The Fixed-Rate Mortgage Time Bomb—The Investor Opportunity It Creates

0:00I don't care if you've just landed your first deal, you're sitting on a portfolio already, or you haven't bought a single property yet. One day, if you make the right moves, your rent link come is going to outgrow your salary. That happened to me in just under 18 months. I went from being a full-time school teacher to earning over 10,000 pounds every single month to property. I'm not first started happening. Nobody told me what actually to do with the extra income and the extra time, and that cost me in more ways than one. So today, I'm telling you the seven things that you need to upgrade the moment the money starts coming in. Let's get it to it. Even if you're early in your journey, or not investing yet, this still applies to you. I know better than anyone how fast property can change your life, so even if you haven't started yet, this information could be useful sooner than you think. But let's say you've already built a team around you. When you bought your first property, you did what everyone does. You found that cheapest condense elicitor on a comparison site, and that the accountant whose other clients are hairdressers and taxi drivers.

1:03And at one property, you can get away with it. But every property you add multiplies the cost of that mismatch. A generalist accountant just files whatever numbers you hand them. But a property specialist constructs you them, and one proper conversation with them usually saves more than a year of their fees. Same story with a solicitor who works with investors daily, instead of occasionally. Never already seen the exact contract issue you're about to walk into. So here's a two question test for whoever's on your team right now. Ask them what section 24 is actually doing to your numbers, and whether your next purchase should go through a company. A property specialist blancer both with ease. But if you get a pause and they promise to lick into it, that's your answer that it might be time to upgrade. I've got a question for you. How much is your time actually worth? An easy way to figure this out is to take what you earn in a year and divide it by 2000 to 80. That's how many Rs, a 40-hour work week, adds up to it in a year.

2:03If you were on 50,000 pounds, your Rs therefore worth about 24 pounds. Not be honest. How many 12-pound in our jobs are you still doing personally? Viewings, the rent chasing, the inbox, the Saturday drive across town because the tap is dripping? Every one of those Rs, you're effectively paying to do a job someone else would do better. And it's not just the loss. It's a missed deal. Every R you spend answering a tenant's email is an R you didn't spend on the phone with an agent or doing a task that actually move the needle forwards. This is where a good letting agent can take the day to day management. A VA of virtual assistants can take your inbox, the bookings and the compliance chasing. These are small prices to pay for the time you take back for yourself. Here's a quick test for you. Where's your gas safety certificate renewal date for each property right now? If the answer is a spreadsheet, a kitchen calendar or a worse, your memory, your portfolio is just one forgotten day to way from a cash penalty. And unfortunately, you've become a bottleneck in your own business.

3:04This upgrade is boring, but boy is an impactful. Proper property management software platforms like Arthur and Asana exist so that rent tracking, compliance dates, tenant messages, maintenance requests and documents all live in one system that chases things automatically. This also removes having to manually track gas certificates, electrical tracks, EPC XperiDits and Deposit Protection deadlines and the fines that come with missing them. And it can even alert you to your rears because software flags and missed rent payment on the day it missed. While it's not uncommon for a busy landlord to notice two months later. And up once, it works every day without you. So what you're really buying isn't just software. It's the difference between checking your phone on holiday because something might be wrong and checking it because you feel like it. Now, in property, it's common for most people to start out small. I started by doing rent or rent, managing other people's properties for a margin, because I didn't have the capital to buy.

4:06The margin I earned became monthly cash flow, which then became deposits for the buy to let's. And each stage funded my next one. And I upgraded the strategy every time the last one I done its job. And that's the point investors miss. Your strategy is supposed to change as you grow. The strategy that got you here is really the one that gets you to the next milestone. So if you already own single let's, the upgrade is not automatically more of them. It's asking harder questions of the assets that you already have. Could this property work as a high quality HMO rent docked by the room? So high springs are 950 pounds a month as a single let. Rent five good rooms at 450 quid each, and the same building brings in 2,250 pounds from the exact same property. There's more learning required to carry out these strategies properly, but the scale of the difference is massive. Being educated and executing these strategies alone puts you ahead of 90% of landlords, because most never take the time to learn this side at all.

5:10Now we've talked before in this channel about owning property in a limited company instead of your personal name. If you've not taken that action yet, that step comes first. But this is the upgrade that comes after it. Once that initial limited company structure is set up, usually investors will have one company holding everything. It deals cash reserves on trading income. However, this can be extremely risky if something goes wrong. It means one lawsuit, one bad tenant claim, or one problem anywhere within it can put everything else at risk. The answer to this is a holding company. That can act as a parent company covering the rest, with separate companies underneath it for their own remits. Profits can move up from them with subsidiary to the parent without a tax charge on the way, which means cash earned in one part of the business can safely fund another with the risks staying fence and the company it happens in. But there is a caveat. Chasing company structure like this depends entirely on your circumstances and on your exoplan. And the exact structure that works brilliantly for one investor could be terrible for you.

6:12Doing this isn't as easy as copying and pasting someone else's formula. It's a decision to make when you're sitting down with your specialist tax advisor. One more floating in the pension ether. There's a pot of money with your name on it. Currently sitting with a fund manager that you've never met invested in funds that you didn't choose and untouchable tell your approaching 70. The instant upgrade to this is called a SaaS, a small self-administered scheme. It's a pension where you're in control. And for a property business it does three big things. First, your limited company can pay profits into your pension pot. And those contributions reduce your corporation tax bill. Second, the money inside it grows free of income tax and capital gains tax. And family members who work in the business can be members of the CM scheme too. Creating one large pot instead of several small ones. And lastly, the most extraordinary part. As SaaS allows you to lend up to half of its value back to your own company on proper commercial

7:15terms. Meaning that money can fund deposits and commercial purchases to help you scale your portfolio. And for some of you, half your total pension amount could be a very big sum of cash. As SaaS can even buy commercial property outright and hold it inside the pension. There are business owners whose pension literally owns the building their company trades from. Collecting the rent tax-free. However, set up wrong and the SaaS is a compliance nightmare. This is exactly the upgrade your specialist team exists for. If you want a more in-depth look, we made an entire video on SaaS pensions with the pension expert Kevin Wheelon on this channel, which are linked in the description. When you do eventually start doing well in property, it's natural that things can start to shift with the people around you. And it's not that anything's wrong. It's that the conversations don't always grow the same as you do. You could be excited about your refinance on your fourth property. Meanwhile your mates are talking about something completely different.

8:16And it's not their fault. And it's not personal. You're just starting to want grows certain circles. And the conversations in them no longer quite match where you're trying to get in life. People don't really talk about how lonely this stage can be. But the danger isn't the isolation. It's that if you become the most successful investor in every room you sit in, your growth now has a ceiling. The answer to this problem lies in the room. And by the room, I mean the people that are in it. We've all heard the line. You become the people you spend the most time with. And we've heard it because it's true. Spend your evenings with people who complain about the economy. And you'll learn to complain about it beautifully. But spend your time with multi-millionaire investors. And you start to think, negotiate and behave like them. So putting yourself deliberately and regularly in rooms full of people who are further ahead. Investors doing bigger deals and solving problems that you haven't met yet is what keeps you growing. The first time you spend an evening with someone who owns 40 units. And talks about it like it's normal.

9:18Something shifts in your mind. And that's your sense of what's possible. And those rooms exist all over the country. Property networking events, mastermind groups, investor meetups. Those rooms are a change in my life more than anything else on this list. But I know most of you will need to live through it to fully understand this point. Mistakes are just how we learn. But if you'd rather learn from the mistakes of others instead of making them yourself, we host a free virtual property event where you'll hear exactly where the experts got wrong. So you don't have to. It kills you in the description. Stay educated, stay sharp. Happy property everyone.