Listen to this episode below:
Here’s a sneak peek at what discussed this time:
In this episode I thought it’d be fun to share some – ‘fairly personal’ details about our new goals and property plans for the next couple of years. I’m going to break down the process Victoria and I have been through recently to create a new vision for our future, understand the financial targets we need to hit to make that vision a reality, and then break it down further to put a create a roadmap that tells us what we need to be doing in terms of the type and number of projects to get there.
I’m sharing this for two reasons – the first is that it’s a genuine reflection of the process we go through pretty regularly to reassess our goals and make sure we’re still working towards a vision that inspires us. It’s something we get asked about a lot, in terms of how we set goals and what our future plans are, so I though it’d be fun to go into the detail of latest goal setting session and tell you what we want to achieve and how we arrived at those plans.
The second reason is that we wanted to take it a step further and work with you to create your own vision, goals and roadmap for the next 3-5 years. January seemed like the perfect time to do this, and especially this year as it’s the start of a new decade, so we decided to run a free 5 day challenge this month where every day we share one simple but effective assignment that combined will create a meaningful roadmap for your own investing journey.
If you want to join us for free then the easiest way to register is to go to insidepropertyinvesting.com/5daychallenge and we’ll send you all of the details.
Our past and current goals
Ok, what we’re running through today is an overview of our own personal goals for the next 3-5 years. This year has been a huge milestone for us to before we look at what’s ahead, it’s always nice to reflect on what you’ve achieved as well.
Around 2 years ago Victoria and I were trying to figure out what was next for us – we’d been able to escape the corporate world and not go bankrupt, our business was doing well enough, although we knew we wanted to keep pushing and growing, we had a house that we loved albeit not our dream home, and we both agreed we weren’t ready to have a family yet, at least not beyond our two furry friends.
What we did want to do was start focussing more on building the business rather than working in it, that old E-Myth philosophy that so many of us read and relate to, but in our case at least quickly forget about when there was a fire to fight. And we’d always had a desire to travel, originally thinking that would be an ex-pat assignment with the day job, and more recently moving on to a period living abroad or possibly just taking longer, more immersive holidays.
The difficulty with that part was we didn’t really know where we wanted to go, and we definitely didn’t want to leave our dogs behind.
Anyway, long story short we’d been sailing a lot with Victoria’s dad around the North Wales coast for the past few years, wrapping up in as many layers as possible most of the time to keep warm and dry, and cursing the occasional day the weather was actually nice because typically it was a Tuesday and we’d be stuck in the office or on site.
So we decided to get qualified but take the opportunity to do it in a warmer climate since we’d be living aboard for a week and wanted to make it an enjoyable holiday as well as an education.
And just like that our eyes were opened to this new world! That week sailing around Gibraltar was a totally different experience to the UK, and as we started to realise that the med and most of the oceans around the world were full of people living on boats full time, that very quickly became our way to live abroad without having to pick a single location, and to be able to take the dogs with us.
It also hit our other goal of spending more time on building the business rather than working in it, as there was no way we could move abroad without seriously upgrading our systems and our team so that they could look after the day to day stuff.
Earlier this year that goal became a reality as we sold up our house in the UK, moved most of our stuff into storage, and drove to Europe to move aboard our board where we’ve been living ever since and intend to do so for at least a couple more years.
One important thing I want to make clear at this point is that goals aren’t always financial, and in fact in most cases they really shouldn’t be.
Your goals need to be something you’re passionate about – something meaningful to you that will help you get started, put in the effort, and keep going until you get there – and whilst most goals will have a financial element to them, just having a number that isn’t tied to anything more specific will rarely be enough to motivate you to put in the extra effort, give up your evenings and weekends, miss time with friends and family or cut back on holidays, and all the other short term sacrifices that will likely be necessary to make a significant change to your life.
New Goals
Our new 5 year goal is to get to the stage with our business where we can afford a £2million house or a £2million boat. At the moment we’re not entirely sure if we’re going to do this sailing thing long term or exactly how long we will do it for, but if we do decide to keep going for the foreseeable future then the next boat we have our sights set on is in that price range. Specifically it’s a Sunreef 60 sailing catamaran, which is 50% bigger than our current boat and big step up in quality as well. It’s about as big as we can go and still be able to sail the world without needing additional crew, and it’d definitely be big enough to start a family on which is probably still a few years off but could happen on the water if we continue with this life.
Breaking goals down into a roadmap
The next step is to break it down to the next level and create a roadmap, which is a more detailed plan of what we need to do and by when in order to hit those financial requirements. This will depend on the strategy or type of property you’re investing in, and if you haven’t decided on that part of your plan then now is a good time to spend some time assessing your options and making some decisions around this.
You also need to assess your current income, and whether any of that will still exist and can therefore be factored in to your total figure. If you’re in a day job you want to quit then you’ll need to generate everything from property or other new ventures, whereas if you have an existing portfolio or plan on staying in employment than you’ve got a bit of a head start with that income as a baseline.
In our case for instance, let’s say we want to increase our income by £15,000 per month over the next 5 years. That only requires us to increase our monthly income by £3,000 every year and we’ll hit our goal. That sounds a lot more achievable than looking at that original figure of needing an income of £30,000 per month.
Now none of this is rocket science. You can probably take some ideas from this episode and put them towards your own goal setting process without any additional input, but if you want to take it to the next level then we’ve got something really fun coming up in a few weeks, depending on when you listen to this of course.
How can you join in?
Victoria and I decided we would run a free 5 day challenge in a private facebook group to share 5 really simple but effective assignments over the course of 5 days to set you on the right path for 2020 and beyond. We’ll look at both the vision and goal setting side of things, and also putting a plan in place to help you achieve it through property investing.
I know it’s a busy time of year getting back into the swing of things after the Christmas shut down, so we’ll make sure that each day the work required is short, and by the end of the week you’ll have a fully fledged roadmap of how to hit your goals over the next couple of years.
Links Mentioned
Register for the 5 day challenge: insidepropertyinvesting.com/5daychallenge