Introduction
My road to financial freedom
How life shaped me to be a successful property investor.

It’s true that I had enough income from my property portfolio to retire by the age of 38, and I did just that at the age of 40, but I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I was 28 when I bought my first property. At that time I had a successful career as a musician and music teacher, but I wasn’t earning a lot of money.

How did I become a financially independent property investor within 10 years? I’d say it all started with who I was brought up to be. In this introduction I’ll share with you something of my journey and the essential qualities and roles, both personal and professional, that helped me create the life I enjoy today.

Resilience

I grew up on a 100-acre (40-hectare) property surrounded by bushland on the outskirts of Orange in Central West NSW. My dad, Jack, ran a truck springs and chassis repair business he inherited from his father, who had started out repairing wagons and horse-drawn carts. My mother, Barbara, had a side business breeding chickens, Murray Grey cattle and Palomino horses.

We were a very happy family. My younger brother Robert and I spent much of our time riding horses and motorbikes. If I wanted to go camping with my friends, we’d take a tent out the back paddock.

Mum and Dad never had any investment properties. Their only properties were the ones they lived in. Dad sold his house in town to Mum’s parents at way under market value, when he moved in with her on the stud farm we grew up on.

Back then you could buy a house for $20 000 — and Mum and Dad were of the mindset that if you couldn’t afford to pay the $20 000 in cash, you couldn’t afford that house. There’s no lending in my family, and they never had any debt.

We were brought up to work hard and save. My first business venture was a pizza shop, which Dad built for me on the farm. Mum bought the ingredients, then I made and sold the pizzas to my parents for three bucks each: 100 per cent profit! I was eight years old!

Around that time, I was knocked unconscious by a cricket bat at a Scouts meeting. I began to suffer from chronic migraines during which I couldn’t walk or talk; overcome by nausea, I was paralytic. Mum and Dad spent a fortune on doctors. The migraines happened nearly every day until I was put on medication, and even then I still got them every couple of weeks.

I soon realised this was going to be a part of my life, and I’ve managed it as best I can ever since. Sure, there have been times in my life when I’ve been depressed about it, but I haven’t let it get me down too much because as soon as I get over being sick, I’m happy and back at it again. I inherited this resilience and love of life from both parents.

A competitor

When I was nine I joined the local band, playing the baritone, a brass instrument like a small tuba. Despite experiencing a migraine after every band practice, I loved music. Harry, my teacher, started to enter me in local eisteddfods, then regional eisteddfods. But I didn’t start winning until I really began to practise. Before the first state championship I entered I practised for hours each day, and sure enough I won. I was 13 years old when I learned that if I worked hard enough at something, I would be successful at it.

This was a valuable lesson indeed, because in fact nothing I have achieved in my life has come naturally or easily to me, and I have never succeeded at any venture at the start. But whenever I have persisted, developed the passion and worked on the goals, I have won.

Through high school and beyond I won several state and national solo competitions, playing trombone, euphonium and baritone. I sometimes helped my music teacher by mentoring some of his younger students, and I enjoyed that as well.

I also played golf competitively while in high school. I was a member of all three local golf clubs and regularly won Saturday morning competitions around Orange, touring to compete in Bathurst, Wellington and Dubbo. I played off a handicap of 12 by the time I was 15 and I thought about becoming a professional golfer, but I gave it all up because of the migraines and decided to focus on music.

At high school, economics was actually my best subject, but I had my heart set on getting into the prestigious Sydney Conservatorium of Music. I did well in the HSC and in my audition, but I only got a place in the Bachelor of Education program, as ‘the Con’ didn’t accept euphonium players in its Performance course.

Teaching was not my goal, so I went elsewhere. I studied at the ANU School of Music in Canberra and the Illawarra Institute in Goulburn, where I could play my euphonium and work on the trombone. Two years later I reapplied for the Con and got into the Bachelor of Music (Performance) program, majoring in the trombone. I’d auditioned for several other music universities around the country and was offered a place in all of them. My hard work had paid off again!

