www.money-magnets.net

We are Karen Leslie and Adrian Jameson, husband and wife who got married in April 1998, we lived just north of London in the UK, and then moved to Australia in July 2007. Along the way we’ve had jobs, award winning businesses, lost money in property, made money in property, lost money in shares, made money in shares, been hopeless in network marketing and been successful in network marketing. We’re here to let you know what worked for us. Is that any guarantee that it will work for you? No it isn’t but with so much on offer at least you’ll know where to start looking. We will let you know what we’ve learned from our mistakes as well so hopefully you won’t make the same ones we did.

The early days

Karen's background:

I don’t remember as much pressure as a child to have the right kind of trainers, or the right clothes. To be honest that never bothered me much then and it still doesn’t today.

Mum and Dad always paid for everything in cash and the idea was that they would pay down their mortgage and so own their house. That was very important to them.

I don’t remember specifically wanting for any toys or anything like that, but I did have the impression that you had to work hard for your money.

I was brought up to go to school, get good grades, go to University and then have a career. Somewhere along the line I would fit in a husband and children too.

Well I got part of it right.

I did go to school and did very well until I was 18. I failed the exams that I needed to get for University. I had a choice to either re-take the exams (which my parents wanted me to do) or to get a job. I decided to get a job thinking that I couldn’t stand to be at school any more. I didn’t see how I would use that they were teaching me.

I was unemployed (on the dole as it was called back then) for about 4 months before getting a job as a student technician at a London hospital. I remember getting my first pay check and being all excited when I saw the figure at the top and then being really disappointed when I saw the figure at the bottom.

Where had all the money gone?

No-one had explained to me at that stage about tax or pension schemes. My Mum took me through it all and I still didn’t think it was fair. Who cared about a pension? That was for old people! I was at an age when anyone over 23 years old was an old person!

After 5 years my parents decided to move out of London to Huntingdon, and since I was still living at home, I moved with them. The thought of moving out into rented accommodation didn’t even occur to me since renting was ‘throwing good money away’ so I was saving up for a deposit.

At the age of 27 years old I bought my first place in Huntingdon, England. I loved my first house since I could really do anything I wanted. Total freedom!
However when interest rates started to go up I found that I couldn’t pay to have my car serviced. Oh yes I’d bought a car (with some help from Mum and Dad which I was still owed back to them) but with mortgage payments rising I couldn’t do everything.

I was too proud to ask for more money, but Dad realized what was going on and Mum and Dad to the rescue again. By this time I’d also been putting things for the house on my credit card.

That winter the interest rates went up so I couldn’t afford to heat the entire house and so I slept on the sofa with a small electric heater on. The rest of the house was freezing cold.

I got another job in the evenings for a while to pay off some of my credit card debt and to pay Mum and Dad back.

It turned out I was good as an analyst programmer and got a job in Watford.
This meant more money (I was still paying Mum and Dad back), and a chance to move house. I left the 3 bedroom house in Huntingdon behind and settled for a 2 bedroom apartment in Welwyn Garden City.

It was during this time that I got together with Adrian.

After a few years I changed job but I was already becoming dissatisfied with my work. I was working alongside IT contractors who did the same amount of work, but got paid more and worked flexible hours. However all the ones I knew then were very good at what they did and I couldn’t imagine that I could do the same. When I discussed this with some contractors, they insisted that I was good enough to go contracting and make a living. So Adrian and I discussed it and came to the decision that we would buy a house while I still had a salary (mortgage lenders have always liked to regular income) and then I would become a contractor.

It took me a few months to become a contractor so during that time I didn’t have any money coming in, but luckily Adrian kept winning timeshare holidays.

That first holiday we could either hire a car to drive around Southern Spain or eat, so we chose to eat!

It was around that time that we made our first property investment. We bought a timeshare. In hindsight this was not one of our better moves but it proves that we’re human! Always read the small print! When the interest rate kicked in after x amount of months we had a 24% interest rate. Well we got that paid off pretty quickly but things were tight for a while.

I was getting contracts by then and Adrian had a salary as a gardener. So he made the steady money while I never knew whether I’d get another contract or not. Usually I would get a contract, so the money kept flowing in and usually out again on something else.

Then after several years the contracting market got tight and I couldn’t get a contract. I applied to temp agencies for any office work but I was either over or under qualified and at one stage could only be an Avon Lady (delivering catalogues door to door & collecting orders). That taught me a great deal and I have a great respect for Avon ladies!

