My Story
In today’s episode, I will expand on what “being a professional investor” means and why people want to become one when they retire.
Let’s start with my own story.
I consider myself lucky because, throughout our lives, my husband and I have made a huge effort to monitor our money constantly.
We’ve ended up in a situation where even when we had small kids, the money I earned from investments, business, or consulting was earmarked for future investing.
That’s why, for a long time now, I’ve had the luxury of being able to say that I’m a full-time investor.
It sounds dull to some people, but it’s entertaining for me.
I enjoy understanding how deals get put together, meeting people with the results I want, levelling up as an investor, and realising that the more you know, the less you know.
We sometimes perceive that we need to know everything or have all our ducks in a row.
The truth is, investing is like learning a new language.
For example, I tried to learn Spanish when I lived in Barcelona. Initially, I thought I was really good at it.
But when I started to immerse myself in sentence structure, I realised how bad I was at it.
I went through a period of being very self-conscious about speaking.
I think the same thing applies to investing or any discipline.
The more you learn about investing, the more you realise that many talented people in the world are way ahead of you.
Because I can play as a full-time investor, my focus now is broad enough to encompass the juicy and fun area of alternative investment.
It’s like you’re constantly looking to redeploy, and you have to reinvest a lot of money.
My greatest metaphor for alternative investments is this:
Imagine going into a sweet shop and having a little paper bag (let’s call it a little amount of money).
What you need to do is choose from rows and dozens of sweets for your bag.
The challenge here is not an absence of deal flow or a shortage of deals. It’s more of the small amount of capital you have right now.
It’s a different dynamic when you can choose your deals and have the capital than when you constantly have to chase deals.
For the last decades, being an investor for me has been a full-time, fun passion, if not a part-time endeavour.
People will often get into investing because they want to grow their wealth and create the money to shape their lives the way they want to.
But the things that frustrate the hell out of them when it comes to it are the frustration of having to compete for deals and the time wasted on deals that aren’t fit for their goals.
Suppose you can get yourself to a position where you’re cherry-picking great deals and have a deal flow pipeline.
In that case, you can go from looking at your wealth inconsistently to being a professional investor.
What Would it Look Like to be a Professional Investor for a Living?
If you want to do professional investing for a living, it’s important to recognise the cadence (meaning the frequency and intensity of time and energy needed) of wealth building.
The cadence of wealth creation is entirely different from your job or business.
I would say there’s probably not a day that goes by where I’m not doing something to move the needle on my finances.
It can be simple things like administration, talking to a builder, tidying up some piece of administration, choosing deals, or speaking to new deal operators.
There’s always something to do.
But now the question is, “How do you create a healthy cadence around your wealth creation that feels good for you?”
At the end of the day, if you don’t feel good doing something, you don’t need to do it.
The intensity of playing with money for a living is a fun pursuit for a lot of people.
Client Case Study
Let me tell you something about my clients. They were tradies by background, and they’ve run a successful business over the last 30-plus years.
They now have a portfolio of alternative investments generating great cash flow, sitting on the side of the other wealth they’d already built before we met.
One interesting thing about this particular couple is that they had a business they felt they couldn’t sell.
The business was very niche and heavily relied on his skills, so their idea was to shut up shop and retire.
After immersing himself in the alternative investing space, he now understands how these investments work.
He has his own investing rules and knows how to distinguish between a deal that’s a fit and a deal that isn’t.
Both parties in this couple are interested in being investors as their hobby in retirement, and I’d like to add that they’re probably likely to retire in the next 12 months.
Wealth creation isn’t rocket science.
Unfortunately, a whole industry is trying to make us believe that handling money on our own is too complex and that we should outsource the decision-making and management to others.
I don’t advocate that at all.
You must retain control of your investment decision-making and partner with others to achieve the desired outcomes.
What I love about the couple we’re talking about is that they levelled up their thinking as investors without formal training.
They now recognise what it takes to build a successful portfolio of investments that will give them the desired outcomes.
They are clear about investments they may have made in the past that weren’t aligned with their goals, and they’ve got a clear plan and an order of execution to get them over that last 5% to get them to the finish line.
They’re good at dotting their eyes, crossing their Ts, and making sure that they keep a tidy house regarding bank accounts, management, and administration.
My hat is really off to them for having done a terrific job of levelling up as investors and putting themselves in a position where they can be professional investors from here on in.
What Can You Do to Make it Happen?
Now you might ask, “What can I do to make it happen?”
If you are genuinely interested in managing and building wealth, becoming a professional investor for a living is within your grasp.
Unfortunately, as we start our wealth creation journey, we must build capital before we can have the luxury of playing with it.
But I believe you don’t need as much capital as the world tells you because you can start to play as an investor much earlier in the journey.
Continue building your portfolio of high-performance investments so that when the living expenses you need to maintain your lifestyle are taken care of by your investment portfolio, you can have the luxury of choice.
That is when you can let go of your active income and focus entirely on continuing to grow, nurture, and preserve your passive income.
Final Thoughts
The idea of being a professional investor is not about sitting on your butt and trying to make money. It’s not also a way of doing nothing at all.
Becoming a professional investor for a living is an opportunity to say, “I’ve fitted my own oxygen mask.”
Now, you can focus on other important things like the impact and influence you have in the world, spending time with your kids so you can shape who they become, or getting involved in charitable causes that you think are important.
When you have the luxury of knowing that you’re good and being taken care of, you can start to have a much bigger impact on the world.
If you’re a business owner feeling frustrated that despite doing everything right in the property investing playbook and you’re no closer to financial freedom, then head over to www.inkosiwealth.com to learn more about how you can use alternative investments to catapult your investing income and blend strategies to shave decades off your timeline to financial freedom.
If you’re interested in understanding how to create wealth through alternative strategies, please check out my programs, where I help you catapult your investment income and blend strategies to shave decades off your timeline to financial freedom.
Or, you’re welcome to get in touch today, book a call with me, and I would be happy to talk you through it – no obligation!
