The Freedom Formula: Live More, Work Less and Leave a Legacy With Property

By Bushy Martin

• Do you feel like you have no time and no life outside of work?
• Are you concerned you will have to keep working forever just to maintain your current lifestyle?
• Do you think property investment is the answer but you don't know who to trust or where to start, and you don't have the time or expertise to do it properly?

As a time-poor professional, you are not alone. If you are one of the many who feel trapped and you can't see a way out, this book will help you eliminate your fears and achieve your lifestyle goals. The Freedom Formula gives you a step-by-step process
that has helped thousands of others to focus on their careers while their income is replaced through safe and affordable property investment.

After reading The Freedom Formula you will:
• master the principles, process and people required for property to create and fund your ideal lifestyle
• build a property portfolio without impacting on your time or restricting your way of life
• understand property market cycles and know what to invest in, when, where and how to satisfy your needs and goals.

By following this unique approach, you too can get your time back to live more, work less and leave a legacy. Imagine the peace of mind and sense of freedom you are going to enjoy in knowing your future is finally secure so that you can live life on your terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925648225

Book preview

Title

First published in 2018 by Bushy Martin

© Bushy Martin 2018

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.

All inquiries should be made to the author.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Project management and text design by Michael Hanrahan Publishing

Cover design by Peter Reardon

Disclaimer

The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action or not take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice where appropriate, before making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the author and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based on the information in this publication.

CONTENTS

Start thinking differently: Upside down and back to front

What is the value of this book?

Introduction: Freedom for intra-preneurs

Who will benefit most

PART I: YOUR FUTURE WEALTH PROGNOSIS

We don’t know what we don’t know

1Shock therapy reality check

2Welcome to the wealthier you

3Do you have an in-vested interest?

PART II: THE FREEDOM FORMULA

Bushy-Buffettisms

Start giving yourself plenty of TLC

4(It’s about) Time

Looking at your time horizon

The disastrous cost of delay

How much time do you have?

5Compounding returns

The snowball effect

6Are you out of your mind?

7Network equals net worth

8Start:egy

Where are you now? Your strategy stage

Show me the money! Positive cash flow or capital growth?

9What is your value?

Leverage and the BEAR facts

10 Affordability (and risk)

11 Income – don’t give up your day job

12 The Freedom Formula: The proof is in the pudding

Wealth cake: How to have your cake and eat it too!

Learn the hard way or take a pill?

PART III: THE PROPERTY WEALTH CLOCK

13 Introducing the Property WEALTH Clock

The scientific art of property – the 1 percenters

14 (Your) W hy

Your preventative wealth prognosis: It all starts and ends with you Living by design

Monetise your why: What will your ideal lifestyle cost?

15 E xamination

Starting point: What are you worth?

Activate before accumulate

Wealth creation capability: Back to the bear facts

Preventative wealth inoculations

16 A pproach: Your start:egy

Freedom: Your remote control parallel property portfolio

Wealth by stealth portfolio phases

Income for Life wealth by stealth start:egy

17 L everage

Income for Life ladder: Becoming a money mountaineer

18 T reatment

Time-poor professionals investment ‘gearset’

Macro to micro: The 6 Ss in your property search

19 H ealth check

Stunned gonnas

Solo sunbakers

Telescope not microscope

Conclusion

Bringing home the bacon

About the author

Join our Freedom Fighters

Author acknowledgements

Appendix

Capital growth or cash flow calculator

Income for Life Ladder

START THINKING DIFFERENTLY: UPSIDE DOWN AND BACK TO FRONT

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‘.got always have you what getting on keep you’ll, done always you’ve what doing on keep you If’

Did you take the time to read the previous page? Or did you just skip over it because it all felt a little too hard? Be honest with yourself, because this is where the sheep get separated from the goats – this is your first opportunity to test who you really are when no-one else is watching.

If you thought, Wow, this is a bit different and interesting and worked through the frustration to read the page from the bottom to the top – congratulations! You have just proved to yourself that you have the right stuff to challenge yourself, embrace change, live with discomfort and frustration, and demonstrate the dogged persistence to see something that is difficult through to the end – this is the very essence of what it means to take the road less travelled and achieve long-term freedom by replacing your income safely and affordably through property investment. You are already demonstrating to yourself that you have the right mindset to invest successfully.

If, on the other hand, you thought, OMG, this looks way too hard! Forget that! and just skimmed and skipped ahead, you have probably just done what you have always done – cutting corners and trying to take the fast and easy road. How well has this worked for you in the past? You jump in, try to make it happen in a huge hurry and when you don’t get instant results, you are off chasing the next shiny bright flavour of the month. If this is you, then you are the very person who really needs to read this book and take the information it contains on board because the opportunity to transform your life is sitting in the palm of your hands. Unfortunately, however, my guess is that you won’t. You’ll stop about now or in a couple of chapters, flick through the rest of the pages looking for quick fixes and when it doesn’t all magically happen for you, you will fling the book onto the shelf with all of the other half-read road to riches tomes and go hunting for the next best thing.

If you want to be a successful investor, history shows you need to become the financial equivalent of a forest plantation owner – someone who engages a professional team of foresters and tree horticulturalists to deal with the art, science, technology and business of growing trees for harvest long term. You need to be a cultivator who engages others to prepare and nourish the soil, sow seeds, water the seedlings, protect and de-weed the area, and prune and thin the trees through the fluctuating seasons over 15 to 30 years (or more). Someone who fully expects and anticipates dealing with the normal cyclic seasonal swings and trying conditions of hot dry summers and cold wet winters as well as the infrequent occurrences of flash floods, famines and fires. If you thought that investing was like picking colourful wildflowers, then you need to think again.

So here is your first challenge – if you really want to succeed in life, go back and read the previous page from back to front and bottom to top and prove to yourself that you have the determination and persistence to work through something difficult and painstaking that feels uncomfortable – without these qualities I am confident that you will never know true sustainable success (in whatever way you choose to define it) in any area of your life.

If you still feel this is too hard or a waste of time, do yourself a favour now and give this book to someone you really care about – someone who you know will take the time to read the book from cover to cover. It is the best gift you will ever give them because it has the power to transform their lives. And in years to come when they are enjoying all of the peace of mind, freedom and time that financial independence brings, they will thank you deeply for your generosity and insight.

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF THIS BOOK?

The value of this book is up to you …

The value you place on anything will decide how much you care about it and look after it.

So if a book engages you, entertains you and is a good read, it’s probably worth about 40 bucks. However, what if I told you that hidden between these covers is something that has the power to transform your life and help eliminate homelessness?

What if I told you that contained within is the proven formula and process to help you create the freedom of choice you have always longed for that will allow you to work less, retire early and live a fulfilled life? What if you could follow an easy step-by-step, remote-control process that could generate $300,000 in passive income per year by growing your asset wealth by $6 million over the long term?

Did you know that in Australia:

•we have the fourth highest percentage of homeless people across 45 developed countries

•over 105,000 people will be homeless tonight (that is 1 in 200 Australians)

•half of all homeless people are under 24 years of age and over 30,000 are children younger than 18

•more than 200,000 abandoned pets are ‘destroyed’ nationwide each year.

So what if I also told you that the profits from this book will help to reduce the impacts of homelessness and abandoned pet euthanasia? All profits from book sales will go to programs that help homeless pets and their people remain together while they get back on their feet, and to be as healthy and happy as they can be. For some homeless people, their pet is the only positive thing left in their lives so, given the mutual mental, emotional and physical benefits, keeping them together is critical.

This book not only empowers you to achieve all of this but provides the prescription to make all of this happen. We would say you can’t put a value on that – it is priceless.

So what do you really think is the value of this book? If you don’t think any of this is worth anything, then take the book for free – but if you do this, please do me a favour and ‘pass it forward’ by making sure you give the book to someone you care about who is genuinely interested in fulfilling their dreams while making the world a better place, but can’t see how to do it.

However, if you think that having the freedom to live life the way you have always wanted to, while enjoying the feeling of true fulfilment that only comes from generously helping others by improving the home lives of those less fortunate, are worthwhile goals, then I encourage you to donate accordingly.

In this context, following the game-changing example of Daniel Flynn in his book Chapter One: You have the power to change stuff, the question is no longer ‘How much do you want to pay for this book?’ Instead it becomes, ‘How much are you willing to invest’ in a proven concept that could change your life and improve the lives of many others?

The choice is now up to you …

We cannot become who we want to be by remaining who we are.

Max De Pree

INTRODUCTION

Congratulations on taking the time to start thinking about your future – you join the slender ranks of the select few who have the courage to swim against the tide, to lift your heads and take control of your destiny. To ensure I am not wasting your valuable time, this book will show you how to regain your time and your freedom long term by replacing your income through building wealth with property. If this is what you are looking for, you are in the right place. If not, stop reading now and look like a hero by gifting the book to someone you care about who is looking for these answers.

If you are looking for another shiny and new get-rich-quick scheme, truckloads of other books are already available that will sell you the unachievable dream – for my money, they are thinly disguised sales brochures posing as books, full of airy-fairy unproven concepts written by self-proclaimed overnight successes who don’t walk their own talk. This book is not one of them.

