Lloyd Edge, Set for Life

Hi Lloyd! What's your elevator pitch?

I write about how ordinary people build wealth. My new book, Set for Life, is the fourth I've written and the first that isn't really about property at all.

The argument in it is this: most people are not bad with money, they're up against something built to beat them. Spending has been engineered down to a single thumb tap and pays you back in about four seconds. Saving pays you back in four years, if you're lucky, and gives you nothing in the meantime. Put those two habits in a room together and the outcome was never in doubt. I call it dopamine spending, and it's why people on perfectly good salaries keep arriving at the end of the month with nothing.

My first three books, Positively Geared, its second edition, and Buy Now, were Australian property books for Australian readers. Set for Life is a different project. It's about how you build financial security from an ordinary income and then pass it on, and none of that is specific to a market or a country. The mechanics of a deposit change from place to place. The reason people never get one doesn't.

Alongside the writing I run Aus Property Professionals, an independent property advisory business across four Australian cities, which is the same idea delivered as a service.

What does the market need it?

Two gaps, and the book exists because of both.

The first is that nobody is ever taught this. Not at school, not at university, not at work. There's no point in a normal life where somebody sits you down and explains how compounding actually works, what a deposit really requires, or why your income alone won't get you there. The information isn't hidden behind a paywall or a qualification. It just isn't taught, so people arrive at 35 feeling stupid about something nobody ever showed them.

The second is that most financial writing is either conflicted or abstract. It's written by someone with a product to sell, or it's motivational rather than practical. And nearly all of it quietly assumes you already have money. Almost every book on wealth I've read presumes a deposit exists. Mine starts before that, because that's where I started.

This is also where my earlier books stop being the right comparison. Those were about the Australian market, its tax treatment, its cycles, its rules. Set for Life is about behaviour, and behaviour travels. The UK household saving ratio fell to 8.9 per cent in the first quarter of this year and the standard explanation is bills and the cost of going out, which lets everyone off the hook far too easily. Britain and Australia have very different property markets and exactly the same problem, because the problem isn't the market. It's that spending got redesigned into a reward loop and saving never did.

Where is the business today?

Set for Life came out with Wiley this year and it's available in the UK now.

It's my fourth book and the one that changes direction. The first three were property books written for Australians, and they did their job. This one moves out of property into financial security more broadly: how you save when saving feels like nothing, how you build income, and how you pass it down instead of watching it leak out one tap at a time. Property is still in there, but as the tool rather than the subject. That's deliberate. The audience I care about now is anyone on an ordinary wage who's been told wealth isn't for them, and that isn't just an Australian audience.

The business behind it is thirteen years old. Aus Property Professionals has gone from me and a laptop in Sydney to local teams in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, and we're now at 35+ people, doubling our revenue again this year on the back of 110 per cent growth the year before. We've built strategy software that lets clients model their own plan, and the property management arm we're launching will add another fifteen roles and take us to fifty staff this year. But the honest hierarchy is that the business funds the mission rather than the other way around.

What made you think there was an opportunity here?

I was 28, teaching high school music, and the numbers on my own life didn't work. I couldn't comfortably cover the mortgage on a one bedroom flat, and it was obvious that saving harder was never going to fix it. So I started buying property, and because I had no money I had to create equity rather than wait for it, which meant renovating, subdividing and eventually developing. I started with a $30,000 deposit. I left teaching at 40 with eighteen properties worth more than $35 million.

The books came out of what I noticed on the way through. None of it was clever. It was a sequence of unglamorous decisions repeated for a decade. And everyone I explained it to said some version of, why has nobody ever told me this. That question is the reason I write.

The first three answered it for Australians who wanted to buy property. Set for Life exists because I kept meeting people the property books couldn't help. People who weren't ready to buy anything, who needed the step before that, and people who had built something and had no idea how to make it survive them. That's a much larger group and it isn't confined to one country.

I didn't research the niche so much as live in it. More than a decade of making the mistakes personally and paying for them personally is slow, expensive research, but it means that by the time I wrote any of it down I knew what holds up in a falling market rather than only what works in a rising one.

As for what's wrong with the competition, most personal finance writing either cheerleads or gatekeeps. It tells you to believe in yourself, or it tells you the game is rigged and stops there. I wanted something that admitted the game is rigged and then explained how to play it anyway.

What's your biggest strength?

That I did it on a teacher's wage, and that I can teach.

The first half matters because credibility here is almost entirely about whether you started where your reader is standing. I wasn't a banker or a fund manager. I was on a public sector salary with a small deposit and no safety net. When someone tells me it isn't possible on their income, I'm not quoting theory at them.

The second half is the part people underestimate. I spent years in a classroom, and teaching is a different skill to knowing. Plenty of people understand property. Very few can explain it to someone who's frightened of it. Every book I've written is really a lesson plan, and the reason Set for Life spends time on behaviour, on why we spend and why saving feels like nothing, is that you can't teach someone a method until you've explained why their last five attempts failed.

Underneath it, there's the research work at the business, where we assess opportunities across all 15,300 plus suburbs in Australia against infrastructure spending, population growth, jobs growth and vacancy rates. It means what I write isn't only my own experience, it's tested against a national dataset every week. The industry seems to think it holds up. I was named REINSW Buyers' Agent of the Year in 2024.

