What they dont tell you in property forums??

Sometimes married life feels longer...

 

It's an interesting dichotomy here on PropertyChat - on one hand the people here are generally fiercely independent and DIY types who take responsibility for their financial future into their own hands and refuse to rely on the government to look after them or to outsource their decision making to 3rd party spruikers.

But at the same time, the people who try to DIY everything (usually to save costs rather than because they actually do know what they are doing) are more often than not the people who run into trouble.

Interestingly enough, as DIY as people are - most of the best investors I know still rely on the advice of others.

I think advice is critical - not in the "outsource your decision making" way, but as actual advice "here's what I want to do - what are the things I haven't thought about?" or "will this get me closer to my objective" or "how could I go about achieving this?".

The trick is that the concept of "advice" is often associated with old school "financial advisers" who are traditionally known to be nothing more than financial product sales people who will refuse to consider real estate as part of your investment portfolio. Fortunately that industry has changed somewhat.

But the thing is that advice should come from many different areas. I'm a strong believer in having a team of people around you who will pull you up and say "hang on a minute - this doesn't really make sense" if they think you're doing something silly.

The advice should come from people like your mortgage broker, your conveyancer/solicitor, your accountant, your buyers agent, your property manager, etc - all people whose opinions and advice you can weigh and use to measure against your intended path. It can also come from other people who have done or are doing what you are trying to do - learn from other people's experience, learn from their mistakes.

We get a lot of people asking for recommendations on advisers - but finding a good adviser alone isn't the answer to everything (and why gurus with a single strategy they sell to everyone is not a good way to go). You need to know not only what questions to ask of your adviser, but also how to interpret their answers and to judge the quality of the answers given.

Advisers are not infallible - they can't know everything and they can only work with the information you give them and give you the advice you've asked for. If you aren't able to articulate what it is you are doing and what it is you need, then you are unlikely to get the answers you are seeking.

That's what the community here on PropertyChat can help you with - as @Jane Ridder eloquently put "[you can find] people [who] will help to challenge your thinking and give you insights that you'd never considered". You won't find all the answers - because everyone has different needs. But you will find people who understand you, and will help you learn how things work.

If there's anything I'd like to be known for as a result of the existence of PropertyChat, that is helping people to understand when they need to get advice, but more importantly - how to know what questions to ask and then measure the quality of the advice they are receiving and make a judgement.

The inquiries into the financial planning system that came about after the GFC showed so many cases of people relying on the advice of people who they thought had their best interest at heart - but really didn't. Some times it was because the advice really was inappropriate. But even then - I know many cases where the advice was exactly what was asked for - but was simply wrong because it didn't actually get them closer to their goals or take their risk profile into account - people asked for the wrong thing!

Having people become more educated about financial matters - more educated about the financial products and services they may purchase or use - more educated about how things work - will hopefully let them make better decisions on their own, or better prepared to engage with an adviser and ask the questions that are more likely to get them the advice they need to achieve the outcome they seek.

I learned a long time ago that putting all your energy into finding the right answers is generally the wrong approach - you should instead be putting your energy into asking the right questions - the answers will naturally lead from there.

Maybe I should use that as the tagline for PropertyChat: "Helping people ask better questions"?

 

That wasn't luck. They identified a business need (their own), came up with a solution - and along the way identified that it was something that other business could also use and decided to commercialise what was originally an internal project.

There's nothing lucky about it - they pretty much invented a new industry (scalable on-demand IT infrastructure) because they were savvy enough to come up with a solution to a problem and even more savvy enough to recognise the opportunities that existed as a result.

Insight, not luck.

 

I have noted that happens on occasion - but in general, recommendations are genuine.

That being said, people do sometimes have vastly different experiences with the same service providers - it's very much a case of YMMV, but also do your own due diligence!

Perhaps rather than relying on the recommendation of a single person - get a number of recommendations and make your own choice.

Yes, but that's not the reason why people make recommendations.

Somersoft was not a commercial forum and yet exactly the same recommendations were made there.

Care should always be taken when acting on recommendations - it's worth trying to understand the nature of the relationship between the person making the recommendation and the person being recommended, especially if you don't know the person doing the recommending well enough to make your own judgements about their advice.