FREEDOM FOR INTRA-PRENEURS

The Freedom Formula is unashamedly written for you if you are a time-poor professional who enjoys your work and wants to continue to focus on building your career, your income and your lifestyle. In other words, you are an intra-preneur. But you are also looking for a safe and affordable way to live more and work less and secure your long-term future without creating a second job. You are looking to build wealth by remote control and believe in property but don’t have the expertise or the time – right now, you don’t know who to trust and you don’t know where and how to start.

You also appreciate that life is good here in the ‘lucky country’. We have the best of everything and more creature comforts than ever. We live in one of the safest, least populated and most affluent countries in the world, where high-quality and affordable everything is at our fingertips. Houses, holidays, health, cars, clothes, schools, sport, entertainment, gadgets, games, you name it – we can have it all. And because everything is available, it seems we have to have everything now, and most of us do.

So, yes, life is good, but is good really great? Do you have the time to really enjoy everything you can and want to do, or are you constantly feeling harried and hurried. Do you feel under constant pressure and stress trying to keep up with a world that keeps demanding more and more of you and seems to be running faster and faster? A world where having everything and keeping everything means working harder and longer to maintain it. This world has become a merry-go-round that has sped up so fast we are hanging on ‘white knuckled’ for dear life – we are running so fast and feel so exhausted that we are at the point of losing our footing, tripping and falling over, never to get up again as we are trampled by the stampeding herd.

We have everything, but maintaining this is getting harder, and we just don’t have the time or the freedom to enjoy it. We are so busy just doing – with every waking moment spent dealing with the constant barrage of urgencies and emergencies of the day – that we just don’t have the time or energy to think about tomorrow.

No margin for error

In the words of author Richard Swenson, we no longer have any margin. In this sense, margin is

The space between our load and our limits, it is the amount allowed beyond that which is needed. It is something held in reserve for contingencies or unanticipated situations. Margin is the gap between rest and exhaustion. The space between breathing freely and suffocating.

Nailing the insight that perfectly captures the illness of our age, Swenson goes further to argue,

We must have some room to breathe. We need freedom to think and permission to heal. Our relationships are being starved to death by velocity. No one has the time to listen, let alone love. Our children lay wounded on the ground, run over by our high-speed good intentions … Who plundered those wide-open spaces of the past, and how can we get them back? There are no fallow lands for our emotions to lie down and rest in. We miss them more than we suspect.

Are you one of the many who outwardly pretends or kids yourself that life is good, but secretly despairs that you desperately need more margin? You quietly pine for more time and breathing space to enjoy all of the niceties that life has to offer – and more freedom to choose what you want to do when – but you feel trapped on the treadmill and fear that the minute you stop sprinting, the hard-fought trappings of your lifestyle will grind to a screeching halt.

In the immortal words of one of my favourite Pink Floyd songs, many of us have become ‘comfortably numb’. We are resigned to the fact that what we have now is as good as it gets and because we are starved of ‘margin’ we just don’t have the time or energy to find a way to get our childhood time and our freedom back. If only there was a way out.

Or maybe you are one of the many time-poor professionals who love your work and your career and know you need to be doing more to secure your long-term future and leave a lasting legacy for your family but you don’t have the time, don’t have the expertise, don’t know where to start and don’t know who to trust.

We feel caught in a time trap. We can’t seem to take the time now, so that we can invest in the time we have left to make the time we need to enjoy life to the full.

From good to great

Newsflash! This book has the power to take you from the good life to the great life. It will challenge you to wake up from your malaise and give you the ways and means to regain your time and your freedom – to truly enable you to live your ideal life now and into the future. How do I know this? Because the principles and processes this book distils have worked for my wife and I personally, and the countless others we have helped over the last 20 years.

Money, money, money

Like it or lump it, but in our current westernised capitalist world, money makes the world go round. Unfortunately, ‘money’ and ‘investment’ seem to have become dirty words in our culture – to invest and make money is somehow equated to the pursuit of evil. However, every single one of us is ‘investing’ every second of every day – whether we are doing it consciously or unconsciously, we all make daily choices on where we decide to invest our time, our money and our interest. Money is the lifeblood enabler of our choices and the fuel for our freedom – for me, it buys time, influence and a voice to do good. You may not want to acknowledge it, but see how long you can survive without it – because, in the words of Zig Ziglar, ‘Money isn’t everything, but it ranks right up there with oxygen.’ The cold hard reality is that if you don’t master money, it will master you. And just like the flight attendant who always tells you to strap on your own oxygen mask first before helping others in an emergency, once you have taken care of your own (money) needs, you are then in a position to help others – see how long you last, however, if you try it the other way round. So the answer is to build wealth to sustain a steady flow of life-giving (oxygen) income.