At last I moved to Sydney to study music. I was living close to the water and, as a country boy, I appreciated the convenience of walking to the shops. I would go to see orchestras play at the Sydney Opera House and walk around Circular Quay, soaking up the atmosphere. Several of my classmates at the Con were former ‘rivals’ from music competitions I’d entered growing up, so it was a lot of fun, and we had excellent teachers and mentors.

At university, funds were tight. I often lived in share accommodation with several other students. I was on limited fortnightly AusStudy payments from Centrelink. Once I had paid my rent, electricity, train fares and maybe a little petrol for my car — a lovely old petrol-guzzling 1979 Ford Falcon with more kilometres on the clock than I spend on a property these days — I didn’t have a lot left over.

Sometimes my old flatmates, who are now very successful musicians, like to remind me of those times, back in the day, when all I could afford was a 30-cent ice-cream cone from McDonald’s for lunch and I often had to go without dinner. I guess I have come a fair way in the past 25 years!

I was loving life though, but then in 1995, while in my first year at the Con, my dad got cancer. I knew he was 26 years older than Mum — he’d fought in World War II — but I was young, and I still believed my parents were going to be there forever.

The day my father died Mum came down to Sydney to watch me play in a recital. She broke the news to me afterwards. It hit me hard. I was devastated. I had to take time off my studies and repeat a couple of subjects as I’d slipped so far behind.

A teacher

At last I graduated from the Con and was playing professionally in bands and orchestras: the Sydney Brass Ensemble, the Sydney Youth Orchestra and the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra. I even played at the Sydney Opera House quite a few times over the years.

I was very happy as a musician but the work was inconsistent, so I started picking up some instrumental teaching jobs. I loved helping the students play the best they could on their instruments, the way I had done when I helped Harry back in high school. That’s when I realised that teaching was actually something I would enjoy, and I started to love teaching more than playing.

Even now I can’t stop teaching. A desire to educate people about property is the reason I wrote this book. So my passion for teaching has never died.

A saver

As soon as I was earning money, I started to save as much as I could. I was renting in poorer areas of Sydney because that’s what I could afford. I never had a credit card, I didn’t go overseas on a ‘gap year’ holiday and I still drove old cars. I just put my money away for the future.

I am still very frugal. My wife Renee often urges me to buy new clothes. We have a running joke between us that I’ll spend hundreds of thousands on an investment but won’t fork out $20 for a new shirt from Kmart. The way I see it, that shirt will not yield a financial return so it’s not a good investment!

A homeowner

I was fortunate to be teaching at schools in quite wealthy areas on Sydney’s North Shore and in the Eastern Suburbs. I’d go around to give a kid a private music tutorial at their harbourfront home with their parents’ BMW convertibles parked in the driveway and I’d think, geez, how do these people afford to live like this? I’m a struggling musician here, renting a cheap unit. How I’d love to be in this position one day!

In 2003 my grandma passed away, and my mother moved off the farm and into the house in Orange that originally belonged to my dad’s parents almost 100 years ago. She gave the farm to my brother and me as ‘a start’. Rob bought out my share; he’s still got the farm and lives there to this day.

With this small family inheritance and the money I’d been saving, I had a good deposit to buy my own property. But how was I going to get a mortgage, as a self-employed music teacher earning less than $50 000 a year?

I found a very good mortgage broker who got me a ‘low-doc’ (low-documentation) home loan from a non-bank lender, where I didn’t need to produce payslips. I would have struggled without that first loan, so I was lucky.

With my pre-approved budget, the choice came down to an older two-bedroom apartment or a brand-new one-bedroom apartment. I decided to go with the new apartment in Rockdale: a shoebox of less than 50 square metres that cost me $260 000.

When I first moved in, Rockdale felt small to me, but it was close to the water and, while I had no clue that I’d be a serious property investor one day, I knew this was just a start for me in the property market.

It was the start of my travels as well. Six months later I took my first trip overseas: a whirlwind 16-countries-in-three-weeks Contiki tour of Europe. At 30 years old, I was the second-oldest person there, but I didn’t care.

