Gold: An Investor’s Story by Julia Banda
For a good number of years I dealt in stocks and shares and a little Forex trading, and then I went into property investment. I was confident that things would go well and so I sold most of my shares, took the money I’d made on the foreign exchange markets, and started building a property portfolio.
Ten years ago, investing in property for the by to let market seemed to be the way to go for a lot of investors. It didn’t take me long before I had several properties, some at home and some abroad, I’d even brought in a property management company to deal with the everyday running of my properties. I think that when it came to dealing with the people from the property management company I was a bit naïve. I assumed that they would vet the tenants before they leased my properties, and that they would keep a regular check on the condition of those properties, I was wrong.
Not all property management companies operate in the same way and the one I had chosen was as new to property management as I was to property investment. A couple of years went by before I eventually realised we were like the blind leading the blind. I received a letter from the company telling me that they could no longer get the same amount of rent that they had been getting for the properties because they were decreasing in value. I couldn’t believe this to be the case and so I arranged to go and see the properties in the company of a surveyor.
My properties had not been managed, they had been let to whoever was willing to pay the rent and these tenants were then left to their own devices. I found broken windows and broken doors, in one property the kitchen units had been removed and the toilet smashed. It cost me a fortune to get those properties sorted out and I decided that buy to let was not for me and put the properties on the market. At the time I was trying to sell, the global financial crisis was just making news and the value of my properties plummeted almost over night. I didn’t want to let them again, so I had no choice but to sell as some of them were still mortgaged.
Like many property investors before me I went from being well off and successful, to fed up and broke. I couldn’t go back into stocks and shares because the bottom was falling out of that market as well, I didn’t know where to turn as I was now in danger of losing the house that I lived in if I couldn’t find a way of paying my debts. A friend suggested to me that the one thing that was still making money was gold; I was not sure what to do. I asked around some other investors I had known in the past and they had also changed over to gold.
After several discussions with my wife we decided that I would remortgage our house and start buying gold. It was the best decision I’d made since the property fiasco. That was almost a year ago now; I’ve paid off my debts and am now making some sensible money again. Gold is definitely the investment for now and the foreseeable future.