30 Properties Before 30. Eddie Dilleen
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 the US with just $300.
The family home was sold for $80 000. That house is now worth more than $500 000. If they hadn't sold it, our lives could have turned out very differently.
In Austin, Mum got a job as a secretary for an airline. We lived in an ugly two-bedroom unit in another very rough area. My sister had one bedroom and Mum and I shared the other, but we only had one bed in there so Mum would sleep on a pull-out couch. When I would ask for a toy, I was told no, we had to put food on the table.
We didn't have a car at first, so for about six months we had to walk miles to the store and back carrying all our groceries. People would yell out at us through their car windows. When I look back now, it's amusing, but at the time it caused a lot of pain for me. To help Mum, I'd take out the neighbours' rubbish for a dollar or two. I thought that was great!
When I was 12 we returned to Sydney. After the September 11 terror attacks, Mum feared for our safety, especially as she still worked for an airline. We landed in Sydney, and once again Mum had only a few hundred dollars and no job, house or assets. A local church allowed us to stay in a church-owned house until she pulled together enough money to rent our own place. But for a single mum in her mid-fifties, finding work was tough and she had to support us on a modest pension. After a long wait, we were finally approved for a housing commission house in Willmot, another suburb of Mount Druitt.
I still remember seeing the house for the first time. I wasn't expecting a palace, but this place was truly awful. There was a scrawl of graffiti on the back wall, the carpets were old and worn, and a distinct smell of mould permeated the place. Everything was in a sorry state of disrepair. The thought of calling this home filled me with despair. I remember begging Mum not to make us live there, but with private rentals in the area averaging more than $250 a week we had no choice. Mum's pension was only $180 a week. At $65 a week, this subsidised place was all we could afford.
Willmot was rough. There were ‘domestic disturbances’ every other night. Police cars regularly patrolled the streets and helicopters buzzed overhead. When I was 14, four houses near us were fire-bombed within about six months. It was scary. In our neighbourhood of mostly commission houses, people would move in and out, or the houses would stand vacant. Most tenants were unemployed and dirt poor. Many used drugs and some would go out, get petrol and just burn the places down. One family on our street had seven kids, none of whom went to school. They just roamed the street terrorising people.
I remember one evening very clearly. Mum and I hadn't realised the house across the street from us had been standing empty. We got home, had dinner and watched TV — normal stuff. At about 7.30 we started seeing light reflecting on the TV, and soon after there was a really strong smell of smoke. We didn't know what was happening, but in the back of my mind I thought, someone's torched a house or blown up a car. (When people in our suburb put out hard rubbish, someone would usually come along and set it alight). Six fire trucks came, the police were called and the entire street was lit up.
The next morning, in the light of day, people were still milling around and carrying on. The house was basically reduced to a pile of charcoal. The police had taped it off. Smoke still hung in the air. I think it stayed like that for about six months until the land was sold to a private investor, who built a rental property on it.
Our house was broken into a few times. When we first moved in, there was no front fence, so people would walk up and just take the furniture off the front porch. Then one night while we were sleeping they broke in and took stuff from the lounge. We only discovered the theft the next morning when we found the window open and stuff missing. Mum's jewellery probably wasn't worth much, but they took it anyway. Of course we had no insurance to replace anything. Thankfully they didn't take any substantial furniture, and we had one of those big old TVs that were hard to carry so they left that too.
Being constantly short of money caused a lot of stress for Mum, who was trying her best to provide for her family. We relied on government assistance and food stamps to ensure we could eat. I might have been a rebel in school, but if someone threw 20 cents on the ground, I picked it up.
It wasn't fun living with the constant stress of break-ins, fires and violent people on the streets, but we just had to deal with it — it was how we lived. I watched as kids from school or the neighbourhood would be drawn into the same cycle of poverty as their parents before them, falling into the traps of drug abuse, drinking, crime and welfare dependency.
Growing up fast
My response to this experience was a bit different from most kids'. Growing up in poverty definitely made me more financially aware than most. You need money to survive. You can't buy food without it. I didn't want to end up on the dole and just continue living hand to mouth like everyone around me. I didn't want to be stuck in this shitty cycle forever. For me, how we were living was all wrong. And the thought that one day my own kids might be stuck in the same rut was even worse. So how could I fix the situation?
I started asking questions about money and property at age seven. We'd go to church, then visit one of Mum's friends in Baulkham Hills, Castle Hill, a nice area in the hill district of western Sydney. I remember they had a big flat-screen TV when they had just come out. I was blown away. They had all kinds of nice stuff in a really nice house, and the drive home from their house to ours left a deep impression on me. We'd drive from an area of big, beautiful, family-friendly homes with manicured lawns towards shabbier and shabbier houses and front yards, until we'd pass a house someone had set on fire. I remember that so clearly. And the neighbourhoods had completely different atmospheres. I knew where I wanted to be.
Visiting these people, I became obsessed with the idea of a different life. I told myself that one day I'd own one of those nice houses. I was determined that when I grew up I would make enough money so I'd never have to worry about it again.
When I was a teenager and started getting more interested in property, I realised that people who create wealth and live in nice areas usually own their home, and some owned investment properties too. At the very least they had steady jobs. No one in our family owned any property. They'd worked for 30, 40, 50 years, and still hadn't been able to lift themselves out of the same rough neighbourhood. I knew I couldn't do that. I had to do something different.
I should note that I felt more mature than other kids my age. At 12 years old I didn't feel like a child. By around age 13 or 14, I recognised that some of the financial decisions made by my parents weren't good decisions, and I knew I wanted to do something different. I felt like I was growing up really fast because I had to parent myself to some degree. I was probably a difficult teen. I don't know if I was rebellious exactly, but I thought I knew better than my mum did.
I certainly got into a lot of trouble in high school. I went to a very rough school that was infamous in western Sydney and beyond, not least for a TV documentary, Plumpton High Babies, that was filmed there. We had day care so girls as young as 14 or 15 could bring their babies to school. The school was the best my mum could manage, but I knew I wanted a very different future for myself and for my own kids one day. Because my family and close friends never went to university, that wasn't on my radar. I thought university or college happened only in America.
As a teenager, I would go visit my father a few times a year. He lived in the Adelaide suburb of Glenelg. When I stayed with him, he would spend a lot of time reading the paper and checking on the stocks he owned. It gave me an interest in stocks, and I did try them at one point (which I cover later). When I was 18, Dad was already 63 years old and had contracted cancer. He passed away at 71 years old, when I was 26. It was heartbreaking losing him so young. He died with no financial assets to his name, no properties, no stocks of significant value — they'd all been used up paying for his retirement and medical bills. For me, this reinforced the fact