WHO WILL BENEFIT MOST

This book is for you if you are a busy professional building your career and enjoying a strong, steady income that supports a good way of life but at the same time feeling trapped on the treadmill and not knowing how you are ever going to be able to work less and live more. Does this sound like you? You don’t know how you can reclaim your time and your freedom, and you are worried about maintaining and sustaining your lifestyle long term and how you can leave a legacy for your loved ones. You may believe that investing in property could provide the answers, but you don’t have the expertise or the time to invest, and you don’t know who to trust or where to start.

You are also likely to be:

•looking for a solution that doesn’t take up too much of your valuable time or impact on your current lifestyle

•frustrated that you have been thinking about investing for years but have never actually managed to get started because your life is always just too busy

•conservative with your money and not a big risk taker – you are looking for a safe and affordable way to build wealth.

On the flip side, this book won’t appeal to anyone:

•trying to get rich quick

•looking to buy (or build) and sell property quickly – for example, flippers or property traders

•wanting to make a career change to full-time property investment.

If you fit any of the categories in the preceding list, do yourself a favour, stop reading and gift The Freedom Formula now to someone you care about who will benefit – it could be the greatest gift they ever receive.

KEY QUESTIONS ANSWERED

For those of you who do fit the bill, this book will answer all of your questions in relation to the following:

•Do I need to do anything differently to improve and/or maintain my ideal lifestyle and be able to stop work comfortably?

•How much does my ideal lifestyle cost?

•What does my long-term future currently look like? How do I want it to look?

•How much longer do I have to work full time?

•What is the gap (between what I have and what I need) and how do I bridge it? What are my options?

•Can I invest safely, affordably and easily? If so, how?

•Why property, and is it really for me?

•What is stopping me from doing it? What are my real fears and obstacles?

•Can I afford it? Initially and ongoing? What impact will it have on my current lifestyle, if any?

•Do I have the time?

•How do I do it and who do I need to help me? Who can I trust to look after me?

THE BENEFITS OF THE FREEDOM FORMULA

As you read and understand the principles outlined in this book and start implementing the processes you will likely feel some or all of the following:

•(initially) concerned about your future

•motivated that time is of the essence and you need to do something now

•clear about your ideal lifestyle and optimistic about achieving your lifestyle goals

•confident that you can reclaim your time and your freedom to work less and live more

•surprised that you can invest safely, affordably and relatively easily

•fully informed, inspired and starting to implement your investment strategy

•excited that property can make it all happen for you

•relieved that you have finally found something you can trust that is going to help you get it done

•confident that you have a structure, a process and the people required to make it all happen for you – you don’t need to reinvent the wheel or do it all yourself

•peace of mind now, knowing that your future is secure and looking after itself.

Expected outcomes

As a fellow busy professional, I am very mindful of the value of your time and effort, and wrote this book to provide clear outcomes. Once you have finished reading, you will be able to enjoy:

•clarity on exactly how you want to live now and in the future

•an understanding of how much passive income you will need to generate, and by when, to fund and sustain your ideal lifestyle

•implementing a step-by-step process to achieve your lifestyle goals and secure your future with property

•awareness of what type of property you need to invest in

•the ability to engage the right team in the right order to make it all happen.

Property investment can be an amazing way to achieve financial freedom and lifestyle fulfilment – but only for those who comprehend and master the principles, processes and people required. If you are looking for some help to put the entire property puzzle together, you have arrived at the right place at the right time. The aim of this book is to take you from complex confusion to comfortable clarity – so that you know exactly what you can and need to do to live life on your own terms.

Your customised plan

The Freedom Formula helps you paint out a well-considered plan tailored to your specific needs – it is not a shoot-from-the-hip, one-size-fits-all approach. All teams of successful professionals follow a detailed plan when the stakes are high. For example, pilots follow a flight plan and surgeons follow a treatment plan. How comfortable would you be if your brain surgeon turned to you on the operating table and said, ‘Let’s just wing it’? Sadly, this is exactly what most property investors do.

Picasso was famous for saying, ‘Good artists copy but great artists steal.’ I trust this is somewhat true of The Freedom Formula, because it combines a collection of high-performing recipes that I have begged, borrowed, stolen and modified from myriad tried and proven sources and perfected over time to drive my personal success. Starting with a clear picture of where I wanted to end up, and as a continuous learner, rabid reader and relentless questioner over the last 35 years, I gradually honed and polished each and every piece of the jigsaw – as I went about making every mistake under the sun – to finally assemble a seamless ‘masterpiece’ that I am proud to call my own. The key here is that the completed jigsaw puzzle collectively creates value that is much greater than the sum