Introduction to The 3 + 1 Plan

In The 3+1 Plan I am offering you an answer to the great challenge that we all face at some moment in our lives. If you are like me, this can be summed up in three simple questions:

• How can I achieve a more secure financial life for the time when I want to work less or to start retirement?
• How can I achieve this without it taking up too much of my time?
• And how can I achieve this while having a better lifestyle along the way?

My answer is The 3+1 Plan. That is my shorthand for building a portfolio of four properties.

I believe that with 3 properties to rent and 1 to live in as your home, you can achieve your financial future, without wasting your precious time dealing with the day?to?day hassles or worrying about the market. I know that The 3+1 Plan works, because I have thousands of clients, across three countries, who have created their own 3+1 Plans, and each one works for them.

Out of the five traditional ways of planning for the future: pension plans; stock market portfolios; savings plans; investment in new businesses; and property, I have been in the investment business for over fifteen years. Around the turn of the new millennium, I came to realise that three of those five ways are no longer likely to secure the financial future that you want, while the fourth requires too much luck, extreme experience, time or talent to be reliable.

Pensions, stock market investments and savings no longer bring in serious profits, and investing in new companies is too risky. It seemed to me that only a property portfolio could achieve the successful financial future that most people rightly want. This thought led me to creating The 3+1 Plan and refining the strategies that would give you the wealth and lifestyle that you want.

Why The 3 + 1 Plan will work for you and become the basis for your new lifestyle

The 3+1 Plan is my answer for anyone who wants to plan their finances and achieve greater wealth. It is not complicated. As you will have read in the Introduction, I believe that, with three extra properties, in addition to your home, you can face the future with confidence.

The 3+1 Plan was born out of a conversation in 1999 that I had with Peter James. We were discussing what it takes to ?practically? retire ? not fully retire, necessarily, but to have the money to stop working quite as hard, take a look at your future and decide what you want to do for the next part of your life. He argued that you only needed your own home and three other buy to let properties to get into a position to fund any retirement.

At first, I thought that it seemed far too easy ? only three buy-to-lets and your own home. So I ran the mathematics on some of my own properties and found that the numbers fitted! Actually, it worked out to be more money than if I had kept working. I wrote about our conversation in my Financial Partners newsletter under the name ?The 3+1 Strategy? and over the years developed it as I met with thousands of people who wanted exactly what The 3+1 plan offered.

Most people wanted to achieve a self?funded retirement and a supplemented lifestyle without having to spend a huge amount of their life creating this extra wealth.