A strategist

Since 2003 I’d been working at Moriah College — a private Orthodox Jewish school in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs — first just one day a week, but by 2005 I was there four days a week, teaching brass and conducting.

In 2006 I was appointed the Head of Brass and Percussion at Moriah. Now a full-time teacher, I was still playing gigs and conducting with the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra and the NSW Fire Brigades Brass Band, with whom I went on tour to Austria and Germany. Competitive as ever, I joined several of Australia’s leading brass bands — I continue to play with them to this day — and won a number of national band championships.

I was now drawing a pretty good teaching salary for a job that didn’t involve classroom teaching. But I knew there was a limit to how much I could earn as a teacher, and superannuation wasn’t going to pay me enough to retire on.

Rockdale, my ‘buy and hold’ property and home, wasn’t worth any more than I’d paid for it in 2003. I was thinking, what have I done? I’ve got property in a good location, just like you’re supposed to, but I’m not making money.

Of course, I’d bought Rockdale at the wrong time: after the Sydney Olympics 2000 spike, when the property market was declining. But the fact that the property hadn’t performed yet made me think there had to be a better way of doing this, because there were people out there making a lot of money from property.

I started reading books and articles about wealth creation every night after work. I realised that trading your time for money your whole life doesn’t get you anywhere. I was inspired by people who had used their success with property to achieve financial independence. That’s when I decided that if I was ever going to retire from teaching, property would be the vehicle.

An investor

I thought, okay, I want to start expanding. I need a second property. I looked at some of the cheaper areas in Sydney and in 2008 bought a three-bedroom villa in Ingleburn for $262 000. I moved into Ingleburn and rented out my Rockdale property straight away. I was now officially a property investor, but Rockdale was negatively geared.

I was living in a working-class suburb and everyone at school was bagging me out. It was frustrating being so far out, 50 kilometres from the Sydney CBD, but now I was focused on the bigger picture. I knew the first few years would be hard, but I had the end in sight. I wanted financial independence, and then I bought my third property — and I knew I could get there.

Two months after buying my property in Ingleburn I looked into how much I was going to have to borrow to buy another. I realised that if I was to keep moving forward I needed ‘cashflow-positive’ properties, but I didn’t yet understand that creating growth is more important than high rental yield.

While educating myself, I enlisted the help of a buyer’s agent. I told him I wanted cash in the bank at the end of the week. The property he found me was a house in a regional mining town called Blackwater in Central Queensland. It cost $260 000 but it was returning about $800 a week, so it had a good yield, and for the first few years it was getting a lot of growth.

Then the mining sector collapsed, and in towns like Blackwater rents and values tumbled. Some people had 10 of these properties; fortunately, I’d taken a calculated risk and bought only one. In hindsight the buyer’s agent should not have recommended that property. More about that later when we discuss locations and investment-grade properties.

After Blackwater, I really started to get the bug. I became a lot savvier about my purchases. I was pretty single-minded. Colleagues at work were saying, ‘Four or five properties — aren’t you worried about debt?’ But I was just getting started, while they still don’t have any investments because they’re too wary of the risks.

A romantic

In 2009 another passion was ignited in my life. I was conducting the Sutherland Police Citizens Youth Club band and one day we welcomed a new clarinettist: a beautiful and brilliant brunette who immediately caught my eye.

Renee was a chartered accountant working for Ernst & Young. It took more than a year for me to ask her out. I imagined she saw me only as the conductor at the front of the band. She’s 12 years younger than me, yet this was half the age difference that had existed between my parents. Dad had always thought the age gap would be too big between them, which meant Mum had to chase him for four years before he finally decided to go out with her.

Luckily, I shared my mother’s romanticism and patience, because I had to chase Renee for a while. I started organising parties at my place in Ingleburn. Renee didn’t realise I was having 20 people over every couple of weeks just so I could get to know her more. I was forever dropping hints like, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…’

Then we went on a couple of band trips and in Tasmania, at the 2010 Australian National Band Championships, we got quite close. After that, we started to spend time together, and she would come for rides on the back of the motorbike with me. She had no fear, which I thought was pretty cool. We had a lot of fun.

