Tall poppy syndrome

In Australia, when someone stands out from the crowd we sometimes have a tendency to go along with a group mentality and chop them off at the head to bring them back to everyone else's level.

So what is a “tall poppy”? It is a person who is doing something different, trying to get themselves ahead of the crowd and who stands out from others. The decision you need to make is whether you are happy to just tick along in life, or whether you’re someone who is prepared to take the steps to educate yourself and move forward with building your wealth. One way to do this, obviously, is through property investment.

There’s a big difference between the lifestyle and life expectancy of my parents and grandparents generations and what’s happening now. Doing something about your financial freedom is more important today than ever before.

In my grandparents circumstances they left school at 15 then worked at the same job until they were 65. At that time the average life expectancy was 75 and the strategy to life was to pay off your home loan while tucking a little bit extra under the mattress for retirement – which, on average, was about another 10 years. This strategy worked back then. But what was their lifestyle like? It wasn’t extravagant. A holiday was usually just taking a caravan down to the local caravan park and camping on the foreshore.

So let’s compare that to today’s lifestyle. The average age of completing education is 20-25 years old and we want to retire younger – if you ask people, most would say they want to retire at 50-55 years old. Our medical system is a lot better, so life expectancy has stretched out to 85 years or more. And what’s our lifestyle like? I go overseas for holidays, my kids all have iPads, we tend to want more disposable things than in my grandparents’ day. To put it simply – everybody wants more.

So what’s occurring here is you’ve got a much shorter space of time to build your wealth to support a much longer retirement period and a much more extravagant lifestyle. The simple solution to making that happen is by investing in property to generate wealth – and to not be afraid of being a tall poppy.