I know we can calculate the benefits of 'doing', but I wonder if there is some form of 'opportunities lost' calculator to cover the lack of action ? :-)
A few years ago I attended one of Steve's seminars, and it was the first time I had the opportunity to see how the sharemarket could play a part in property acquisition. I was probably over-enthusiastic if anything, as it was the first time my wife and I had jointly attended something, and both agreed / got a lot out of it :-).
It highlighted how many past opportunities we'd lost (we were in our mid 30's and several great properties been and gone) but now feel significantly more on track, more comfortable with debt, and a lot more knowledgeable about leverage and growth.
At the time I was using the opinions on
www.somersoft.com as a sanity check for any strategies we were considering, as we have always been pro-property and the advice was almost always excellent on there.
The Somersoft / Navra history isn't worth dwelling on, but I found the advice surrounding issues such as using Navra Invest bordered on aggressive, apparently (in my limited knowledge) inadequate and ill-informed, and in some cases probably motivated by something other than a desire to help others
.
Its amazing how the 'risk averse' aspects of our personalities nagged at us, despite us trusting what Steve had presented, even when we relegated most of the other informal advice to the 'dodgy' category. We had a small moment of stock-taking - "maybe we are doing the wrong thing - what about all these risks" - but thankfully we soldiered on, with no small amount of help and support from experts in their field like Steve Navra, NickM, and Rolf Latham.
With what I know now, I think any financial planner would assess us as grossly over-exposed to Navra Invest (most of our equity is in the fund, and our Super Fund has a reasonable swag of units in the company). Over time, we will probably seek to diversify, purely to spread our exposure. Doesn't change the fact that the Navra way is probably to us, what Scientology is to Tom and Katie ;-) (silent birth, anyone ?)
In the meantime, the Navra stuff has done exactly what Steve said it would. We are significantly better off and thanks to his dynamic nature (and yes he is a great salesman - not that there is anything wrong with that ;-) ) we have bitten the bullet on a property development that we are reasonably certain will set our daughter up for life. Photos to follow
Had we listened to the apathetic prophecies of doom earlier on, we would have missed out on a substantial amount of income over the last couple of years, and our asset base would still be limited to what it was back then.
Over the same time we saw similar examples of well-meaning advice (like a Xmas party with friends in their mid 40s with a good amount of equity, and their parents saying "oh no those Line of Credit things are terrible" - so our friends will never consider expanding their horizons because they have been prorgrammed with a fear of something they don't understand - in the meantime with parent's blessing extending their home loan to buy a new car)
I've tried to encourage young people we know to at least attend something like the Navra seminars, and stick a toe in the water. The education of actually doing something seems priceless to me - just wish it had been earlier for us. Luckily Ella is 17 months old so we have plenty of time to make sure the offspring is better educated much earlier in life
Happy Anzac
Carl
