've learned a lot about the importance for my clients of buying in school catchment zones, but we bought in this area simply because we loved the house. The local primary school is pretty good, by all accounts, so that's where my sons are going. We've booked them into a private school from year five or year seven, whichever works out.
I want my sons to treat others as they would want to be treated themselves, because that's how I like to treat people and that's how I was brought up. For me, teaching them to behave with honesty, integrity and humility is vital. I want them to be really accepting and to go to school with kids from all types of backgrounds and financial circumstances, where they can share what they have with others with humility.
What's important to me as a father is that Riley and Caelen are happy with what they are doing. People ask me, ‘Are your kids going to take over your business some day?’ They may, but then again they may not. But I will give them a good grounding on investing and looking after money — subjects they'll learn little about in school. Each of my boys will have a good financial head on his shoulders.
I had to learn all that the hard way.
MY PROPERTY GOALS
When I was a kid, long before I became the owner of a large, multi-faceted business, my first goal was to become a musician. And when I became a musician I had little money, because music is definitely not a well-paid profession.
I achieved one of my biggest life goals at the time when I moved to Sydney to study at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. I loved studying, and I was doing some gigs and tutoring schoolkids in music to subsidise my AusStudy fees, which were like a government allowance for students in the 1990s.
In those days investing was the last thing on my mind, which in hindsight is pretty strange considering economics was actually my best subject at school. But I could see I wasn't going to make enough money as a teacher and musician. I used to run out of cash every fortnight. I remember one time I had to go to Newcastle for a music competition and didn't have a cent in my bank account, and couldn't even pay for petrol for the car. I was about 20 years old and I thought, this isn't the way I want to be living.
GOAL 1: SAVING TO BUY MY FIRST HOME
That realisation planted the seed of a financial goal. I thought, I have to start saving and putting money away.
And save I did. I was very frugal. I had no credit cards, though I drove a petrol-guzzling 1979 XD Ford Falcon. To keep a promise I'd made to myself, I didn't even travel overseas until after I'd bought my first property.
In my twenties I started to get interested in buying a property, not as an investment but so I didn't have to pay rent! I thought of rent as ‘dead money’, because that was what most of society believed back then.
Then, in 2003, I bought my first property, a tiny apartment of around 50 square metres in the southern Sydney suburb of Rockdale. I had saved up about $30 000, which covered the deposit and purchase costs.
I had no idea what I was doing really. It was the first time I had dealt with pushy real estate agents, and they must have seen me coming from a mile off. It was also my first experience working with a mortgage broker — which was actually fantastic, because I needed the personal assistance of a broker rather than dealing with a bank.
It was pretty interesting to watch because my broker was doing his best to get my low-doc loan over the line, and the real estate agent was calling my broker every day for an update on the status of my finance. And my broker found that pretty annoying, but obviously the agent was eager to close this deal.
Being new to property purchasing, I was hesitant about negotiating. Big mistake! When purchasing a property, you should never be scared to negotiate hard. Put up your hand and offer a good figure. I was lucky to get my first property at a pretty good price, but that owed more to the markets at the time than to my negotiating skills.
I bought that property without having any kind of strategy in place. I had no plan for creating a property portfolio at the time, but I knew it would become an investment, and I could always sell it to buy another property, or rent it out.
GOAL 2: MULTIPLE SOURCES OF INCOME
By the time I was 30 I had what I thought was a secure teaching job at an excellent school. I had a regular income and owned my own home — I was set, or so I thought.
Then, in 2007–2008, around about the time of global financial crisis, country after country around the globe was plunged into recession. A few people got laid off at my place of work, and I realised that, for most of us, job security is a bit of a myth. I thought, I really need to start investing.
I worked out that I needed to create multiple sources of income. I needed a vehicle that provided a good ongoing cashflow rather than relying on a job that might or might not exist in the uncertain future.
My Rockdale home didn't build much equity for the first few years, as I'd bought it at the wrong time in the cycle, just after the boom of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games when Sydney property prices were in decline. So it hadn't increased a lot in value, but after three or four years it was at least heading in the right direction. And I realised that property was a good vehicle for me because it was less volatile than investments like shares.
You only need to save one deposit.
My advice these days is that to get started you really only need to save the deposit for your first property purchase. You can then buy subsequent properties using your equity in the first property by taking out a second loan — if you can satisfy the bank on your serviceability. But for me it wasn't a case of buy, increase the equity, buy the next one, rinse and repeat, the way I do these days. Back then I knew nothing about manufacturing equity.
So, because my first property wasn't enjoying much growth, when it came time to buy my next property, I had to rely on the money I'd continued to save to put down another deposit.
I didn't mind. I was always very comfortable putting my savings towards buying property. Even these days, I'm happy to save and put money into a property, knowing that such an investment will help me achieve greater financial freedom in the future. That Rockdale unit has now tripled in value, and I have actually refinanced it four times over the years to access the increased equity to help fund new purchases.
GOAL 3: PROPERTY UPGRADE AND FIRST INVESTMENT
When I started investing in property I hadn't even met Renee and I certainly