For new investors as well as seasoned market analysts, finding ‘the right time’ to invest is a constant challenge, but Pete Wargent has a simple answer.
The renowned financial analyst, international property buyer and real estate expert told Bushy Martin on the Get Invested podcast that ‘the right time’ is now.
“I think (the thing) you take away from my journey is certainly start today,” Pete sad. “I think perfection, if you wait for the perfect time to invest that’s merely a fantasy that you view in hindsight.
“Everyone is an expert reading the chart from right to left, but the best thing you can do is start today, learn from your mistakes, but try to focus on quality investments that you can hold for the long-term.”
Pete is a chartered accountant by trade who invested his way to financial freedom by the age of 33.
He has and continues to profit from so called ‘fear’ in the property market.
“Whenever I hear people say it’s doom and gloom for this particular market, I put it on the watch list because that’s when the bargains come,” Pete said.
“It’s when sentiment is at its lowest (that) we bought a lot of properties in Sydney, in Bondi, Darling Harbour, inner west, all around 2007, ’08, ’09 when the market numbers might have not been showing a massive correction, but the difference in sentiment was like chalk and cheese.
“You could make low ball offers on blue chip property, and it was, don’t get me wrong, it was a difficult thing to do when everybody’s telling you not to, but I’ve tried to carry that principle right through to today.”
Pete initially started investing in the stock market, before being introduced to property by his (now) wife, who was raised in a farming family with a passion for investing in land.
“She was a home owner from a very young age,” he said. “She bought a house in Cambridge in the UK, which she still has today, the best part of a quarter century later. I just had to respect the results. I’ve always been agnostic. I don’t care whether are returns come from real estate, stock market, whatever, but yeah, I just had to respect the results from the leverage and the growth that she’d achieved.
“She’s absolutely adamant that her parents taught her you don’t sell property. That’s been our strategy for, well, since she bought her very first house way back the mid ’90s.”
For Pete, growing up in the UK as one of seven boys, investing was never a topic of conversation around the family dinner table.
Pete’s father was a social worker and his mother a “left wing socialist”.
“Certainly from an investing point of view, yeah, that was very much against the grain because our parent’s generation, it was really a case in Britain of people bought their council houses if they could from the government, but nobody … very, very few people invested in the stock market,” he said. “For people to go out in invest in real estate, become a landlord, that was almost a swear word.”
By his own admission, Pete never pushed himself through school and even while climbing the corporate ladder. It was taking charge of his own destiny that brought the best out of him.
“I actually recently caught up with an old teacher, and he said ‘you’re quite clearly one of those people who should always have ended up working for yourself’ because all the way through school, all the way through my career at Deloitte where I went all the way up to director, but I always did the bare minimum. I never did anything to excel. But it was only when I came to work for myself, then found something that I really had a passion for that I put in that extra 20 percent.”
Listen to the full interview here.
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