What is the secret to making the business work?

The main challenge, and the one worth passing on, is that I had to make myself less necessary.

For years I personally inspected and negotiated on every property, and I was the only person who could explain the strategy properly. That's flattering and it's also a ceiling, because nothing grows past the founder's calendar. So I wrote down what was in my head. First as internal playbooks, so every adviser in the business thinks the way I do. Then as software, so clients can model their own scenarios without me in the room. Then as books.

The books are the furthest extension of the same instinct, and Set for Life is the furthest of the four, because it gives the whole method to people who will never be clients and who mostly don't live in the country we operate in. On paper that's commercially mad. In practice it's the best thing we've ever done. The people who read it and decide they'd rather not do it alone arrive already trusting us, and the ones who do it themselves tell other people.

If I could give a founder one piece of advice it's that: write down what's in your head years before you think you need to, then give it away. Removing the dependency is what turns customers into advocates.

How do you market the company?

We teach, and we've done it consistently for over a decade. Four books, a podcast, and a steady presence in property and finance media. The method is public. The business is what you buy if you'd rather not do it alone.

Two warnings for anyone considering the same approach. It only works if you're prepared to be properly useful, because thin content that's really an advert wearing a hat does more harm than doing nothing. And it compounds slowly. There's no month where it suddenly works. Thirteen years in, most of our clients arrive already trusting us and our client repeat rate sits at 87 per cent, but none of that happened in year one.

The books are the clearest example. A book is a terrible advertisement and an excellent introduction. Nobody finishes one and feels sold to.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

Self funded from the beginning. No outside investment, and no debt. I started it from scratch and have never taken any on.

It's been enough, mostly because this isn't a capital hungry business. The costs are people, not stock. The one place I've had to be patient is technology, where building proper software costs real money up front and pays back slowly, and we've funded that from operating profit rather than raising. That's meant building more slowly than I'd have liked, but nobody outside the business has a say in what we tell clients. For a business whose whole proposition is independence, that trade has been worth it.

Books are the same, incidentally. Nobody writes four of them for the royalties. You write them because they're the only marketing asset that still exists in ten years.

Tell us about the business model

The business is fee for service. Clients pay a flat fee agreed up front and we take no commission or referral fee from any developer, seller or agent, so if a property is wrong for someone we have no financial reason to pretend otherwise.

There are three arms to it. Investment is the largest, working with everyone from first-time investors to seasoned portfolio holders. There's a development arm, where we manage duplex and townhouse projects. And there's primary residence, for clients buying a dream home, upsizing, downsizing, or after a holiday home or a short-term stay property. Across the three, we settled 518 properties for clients in the past twelve months: 464 investment properties, 25 primary residences and 29 development projects.

Overheads are almost entirely people. Our advisers and buyers' agents, research analysts, client service team and a leadership team across four states. No inventory and no property on our balance sheet, so the model lives on utilisation and repeat business, and with a client repeat rate of 87 per cent, that's what has helped us grow so well.

Property management is the next arm and it's a straightforward one. We already give clients a fully integrated service from purchase through to management, we just do it by referring them to trusted partners. Bringing it in-house means a better and more streamlined service for them, revenue we've historically handed to somebody else, fifteen new jobs, and a business worth more than it was.

Publishing sits outside all of that and is best understood as the top of the funnel rather than a revenue line. The books don't make the money. The trust does.

What were you doing before?

Teaching high school music, right up until I was 40. I was good at it and I enjoyed it, which surprises people. I didn't leave because I disliked teaching. I left because the portfolio had made it optional, and because I'd worked out I could teach something people needed rather more urgently than they needed music theory.

The teaching never really stopped, it just changed subject. Every book I've written, the education-first way the business works, my leadership style, all of it comes out of a classroom. I still think the job is finished when someone understands it themselves, not when they've handed it over to me.

What is the future vision?

Set for Life is the start of the bigger project rather than the end of it, and the reason I moved away from writing property books for this one is that the bigger project was never going to fit inside one.

What I want is for financial education to stop being something you either stumble across or pay for. I started running financial literacy sessions in schools long before I had children of my own, out of a simple belief that practical money education has no place in most curriculums, and it has since grown to include my own kids' school. The book was written to take the same material to people who will never be clients. Where I'd like it to end up is a proper program with free resources for teachers, so a sixteen year old learns how a deposit works around the same time they learn anything else useful. That ambition isn't Australian either. The generation coming through now will inherit less than any before them, and that's as true in Britain as it is at home.

There's a commercial future alongside it. We're finishing a client app and rolling property management out from Sydney across Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide. We're also looking outside Australia, and Britain is a genuine part of that. I've been considering buying investment property in the UK for a number of years now, and expanding the business over there is very much on the cards as well. Dubai is the market we're furthest along with, where there's a clear gap for a fee based advisory model, and the UK is next in line. None of that is idle wondering, it's something I've been actively exploring, and the reasoning is simple enough: the problem I write about isn't an Australian problem, so there's no particular reason the business should stay an Australian business.

If I zoom right out, what I actually want is for wealth to stop being something that only happens to people who already had some. Property was how I got there. The book is how other people do, wherever they happen to live.

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