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My name is Angela Bryant and I would like to give you a bit of background about my own investing history. My book, The Complete Guide to Property Investing Success, is based on my experience of building a buy-to-let portfolio of over 80 properties with my husband Dave, worth over £11,500,000, from our first investment property bought in 1995. We started out with nothing and never had a high income or any other special advantages.
In 1981 we married while still students: I was studying for a degree in psychology and Dave in engineering. We were granted the tenancy of a property which we were told to sub-let to other students. It always seemed normal after that to have lodgers and we continued to do so for years, which helped us financially. Later, buying another property seemed like a natural extension of having lodgers.
After leaving university, we both worked hard and had two jobs each as well as taking lodgers. By working hard and living frugally, we eventually managed to buy our first home in 1984. Over the years to come, we never earned much but spent even less and as spare money built up, we just made capital repayments on our home mortgage. I never thought about money, just accepted we didn't have any! Besides, at that stage I was more interested in our own nest building. Ten years after buying our first home, we had totally paid off the mortgage and I was expecting our third child. Not wishing to have the upheaval of moving house at that time, we decided to get another property so we could carry on having a mortgage to pay off - and "lodgers" could live there, instead of being in our space! This was in 1995, before the birth of buy-to-let mortgages.
So we bought a one bedroom flat to let out by remortgaging our own home and then carried on paying off that mortgage, while I focused on motherhood.
I began to get seriously interested in making money, as I knew that I did not want to go back to working for someone else and that being at home for the children was a top priority for me. When the children were small, I read books about “how to get rich” whenever I got the chance, and began to realise with more and more certainty that property was the best way.
After three years, we had more or less paid off the £30,000 mortgage on our first investment flat and I now wanted to move to a bigger home, which we set about doing in 1998. I went to see a mortgage broker and he nearly fell off his chair when he heard about the flat and the two paid off mortgages. He explained that not only could we afford to move to a bigger house, but we could also remortgage the flat and buy more investment properties. Then I saw the light:
"EUREKA - LEVERAGE! Don't get rid of mortgages, take on as many and as
much as you can!"
I felt I finally understood what I’d been trying to learn. So, after we had settled into our new home, I remortgaged our first investment property and got enough money together to buy four more properties. I suppose the rest, you could say, is history - except that I made it a goal to share the secrets of all that I have learnt over a dozen years as a property investor, with others.
Dave gave up his day job in March 2003 to manage and maintain the growing number of properties. Dave is the real hero of our property business and is the most hard-working, reliable and trustworthy person you could hope to meet. He is very practical with handyman skills, which has saved us a fortune over the years both in our private lives and with our investment properties. He also deals with the tenants. In any business, it is important to go to work IN the business (as Dave does) and ON the business (which is my focus). It is essential to our business and our lives that we work together in a spirit of harmony.
Since 2005, I have sourced property below market value, analysing property deals and finding creative solutions to produce a win: win situation for both buyer and seller.
I hope you enjoy my book and that it enables you to find your own Property Investing Success! | 
