Dear 30-Year-Old Me: The Tightrope Between Wealth and Life

admin    Uncategorized     agents

Property118

Dear 30-Year-Old Me: The Tightrope Between Wealth and Life

You already know how to create and multiply wealth, that won’t ever be your problem.

While others are chasing stable income and luxuries, you’ll already see the bigger picture: how time and debt can be transformed into equity, how every £1 million borrowed today and sensibly invested into properties with strong capital appreciation prospects becomes £million’s in equity in the decades that follow. You will be patient enough to hold your nerve and manage properties and tenancies in a way that transforms your houses into other people’s homes. That alone will be rewarding, but the excitement of building that empire will not be enough. You’ll balance risk like a mathematician, confident, precise, relentless, and it will work out in the long run.

You’ll help Mum and Dad retire early. You’ll hear their stories of their winters in Florida, laughing in photographs they’ll send while you work late, replying with pride and exhaustion.

You’ll pay for the whole family to go to Disneyland, cousins, nephews, nieces, everyone. It will be a holiday that becomes a legend in family stories. They’ll send you videos of the parade, your niece waving. You’ll smile at the screen, then turn back to your email Inbox, because whilst they’re riding the rollercoasters you will be at home responding to the constant ping of messages from your BlackBerry phone.

When your daughter turns six, you’ll pay for her to visit the ‘real’ Santa in Lapland. She’ll fly there with her mum, bundled in new snow gear you paid for, believing it’s the most magical trip in the world. She’ll remember the sleigh rides and the cold air on her cheeks for the rest of her life, but she won’t remember you being there, because you weren’t. You were working, always working, convinced that paying for the dream was the same as living it. The only time you won’t be working is when you’re sleeping, night or day, wherever you’re too exhausted to even contemplate doing anything else.

You’ll miss your daughter’s school plays, her parent evenings, even the little victories she’d wanted to tell you about in person when you picked her up from school in your Ferrari, all because you were too busy talking to people at the office on your car phone. You won’t hear the applause at the end of her performance at the school play, or see her scanning the crowd for your face. You’ll tell yourself it’s temporary, that you’re building a future for her, that one day she’ll understand, but all she will remember is the empty seat in the crowd where you were supposed to be.

It’s not guilt you’ll feel years later, it’s sadness. The kind that comes quietly, when you realise the people you worked hardest for just wanted you.

They weren’t jealous of your generosity to your family or work colleagues. They were jealous of your attention.

Your first marriage will end gently. Not much shouting, no villains, just distance. You’ll divide a life built on good intentions and too little presence, and it will take you years to understand that your absence grew from a festering bad habit and false beliefs. You were trying to protect your family with money when what they needed was time.

In the years that follow, something remarkable will happen: you’ll rebuild, you will learn to love again, but this time it will be very different. You’ll have learned the value of attention and what it actually means to your loved ones. You will still do plenty of travelling, but you won’t be looking at your phone every time it pings because the pings will be silenced during the scheduled quality time you’ve pre-agreed. You’ll have realised that love isn’t about sharing wealth, it’s about sharing your presence. You will have been happily remarried for 13 years, and as a result of engaging, you will have acted on the wisdom shared by your wife, whereas previously you were more likely to be dismissive of living and learning from those beautiful moments because you believed work-related issues mattered more. Emotionally, you will have transformed without realising how you got there.

You’ll have helped your brother grow a business, guided your stepson and his partner through their first renovation, supported family abroad through hard times, and you’ll actually have been there as opposed to just paying for it. That’s what they will remember most, because it’s what matters to them.

Work will still matter, but life will mean more.

Your son-in-law, who you will never have met, will be a finalist at the Property Investors Awards. You will see pictures on Social Media of properties you purchased, but went to your ex-wife as part of the divorce settlement, repurposed as modern AirBNB’s by your daughter and son-in-law. You will see your grandaughter you’ve never met presenting those properties on video’s posted on Social Media, and you will feel proud and sad at at the same moment.

One day, in your late 50s, you’ll be sitting by a pool, a glass of wine in hand, and realise that living the good life was never about wealth alone. It was about being able to stop, to breathe, to show up, and to stay. You’ll wish you could reach back across the decades to tell that younger man one thing: “You will always be able to build successful businesses, but you’ll never remake the moments you missed.”

So stop. Look up. Go to the play. Take the trip. Be in the photograph.

The business will wait, the memories won’t.

Your older and wiser self.

Why I’m sharing this so openly

I’ve thought long and hard about whether to share this publicly.

Part of me hopes that one day my daughter, her family (and even my ex-wife) might read it and understand that none of what I built was ever meant to come at their expense. The truth is, I’ve made my share of mistakes, and I’d rather those mistakes serve some purpose than just sit quietly in memory.

I’ve always believed it’s better to learn from other people’s experiences than from your own regrets. That’s why I’ve chosen to write and publish this letter to my 30-year-old self, to give others a chance to pause, to recognise the patterns before they harden, and to make changes while there’s still time.

If sharing my story helps even one person step back from the treadmill, reorganise their affairs, and reclaim the moments that truly matter, then it’s worth every word.

The financial side of what we do at Property118 is obviously an important aspect in all of this too; restructuring, succession, planning for freedom rather than obligation, but the real goal is to create time to live, because wealth alone can’t make life rich. Only time and attention can do that.

Please reflect, comment on, and share this article. As you can see, I’m an open book and wear my heart on my sleeve.

However young or old you are, please use whatever time you have left to build the life that you and your family really want and deserve. I recently lost a very dear friend (Mike Woodfine), he was just 66 years of age and had retired only three years ago. The weeks since his passing have been a period of reflection and mourning that finally pushed me to write this article, which has been on my mind for far too long. Mike’s illness was diagnosed just three weeks before he died. We never know how long we’ve got left.

If you need some help to reorganise your business affairs in a way that provides the time and cashflow you deserve to be able to share, I’ve built a team of consultants to assist you. Our consultancy doesn’t only cover retirement, business continuity and legacy planning. It can also help you understand options and opportunities that you may be blissfully unaware ever existed, or simply overlooked or wrote off, and which could enable you and your family to live the rest of your lives without regrets. It’s only too late to fix things when you’re gone.

The post Dear 30-Year-Old Me: The Tightrope Between Wealth and Life appeared first on Property118.

View Full Article: Dear 30-Year-Old Me: The Tightrope Between Wealth and Life