My parents ran a French restaurant with a handful of staff, and they didn’t have pensions or benefits. They had friends who didn’t have a lot of money. Even as a young child, I started seeing the stress not having enough money brought into people’s lives. I didn’t want to be in that situation. I wanted to be able to live a comfortable life, and it seemed like money was the only solution. So I worked a lot.
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“I’ve done everything under the sun”
I’ve done everything under the sun. I worked at my family’s restaurant, but I also worked at Tim Hortons. I cleaned cars. I mowed lawns. I once got a contract cleaning cigarette butts out of a parking lot as a side-hustle. By the time I was 22, I had saved about $100,000. Most of my money was in mutual funds, as well as guaranteed investment certificates (GICs).
Once I finished school in 2013, I worked for TD Bank as an underwriter. I think I was making $50,000 a year. But I kept working on the side. Bartending brought in another $25,000 or so. That means, at the age of 22, I was making about $75,000. Even today, that’s a very good income. I worked in banking, then went into the automotive sector, then returned to the proverbial nest egg—running my family’s restaurant full-time.
That’s all I’ve ever known—seeing my parents work 60 to 70 hours a week, through weekends and evenings and holidays. Because I was working full-time and part-time, and I had limited expenses, I was able to put away $50,000 a year into my investments.
“Real estate was a big part of my portfolio”
Real estate was a big part of my portfolio. Ontario real estate has done very well, and I joined a group called Durham Real Estate Investors. Essentially, it’s just a bunch of old-timer real estate investors who meet once a month. These people were explaining strategies around renting and renovating rental properties, and adding in basement suites. Think the Scott McGillivray show, Income Suite.
So I took advantage of leverage in my existing condo because I had built up equity, and then reinvested it periodically. Most of that money went back into the stock market. In 2016, I started moving into broad-based, low-cost index funds that tracked the S&P 500. Diversification was always my strategy, and I believed holding different assets would help my portfolio.
Around 2018, when I was 25, my girlfriend and I decided to move in together. We paid $630,000 for a house in Whitby. A few years later, we bought a second house together in Whitby for $540,000, with the help of a partner. It was a single-family home that we converted into a duplex with two units, refinanced, then leased out.
By that point, I had around $500,000 in cash and in equity across my properties. Real estate prices went up, so I refinanced the condo. This was a rinse-and-repeat process. Each time I refinanced, I would either buy another property or reinvest in the stock market. I would sometimes lend money privately or participate in joint ventures, where I’d team up with other people to flip houses. I also did private lending deals for investors, where I’d get a relatively high interest rate on the money over a short period of time.
