Welcome to the Mozaique Property blog.
My name is Jayne Owen and I have been involved in UK property in some shape or form for – umm, well – rather a lot of years actually. Though I often still feel like a rookie, partly because I very much took a back seat when husband David (aka The Other Half) initiated our first steps in property; and partly because you can never know everything about anything.
Thinking about it, those early ventures all those years ago – way back in the last century – were far more by accident than by design. David got serious about property in the early 2000’s while I busied myself elsewhere for a long time, only really sticking my oar in within the last couple of years. I guess it’s fair to say that we’re now both in the business full(ish)-time.
It only occurred to us recently that over these 25-30 years we’ve probably learned more than we thought we had. Particularly after we deliberately began to focus on educating ourselves more in matters relating to property and investing.
Knowledge of course is wonderful. Experience even more so. Some of our ventures have been successful, others challenging and inevitably there have been those we wish we’d never even seen.
The quest for freedom
The goal of many when they start investing in property is to become financially free. We weren’t any different. A couple of questions might occur to you at this stage.
- Are we there yet? That depends on your definition. My best answer for now is “we get by”.
- Are we ‘living the dream’, to coin an over-used phrase? That depends on your definition, too. There is no yacht, flash car or grand mansion, but there is a small van, a Smart car and a bigger-but-very-ordinary family car that takes more than two people. We live in a 3/4-bed house that needs modernising. We’ve made some tough decisions and still have to work and live to a fairly tight budget, but neither of us has a boss (well, The Other Half thinks he doesn’t
), and each work to our own schedule. It’s a baseline for freedom as far as I’m concerned.
An invitation to you
This blog is my invitation to you to join us in our continuing (ad)ventures in property as we move forward.
We’ll share with you some of our stories, funny and painful, as we go along; we’ll also talk about our property journey and some of the previous projects as well, sharing with you what we learned from them.
Because I’m interested in and fascinated by all sorts of matters psychological, there’ll probably be quite a lot on that subject as well, where it is relevant to property.
And if you have a property story to tell, good or bad – do please share! In the end, we all learn from each other.