Thoughts on strategy to early semi-retirement

yes, but for my situation it would be top-up work as my wife is the primary wage earner.

Cheers,
Inertia.

 

What's your thought @Angel about Disneyland if you have more than one child (as in spread age ranges).

 

wait until the little ones are older!

We took our 3 to Eurodisney between xmas and New Year - aged 10, 8, 8 - and they were great. We were very strategic about hitting the rides with the shorter queues (there's an app for that!) and bailed before the end of the fireworks/light show (Sydney NYE is better anyway!) and avoided the crush of 100000 people all trying to exit at the same time.

Cheers,
Inertia.

 

You seriously want to take more than one child on a 13 hour flight?

 

Disneyland is an attraction. I have no thoughts about it, I'm talking about value for money financial plans. For a lot less of your $$$$, Australia Zoo is closer and easier to get to.

How many kids beg their parents to take them somewhere unless an adult has firstly introduced them to the idea? It's like they dont know that going to the dentist is scary unless someone else has told them it is. They dont know that Disneyland is something they must do unless someone else has told them it is.

Pester Power

 

I promised that in exchange for everyone's advice and discussion I'd post updates on the strategy as I go along and I'm probably due for one. No big milestone achieved but a lot learnt since I first wrote the opening post.

Essentially I've been educating myself a lot on property and investing (I can get pretty obsessive about something once I get my mind to it), mostly through relentless podcasts listening and online resources readings. I have also sought advice for some things I didn't fully understand.

This has helped identify quite a few things I hadn't considered before, including as some had mentioned here the idea of not dismissing resi property for wealth building despite the goal being passive income (@Sackie had pointed that out), as well as finding tax effective methods to build that wealth and invest (there's a lot I didn't know about deductions, debt recycling etc. which is what @The Y-man and @Terry_w were referring to).

The opportunity I had mentioned to invest in a JV has solidified too so we're looking at fitting this into the strategy.

Finally on the income/spend side of things, we've done a spend audit and budget which we will monitor in the next few months and we're actually coming a bit under the 50k combined expenses a year I had mentioned in the opening post (special holiday and mortgage not included), but it's also identified a few easy wins to save and reduce this even further without too much drama which we're actioning now. Adding to this is that my partner is getting a pay-rise by end of financial year which should add up to a 10% gross salary increase, and we've figured that her HECS debt will be all paid off through tax in 10-12 months so that will boost income/cash flow.

So essentially what's changed is that I'm fast tracking the start of the investment journey (invest now vs in 12-18 months as I had written) and created a more sophisticated strategy which in rough outlines is the following:
1. Invest into a 'growth' property asset in the JV as it's done with a builder who can save us a lot on renos and future value-adding
2. Invest in a 'balanced/yield' property asset with scope for future value-add for rent increase
3. Smash down the non-deductible debt with our surplus and via debt recycling on the investments
4. Start investing into shares a few years down the track (a mix of Vanguard and high dividend paying shares)
5. Use value-adding on the properties for both equity, growth and rent-boost and invest all surplus into shares

To keep track of all this I've also created a personal 10 years financial tracker, taking into account things like expenses for kids (it was a big topic in the thread here), mat leave, part time, interest rates and offset accounts on the loans, rental return and shares return. It's looking like the 10 years time frame is doable if all goes exactly to plan and we see the growth we need in the 'growth' asset in the JV but of course there are lots of Plan Bs and Cs.

Anyway one thing I can advise for others in similar situations at the very start of their investment journey is that there's a lot of value in self-education and education through others (here, in real life, in podcasts and blogs), it does open a whole lot of options for consideration.