Three months after we started dating, I thought, this feels right. Let’s set up a life together... and we bought an $800 000 house in Sydney’s Inner West. Buying a house with a mortgage on it is a bigger commitment than an engagement ring, but the risk was on me because it was my $200 000 deposit. Maybe Renee would have felt differently if she had put down money! Then she went and bought all the furniture, so I knew she was on board. Three months after we moved in together, we were engaged.

Meeting Renee changed my life in many ways. I know she helped me dress better and was always taking me shopping, but she inspired me in many ways — and ultimately it was Renee’s idea that I start a business in property on top of my investments.

An optimist

In 2010 I was appointed as director of Moriah’s Symphonic Wind Ensemble. I took them on a tour of America and Israel in 2011 and again in 2014, performing 20 concerts in 21 days, including performances at Disneyland. I also conducted them to victory at the NSW state championships and in the Sydney Eisteddfod in 2012.

It was a great experience for the kids in the ensemble but it took up a lot of time, as we rehearsed every Sunday and all school holidays for the whole year. I was also getting up at 5:30 every day to conduct an early-morning band rehearsal. I didn’t get paid overtime, and every time I conducted I was rewarded with a migraine.

After a while that lifestyle took its toll. I thought, you only live once. That’s a cliché only because it’s true. I’ve always felt strongly that when you’re not passionate anymore, you should start looking for a change. There were teachers at the school in their sixties who said they wished they’d retired and done something else 30 years ago. I thought, well it’s not very fair to the kids if you’re just here because you don’t know what else to do.

I already knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to create the financial freedom to live life on my own terms. Since I was a kid entering those first music competitions, I’d known that if I worked hard enough, I could achieve anything. When I got serious about property investing, I adopted the mindset that I would succeed no matter what.

A developer

I had a good property portfolio, but it still wasn’t returning enough to cover my salary and make me financially independent. So I was attending seminars on ways to make money quickly by developing properties instead of waiting for capital growth.

In 2012 I bought a corner block in the best area of Armidale in NSW’s Northern Tablelands for $159 000. I built a duplex on it and the whole development project, including construction, council costs, stamp duty and legals, came to $629 000. And when it was completed, it was subdivided into two separate properties.

Here’s the kicker: I had the two separate properties valued and they came back at $380 000 and $390 000 respectively. This left me with $141 000 in equity — twice as much money as I was making in a whole year of teaching.

And that’s when the light bulb went off in my head and I thought, well, I’m onto something here. The two properties rented easily. Now I had positive cashflow and I was able to borrow off the equity.

Renee and I got married and I was on top of the world. Best of all, the Armidale subdivision really got Renee interested in property as well. She said, ‘Let’s do it again!’

In 2013 alone I bought five properties in NSW and Queensland using mainly the equity achieved from that first subdivision. I’d come home and say, ‘Honey, I bought another property today!’ and Renee would say, ‘Oh yeah? Where?’

The Armidale duplex was my ‘aha moment’. As I repeated the process in 2013 and 2014, I had some good developments where I made $200 000 profit — and from there, the profits increased exponentially. Now I was creating equity, and my life turned around. And I’m thinking, okay, now I know how I’m going to achieve my goal.

The idea of starting my own business crept in when Renee started saying things like, ‘When you’re meeting clients in cafés you can talk to them about your duplexes!’

Knowing I had a few good investments, family and friends started asking me whether I’d recommend the suburb they wanted to buy in and how contracts worked and whether I would recommend builders I’d used. It got to the point where Renee said, ‘Why don’t you just start writing blogs and getting it out there, so I don’t have to listen to you talking about property at home all the time?’

So I started a blog called Aus Property Powwow, posting all kinds of free information on property development as well as some of my own investing insights and my thoughts on the markets in general. People were reading the blog and commenting, then some started to approach me directly, asking if I could help them with some property searches, but I wasn’t yet qualified to give such advice.

