When Amanda walked on stage and handed me a black stone I had given her a couple of years ago at the Platinum International Conference in Thailand, I knew there was a story behind it.

“It was for finding my voice,” she said. “Back then, I’d lost it. I’d lost myself.”

Today, that same woman stands in front of a room full of investors, telling her story with humour, clarity and a level of courage that gives you goosebumps.

And it hasn’t exactly been a gentle stroll.

In 2011, Amanda was at the peak of a very shiny corporate career. She’d just won Marketing Program of the Year from the Australian Marketing Institute, working with big multinationals, doing the big campaigns, wearing the big heels. It looked like the start of a textbook “successful” life.

Then redundancy.

Then cancer.

Then another redundancy.

Then more health complications, surgeries, medical menopause (twice), lymphedema, heart monitors and a body that just kept throwing up roadblocks.

All while she and her husband were charging ahead as investors – fifteen properties in twelve years, good incomes, big plans – and then, right when they thought they’d finally dug themselves out of a very deep hole, the ground shifted again.

When “We’ve Made It” Vanishes Overnight

For five brutal years, Amanda and her husband did what most people would consider impossible.

After breast cancer, chemo, income halving and a string of medical curveballs, they could have sold everything and limped into a modest, stressed retirement. Instead, they went hard. They restructured, they sold down, they paid off debt.

They worked the numbers and the properties until, finally, they got to a point where they had four properties, owned outright, and a brand-new townhouse they’d just sold for a million dollars cash.

The plan was elegant.

Put the million into a self-managed super fund.

Because he was 65, tip it into his member account so he could access it.

Combine that with the rent from the debt-free properties and live on around $95,000 a year of passive income.

They had done it. After everything, they’d built what looked like a rock-solid retirement.
And then he left.

The money was in his member name, inside a structure she couldn’t control. When the relationship unravelled, so did her access to the funds.

At the same time, she discovered the ownership of the properties wasn’t what she thought either – she effectively owned one and a half of the houses, not the equal share she’d assumed.
The message she gives everyone now is simple and sharp: be in control of your money.

What followed was a divorce conducted during COVID, with Amanda stuck in a half-renovated marital home in Melbourne, mice coming up through the floorboards, court documents on the bench and a heart monitor strapped to her chest. He moved to Queensland; she moved into survival mode.

There was no income. No job on the horizon. No “nice, clean” settlement that magically made everything easy. There was just Amanda, some property skills, a body that had been through the wars, and a woman in the photos who looked, in her words, “dead behind the eyes.”

The Granny Flat and Uncle Jeff: Healing in a Tiny Backyard

When life falls apart, you rarely get to reinvent yourself on a blank slate.

Amanda did what she knew.

Out the back of that cold, half-renovated Melbourne house was a granny flat. She renovated it, listed it, and found her first post-divorce tenant: an older bloke the community introduced to her on Facebook, who couldn’t read or write. His name is Jeff, but she calls him “Uncle Jeff” now.

They looked after each other through lockdowns. He helped her with little jobs around the place; she gave him a safe, stable home. It wasn’t glamorous, and it certainly wasn’t a financial miracle, but it was an incremental stretch step. That’s the phrase she uses – little stretches, not giant leaps.

At the same time, she sold a unit in Queensland and bought an inner-city unit in Melbourne’s Exhibition Street as an Airbnb. The shift nudged her income up by about $150 a week – not life-changing, but one more step away from the edge.

And then she did something that, on paper, made no sense and yet was exactly what she needed.
She moved into her dream apartment in East Melbourne.

It was too expensive. The rent at the time was around $50,000 a year, now closer to $60,000. But she took $50,000 from her court settlement and decided, “I’m going to spend this on myself. I need a beautiful, healing place to live so my body and mind can find equilibrium again.” It was meant to be a one-year experiment. It’s been three.

That apartment became the physical representation of a new story: “I am worth living somewhere I love.”
Even while the finances were tight, she was starting to rebuild something much more important than a balance sheet: her sense of self.

