By Al Lewison

When catching up with an old work buddy Mark, who I hadn’t seen in a while, it got me thinking about the sacrifices I had to make in the early days, when I started investing.

When I bought my first investment property, Mark was the bloke who said to me, “What are you doing you loser, you’re moving out to Bayswater? I’m moving to Hawthorn; why would you be moving out there?”

Making this sacrifice of buying out in the less trendy suburbs, in order to start investing in property and setting myself up, might have seemed like the wrong thing for me to do to my friend, but I knew would pay off for me in the long term. Catching up with my mate, turned in to a light-bulb moment for me, and it’s not the only time that has happened recently. Not long ago, I was reminded of one of these moments when I was playing online Monopoly (don’t judge me it’s good fun!).

What I realised is, when you start the game, you have this money in your account and some choices.  You can just keep going around and collecting your money as you pass GO but if instead you buy as much property you can, it gets to the point where you’ve got basically zero money and you’re living on the poverty line.

But, if you make some early sacrifices and buy up, then put down some houses and hotels, you will experience delayed gratification because as we all know, in Monopoly when you spend all of your money on properties at some point the money will start coming back to you. Are you seeing the correlation to real life yet? You’re planting seeds right now for an outcome that’s going to benefit you long term.

So nowadays I’m saying to Mark, “I’ll pay for your lunch at whatever restaurant you choose!”