What’s happened to the Australian Dream?
Property Investment
After more than eight years of feedback, we think the Aussie Dream is:
- Paying off your home
- Having your Super AND an investment property to look after you in retirement
- Creating a nest egg for you and your kids
But sitting at clients’ kitchen tables in suburban Melbourne, listening to how they desperately want to stop spinning their financial wheels, we noticed a distressing trend: not all was as it seemed in their seemingly comfortable lives.
Lift a small corner of the rug, and whoa! Just look at that money mess hidden underneath.
I’m talking about a lifestyle being lived well beyond their means. Tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, vehicle loans, personal loans and store cards, all funded by the equity in their home. We were being asked to provide clients with the strategy to purchase an investment property and provide guidance and support. However, our job and their dreams were being hindered indefinitely by financial dirt they had been sweeping under the rug for years.
Often, so much dirt accumulates that lifting the rug becomes unbearable. Painful.
Check this out; I’m at a client’s place with the husband, sitting there hoping to help, and the wife is so shit-scared of facing their financial reality she almost refused to return home. That’s what happens when you’re 50 with a half million-dollar mortgage and you’re running out of time to pay the mortgage off before you retire.
Having finances in such dire shape robs people of self-confidence and disempowers them.
Bad spending habits, no spending awareness, no clear idea of reasonable spending limits; we see it all with ever-increasing frequency. But what disturbed us most? The size of their mortgage compared to what it was when they purchased their home.
We see homes bought, say, fifteen years ago for $200,000 with a loan of $160,000 now looking more like a home worth $500,000 with a loan of $400,000. The opportunity to smash their mortgage and achieve the Aussie Dream has escaped them. Unless they make a change, they’ll be at the mercy of their mortgage forever.
Regretfully, becoming financially literate has never been a priority of the average Aussie, with the banks and the typical mortgage broker using this to their advantage. In other words, they profit from your apathy.
Around every four years, your bank or broker is going to entice you into refinancing for a new 25 to 30-year loan term which resets the debt cycle back to a point where close to 80% of your repayments go towards paying the interest on the loan. It’s not until year 15 that more than half of the repayment is going to the principal!
The banking and finance industries are having a great time treating hard working mums and dads like mushrooms, taking advantage of their ignorance while not providing the knowledge they need to pay off their mortgage quickly. Crushing your mortgage is the most straightforward way to improve your financial position.
Clover Partners offers a simple financial strategy that makes achieving the Aussie Dream realistic and achievable through a simple and sensible process:
- Providing a ‘Reality Check’ where we listen to our clients, then, together work out if our strategy is right for them. Just by taking this baby step, our clients instantly begin moving from feeling stressed and out of control to feeling more educated, empowered, and on their way to being in control financially.
- We show people how the system is rigged in the banks’ favour, open their eyes to how everything works, then set them up in a way that they can ‘beat the banks.’ For eligible clients, we offer a couple of unique strategies where, together with the purchase of an investment property, we can make some small but powerful changes to redirect their cash flow which can literally smash the principal of their loan—often resulting in an outcome that sees them own their home in half the time.
- Owning an investment property that’s been chosen by a property expert does three things perfectly; it rents out every day of the year, it grows in value steadily over time, and it costs next to nothing to own. Choosing a property like this might take 100-200 man-hours, hence why so many people talk about it, make a start with research, then let years slip away and take no action. Clover Partners has the decades of experience, the knowledge (in finance, accounting and property) and the correct strategy to make investment property ownership an affordable reality for just about anyone who doesn’t have the time, expertise or confidence to do it for themselves.
Can you imagine life where your finances are sorted and you’re in full control? Where you’re on the path to being free from your mortgage and have a nest egg you can see growing with your very own eyes?
Don’t do what everyone else does and be a slave to the banks for half your life. You don’t need a financial planner selling products you don’t understand. You simply need to get the basics right and have a partner to help you stick to your plan. It’s easy to find out how and easier to make happen, so get in touch, we’d love to help.
Want more insight? Give us a call on 1300 823 995 or touch base below
