Money Mastery Mindset with Leonie Fitzgerald

Episode 315: Money Mastery Mindset with Leonie Fitzgerald

 

Earning money is tough, but learning how to save and make money grow is tougher. In this episode, Leonie Fitzgerald, the Founder of Wealthology.com, teaches us about money mindsets, money tools, and money-making habits. She also gives some smart hacks on how to give up unnecessary spending habits and outlines a list of rules that you can follow to save money. Follow her wealth and success coaching program and learn how to create a budget and afford a promising future.

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Watch the episode here:

This time we’re talking to someone in Australia. We’re talking to Leonie Fitzgerald. She is going to be talking to us about money mindsets, money tools and money-making habits. I like talking to people from other parts of the country because A) We find out that we’re not all that different. B) There are things that you don’t even know you can do yet because you haven’t ever left the country. I’ve got to give homage to my sponsor, TaxFreeFuture.com. Please check out the 37 videos there. If you are not investing in a tax-deferred or tax-free account, then you’re losing a big advantage. Please go to TaxFreeFuture.com because you will not believe what your financial advisors are not telling you. We’re going to tell you what they’re not telling you. Leonie, are you like all of us who started out dead broke and finally had enough of that crap and decided you were going to do something about it? There was this a-ha moment, then you went off on this long journey and it took a little while and you figured it out. Was that the long and short of it?

There was a bit of that. I bought my first property when I was eighteen, but I didn’t do much more with it until I was about 30.

You didn’t do more with the concept or you kept that house that whole time?

I kept that house the whole time. I sold that after about twelve years. I moved to London. I bought a flat in London. I bought a 150-year old house to do a development project on and a complete renovation.

I thought you were in Australia?

I’m in Australia now, but I lived in London for ten years.

How was that?

It was cold.

What does that mean? How do you spell cold?

It was freezing cold. The weather was very gray.

We’re hot here most of the time. I’m from Texas. We have one season. What was the pressure? What was the push? What was the tipping point? What happened?

The renovation project that I bought, we wanted to develop it and build a second house in the garden. The neighbors weren’t overly happy with that. They canceled, denied out planning applications on several occasions. We never got to build the house. Once we finished the renovation of the actual original house, the GFC hit the weekend we finished.

The GFC is the Global Financial Crisis. I had to ask what that was.

It hit badly in London and it hit quickly. We lost all of our profit in about three months.

There’s a lot of freedom at the bottom though. My book, My Life & 1,000 Houses: Failing Forward to Financial Freedom, I wrote about my time in the woods. That’s what everyone relates to because everybody that I know who’s successful spent some time in the woods, dark, cold and wondering what’s going to eat you because you don’t have much to defend yourself with. I discovered though that there was a lot of freedom at the bottom. You could reinvent yourself. You could change your mind about everything. You could become whatever you wanted to because when you’re at the bottom, nobody cares. Everybody who was hanging around, they’re gone. You’re free to reinvent yourself if you have the will and the desire to. Did you decide you were going to reinvent yourself?

Yeah, I did. I moved when I was 33 back to Brisbane in Australia. I was a single woman. I had $85,000 worth of debt on credit cards because of that renovation. I flew home on Christmas Eve of 2008. That was in the middle of the GFC and nobody was hiring. I couldn’t find any work for about three months. I was living with my aunt. I was living on a single-bed mattress on the floor, feeling quite sorry for myself and living on credit cards. I decided to draw a line in the sand and thought, “This is as bad as my luck is ever going to get.” I went out and got some free life coaching from a gentleman that was starting his own business and wanting some testimonials from people that he was practicing on. I put my hands up and volunteered. I had three sessions with him. He started on a career change and that’s how I got into property. Before that, I was working in financial services. I got a job in property back up in Brisbane and that’s where it all started. That was about several years ago.

 

You’re offering a free eBook called Master Your Money Mindset. It’s got discussions about mindset shifts, moneymaking tools or money tools and moneymaking habits. Where do you want to start? Talk to us about the mindset shift. What shift is that?

You can have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. With the growth mindset, you’re open to learning and you believe that there are better ways to do things. I had to get myself into a better mindset. I was feeling quite sorry for myself. I was wondering why all of that was happening to me. I had to give myself a bit of a kick up the ass and get on with it. You can only feel sorry for yourself for so long.