Stepping into ILRE: From “Loser” to Full-Time Property Person

By early 2024, Amanda had picked herself up enough to start looking for what was next. A close friend who’d done ILRE twelve years earlier – and whose daughter is now in the community too – was the nudge she needed. She knew property was a team sport. She knew she needed a tribe. So she came to Bootcamp in Brisbane in March.

At that point, her “original position” looked, on the slides, like this:

A principal place of residence she Airbnb’d and rented.

One remaining unit in Mermaid Waters.

The Exhibition Street Airbnb in Melbourne.

A bit of cash in a managed fund.

Altogether, about $2.7 million in assets, with cash flow that looked okay on paper… until you factored in the $50–60k a year she was paying in rent. Growth was running at about 3.4 per cent per year. It wasn’t enough to retire on, and she was already effectively retired whether she liked it or not.

No-one was queuing up to hire a middle-aged woman with patchy employment, major health history and a CV that screamed “overqualified and inconvenient.” Property had to become her work.

The hardest part wasn’t learning about deals. It was letting go of who she used to be.

She’d been the award-winning marketer. The corporate woman with the title, the team, the status. When that went, she felt like a nobody. Standing in Thailand later that year, when I asked what success meant to her, she realised she’d been judging herself purely on what she’d lost.

She’d forgotten the wins. Forgotten that she’d already achieved things most people never do.

That’s when she quietly decided to own her story again.

With Narelle as her Platinum coach, we pulled everything apart. We worked on mindset, not just money. We got very clear that she wasn’t “unemployed and washed up”; she was a full-time property person. And that meant she needed a Blueprint, not a pity party.

Project One – The Ballarat Regional Reno Flip

When we first did the Blueprint, Amanda had one big idea: “I should do commercial. My problem is cash flow. Commercial is cash flow. Therefore, commercial!”

Narelle looked at her numbers and said, “Regional reno flip.”

Amanda cried. She’d done ten years of renovation; the idea of picking up a paint roller again was traumatising. But we weren’t sending her back to flog herself. We were sending her into a controlled, well-structured chunk deal to rebuild both cash and confidence.
Step one was structure.

We set up a consultancy trust, a flipper structure and a gift-and-loan-back trust to give her asset protection, repeatability and access to loans. At the same time, an off-market offer landed on her PPR from a developer.

This was the house she’d bought at auction herself, the one she’d mentally earmarked as “the home I’ll experience my financial freedom in” and the site she’d planned to develop. Emotionally, she was welded to it.

“Why wouldn’t you sell it?” Narelle asked.

That question cracked it open.

The site sat in the middle of large-scale development by bigger players. She could go toe-to-toe with them as a single block and hope, or she could sell to them and let them pay a premium to increase their footprint. She chose the latter, bargained hard, and secured $1.2 million with an eighteen-month settlement and early release of a 12.5 per cent deposit.

That deposit funded her asset protection restructure and unlocked a $600,000 loan that brought her to tears. “Maybe I actually am a property investor now,” she said.

With the structures in place and access to funds, she went shopping.

She chose Ballarat deliberately: affordable price point, a decent-sized regional city with economic diversity, and close enough to Melbourne that a two-hour drive wouldn’t kill her. She bought a tired two-bedroom, one-bathroom house and turned it into a three-bedroom, two-bathroom stunner.

Main bathroom fully renovated. Ensuite added to the front bedroom. The old dining room became bedroom three. The kitchen was completely redone with French doors opening onto a timber deck so you could finally see, and use, the big backyard.

She went in with two clear aims: create her “reno dream team” of local trades and make money without going broke making money. Every time she wanted to overdo it, she remembered Narelle’s “Don’t do too much.”

She bought it for $590,000, spent more than she originally planned on the reno but still within a workable budget, and the revalue came in at around $870,000. The property is on the market now, with a projected profit of about $242,000 before tax.

