Next meeting of new investors group – Sydney

For those who were interested in meeting up but never did, below is the latest post to the ‘Investors Group for Newbies’ thread that can be found in ‘Opinionated’ (I’m trying to get it moved to ‘Heads-up’)

Wash-up from first investors group meeting held on 27/11/03

Off to a good start last Thursday. Small turnout but what the hell, we couldn’t have accommodated a cast of thousands anyway.

Firstly thanks to Otto for providing the venue and to Jeff for being our first presenter. Thanks to Amit for following up with the mailing list.

Overview
There were only a few items on the agenda but somehow it still took nearly two hours to get through. The main event was an informal presentation by Jeff, (Still_in_school) of the investment strategy that has led him to having acquired 11 properties in less than a year. Not surprisingly this led to a good deal of discussion around the fine details of the process. No doubt this subject will still be a hot topic in future meetings.

The other main area discussed is what I’m now going to call Project Pushing. This consisted mainly of me using the group’s input to help clarify the approach I’d like to take rather than any formal start to the process. The end results of this synthesis are detailed in the General section below.

It was also decided to get together again in two weeks time at the same venue and that I would draft an agenda for the meeting, again see below.

Action Items
1) The only formal action item to be defined was on Amit. Amit has got his head around Trusts and has agreed to prepare a twenty-minute presentation for the next meeting, which will be followed by a ten minute Q&A session. Amit is not a financial advisor so this is knowledge sharing by a peer – only.

Other Actions
I have agreed to draft templates for:

· Statement of Goals document
· Balance Sheet
· Cash Flow Statement

This was not a formal action item as most people already have their own versions of these documents. The (selfish) intention is to ensure I have my own. I am however happy to share these templates with whoever is interested.

In addition I have challenged Amit to buy a CF+ property before me or forfeit a bottle of good Champagne, if he does then I’ll have to stump up the bubbly (however, given the current state of the market we may both be waiting a while to collect…)

General
Personally I found the meeting extremely useful in helping to clarify my thinking. I have created V1 of the Statement of Goals and in doing so a further clarification occurred.

I now believe goals have two dimensions, time and life aspect. By life aspect I mean areas such as Financial, Career, Education etc – nothing new here – just new to me. I have broken the time dimension into: 5 years, 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, 1 month and, most importantly, tasks. The tasks relate to the 1-month goals and being such are very easy to define. The trick of course is to actually do them.

It was at this point that the idea of ‘Project Pushing’ crystalised. I define Project Pushing as the application of an external discipline to our own actions. By keeping the Statement of Goals up to date we will have a list of tasks to complete within the month. Meeting every fortnight or month to review / report progress to others on the tasks you’ve set yourself means you will have to stay focused in order to deliver.

I appreciate that this approach will not appeal to very many people but all this needs is two or three committed individuals to start with. I am quite happy to organize this. I would imagine that many people would drift off once they had acquired enough momentum. Again I would imagine that this approach would be more useful for newbies rather than those who are already making headway though I’m happy to be proved wrong.

However, I believe most people want to meet simply to network and share knowledge. Therefore, I would like to take a dual-track approach to future meetings. The first part of the meeting will be split into two streams: Project Pushing, for those interested, and general networking; the second part will be knowledge sharing by way of a presentation which will of course mean more networking. I’ve put together a preliminary agenda, see below, for the next meeting that I hope illustrates the idea.

At this point I want to know if there is any interest for the Project Pushing idea or am I pushing something else uphill! Email me if you want to get involved and based on the response I’ll adapt the meeting accordingly. Email: [email protected]. Please title the email Project Pushing.

Agenda

1a) First meeting of the PP group
This will be a preliminary exploration of where we are individually and to flesh-out the approach taken.

1b) General networking (I’ll need someone to own this – any offers?)

2) Presentation on Trusts
Content overview to be provided by Amit (cheers mate – really dropped you in it with this one eh?)

3) Date and venue of next meeting

4) Any other business

I’ll flesh-out the agenda once I get some feedback.

Cheers, Tom

As usual I’ll post this on the PI.com forum