One of the things I learned, not even in my real estate career but early in life, was whatever it is you’re afraid of, you need to go right to it. You go right to it, dive into it and get as much information about it. Every morning when you wake up, face up with it. Your dragons start to shrink. You think they’re big dragons, but when you get up close to them and start figuring out what the issue is, there are ways usually to fix everything.

It’s funny you mentioned fear. I’ve got a Post-it note on my desk that says, “Fear means go.”

Fear is conquered by action. That’s what I wrote in my book. It must be some universal law because it works the same for everybody everywhere. When I read your bio, I thought I saw something interesting. It said you gave up coffee for coaching. I thought that meant you were spending $7 a day on Starbucks coffee as they do around here. They decided to take that $210 a month in coffee to go try to do something different and change your life. I know $210 doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but if it’ll get you a couple of sessions or buy you ten or twelve books and you can immerse yourself in something, you can probably come up with some ideas. What did you mean when you said you gave up coffee for coaching?

The life coach that I worked with wanted a coffee, that’s what he was charging for a session because he wanted a testimonial. I could afford to buy a coffee on my credit card. He would give me an hours’ worth of coaching. Giving up coffee is a good point because I read a book many years ago, I can’t remember the author, but it was all about giving up for coffee a day. Here in Australia to buy a decent coffee it’s $5 and $6, which is probably equivalent to $4 in America. If you saved $4 every day, that’s $20 a week. If you put that into something and save that money, it can get you ahead financially. That was a bit of a formula that I used many years ago.

I interviewed this guy one time named Jordan Goodman. I was looking him up on my phone and he has all these money hacks. He’s an interesting guy. He’s got his own podcast. He’s got a radio show. He had many hacks to pick up some extra money. It was unbelievable. When you looked at him, “I got that, I can do that. I could give up coffee. I could give up cable TV or half of my channels.” What habits do you suggest off the bat people pick up? Is there anything that’s obvious or is it different for everybody?

The cable one is a good one. We have Netflix here in Australia, which is about $10 a month for Netflix. I don’t know how much cable is in America, but it’s quite a lot more expensive than Netflix membership.

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We have Netflix here. They have a million movies and none of them are any good. Every now and then you find a good one. I have seen all the movies. They can’t write another movie with a different plot. They’re all the same movie with a different costume on. You watch TV for 48 years or whatever. There is no new movie.

The other thing I always suggest to my clients is your life insurance, income protection, house insurance, car insurance, ring around at least once a year and do comparisons. That can save you quite a bit of money. The other thing I do also is bank fees. I don’t pay any bank fees with any of my banks. I also call regularly to get reduced interest rates and they give them to you as long as you ask.

They don’t give it to you if you don’t ask, do they?

No. That’s the challenge in most people is they don’t ask unfortunately. As long as you are speaking to the right person at the bank that can authorize the interest reduction, I usually get a bit of a rate reduction every time I’ll go.

Another way to do that is call other credit card companies and see if they’ll offer you an incentive to move your balance over to their card. You can get 0% or 1% or 0.5%. Also re-shopping your car loan, these are all great ways to figure out how to afford a coach or a course or a three-day event or something. Also, gas apps that’ll tell you where the cheapest gas is in town. We have gas apps around here and they’ll tell you exactly where the cheapest gas is. Sometimes it’s $0.50 cheaper a gallon. You can save up pretty fast in a month especially if you’re a guy that’s driving a lot. I always get that app. I go fill up wherever because I’ve gotten lazy. I’ve gotten privileged.

The other thing also that I find a lot of my property investor clients don’t do is increase their rents on a regular basis. Sometimes as a landlord, we feel like we can’t increase rents or we love our clients and we want to do right by them. We don’t put our rent up and that can be detrimental for you as a landlord. That’s another thing that I usually recommend that clients look at every twelve to eighteen months.

This is interesting because I didn’t see that coming. You’re addressing people that have some girth, some property or wealth somewhere locked up. They’re maybe not making it monthly because you can make all the money in the world. If you don’t make more than you’re spending than you owe, then you could have issues.

