30 Properties Before 30

How You Can Start Investing in Property Right Now

Eddie Dilleen

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780730399896
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780730399902
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Real Estate
• Index: Business

**Finalist of the Personal Finance and Investment Book of the Year at the Australian Business Book Awards 2022**

Find financial freedom through property investment with help from an Australian success story

Drawing on his own remarkable rags-to-riches story, author Eddie Dilleen delivers a recipe for financial independence in 30 Properties Before 30: How You Can Start Investing in Property Right Now. In the book, readers will find a step-by-step roadmap to building an expansive portfolio of properties and advice to help them reach their financial goals sooner.

The author includes powerful formulas and strategies that anyone can use to take control of their financial future. Readers will also find:

• A straightforward starting point for all Australians looking to begin investing in property
• A persuasive message that it's never too early (or too late) to get involved in property investment and the tips, facts, and techniques readers need to succeed
• An informative guide for first-time home buyers just dipping their toe into the Australian property market

30 Properties Before 30 is the perfect book for anyone — regardless of age, wealth, education, or background — who hopes to build a better life for themselves and their family.

PART I
MY STORY

As you'll already have gathered from my background, I'm not your typical property investor, and perhaps partly for this reason, over the years my story and strategies have been featured by multiple media outlets. Many people have reached out to tell me how my story inspired them. Because if I could do it with my initial disadvantages, they realised, then surely they could too. This feedback always makes my day! So after some consideration I decided to begin this book with a brief account of my own personal story.

My message here is simple: it's to never allow the personal challenges you start out with determine the trajectory of the rest of your life. Whatever your circumstances, your future is not set in stone. Only you have the power to create it.

If you have grown up around motivated people who work hard in a stable job and provide for their family, you are luckier than you might realise. But if not, it's never too late to break the cycle. Resisting societal expectations and peer pressures is not easy, nor is breaking poor cross-generational financial habits. Taking control of your life and educating yourself is the first step.

If you want to dive straight into the nitty-gritty of property investing, feel free to flick to Part II. If you'd like to learn a bit about my upbringing and the journey of acquiring my first ten properties (with all figures and details), then read on.

CHAPTER 1
Breaking the cycle

My parents met in Escondido in southern California and got married in their early twenties. My mum had grown up there, the youngest of three siblings, in an average American lower-middle-class family. There wasn't much money. She finished high school but never went to university. No one in my entire family had been to university. I didn't even know what university was until my teens.

My father grew up in Brooklyn, New York. When he was 17 years old he enlisted in the navy, lying about his age. He was sent to Vietnam, where he was wounded and got a silver star for saving others' lives. Mum told me he had a lot of problems after he came home.

Thirteen years after getting married, they moved from the US to Sydney. My father had big dreams of getting rich through multi-level marketing schemes and various other plans, but they never seemed to work out. Dad was a self-employed welder. Later he worked for a company, but the pay was very low. He always wanted more. At the dinner table he'd say how we should always save 10 per cent of what we earn so we could build up a good amount of savings in 10 years. He really wanted to get ahead financially, but no matter what he tried, he just didn't get there. Even when my parents were together and very poor, Dad faced a massive tax debt when he tried to work on his own.

My parents had three children. I was the youngest, born much later than my sister and brother when Dad was 45 and Mum 41. I remember lots of financial stress — my parents were always fighting about money.

Hard times

We lived in a rough area in Mount Druitt. For those unfamiliar with it, Mount Druitt is a lower socioeconomic suburb an hour's drive west of the CBD that has long held a reputation for crime, drugs and domestic violence. But it was affordable and my parents were able to buy a house there in the late 1980s for $50 000 and settled into their new life. We lived right next to the shops in the neighbourhood of Whalan. I recall how we were forbidden even to pick up the mail because drug syringes often littered the ground.

My parents split up when I was eight. My father moved to Adelaide and my mum, sister and I moved to Austin, Texas, where Mum's sister lived. My brother stayed in Australia. We arrived in th...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: MY STORY
• PART II: INVESTMENT STRATEGIES
• PART III: YOUR INVESTMENT JOURNEY
• CONCLUSION
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT