Our beginnings in the property journey!

Hello everybody

I have been reading the Forums with great regularly and have finally decided to start posting and learn as much as I can in the process. At this stage, I might not be able to help many people with answers but it does not necessarily have to be about that, should it ? You can make a useful contribution to the Forum by encouraging people to achieve their goals or maybe congratulate somebody when they achieve their dreams or maybe even offer words of encouragement to somebody who is feeling dejected. Also, a big thank you to Forum members who post such excellent answers and do so with great humility and politeness. It is really refreshing to see that.

Me and wife are aged 30 and 26 respectively with no dependents and a tiny personal debt (car loan). We are both earning good incomes and do not have excessive spending habits. We have now been married for just over a year and we would now like to buy a PPoR and get on to the property bandwagon. All these years, I (like most people I knew) had only one ambition; to buy a PPoR and make extra repayments and pay it off ASAP. However, I always had a nagging suspicion at the back of my mind that buying and owning 1 PPoR at the end of your working life won't mean much because along with your PPoR, everything else would have appreciated in value as well and downgrading at that stage seemed like a poor idea.

At this stage, I decided to buy a couple of property investment magazines and saw case studies about how people used leveraging to become millionaires and it was as if a light bulb inside me just switched itself on. This prompted me to borrow some books (Yardney, Fitzgerald, Somers Etc) and then some more and now I am fascinated and cannot wait to get started. We have decided to buy a PPoR first (want a place to call home) and then be disciplined enough through proper loan structures to leverage that into my first IP in a year or two after that and then build on that. I am working with a great Mortgage Broker who has been extremely helpful and generous with his time and in time I hope to surround myself with a knowledgeable Accountant and maybe a Buyers Agent for my first IP purchase.

I started off with a goal to have enough assets that generate passive income that reduces the need for my job driven income by 50% in 15 years. But after reading some of the amazing goals achieved by many and also because I don't want to shoot too low (lest I reach it) my target now is to be able to retire in 15 years time completely (I might choose to work part-time but that should be my choice). I know it will be hard work but I love researching about property and learning everything I can about it and it does not feel like a chore to me. Also, me and wife don't have an extravagant lifestyle and we are able to save a good percentage of our incomes in addition to paying rent. But the biggest motivation comes from the prospect of finally having a chance to quit the rat race and be financially independent.

Thank you for your time in reading this and also a big thank you for all of you who post here regularly and are generous with your expertise. I appreciate it very much.