Another thing that I suggest people do is on paydays to transfer a certain amount of money from their pay directly into a savings account, ideally 10% if you can. If you have that automatic direct debit set up on payday, you don’t miss it. You get used to living on less. When I first came home from London, I had $85,000 in debt, which I had to pay off. It took me about two and a half years, nearly three years. Every week, I would transfer a certain amount of money into a savings account and that’s all I had. If I’d spend all that by Wednesday, I wasn’t doing much on the weekend. I learned to live on less because I created that habit. That’s a powerful way of reducing your expenses.

 

My niece graduated from college. She got her Master’s degree and she got a nice job. The first thing I said was, “Let’s set up an IRA and let’s put 10% in.” You’ve never made any money before. Whether you make 100% or 90%, your body is not going to know the difference. This is going to learn to live on whatever you give it. I like that. Also, there’s this thing called Acorns. You can set your credit cards up in this Acorn account. When you buy something for $9.10, it rounds it up to $10. It puts the other $0.90 in your IRA. That’s how you used to go save your change in the jar. The jar wasn’t making any interest or wasn’t invested anywhere.

That’s like full savings. You don’t notice it. It automatically comes out. Most people spend 110%. They spend more than what they earn and that’s their first mistake. Secondly, people don’t have any understanding of what their outgoings are, their bills because they’re not working with a budget. I like to call a budget a spending planner. At the beginning of the year, I sit down and I work out, “What is my lifestyle going to cost me for the year? How much do I want to put towards travel? What do I need to pay for a few? What do I need to pay for electricity? What is my living expense going to be?”

I work out what that’s going to cost, then I know how much income I need to make for that year. I work with a lot of business owners as well. There’s a huge opportunity to decrease your expenses as a business owner because often you never sit down and look at what’s going out. You could give up the bowl of fruit that you’re buying for the staff every week and save $40. For instance, your stationery orders. You maybe get discounted stationery with another supplier. There are so many things you can do as a business owner to cut costs.

Give your employees an incentive, “I’m buying lunch to anyone who can save me money, go through everything you know on what we can save on.” $25 a week and all you’ve got to do is buy them a $10 enchilada plate. That’s a good idea. This is running through my head for our audience, it takes a little money to hire a coach. I bet if you go to REInvestorsSummit.com/moneymindset, you get your free consult with Leonie here. I bet you she can figure out an opportunity laying around to pay for this coaching. I bet you she could figure it out inside your own budget or get you very close to getting this for free by making a few changes or even going back and reviewing where you’re at.

We have to review around this household should probably be done more often, but once every six months, we have a spreadsheet of all the things we’ve elected to have to be our credit cards, “You want to sign up for this app. You want to sign up for that app. You want to sign up for this subscription.” A year goes by and they send you a renewal and you think to yourself, “I haven’t used that thing since a month after I signed up for it and they had been charging me every month.” You’ve got to go back. It should probably be every quarter now because it seems like I go out and sign up for things I think I’m going to use them. I never use them or I don’t participate or whatever the deal is I’m signed up for.

A great example of that, Mitch, is the gym membership. How many of us have had a gym membership and haven’t gone to the gym?

I worked out once 1976 I think it was. You probably have some gym equipment lying around your house that you haven’t walked on or lifted for how many decades. Why don’t you settle that, go get your coaching over here and learn how to change a few things and become a millionaire eventually? The good old yard sale, you’ve got to have that one on your list. Have a yard sale and you’ll pay for your coaching.

You can sell stuff on eBay. I’m sure you have all different kinds of websites over there. We’ve got a couple of websites here where you can list stuff for free so you don’t even pay a fee to sell something. My sister sold a whole bunch of stuff and made $450 in an afternoon.

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You weren’t using that stuff anyways. They were clutter. It was keeping you from being able to get to the washer and dryer easy.

I keep thinking about selling my wedding dress. I’m never going to wear it again. It’s clogging that room in my wardrobe.

Think about you give someone else a beautiful day.

I’ve only worn it once.

