12:23 – Chris’ plans toward his future

15:00 – Not compromising your lifestyle for financial freedom

19:53 – Taking it slow and steady

21:22 – Outro

What lessons did you get from your parents regarding wealth?

• Dad was a heart physician and mum was a nurse, well enough but not mega rich – they were conservative and weren’t flashy spenders
• Brought up with the fact that rent money is dead money
• Went home hunting and knew nothing about property
• Lucked into property (saw 100 properties) and found a beautiful one that he wanted and figured out how to make it work
• His skill base is around logic, numbers and no emotion
• Logically good with basic numbers and thought that to buy a 1 br unit, that this wouldn’t work
• Instead, for a 3 br house, he could rent it out (12% rental yield at the time) and live for free
• Didn’t know what a yield was until his 30s
• Just knew how to calculate money going in and money going out
•  Unemotional about the numbers, it’s just a means to an end

How do you respond to people saying “you have it easy”?

• Chris aware that he’s known as being one of the lifestyle kings – goes overseas 10
• 15 times a year but because he runs his business on American express and he gets to use frequent flyer points
• Lives in a $5m home within $10 – $15m neighbourhood but they rent the property
• Sold his Lamborghini for a profit recently
• Point is – he has a knack of being able to make money
• His lifestyle is pretty free – nothing scheduled in if he doesn’t want to
• He doesn’t do 40 – 60 hours of work but the weight of debt is what he carries with him ($10 – $11m in debt)
• If interest rates go up, it costs him an extra $100k a year
• He’s comfortable with the burden of debt rather than carrying 60 hour working weeks instead
• Built it that way but it comes with a price tag – stress
• It’s all manageable and by choice – he doesn’t need to leverage this high up
• Currently, he’s not gearing much because he doesn’t need more debt or more property
• Key point: he’d rather leverage money rather than his time

How Do You Teach Your Kids about Money & Wealth?

• He spent a few years going to ultra-high net worth conferences
• He found that the biggest issue in Australia for these individuals is how to avoid turning your kids into spoilt brats
• No one has the answer yet
• “Mommy are we rich?” – book recommendation
• From a money perspective for his kids, it’s hard to teach them about money when they’re surrounded by fancy boats, 360 degree views of Sydney and flashy cars
• They’re strict on them and trying to teach them through games and discussions such as Monopoly
• Hopes that they’ll get educated but it’s a very difficult thing
• Done classic charity work – hopefully they start seeing more and more of that as they get older to give perspective

You’ve geared aggressively and been aggressive with building your own wealth. What’s the next 3 – 5 years look like for you?

• Main thing was to build an asset base
• So when Chris got out of working, he had $3.5m in property with 6 properties growing at $100k a year during a boom
• When you don’t work, you’re spending 24/7
• Property market doesn’t go up forever
• Realised he needed to get his asset base beyond $3.5m and aimed for $10m
• Then his next aim was de-leveraging by waiting for the property market to increase and then you’re better geared when this increase occurs
• Current portfolio is about $17 – $18m and aiming to gear to 70 – 80%
• If you have $5 – $6m in offset accounts to live off
• If everything went wrong, you’ve got $500k a year for 10 years
• Only buys blue chip second hand properties which stable. Those will almost never go down and he’s happy to play the long game
• Have a bigger cash buffer in offset or in different entities or banks to diversify

What does financial freedom mean to you?

• A lot of people on the speaking circuit in property who show the flashy lifestyle for the sake of it
• For Chris, he genuinely loves fast and flashy cars and doesn’t do it for the sake of showing off. However, this can give off a negative first impression
• He’s not material for the sake of being material
• The ultimate thing is freedom of choice: he doesn’t want to work and commute to the city. He’s out most evenings and doesn’t have to be there if he doesn’t want to
• He never wants to get up thinking he’s got to do something for the sake of it
• He’s created a life of just doing the stuff he loves – loves TV, speaking, inspiring people
• Starve their lifestyle advice – it really is balance. Every week he hears about someone dying, negative media coverage, so many people were saying “if only I did this”
• People say what’s on his bucket list – he says there’s nothing on his bucket list because he’s doing everything that’s on it
• Biggest fault is that he’s invested too hard but also lived very hard
• As he’s almost 50 – he’s only got 5 – 10 years left to do active kind of things such as skiing. So he books more trips
• Whenever there’s a tragedy, he books another trip because there’s no guarantees that there’s a tomorrow
• The only reason he can do it is because he’s built a big asset base when he was young

For those who are listening, where do you see the greatest opportunity for those who want to create wealth over the next decade?

• Slow and steady wins the race
• All of his assets are blue chip
• Never tried to time the market
• None doubled overnight
• Buying the decade game
• 90 – 95% are all in solid blue chip investment classes
• Diversify into cash and other asset classes