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It Starts With You… 10 Principles of Investing in 2022

Helen Chorley, investor and former investment banker, comments

Happy New Year! I can say that now without the post-Christmas existential groan. It’s finally an acceptable time to say it. Can I also say I’m glad January’s almost over.

My biggest issue with the ‘month of motivation’ is not what you might think - the weather, the Christmas waistline hangover, although both are inconvenient to say the least. No, it’s something far more insidious; the incessant motivational messaging; the fighting talk which comes with this time of year. The ‘hustle’ and the ‘grind.’

It’s a language that is particularly rife in property and investment. I’m sure it seeks to empower in some way, but often just supports the idea that success comes through sheer force of will. That alone can trigger so many investors looking for that thing; that’s going to be The Big One. The game-changer. Any of us who have been in property long enough will know that that simply isn’t the road we’re really on.

I don’t have an issue with people wanting to fine-tune their strategy (we are reading PIN after all) however I think that somewhere in that energy of ‘new’ strategies, we can forget (or just subconsciously ignore) what it is that really needs to shift. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Well some of us can go insane simply setting ‘new’ goals based on our still-going-on experience, all with the illusion that something has changed, when it hasn’t.

Last year was full of face-offs between unhappy developers and investors. I could honestly count on several hands the number of phone calls I received regarding losing money in poor property investments, or with dodgy people. Obviously I took it in part to mean I’ve finally surrendered to my role as property investment Agony Aunt (oh dear!) But it also perhaps means we are seeing this issue ever more clearly, and the true the scale of it.

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