It might seem petty to some people out there and some people may not need this, but there is a bunch of people in this country I know that need to start paying attention. It’s so easy to not begin as soon as possible because the sooner you start, the sooner things get better or things get big. You’re in your twenties and you wake up and you’re 35 or 36, there are fifteen years gone by that you didn’t do anything, put anything away. You could have had a nest egg. You could have had a good start when you finally wake up and go, “At the rate I’m going, I’m not going to be able to retire.” You can have something to start with. I wake up every morning and go, “What happened?” Some of those little things I bought that I left laying around like a piece of land over here on the corner and a piece of land over there in the corner. While it’s very devastating, sometimes we’ll see how fast time passes. It’s also in your favor with certain things. Time is good in wine and in money. The land sitting around next to paved roads. Do you talk a lot about IRAs or 401(k)s or anything like that?

It’s a little bit different over here in Australia. I talked to a lot of my clients with the property. A great example, I’ve got clients that I’ve been working for about six years. They were due to buy their third investment property several months ago. They had some changes with their job so the bank wouldn’t lend them any money. By delaying that third purchase for several months, it impacted the end result of $20,000 per year in retirement. It’s a massive impact by delaying for several months. Most people wouldn’t think too much about that. With property, you know this, Mitch, it’s all about time. The longer you hold it, the more money you make. The sooner you can acquire your assets, the better result you’ll have in retirement. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t plan and they get to 50. I have a lot of 50 to 55-year-olds come to me, all panicked because they want to retire in ten or fifteen years and they haven’t done anything about it except work on paying down their home line. That’s great to be debt-free on your home when you retire, but you’ve got no assets paying you an income to live on. You end up on a pension. Over here it’s $400 a week, which is not much money.

Most of the time, that’s not meant to live on. Maybe I’m talking about Social Security over here in the United States. I don’t know where people got the idea, “It’s not enough to live on.” It was never supposed to be lived on. It was supposed to supplement you when you start having to pay for prescription drugs. It wasn’t supposed to be lived on. You were supposed to take care of that yourself. You gave your whole future to the government. They’re going to take care of you good. With rent increases, I have 1,600 storage doors. Self-storage is my forever play because there are flips that’s one-time cash. There are owner finance deals. That’s temporary cash because when you sell a house on payments for 30 years, but that the payments are going to expire. You have to have a forever cash play or module in your investing. You all have self-storage, mini storages. People in America have so much junk that they keep it off their house. They have to rent 10×10 squares with roll-up doors so they can keep some more junk that they’re never going to use.

My favorite words of all time were, “I’m just going to be here for three months.” Ten years later, they’re still sending me $60 a month. I go around and that’s one of the things we learned early on is we increased the rents $3 at a time. We keep going into the 600-unit circle. Every time you complete the circle, it has increased your income $4,800 a month, which is almost $60,000 a year. It’s a whole other income every time you go all the way through that circle. You start over again because, by the time you get there, you start over again. There’s a little secret for these storage owners out there. I always like to raise the bulk of those rents though when it’s 105 degrees because no one’s going to get in a truck and move that crap. We increase 75% of the people in the hottest three months of the year. I don’t know where you’re from or where the devastating part of the climate. Up north, you should increase the rents when it’s freezing cold because no one wants to move when it’s below zero.

 

Here, everybody moves. They want to get into their new rental property in January before school starts. January is the busiest time to rent property here in Australia.

I was talking about the rent increase though, increase their rent in the winter if you can. I don’t know how that works. We talked about money tools. These are three of the big topics in the eBook you can get for free. It’s called Master Your Money Mindset. You go to 1000houses.com/moneymindset. You can not only get the free eBook, Master Your Money Mindset, but you can also figure out how to get a free consultation here and discuss your personal goals, personal life and your financial life and see what you think can happen. It’s a great opportunity especially if you’re doing nothing or been doing nothing. Please do something because you’re going to regret it. You’re going to wake up two decades from now and go, “What did I do? Why don’t I have anything?” It’s not that hard to get on the right path.

I have an idea. Some of you may have a spouse out there that might be a little gregarious in the spending department. Maybe get them this coaching or counseling as a gift and maybe they’ll shift that energy to a different thing because usually spending is an energy burst. If you can find something else to substitute that energy burst with that’s more complimentary to your life, maybe you can get someone to switch a track. They may not even have any idea. I would look at this as a game. People play on video games, Leonie. I play video games. This is my video games. I’d say, “How much money can I make this computer-generated business?” It’s a game still and we all keep score of the game. You can tell if you’re winning or not if your bank account goes up or down. I choose different kinds of games. I take the challenge of those. I do look at it as a game.

You need to know how to play it.

There’s a certain set of rules. When you break the rules, you get less money. When you do good, here are the rules, you get more money. You have to figure out the rules pretty much like those video games make you do. You’ve got to do trial and error, “There’s the window. That’s what you do to get over that wall.”

It’s the same as if you want your teeth when he’s 75 years old, there are rules of the game to have your teeth at 75. You’ve probably got to brush twice a day and floss once a week. You’ve got to follow the rules to keep your teeth. It’s the same with wealth. You’ve got to follow the rules. Ideally, you want to save 10%. You want to invest it in something that’s going to grow your money. When you have a certain amount, you work that into an asset that’s going to grow your money safely that you can get back at when you need it. I believe you should also insure your money in case anything unforeseen happens down the track. I hear many horror stories about people that don’t insure their assets and getting into strife. There are rules to the game of money. They need to understand what they are and follow them.

Do you have a list of rules?

I do. Have you ever read the book, The Richest Man in Babylon? It’s a bit of a parable. There are seven things in there that they talk about and saving 10% is number one. If you read that book and follow the rules, you can only have success.

Most people spend 110% more than what they earn, and that's the first mistake. Share on X

It’s all biblical. It was written 2,000 years ago. There have been no new rules since that book was written and they’re in there. This is not rocket surgery. It’s a combination of it. It’s not brain surgery and rocket science. It’s how a dumb guy gets it mixed up. What else would you say to someone out there who’s struggling with finances? What’s a parting word you would say to someone out there that’s struggling?

Think clear on what your goals are and what you’re working towards. If you have a look at where you are right now financially and where you would ideally like to be, what does life look like? You reverse engineer. What do I need to do to get to that point? What steps do I need to take? That’s what I do with my clients. It’s funny you mentioned about you might have a spouse that might not be on the same page. I hear it all the time. Often, I hear that women are looking after all the finances for the household, hubby goes out to work and that’s generalizing. I did get a lot of complaints from the ladies that they are having to pay all the bills, look after all the filing and hold the bookkeeping at home.

When I work with couples, I work with them together to show them that you both need to take responsibility. You both need to know what your passcodes are to get into your online bank accounts in case God forbid one of you dies. You both need to be on the same page and that is the same for goal setting. Often when I sit down with a husband and wife and I’ll ask them about what they want to do when they retire, the hubby says, “I want to drive around Australia with the caravan and go caravanning for twelve months.” It’s very common here. You guys do it in RVs over there. Often, the wife has got her mind set on doing five-star around Europe. They have two very different goals. Firstly, you need to get on the same page. You’ve got to sit down together. If you’re in a relationship with your partner, work out what it is that you want in life and get a bit of a planning place to hit in that direction. It’s not just burying your head in the sand and hoping for the best like the majority of people do. Unfortunately, in this country, 95% of people retire on a pension and at the moment we’ve got two generations on a pension. We’ve got my grandparents and their parents.

I was lucky. My wife thinks jewelry is a waste of money, flowers are made up by Hallmark and Hallmark is a gimmick made up by people that print paper. I’ve been the luckiest guy in the world because she can smell $0.2 out of place from a million miles. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars she’s probably saved me by checking up on credit card charges, going back and telling people, “We canceled six months ago, why are you still charging?” Also, she’s very tough on the people that come to collect money. They have to have the paperwork right. She reviews all the statements and it’s helped me a lot. She’s affectionately known as The Money Bitch. She has the moniker on her desk, The Money Bitch.

If you want some money, you need to go talk to her and believe me, you better have your collective crap together because she’s going to hammer you if you don’t have your stuff right. She’s been a blessing for me because I go through town and with all this dust. I swirl everything and I start making things happen. I’m throwing stuff up on the wall to see if it sticks. I don’t pay any attention after that. Someone has to come, clean up and organize behind me because I’m too busy making the next mess. That’s where I go and do. Once I’m finished creating that big mess, I usually walk right out the back door and don’t even look back. Someone needs to go take care of that, manage it, collect it and service it and whatever has to happen with it because I created it. I’m a good creator. I’m not a good maintainer. I don’t do the maintenance. If I didn’t have a wife like that, I’d have to hire that person.

