How to win the property game

I recently caught up with a guy who had called me a “loser” for buying my first property in the Victorian suburb of Bayswater (not exactly a hip place at the time) as all of my friends were moving in to Hawthorn (much trendier).

At the time my friends really couldn’t understand what I was doing, and this seems to be something many people I speak to at the moment are experiencing. So I thought it was time to talk about sacrifice and how that relates to property investing.

Once I started thinking about writing this blog I thought about the board game Monopoly. Random? Yes, but stick with me here.

What I realised is, to start this game off you’ve got money in your account and some choices. You can keep going around and collecting your money as you go pass Go, but you can also buy a lot of property – so much so that it gets to the point that you’ve got almost zero dollars, but you’ve made sacrifices and know you’re soon going to start reaping the rewards.

This, folks, is delayed gratification – you‘ve spent all your money buying these properties as you’re going around and then what happens? Money starts to come back to you. So then you upgrade your property, you put up some houses and hotels and, hey presto! You win the game and get some serious satisfaction about making those choices while your friends just kept going around, collecting their money.

Moral of the story today? Don’t let what other people think deter you from your goals and, if necessary, make the sacrifices you need to make to win the game.