The exact sale price will be whatever the market decides, but the important part is this: she executed a textbook flip through her flipper company, with income flowing into her consultancy trust so she could start counting that money as business income, not just a capital gain.

From “too traumatised to paint” to “I’ll be speaking on renos next weekend.” That’s what I call a transformation.

Project Two – The Preston Rooming House and Amanda’s “Why”

The next big move was what I call “Amanda’s heart project with a spreadsheet attached.”

When the PPR finally settled and that 1.2 million landed, she bought a solid brick four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Preston for $1.1 million. Inside it was all exposed brick and dated decor, but the location was gold – less than a kilometre from High Street, bus stop at the door, middle-ring Melbourne with all the infrastructure you’d want.

On paper, it’s a classic rooming-house opportunity: seven or eight bedrooms, potentially with a self-contained studio in the rumpus room or a two-bedroom unit upstairs by rearranging walls and adding a kitchenette. The rent you can achieve for that setup sits around what investors chase for a seven-bedder plus studio, somewhere in the vicinity that would justify a $1.6 million valuation at a seven per cent yield.

In reality, the interest bill right now is high and the operating costs are chunky, so the cash flow is pretty skinny. But Amanda isn’t just chasing yield. She’s chasing purpose.

She wants to provide accessible, affordable housing.

There is a spot where she can put in a wheelchair ramp. There are layouts that allow lower rents for people who need a break without destroying the numbers. She’s also running the scenarios on a hybrid model: create three separate, flexible spaces and run some or all of them as short-stay accommodation.

On current numbers, a three-way Airbnb setup could generate around $127,000 a year with lower running costs than a fully-managed rooming house, and she already knows how to do Airbnb well.

This is where strategy and heart intersect: she’s not just building an income stream. She’s building the prototype for the kind of housing she wants more of in the world.

Project Three – The Mermaid Waters Airbnb Upgrade

One of the quieter but powerful levers in Amanda’s portfolio is her remaining Mermaid Waters apartment.

She originally swapped a Queensland unit for the Exhibition Street Airbnb in Melbourne, which lifted her income modestly. The Mermaid Waters property she still holds is currently pulling in around $880 a week as a short-term rental. At one point she was getting about $650 a week from her old Queensland apartment; the shift to Airbnb brought that up to roughly $800 and then beyond. Helpful, but not yet life-changing.

The next move is where it gets interesting.

In the same building, another owner has converted a two-bedroom layout into a three-bedroom by moving the kitchen into the dining space and turning the old kitchen into a bedroom. Because there are so few three-bedders in that complex, those rare layouts are valued around $750,000.

By copying that design, Amanda can convert a vanilla two-bedder into a much more valuable three-bedroom property, instantly lifting both equity and rental potential. It’s not a “someday maybe”; it’s a live option on her board. Yet another lever she can pull when timing and cash flow align.

Project Four – Five Settlements, a Dream Apartment and a Cabin for Geoff

If you ever doubt what’s possible once you’re back in the driver’s seat, consider this: Amanda accidentally did five settlements in one month.

One of those was the most emotional: she bought the East Melbourne apartment she’d initially rented as her “healing space”. After years of paying high rent, she used the proceeds from selling her final marital asset in Queensland to buy the one apartment in that building that had exactly what she needed – a one-bedroom, a car park and a storage cage – at the price she could afford. She swapped from renting to owning without losing her sanctuary.

Another was for a man who had quietly become family.

Uncle Jeff, the original granny-flat tenant, inherited around $100,000. With Amanda’s help and negotiation skills honed in ILRE roleplays, he bought a cabin in a retirement village. For the first time in his life, at sixty-seven, he owned his home. She negotiated that purchase for him like she would for herself, and you can see the pride radiating off him on his front porch.

There were also other key deals that month: a property in Bellfield, the Preston house, movements in Mermaid Waters, and the Ballarat project going to market. The important point isn’t the list; it’s the capacity.

