Change is the only constant in life…

My journey into an investment property in the UK daniel-spase-548423-unsplash has unfortunately been halted! The house I was buying dated from 1908 and by the sounds of it the roof has not been maintained since those happy times. The Homebuyers survey I had done flagged up a couple of small items including major roof works, electrical re-wiring and brickwork. Fine if you were to live in it but not ideal for an investor who needs rent coming in and is on the other side of the world! I had to pull out of the sale unfortunately but I think I dodged a bullet there so that is ok.

On the same day I found out about a new house (better for depreciation and less maintenance) which was being sold cheap by a house builder company. My very cheeky offer of 20k under was not accepted so back to the drawing board on that one.

I also registered here in Aus to Selfwealth which offers $9.50 trades, cheap like the budgie and so with excitement bordering on hysteria I went to buy my first Vanguard ETFs! ba bow. Turns out you need a minimum first investment of $600. One good thing though was that I worked out that a couple of the Vanguard ETFs I was going to go for here are actually not based in Aus and so would have meant I was up for US taxes! So up yours Donald.

So in summary this week has not been the strongest step forward to financial freedom 🙂

Next step is to decide whether to buy an investment property in Aus / UK or to buy a place to live in and renovate. Not the easiest decision and pro’s and con’s for both as always! Brexit vs a slowing Australian housing market, or somewhere I can decorate and make look pretty and get my dog I have been hanging out for for a long time.

I will keep you posted!

1. Begin at the beginning

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Welcome to my first blog post, and if you have stumbled across this blog then I guess you have similar intentions to me. To find out more about Financial Independence Retire Early FIRE.

I grew up in the UK to working class separated parents, a cheeky outdoors kid who started doing part time jobs at 14. The next few years were washing neighbour’s cars, delivering free newspapers (or dumping them in the woods 🙂 ), washing dishes in a chip shop, local supermarket, Wimpy, Pizza Hut and Homebase (a DIY megatore in the UK now bust, not related to my performance!). I put myself through University when I realised that there was not much happening in the small village I grew up in and I managed to buy my first house at 24. Years passed, became engaged and we bought a house together. This relationship was not to be and if we fast forward to the present day I emigrated to Australia and have been working here for 7 years.

I have always been a ‘grabber’, any over time going I will put my hand up and I am still like that as an Environmental Consultant, my dad described himself as the same last week so I guess that habit rubbed off. Give me that overtime..

My whole approach to life has been fairly traditional of someone born in the UK, partly sensible partly spending weekends partying! As an Aussie DJ described to me last week, Pommies love house music! That’s the truth.

Anyway lets fast forward to the current position. 38, single, paid off my student loan few years ago and having just spent 3 years working extremely hard and saving hard, I have managed to buy an investment property in the UK. Exhibiting my usual ‘grabbing’ I have worked 60 hour weeks, rented my spare room on airbnb, been an uber driver in my spare time, gone without and saved overtime to set myself up for the future. However recently I find myself thinking ‘oh f**k there’s another 25 years of this’ at work. I think that a side effect of the hustle to get the house has cut down my spare time and energy and led me to think Is there more?

The extent of my families financial plans is to pay your mortgage off. I think we have all been sleepwalking! So like a lot of interesting people on the internet now I have WOKE haha.

Googling terms like ‘side hustle’ and ‘passive income’ led me to talk of FIRE. After a fair bit of reading it all just made so much sense to me and appealed to my nature. The following is my (pretty basic and mostly uninformed so far) plan: