Building your portfolio: Time is money

I hear most people say the same thing: “I want to be financially free, but I just don’t have enough time in the day to spend researching the right properties to purchase.” However, you might find if you sat down at the start of each week and wrote down where you spend your time, I guarantee you’ll be able to cut down on some TV, Facebook or Instagram time, and boom – there are some free hours.

Seriously, think about it. Each week, every single year of your working life you dedicate (probably at a minimum) 40 hours to working for someone else. Yet, when it comes to spending some hours doing something that could mean you don’t have to work any more, or will make you very comfortable in retirement, you can’t find the time? Well, today I’m going to help you with that.

Take a look at the structure of your work day. Normally you run around like a headless chook, constantly checking emails, making and taking calls. What about if at one point during the day you turn your emails off for two hours and dedicate yourself to getting all your work done (much easier when you aren’t checking your emails every five minutes). Or what about instead of being available for every single call, you return phone calls in the afternoon. These small changes, while they might seem crazy, will help you win back your time and suddenly a whole new range of opportunities are up for achieving.

I’ve spoken a lot in the past about the importance of setting goals, so why not set yourself a timetable for the week and make things work in the times that suit you?

My business partner Al Lewison and I started a telco business a few years ago (now sold). Around year two, we had a small team of half a dozen people working there and we were all ploughing away busting our butts and making a fair chunk of money. By the time we owned this business, Al and I had already built a reasonable property portfolio and we made more off that property portfolio in the same space of time, than we did working for a whole year in our business. That result proved to me that I could never work hard enough, to make as much money as my portfolio did (and I could make that money sitting on my bum).

Let’s think about that further – if the median house price is around $500,000 and property grows at 10 per cent a year, your property is worth an extra $50,000. What would you need to do to earn an extra $50,000 a year without a portfolio?

Remember that once you have spent that initial time, doing your research and finding the right process to follow, the time you have to spend making decisions will be minimised.

Hopefully in today’s blog I’ve provided some food for thought and some motivation to set aside some time to start building your portfolio. I built my portfolio so that could spend more time with my family – find out what’s important to you and make things work so you can enjoy life.