Adrian had been trying to tell me about getting into property but I thought that was risky and it wasn’t until I read a couple of books that it really all came together for me.

Those books were Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and One Minute Millionaire by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G Allen.

When I played the Cash flow 101 game that goes with Rich Dad Poor Dad, I got out of the rat race in 1 hour 30 minutes. My friends knew I wasn’t a financial genius and wondered how I’d done it. Unfortunately I had to admit that I had been using the strategy about buying property and renting it out that Adrian had been talking about for years.

It gave me the proof I needed to look more into how to buy property for investment. 
     
Now we own property in both the UK and Australia and are active share option traders as well as having several home based businesses.

We’ve come a long way and we are going to tell you how we did it.    

 Adrian's background:

I was born into a moderately wealthy family in Ireland.

We had a nice house out in the country; we had nice cars, and could afford foreign holidays at a time when they were considered quite a luxury. My father ran his own business but we also had private income. This all changed when I was about nine years old when my fathers business folded, having swallowed what was left of the family fortune, so life changed dramatically.

My father went from being a business owner to being an employee, the banks were trying to repossess our house and a one point we couldn’t even pay the electricity bill and were disconnected.

Unfortunately in this particular house every thing was run by electricity so we had no lights, no heating, and no cooking facilities and no water because the water was pumped out of a well.

This teaches you to become resourceful very quickly. The rest of the family stepped in to protect my private education, as I’m a dyslexic and needed a more specialized education.

Being dyslexic for me means that I have a problem with my writing (it’s almost illegible), and I’m innumerate which means what my eyes see on the paper isn’t what my brain records.

Until they discovered my dyslexia I was considered not very bright.  

While my fathers business folding may have happened when I was about nine years old, the consequences of this event were still being dealt with nine years later.

I remember my mother working 48 hours straight in her knitting business so that we could keep a roof over our heads.

I was taught, like so many people, go to school, get a good education, get a job, get a pension and retire and the state will look after me.

I was aware that there was another way to earn money but I just didn’t have knowledge to access that way.

It was only in my 30’s that I put all the jigsaw pieces in my head together.

When I left school I did a year in horticultural college, and then because I couldn’t find work, I started my own gardening business, where I worked really hard in my business, but not on my business. I worked 7 days a week, 10 – 14 hours a day and didn’t take any holidays.

I wasn’t making huge returns either.  I realized that this wasn’t getting me anywhere and fortunately was offered a job with a landscaping company in London, England which meant that I could start working conventional hours and educating myself in how to make my money work harder.

This is when I started investing in unit trusts and investment trusts in the UK.  I also took out a personal pension to look after myself in my old age. I bought myself a flat to live in and started to pay off the mortgage which we’re taught was the right thing to do.

I believed that I was doing everything right in life, as I’d been taught. I didn’t have any other loans other than the mortgage, and I had the discipline to pay off my credit card every month.

In my early 30’s I decided once again to become my own boss and start my own gardening business. Once again I made the same mistake of working in my business and not on my business.

At this stage I was married to Karen, we had a house and we were paying off the mortgage. We were both producing quite a high cash flow from our businesses, we were having a couple of holidays a year, and we had time share apartments in Spain and the Canary Islands, and travelled large parts of the world. However we had to work for the money to enjoy this lifestyle.

I knew there were other ways to earn money such as property investment and the stock market, but I didn’t have the knowledge to get my money to work for me and I didn’t know where to start looking for it.

The only knowledge I could get was the conventional knowledge in magazines of the time.

When I mentioned property investment to Karen she thought it was risky and that we had to pay off our own mortgage first, which was very frustrating for me. She firmly believed that all debt was bad.

And then we read Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki which was recommended to us by some friends. And that’s when the jigsaw came together.

The proof of the pudding was when we played cash flow 101 (the game that goes with Rich Dad Poor Dad) and Karen used the techniques that I’d been talking about for years to get out of the game very quickly.

From this stems the start of us doing various property courses, and from that first group starting a mastermind group, so of whom we’re still in touch with today.

This accelerated our education and actions to the point where we are now semi-retired at 44 years old, giving us the choices of doing what we want to do.

If I can do this, with the limited skills that I have, this is within the reach of anybody.

We are still continuing our financial education and we don’t see that this will ever stop since there’s always more to learn.