Objective
The objective of this section is to help you decide to make the quality decision to be an investor and educate yourself accordingly. This will require a change of mind set, without which you will be unable to make some fundamental changes to your lifestyle all with a view to helping you to achieve your major life goals. These could be retiring well or early retirement, funding your childrens’ tertiary education or the fulfillment of a dream to travel the world, buy an aeroplane, start your own business, or fund a life calling.
These are all the benefits of the financial freedom that can be gained through property investment. Being wealthy or financially free is attained when you are earning sufficient passive income from your investments to make your job optional and your dreams a reality.
The initial shift in my mind set began when I read Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad Poor Dad. I recommend this book highly. Read it and learn!
Our business at Organic Growth is to show you how to be wealthy. If that appeals to you and you want to hang on for the ride, you can go all the way to being very rich.
The investor’s guide to debt, lifestyle and savings
Debt and lifestyle
A good understanding of debt is essential to successful investing.
There are two kinds of debt—bad debt and good debt.
Bad debt is debt incurred against the purchase of liabilities. It is also known as lifestyle debt. It is the credit card kind of debt, the clothing account kind, the car repayment kind–in other words, any debt that is incurred in the furtherance of a lifestyle that is actually beyond your means. We live in a culture that has made it possible to possess goods that you have not yet paid for. While this is attractive to the majority of people, if you pursue lifestyle debt, it will strangle any chance you have of achieving your investment goals.
Being a property investor means saying NO to lifestyle debt.
- Ask yourself if you really need that fancy new car to impress your neighbours–the Joneses–people who you don’t really like or know.
- Avoid credit card debt. It very easily spirals out of control and before you know it you are spending your hard earned cash paying prohibitive interest on last month’s extravagances.
- Steer clear of clothing accounts, chemist accounts and the worst of all furniture shop accounts.
The key to becoming a successful investor is developing the attitude that if I don’t have the money now I can’t have the item I desire now.
Good debt is debt incurred in the purchase of assets. This is money borrowed for the purchase of real assets that produce an income
- Being a property investor means saying YES to asset-backed, income-producing debt.
- Investing with the bank’s money is fundamental to successful investing.
- Being able to discern the difference between bad lifestyle debt and good asset-backed income-producing debt is the key to successful property investment.
When it comes to defining an asset and a liability, forget what you learned in accounting classes at school or what the advertising media continually bombard you with. Differentiating between an asset and a liability is simple, ask yourself this question: If I lose my job, will this feed me or will it eat me?
Assets feed your personal cashhflow, liabilities eat your personal cashflow!
Savings
Regardless of conventional wisdom, there is no way to become wealthy (financially free) by saving money and it is virtually impossible to save enough money to be able to live off your savings for any reasonable time period.
What farmer can stay in business by planting a seed and one year later harvesting that seed which has now simply swollen to 10, 15 or even 20% larger?
This is what happens when you put your money in the bank or when you put it in a fancy stockmarket linked savings plan. The only difference between these tools is the amount of risk involved and the percentage of interest earned. But a swollen seed it remains!
Retirement annuities and monthly unit trust purchases may be amplified savings accounts, but they too remain savings accounts.
Savings accounts should be seen as storage silos, where you build up and store your investment seed for planting season. To believe the hollow promises of “financial solutions” and “retirement calculators” offered by the insurance companies is naïve. They promise that purchasing monthly retirement annuities or unit trusts will enable you to retire successfully but as many retirees will confirm, this is not he case. Think about it for a moment, if a pension scheme is essentially a savings account that keeps up with inflation, you will have ot save nearly half your salary for 30 years to be able to retire for thirty years,
Read this article on saving for retirement if you need convincing.
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Breaking News
We launched a comprehensive live online course in October 2013 based on Property Investment 101.