By the time I was 38 years old, my passive income from my property portfolio had topped $100 000 annually, which was higher than the best salary I’d ever earned as a teacher. But I wasn’t going to leave teaching and just do nothing, so I made a decision. I resolved to become a buyer’s agent and help people navigate the world of property.

A goal-setter

I enrolled in a three-year Diploma in Property Services. The kids at school knew about the blog and used to ask me about property, but none of the teachers at Moriah knew what I was doing or that I’d soon be retiring from work.

I was on a mission. I’d get up at 5:30 am, start work at 7:00, teach all day then study until about two o’clock every morning. I ended up getting my diploma in three months and obtained my full real estate licence in multiple states.

One of the perks of my new passive income was that when I had free time, I could afford to travel. So in April 2015 I decided to climb to Mount Everest Base Camp to celebrate my graduation.

My previous travels to Europe and the Middle East had been about experiencing different cultures in modern cities, but going to Nepal and seeing first-hand how people lived on virtually nothing changed my perspective in a few ways.

Many Nepalese lived in houses that were only half built or were built of straw; they didn’t even have clean drinking water. Yet they seemed so happy, despite having so little, because they knew no other life. The kids ran around and played in the streets and were happy just to be alive.

Back home we all worry about how big our houses are and getting the latest sophisticated toys for our kids, yet people in developing countries who lack these advantages can still live full and happy lives.

But what I also saw is that these kids were missing out on a decent education. It made me realise how lucky we are in the developed world, and it made me want to help change this situation in the future.

I was thinking, I build duplexes back home so maybe I can build something for these people here. Maybe we can contribute to building a school or community housing? This new big dream made me see how developing my wealth and growing investments and my business might give me the opportunity to do something significant for others. I was more motivated than ever to succeed.

A property professional

When I got back from the 17-day hike to the Everest base camp, I saw some missed calls and emails from the Moriah College rabbi’s wife. I thought, am I in trouble? But she knew I was an investor — and she became my first client. I started popping in to her place in the morning on my way to school to give her property advice.

To make it official, Renee had registered my business name, Aus Property Professionals, while I was away in Nepal. My initial thought was, well, if I can help 10 clients a year, that’ll be good business. I wasn’t planning on having anyone else work for me. I thought, If I can earn enough money to replace my teaching salary, while maintaining my property portfolio (which had also replaced my teaching salary), I’ll be happy.

But then things really took off. I was featured in various property podcasts, on radio and in magazines, and I started getting a profile as a property investor, especially for my duplex developments. The media were calling me ‘the duplex guy’.

I had people contacting me even before I had a website up, wanting to know about what I’d done and how I’d done it, and whether I could I help them. Many of them could really relate to my story: that I had not always been doing property; that I was a teacher, on a fairly ordinary income, when I started investing, and I grew my portfolio from there.

I was getting multiple enquiries a week. I was already used to getting by without much sleep after cramming for my real-estate qualifications. I’d start work very early in the morning, deal with clients at night, by email over the lunch break and at weekends, and teach as well. I did two full-time jobs for a year.

I’m sure some of the other teaching staff saw that I was becoming less motivated than I had been, and I can freely admit now that I was struggling to be there every day. So I took long-service leave and used the three months to make sure that I could run the business successfully full-time. Failure wasn’t an option.

While on leave in January 2016, I summited Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. I was the only climber from all the groups that day who elected to stay up on the freezing summit, despite the thin oxygen, to view the spectacular craters for five hours before descending.

Yes, that was risky. Leaving a full-time job could be perceived as risky too, but you need to take some risks if you’re going to achieve your maximum potential in life. I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as job security. This is why we all need to invest and take control of our future. It was also a main catalyst for my decision to write this book.

An entrepreneur

I was 40 years old when I retired from teaching so I could get out there and give it a go for myself in business.

Renee and I had a mortgage together. I think a lot of spouses would have said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t give up the security of your job,’ but she totally supported my decision to quit that job and follow my passion in property.