It’s quite common. You’re at different ends of the scale when it comes to personality. They say opposites attract. I think they do.

That’s an understatement with us. She’s from Ohio. I’m from Texas. Don’t ask me how that happened. It just did. I dragged her into entrepreneurial-ism by the back of her hair like a caveman dragging his wife into the cave. She was kicking and screaming the whole way, wanting to know when I was going to get a job, “When are you going to get a job? You’ve been at lunch for three hours.” I said, “You don’t understand what I do. The guy I met at lunch was a billionaire. We’re trying to get something settled here. I’m not a billionaire so I need this guy. I’m having a long lunch.”

You probably couldn’t work in a job anyway.

 

Talk about mindset, I drew a line on the sand one day when I was as low as I was going to get. I said, “This was the rules. I’m never going to be worthless tomorrow. I’m going to be worth more tomorrow even if it’s $1. It has to be $1, but I’m always going to be worth at least $1 more than I was yesterday. I’m never going to have a job again. Mitch, figure it out because when you have a job, you’ve got ceilings. People are telling you how fast you can grow 90% of the time or 99% of the time.” They told me when I could go on vacation and when I can’t, when I can rest and when I can’t, when I can go see my kids and when I can’t, what I got to wear, when I got to get up. I’d had enough of that crap.

That’s one thing I look for in my students. I’ve had enough meters pegged way over in the red because they become teachable when they’ve had enough of that crap. A POW once told me, I asked him how he survived being imprisoned in Castro’s Hotel for 24 months. They’re starved to death every day. I said, “How did you survive that?” He said, “This is the most magnificent thing ever created. If you give it enough food and enough water and if this doesn’t go right here, if you can keep your sanity, this body, the most impressive thing ever invented, will figure every single thing out.” That haunted me for a couple of weeks. I was at this point in my life, I was about 28. I had a lot of jobs, but I didn’t have a college degree. No one wanted to pay me very much in and $15, $20 an hour was the most I could make. $20 an hour was good for me at the time, but I knew that it wasn’t good.

I said, “If I can’t go out and make $15, $20 an hour by myself out in this United States of America, one of the greatest infrastructures in the world, shoot me.” I took having a job off the table. The first day, I made $20 for the whole day. It wasn’t a very good day. The next day I didn’t do much better. I slowly figured out over the next fifteen, twenty days how to make $8 an hour, $10 an hour and $15 an hour. The cool thing was every time I invented an increase in my salary or my pay, I was 100% the beneficiary of it. I learned how to make $25, $40, $50, $100, $250 and $500 an hour. Every time I increased or came up with the idea like, “This is how you multiply that,” I was 100% the beneficiary. One day I was at worth about $800 an hour. Some of this stuff doesn’t go over good, Leonie.

My wife said, “Can you go out to pick up the dry cleaners on your way?” I said, “I’m worth $800 an hour. Can we find someone else to pick up the dry cleaning?” I was on the sofa for a couple of days, sleeping by myself. I didn’t go pick up the dry cleaning. It’s like mindset. You can’t work below your pay grade. There comes a point when you don’t mow your own yard. It’s not because you’re arrogant. It just doesn’t make economic sense. Unless you like mowing your yard and somehow that’s cathartic or therapeutic for you, I get it because there are people that like to do that. That’s not me.

You’ve been a pleasure to talk to. To the audience, go get your free eBook, Master Your Money Mindset over at 1000houses.com/moneymindset and also get a consultation with Leonie Fitzgerald. What could it hurt? She’s offering you a free chance to sit down, maybe lay some of your cards on the table and let her show you how you might shift your thought process a little bit and make a huge difference in your financial future. The longer you plan it out, the bigger it’s going to be. The sooner you start, the sooner it starts happening. Tell me about one of your success stories.

I had a client come to me. She was based in Sydney, which is about an hour and a half from Brisbane on a flight. She and her husband had signed three property contracts in a period of twelve months and hadn’t proceeded with any of them because they were scared, quite nervous and didn’t have any education. The people that they are working with wasn’t giving them any education, getting them to sign a contract. I’ve written an article for one of the nationwide newspapers here. He’d read it and said, “You should connect with Leonie, get some coaching and work on your mindset.”