Not that long ago, she was packing veg for money, alone in a half-renovated house, thinking she had no future. Now she’s settling multiple properties across states, orchestrating complex restructures through company and trust entities, and helping someone else become a homeowner for the first time. That’s what she means when she says, “It’s not about the numbers. I’ve had a major uplift in my capacity.”

The Scoreboard – And the Real Win

If you look just at the before-and-after numbers, you might miss the magic.

Before ILRE, Amanda’s position sat around $2.7 million in assets, with about $100,000 equity actually accessible and cash flow that evaporated once you subtract expensive rent.

Now, after the Blueprint, the Ballarat flip, the Preston rooming house, the Airbnb upgrades and the restructures, her current portfolio sits at about $3.9 million. There’s roughly $1.4 million in loans and about $2.5 million in equity.

Cash flow sits around $124,000 a year, not counting income from her consultancy Amamus. On paper, equity hasn’t “dodoubled”; it’s grown steadily. But the structure, the borrowing capacity and the deal flow have completely changed. She’s gone from a cul-de-sac to a freeway.

As soon as Ballarat sells and the profit goes into offset against her loans, that alone will add an estimated $55,000 a year to her income. And that’s before she fully optimises Preston, upgrades Mermaid Waters, or rolls into her next deal.

The numbers are good. But they’re not the headline.

The headline is that she has choices now. Options. A future.

More Important Than Property – And Why Property Still Matters

If you step into Amanda’s office now, you can literally see the transformation.

The “before” pictures show a desk buried in paper, chaos, old identity clinging on. The “after” shots show a clean space with a mind map, a vision board, a flow chart of her structures and deals. It’s not just tidy; it’s intentional. This is the office of a woman who sees herself as an enterprise, not a victim.

She does her fifteen minutes every morning – time just for her, to think, feel, plan and reinforce that she is the one steering the boat. For someone who spent years feeling undervalued and controlled, those fifteen minutes have become a daily act of self-respect.

Her vision board has already manifested twice: the Ballarat house she renovated looks strikingly like the “dream reno” image she once pinned up, and the leafy apartment entrance she imagined now looks suspiciously like her real front hedge in East Melbourne, dog and friends included. She laughs about it, but there’s a seriousness underneath: “Be careful what you put on your vision board.”

Most importantly, she’s found her why.

Housing vulnerable people.

Feeling insecure in her own housing for so long, and watching Uncle Jeff navigate life without literacy or security, has lit a fire in her. Every deal now gets measured against that: does this help me create more safe, affordable, dignified homes for people who need them? If the answer is yes and the numbers work, she’s in. If not, she lets it go.

She’s changed her name, claimed her identity as an investor and an entrepreneur, built a circle of friends who turn up to her 50th birthday and pack out her apartment, and plugged herself into a community that she says has “reno-flipped my life.”

At her first Bootcamp in Brisbane, overwhelmed and exhausted, she wrote herself a line in her notebook: “They say a rising tide lifts all boats. I don’t want to be the boat. I want to be the tide.”

That’s Amanda now.

Not just a woman who survived cancer, divorce, coercive financial control and a pandemic. Not just an investor who turned a shrinking, stuck portfolio into a platform for growth.

She’s the tide lifting other boats – Uncle Jeff’s cabin, future rooming-house tenants, other women in the community who look at her and think, “If she can come back from that, so can I.”

And she’s doing it the way I wish more people would: eyes open, money structures sorted, heart engaged, and a very clear understanding that property isn’t just about bricks and profit.

It’s about power, choice and the freedom to become who you were always meant to be.

“I went from being in a cul-de-sac to now having a superhighway in front of me.”

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These stories and the results in them were captured at a specific point in time. The real estate market and the investing strategies used to succeed are constantly changing. The achievements and results of these investors may have changed since these stories were recorded. Each of these investors engaged in in-depth training, coaching and mentoring to be able to achieve these results. Their results are not typical and should not be taken as a guarantee of the results you may achieve. Your personal results will be in-line with the training, education and hard work that you personally conduct.

“There’s nothing more powerful than knowing what you want.”