Hi All,
I was hoping to hear some experiences of people who have broken their own rules, or their own gut instincts, or have double guessed themselves into some decision making they rather not have made!!
Or curiously enough, has doble guessing yourself, or breaking your own rules has lead to a better outcome than you thought!
Thanks for your stories in advance!!
Looks like everyone is too embarrassed to own up to their mistakes. I must admit, when I read this post, I thought, no way am I going to bare my soul, but here goes.
Probably our biggest mistake was to sell our PPOR which we loved, and move suburbs because we were worried about the proposed parallel runway planned for Brisbane. We would have had double the planes over the top of our house and thought the value of our main asset would possibly plummet. HA, what a joke. The suburb has pushed ahead in leaps and bounds and really, we could have stayed and made good profit.
Having said that, by selling we ditched our mortgage, bought a “worst house in the best street” and borrowed to renovate it. Sold it, made some money and bought another dogbox in another good street. We ditched our mortgage again and borrowed to renovate yet again.
Each time I see the growth figures in the suburb we left, I cringe. However, I am sensible enough to know that if we had stayed, we would have had to add bedrooms and our PPOR mortgage would be bigger and we would not have bought the IPs that we have. We are not “wealthy” but we are well on track for a healthy retirement (fingers crossed).
So, in the long run, I think if we had stayed, we would probably be better off financially for that property, but probably would have more private debt as well.
I don’t know if we would be better off in a net assets sense, and it is too difficult to work out because the people who bought our “landmark” house have plonked a poxy second story on top, so personally, we wouldn’t buy it now, because it has turned into an ugly mess (in our opinion). Even if it sells in the future, it is just too hard to gauge what positive or negative effect the extention has made to the house.
I used to mull over this every now and then, but have let it go now and moved on. We are very happy where we are, but I just wish sometimes I had a crystal ball.
Anyway, look forward to hearing others’ stories as well.
My story, Wylie.
Just having told that story, I recall something else I have lost sleep over in the past. After moving to the house we live in now, we decided to sell an IP in order to pay off some private debt to my parents, complete renovating our PPOR and enable us to borrow for another IP.
We put the IP on the market, and first serious buyer spend a day in council trying to get an answer as to whether he could split the corner block and build another small lot house. I must say at that stage, we hadn’t thought of doing it ourselves because we had been told the block was too small. That buyer could get no answer from council and didn’t buy.
We took a deep breath and said to each other, “wow, just as well he got a “no” from council because wouldn’t we feel cheated if this small block had been able to be divided and we had missed out on the profit because we hadn’t thought it could be done.”
Anyway, next purchaser bought it, split the block and put a house on! This was before the really small blocks were everywhere and we had been told our block was too small to split. It makes you wonder why some get a “no” and some get a “yes”. I guess the first purchaser would probably have been told by council to lodge an application, that council would not give an answer without a proper application, ie, not over the phone or even a personal visit. Anyway, the buyer was a developer and did this as a living, obviously knew what he was doing, and probably had contacts as well.
For quite some time after that, I used to mull over this too. We could have done this ourselves and made money. Back then (not now apparently) we could have split the block and sold the land without having to build the house.
Anyway, I used to mentally kick myself when I thought about the money we “gave away”. It took a while to stop beating myself up about this and I am much more philosophical nowdays.
I also have to remember that at the time this was happening, we were fighting with a pool company who had left us high and dry, and planning our PPOR renovation and, realistically, with three young kids, I don’t think the extra stress of doing it ourselves would have been helpful to my life or our marriage.
So, I don’t dwell on it now, and haven’t for quite a long time, but it did plague me for quite a time. As I get older I try to think more of the positives.
It’s funny, but even writing about it now, I don’t cringe like I used to. I must be over it (money isn’t everything).
Wylie.
Hi Wylie,
I think philosophical is good !!!!
Anyway, I used to mentally kick myself when I thought about the money we “gave away”. It took a while to stop beating myself up about this and I am much more philosophical nowdaysNot sure if I was double guessing, or what – but our first IP was bought for $48k with rent of $150/week. Guess we didn’t know just how good things were (or how good they would get when interest rates dropped from 17%). Whatever, we sold it as it was costing us to keep it.
Today that same house would be worth $180k – rent probably $200/week.
In hindsight, would I have kept it? Absolutely!!! But then, you don’t know what you don’t know – and we didn’t know how good we had it.
As I said, though, it helps to be philosophical. The money that was released on sale helped to pay for education for our two sons. What’s that worth? And, today, the knowledge gained from such mistakes has helped us to grow our current portfolio – to our benefit.
Stay philosophical,
Benny
I think my regret is that I started investing late rather than early in life.
I worked full time (one job full time, plus a small part time job), made good, superfluous money, and my rent was very low.
All the money I made was completely wasted most of the time- buying crap, lots and LOTS of shoes and clothes, home decorating thingies, going on expensive holidays (Well I don’t really regret the holidays), buying a brandnew, exxy car which I didn’t need and hardly used (I used public transport or my push bike), going out all the time, not caring about how much I was spending and never saving a cent or investing it, giving money away, not even glancing at the future.
Then we emigrated on our last little bit of money we had, then had kids….no savings aside at all…
Luckily we got a bit wiser then and bought our own house, from which we started to use the equity for purpose of investments.Things would have been so much easier now if I had just started putting a bit of money away for investments- I probably wouldn’t even have missed the money I saved.
You know the funny thing is that no one even interfered- where was the meddling family when I needed it, hehe!
Nobody even suggested that it would be a good thing to think of the future!On the bright side, life was one big party back then with lots of fun memories! [party]
Celivia
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