Finding it hard to get the ball rolling

are you single ?

This form of language ties in well with the OPs concerns over kickbacks ( illegal undisclosed commissions).

At some point, someone needs to trust someone else to help them along, otherwise one does their own P&B, their own Conveyance, their own soil test,their own accounting, use mainly Dr Google unless admitted to hospital etc

ta

rolf

 

hehe

my point is, we all sell

everyday............... even the most mundane simple things woth other humans or organisations are a sale.

ta

rolf

 

My mate ED does a good job here

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1552892201424923

get your big picture sorted the littler stuff sort itself, or as my business mentors say

Sort they why, the how takes care of itself.

ta
rolf

 

In my opinion and experience, a good accountant is critical if you want to progress beyond one or two properties. If your goals are much more simple, you can do it yourself - but I strongly recommend against it for more than that.

A good solicitor or conveyancer is critical if you want to buy anything at all. DO NOT TRY AND DO YOUR OWN CONVEYANCING.

While you can do it without a mortgage broker - again, if you intend to buy anything more than one or two properties, you'll do much better with one than without.

Once you have bought a property, I would also recommend that you engage a property manager to manage it - self managing is certainly possible, but a lot of work and there's a lot of legislation you need to understand to ensure you are doing things right, so best to leave it to a professional in my opinion.

Everything else is optional. I am of the strong opinion that you should not outsource the decision making - just the advice on technical matters which the above will give you. That also extends to using buyers agents - you engage a buyers agent to implement your strategy (ie they find the property that fits the criteria which YOU have defined) - you do not engage a buyers agent to tell you which strategy to use (or worse - to "sell" you a property they've already chosen before they even spoke to you). Be very careful you understand the differences there.

Either way, these should all be independent parties and not work for the same one-stop-shop. You need people who will pull you up and say "hang on - why are you doing this?" or simply tell you that this is not a good idea. These people should all be working _for_ you and your success should be their goal.

Even if you do engage professionals - you should strive to educate yourself as much as possible to ensure that you have at least a basic understanding of how things work. This is the only way you can judge the quality of the advice you are receiving. That is also why this site exists - to help educate people so they can either do it themselves, or judge the quality of the advice they are receiving from the professionals they engage.

In my experience, there are two main ways in which people get themselves into trouble when using professionals:

1. the blindly put their trust in someone who really doesn't have their best interests at heart and never check that the advice they are receiving is appropriate or reasonable. Typically they haven't taken the time to educate themselves about the process to understand that they are not receiving good advice, or they simply allow themselves to get sucked in by a good sales pitch or a charismatic sales person
2. they don't understand enough about the process to ask the right questions of their advisers, and so the advice they receive, while technically valid, does not necessarily suit their goals or needs - mostly because they were not able to effectively articulate the specifics to the adviser. Advisers are not mind readers - you need to tell them what you want (although the betters ones are good at asking you good questions to help you along that path - but it helps if you've already thought through those questions in your own time).

Learn all you can so that you know which questions to ask.

One of the most important things I've learned in life is to not focus on finding the right "answers" ... in many cases you're answering the wrong questions anyway. Focus on finding the right "questions" to ask - the answers will naturally follow. This applies to just about everything in life - learn to ask the right questions.

And the first question to start with is "why". Why are you doing this? Why is this important to you? What outcome do you want - and why? Once you understand why, you can start to work on "what" and the "how", and then eventually get to more specific questions such as "where, when, and even the who" and so on.

I think people who get stuck in analysis paralysis (this was me too, once!) are too focused on these later questions when they don't fully understand the answer to the "why" questions yet. Or they've tried asking why and have only come up with very vague answers such as "because I want to get rich" or "because I want to provide for myself in retirement". I think it helps to get a LOT more specific about the answers. As part of answering "why", you need to paint a pretty detailed picture about what that end result will look like - put actual numbers on things, actual activities you'll be able to do, actual feelings you'll feel. (BTW - these aren't really the "what" questions I talked about asking - the "what" questions relate to the path to achieve the why, not to what the realisation of the why will look like).

It's a bit like mind-mapping. If you're trying to break down a huge task which is very daunting, start by focusing on the end point, then build a layer of ideas and concepts that describe that end point, then for each of those, build suggestions on the things that need to be done to reach that end point, and then for each of those, a list of how you might achieve each of them, and so on. Eventually, you've got this huge chart where the outermost points are quite simple steps - each of which should be relatively easy to implement on their own.

It's like the old joke - "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!" (it's a metaphor - we're not talking about actually eating an elephant!! ) ... it means "How do you start a task which seems overwhelming? You break it down in to lots of really small tasks and tackle them one at a time".

 

This

most people in my and allied industries arent mind readers............ great point, they arent heart readers either.

The REAL issue I find is, that MOST people know what they DONT want, but have little clear or specific vision about what they DO want, and most "advisors" dont know how to help the client with same.

So we end up with something which ultimately is at the request of the client, which sort of makes topical sense and sounds ok at a BBQ, but which doesnt really serve them. Typically, we end with the "Service End User" controlling the advice................... much of the time. As an adviser, the worst thing you can often do for someone is to be an "order taker" and implementer

Being mindful that most peops that endup at PC AND do a little bit of "self work" will usually end up with more clarity.

Your Intention does not determine your outcome - your path does

ta
rolf

 

Absolutely - I should qualify my statement with the understanding that I think you should be telling your adviser/service provider "I want to do X" and I think the service provider should then be asking a LOT of questions to make sure that X is actually what they really want/need (or they should already have an understanding based on previous engagement) and to point out any flaws, roadblocks or consequences of doing that.

If your service provider does nothing more than perform tasks for you - you may as well just outsource all of that somewhere else for the lowest cost, because there is no real value add there.

That's why I don't use online services or the cheapest priced provider for these things - the advice and expertise you get from an experienced adviser / service provider is generally worth every cent you pay them above and beyond the cheaper providers.

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on in my investing career - I went to my accountant (not my current accountant) and told him what I wanted him to do. We didn't have the close working relationship that I have with my current accountant - and so his response was "I don't think this is the best move - but I can see your heart is set on this and you're going to do it anyway, and who knows - it may just work out" - and so we proceeded and I lost a lot of money in the deal.

What he should have (ideally) said is "Simon, you're an idiot - you've done no real research - you don't know what you're getting yourself into - you don't understand the risks - go think about this some more before you tell me that you want to proceed". It takes a really good relationship with your advisers for them to be comfortable telling you what you probably don't want to hear, but sometimes need to. Even if it's just "have you considered the following risks?" - just to provide some checks and balance to your decision making process and to cover things you may not have thought of.