Читать книгу Buy Now - Lloyd Edge - Страница 26

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.