Ready to make a big investment move, what would you do?

Thank you for the encouragement @iloveqld
I feel like this is mixture of @Rex 's idea of keeping everything and improving borrowing capacity, @wylie 's suggestion of buying something in the short term that is more the size we want and has potential for adding value, and then deciding if we should use @The Y-man 's suggestion of investing in shares/lics/etfs now, when we might need that money in a years time, is worth the risk or not.
Also have researched the debt recycling concept and keen to apply that when the time is right, ie, probably not now on a property we plan to make an investment in the short term.
My karma for being a good person is peace of heart and mind, if it brings me a bit of luck along the way even better

 

Update time. It’s been a over a year and a half since my first post in this thread… it was pre-COVID times! Despite the curve ball COVID has thrown we have still taken the advice of nearly everyone that took the time to share some pearls with us back then. We have learned so much from the good people here we really owe everyone that runs property chat and contributes so thoughtfully a huge thank you.

As I say, we took a lot of the advice we received. We didn't sell any properties. Covid hit and we did learn to buy shares, VAS at $62 was actually our first purchase. Lost money on some other purchases after that, learned some lessons. Will be staying away from direct shares from now on! We got pregnant, and I decided to go back to work full time to increase our borrowing capacity. We managed to buy another property in the 6 month window of me going back to work full time and going on maternity leave by finding a bank that would give us pre-approval with the condition that I would be working full time at settlement even though I wasn’t working yet when we got it. We bought within 10km of Melbourne CBD at the end of October 2020 and in hindsight seems we managed to get lucky and buy pretty close to the bottom of the drop in prices. We got a fixer-upper period house on a corner block in an auction with one other person present and are nearly ready to submit plans to council for a townhouse to be built at the back of the block. The period house is being rented until we’re ready to renovate it.

Unexpectedly, when work got shaky in the first lockdown it actually forced us to start a side hustle business that has taken off and is now, touch wood, a full-time hustle for both of us plus employees. Assuming the townhouse gets approved and the business and properties continue to perform as they have been doing we estimate between the 3 IPs & savings we will have a net worth that could generate 80k passive income a year if it was all converted to shares and be mortgage-free in the next 5-8 years. This would make us financially independent and able to retire early if we wanted to (we probably don’t want to completely retire but the choice is always nice!) in our early 40s.

Our short term goals are getting the townhouse approved and built and renovating the period house. Figuring out which one we move into based on how it may affect CGT is another thing. Planning an exit strategy so that we can semi-retire on a passive income within the next decade is something we need to start thinking about as well. Any good advice, recommended resources to read on this are welcome. On one hand it feels too good to be true but on the other hand we have worked extremely hard from humble beginnings for the past 10 years towards this goal. I guess after progress being so slow and hard fought, when it all starts to pay off and gather momentum it feels hard to believe. Has anyone else experienced this?

 

Just reading it today. Hope you have invested in shares when this post was made. You would have done very well. Once again, it proved we don’t know the future…

 

VAS is up around 56% since then (plus div's)

 

Great to hear and congrats on the progress. I'm curious, what is your side hustle that has grown in to a successful business?