Edge Newsletter #2 - Your Network is Your Net Worth

Hey, welcome to the Edge Newsletter! Here are some of my favourite resources, books, as well as current thoughts.

What I'm reading

Meditations by Marcus Aurielus. This is one of those special books that I return to time and again at different phases in my life. I find that I always glean new meaning and relate to different parts every time. It especially helps me remain grounded during tough moments and struggles in life and business.

Turns out I'm not the only one, in this New York Times article, it reports former president Bill Clinton rereads Meditations every 1-2 years and it's one of his favourite books.

Quote

Pain + Reflection = Progress

Ray Dalio

It's in our nature to avoid pain, but looking back, all of my breakthroughs have followed failure and heartbreak. Mr. Ray Dalio surmises that when we set lofty goals and go about pursuing them, reality will kick in, in the form of issues and it's how we deal with these that determines our success. In a way it's liberating, knowing you'll get something either way: either you succeed with your ambitious goals or you gain a lesson that, with reflection, will help you progress.

Resource of the week

The Property Investigation Tools chrome extension is something I've been using for a while. It displays the price history of every listing and dates prices were changed integrated directly to Rightmove. So you have more information when placing offers, whether a property has been sitting around for a while or had the asking price increased.

Thoughts

Have the best people around you. It's an important concept to follow generally in life, but especially when it comes to property. It's impossible to do everything yourself. No amount of research or organisation will make up for a bad team and in property investing, time really is money.

Something I'm learning the hard way, again. I'm currently going through a refinance on a portion of the portfolio. Since my old solicitor is in a transition phase, and we were in a rush, I decided to go with someone else in the same firm that I've never used before to take care of the legals. Suffice to say, it has been a nightmare. By far the worst solicitor I've dealt with. To the point that I considered taking legal action for professional negligence. The deal is still not complete and has already overrun for almost 3 months costing double in interest payments, not counting the endless number of hours of my time. Time I should not need to be wasting if I had a competent solicitor on my team.

I say this not to rant, but a lesson I draw is that hiring the best people should really be treated as an investment. Don't skimp on your inner team, in my experience, getting people you trust, who you get on with, and will give you 100%, has ALWAYS provided a positive return on investment.

Hope this was useful. If you have any feedback, good or bad I'd love to hear from you. Just reply to this email (I didn't set things up properly last week so apologies to any of you who tried to reply to last week's newsletter).

Any suggestions are also welcome.