A couple of days before I finally resigned from my job at Moriah, I went to a park, sat by myself and worked it through in my mind. Okay, is starting a business the right decision? Should I do it now? Is this really the right move? I concluded I had a very clear decision to make. And what I did was I backed myself. I knew I would succeed; I was confident that I had the knowledge and the work ethic to grow the business. Plan B was to make sure plan A worked.

People asked, ‘Are you at least going to have a holiday after you retire from teaching?’ But that Friday afternoon, the last day of my teaching career, I got into my car and took a call from a developer. As I drove out through the school gates for the last time, I realised it was the end of an era.

And on Monday morning I went straight into my business full-time.

I definitely felt a sense of freedom, because I wasn’t tied down to a job routine anymore, and great satisfaction that I was no longer answerable to a boss. And I didn’t have to sit in peak-hour traffic to get to work every morning. It was fantastic. This had been my dream. I was living life on my own terms, building the life I wanted, creating my own destiny.

I already had years of successful investing behind me, so in no time new clients were coming to me. They were impressed that I had grasped the nettle and retired early to live the dream, and that I was doing something a bit different, which was creating equity.

Very soon I had 10 clients in a month. I learned so much. I got involved with a lot of other entrepreneurs and business owners. I started a group on Facebook called Base Camp Property Group, where I mentor people entering the property market. I employed more people — and pretty soon we had so much on the go that I could scale the business.

A success

I have some big clients who’ve done multiple properties through us over the years, and some bigger properties. We’ve got expat clients in the UAE, Hong Kong and Singapore, who we get to meet with when we’re travelling.

I’m not all about just helping people with massive property portfolios, though. I love helping people on low incomes who are trying to get ahead. Those are the people I really enjoy helping to grow their portfolios, build larger incomes and improve their lifestyles, because I started where they are and I get all that.

Renee came on board in September 2017. I didn’t really have a job for her; she pushed her way in! But she’s a chartered accountant; she had a Bachelor of Economics and then she did her Certificate in Real Estate, so she was highly qualified.

Soon she was sourcing properties, finding property managers and organising insurance for clients. She turned out to be pretty good at writing blogs herself. Renee has won an award from the Real Estate Institute of New South Wales for the successful work she’s been doing, to add to the wall of top buyer’s agent awards in my office.

Today I have a property portfolio worth $12 million, a beautiful waterfront home, nice cars and a boat. Renee and I don’t need to work but we both love what we do, and when you love what you do, it’s true that you don’t work a day in your life.

Image containing an illustration of Lloyd surrounded by his family (Renee (wife), Riley (son) and Frankie (dog)), sitting on a wooden dock surrounded by water. The following caption is provided: “Lloyd, Renee, Riley and our dog Frankie.” — **Lloyd, Renee, Riley and our dog Frankie**

Along with our dream jobs, our dream home, some dream cars, a dream boat (you get the picture), in 2019 we welcomed a son, Riley. His second name’s Jack, after my dad. As my own boss, I was able to get to every single one of Renee’s prenatal appointments and Riley’s baby appointments, and I can take him to swimming lessons or the park. It’s all about creating lifestyle choices so you can actually do things like that.

I want Riley to grow up well-grounded and with integrity, as I did. I also want him to have empathy for those without his advantages and a real understanding of his good fortune. When Renee and I volunteer in Africa or Nepal, we will bring him with us. That’s one of my big life dreams, and it’s one of the reasons I am still in the game and growing my business. It’s not just about becoming a multi-millionaire, but about what I can do for others and the legacy I mean to create.

These days I know a lot of people who live life on their own terms. Every day I deal with successful business owners, entrepreneurs and property investors — and I can tell you there are plenty of people out there who began where you did, then really gave it a go, doing much of what this book recommends to achieve financial freedom.

If they can do it, and if I can do it, I promise you, so can you.

About the author

Acknowledgements

Preface
Let’s get positively geared
Why I wrote this book and why I’m excited you’re reading it.

Surmounting hurdles to smart property investing

Do you want to build wealth?

Get out of debt and achieve financial freedom as fast as I did