We started to work together. On our third coaching call, she said that she wanted to buy an investment property, so they both flied to Brisbane. I took them around for the day, introduced them to some builders, found them a magical property and they proceeded with that purchase. They went through with it. They were excited to do that because for twelve months they’d been trying to buy a property. Because of the mindset stuff that I’d been doing with her, that she felt like she was comfortable to move forward with the process. As you were saying earlier, fear gets in the way of many people taking action. The biggest mistake I have found with people is that they don’t do anything.

Paying someone to be in your corner to focus on exactly your issues, don’t ever underestimate that. Not only you’ve got a second set of eyes, but it also gives you a little bit of confidence when you can concur with someone that you admire or who’s in a place where you want to go or has done what you want to do. When they concur with what you’re doing, that takes a lot of hesitation out of the decision-making process or even keeps you from being stifled. In my business, I coach people on how to buy and flip houses. A lot of times they got a perfectly good deal and they’re not jumping in. I’d call them and go, “Have you got the contract yet? Run to that place and get the contract signed. What are you doing? This is a good deal run.” They do, but they don’t trust their own decision-making process because they haven’t ever made those decisions and been successful before. They may have never even made those decisions at all before. They don’t know if they would be successful if they made those decisions or not. They’re second-guessing themselves. That’s part of what a good coach does. We’re part cheerleader, part psychologists and part someone you’ve got to answer to. If you don’t do what you said you’re going to do, you hold people responsible.

Most people know what they need to do. They don’t do it because there’s nobody to push them along and keeping them accountable. Most of my clients that I coach know what they need to do. They just want me on the end of the phone every fortnight kicking them in the ass to get them to move forward. They know when we’ve got a call, they have to have done those steps. Otherwise, they’re going to get a bit of abating. Otherwise, they don’t move forward. Sometimes I’ll have to push people a little bit. A lot of people don’t do things because they’re afraid of failing. That big fear of filing, nobody wants to fail and we don’t want that. It’s easier to do nothing than it is to do something.

It’s been a real pleasure talking to you, Leonie. I want to thank all the people out there reading. Thanks for stopping by to get you some Leonie Fitzgerald. She has a Wealth and Success coaching program. If you’re interested, she’s going to help you learn how to create a budget, how to live by a budget and how to find the money to afford the things you want to afford out in the future, go to 1000houses.com/moneymindset. Thanks, Leonie.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• 1000houses.com/moneymindset
• 1000houses.com/grow
• 1000houses.com/Pin
• 1000houses.com/101
• 1000houses.com/Coaching
• Leonie Fitzgerald
• My Life & 1,000 Houses: Failing Forward to Financial Freedom
• Master Your Money Mindset
• Jordan Goodman – previous episode
• Acorns app
• The Richest Man in Babylon

About Leonie Fitzgerald

Leonie started investing in property in 1993 when she was only 18. She also started to learn about self-education around the same time. She quickly became aware of how closely creating wealth and having the right mindset are entwined.

A renovation project in London went sour when the GFC hit and not long after, Leonie moved back home to Australia, a 33-year-old single woman. Unable to secure work, and with a fractured wrist, she was living on the floor of her aunt’s place, sleeping under a Winnie the Pooh doona and accrued $85k debt on numerous credit cards.

Leonie decided it was time to draw a line in the sand and exchanged coffee for life coaching where she designed her dream career and within 6 months she had started living it. Her new career progressed quickly at a national property investment company where she was helping people all over Australia transform their financial futures. 

Founder of Wealthology Australia Leonie has coached over 10,000 hours delivering strategic, powerful coaching all over the world, empowering humans globally to transform their money and their mindset to live a life desired. Using brain transforming technology she guides people through life-changing transformations implementing changes that impact the way they can live, in abundance with prosperity. 

She also helps people create a better financial lifestyle for themselves by delivering the ultimate property investing experience. She specializes in financial success unlike many out there who purely focus on the property she helps her clients become wealthy sooner by investing smarter. 

A sought-after consultant and speaker Leonie was a finalist in the Women of Business Awards of Australia 2017. She is known for her genuine approach to life and is committed to helping those who would like lasting results while having a bit of fun along the way.