Sometimes it takes a bad situation to see the light. That’s Adrian Socha’s story when it comes to his investment portfolio.
Bad circumstances led me to property investment.
I’d been through a separation after a fairly full-on relationship, and I’d ended up living with three other people in a two-bedroom share house.
It sounds trivial – I’d lost a girlfriend and I was living with other people, but I was only in my twenties. But you try telling that to someone who is convinced that the world has it in for them!
But bad situations sometimes have the surprise effect of focusing the mind on a single goal. That’s what happened to me.
Living in that kind of situation without anything to actually put your own name to is a fairly depressing scenario, and it occurred to me that I really needed to be doing something with my life that had a long-term perspective.
I needed a goal that would remain intact regardless of the other circumstances that may change in life.
It started with a few searches on YouTube – just videos about how to pay your mortgage off faster at first. But it was enough to sow the seed about creating wealth through property investment.
Not long after, I was reading books about property investment. I was attending property investment workshops, spending my weekends at seminars. I was just devouring all the property investment advice that I could.
I became a member of a property investment group, and they started exposing me to deals that would suit my situation.
All of a sudden, I didn’t care about the fact that I was sharing a rental property.
Investing made so much more sense than simply paying off my own home’s mortgage – not to mention the tax return benefits of owning an investment instead of a home, and the flexibility of not being tied to one location.
So, in February 2010, I purchased a property in Freshwater, on Sydney’s northern beaches. That was when Sydney values were in a slump – you can imagine how much it’s improved since then.
Even in the time between my first purchase and purchase number two, the market had moved enough for me to start considering deals north of the border.
My second purchase was in Brassall, Queensland. This one was entirely different – it’s a dual-key home that was purchased as a new build. Apart from a few issues with my builder, it’s been a fairly successful investment – netting me around $565 a week.
I have one more purchase on the cards, this time in the Brisbane area, where I now live.
But the expansion of my portfolio beyond that has been thrown into doubt by the revised lending conditions of late. I’m still on a low income, and there’s only so much that the bank is willing to lend.
But regardless of what happens, I feel far more ready for the future than I did five years ago.
Two properties are better than none, and focusing on building that small portfolio is what dragged me out of a bad situation and made me the person I am today.
Hell, I could even handle living in a share house again knowing that I have an investment portfolio to my name.
