Happy New Year, everyone. Welcome to your 2026. We're going to make it your best ever year in property.

And to start with, we're resharing a four-part series that we first heard a couple of years ago, which we've designed to set you up for maximum success.

Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us. If you're new here, this is your first

episode. You've picked a great place to start. We've been presenting this podcast for over 10

years. And behind the podcast, we run a business called Property Hub Invest. That's certainly not for

everyone. We're not going to push it on you, but it helps a select group of people build their property portfolios. So we spend all day, every day for a very long time immersed in property. And over that time, we've seen a lot of people trying to get started. Some of them extremely successfully. Some of them, not quite so much so. So in this series, we're putting together the steps that we believe you should follow if you're new to property, or even if you've been in it for a while, you've made a start, but you want to go further. This can be a reset for you. So we're going to start in this first part with looking at where you are now. It kind of makes sense, right? If you're going on a journey, you need to know where you're starting from.

You do, and it's not as straightforward as it seems,

because you probably think, well, of course I know where I'm starting from.

Well, let's see if you do.

The first thing you have to explore is your situation.

Take the time to have a think about this and go through this process. So what is your situation. Take the time to have a think about this and go through this process.

So what is your situation? And it starts with the financial. So the basic things are, how much

do you have savings? So how much have you got? What's the initial pot that you're working with?

How much debt do you currently have? Because if you have bad debt,

and there is a difference between good debt and bad debt, we'll come onto it, then you need to get

rid of that bad debt. In most circumstances, the best financial decision you can make is to pay down

your debt because debt is normally expensive. Now that does not include your mortgage. A mortgage, particularly on

Baitalettes, is classed as a good death. And that needs to be assessed as well, which is the next

thing you need to look at is what assets do you have? So do you have any properties already? You should

know the answer to that. When you look at that, look at the equity in those properties and this can be included for your own home as well

So look at the properties you own and look at the equity available now how much equity do you have? Well normally on a bi-to-let

You can get a mortgage of up to 75% you can go beyond that but the rates get expensive

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