I Put Six Figures Into Stocks, Crypto, and Property. Only One Made Me Rich.

I need to get something off my chest.

In 2020, during the pandemic, I put real money — six figures — into four completely different asset classes. Australian shares. American tech stocks. Cryptocurrency. And a beat-up house in Melbourne's southeast sitting on 600-odd square metres of dirt.

Every single one of those investments exceeded $100,000. These weren't hypothetical portfolio allocations from a textbook. This was my actual money, kept me up at night money, staring-at-my-phone-at-3am money.

Some of these made me genuinely wealthy. One of them nearly gave me a heart attack. And the lesson I pulled from the experience is something I now tell every client who walks through our door: there is only one perfect asset class. It's the one humans have fought wars over for 2,000 years.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me walk you through all four.

Asset 1: Australian shares (Webjet and Qantas)

During COVID I bought two airline stocks. The thesis was dead simple — travel would come back, airlines were trading at pandemic lows, and I'd ride the recovery.

Webjet was the first. Online travel platform, stock had cratered. I bought in. Qantas was the second — a larger, more established play to hedge my risk. Bought Qantas around $4 a share.

Qantas performed decently. It's now sitting around $10. So my capital roughly doubled over a few years. Not bad on paper.

But here's the cold water. I'm a young professional in Australia. Like most people my age, I can save maybe $30,000 to $50,000 a year after rent, food, and living costs. If I put $50,000 into shares and double it, I've got $100,000.

What does $100,000 change about my life? Honestly. Not much.

It doesn't buy a house. It barely covers a deposit in most Australian cities. It might buy a nice car that depreciates the second you drive it off the lot. A couple of overseas holidays. Some handbags if that's your thing. And then it's gone.

Shares are fine as a savings vehicle. But they won't make you wealthy unless you start with millions. The average punter putting $3,000 to $5,000 a month into an index fund is building a nice retirement nest egg — not generational wealth.

And there's no leverage. You can't borrow 80% of a share purchase at 6% interest from a bank. Nobody gives you that deal. Without leverage, your returns are capped by how much cash you can physically save.

Asset 2: NASDAQ index fund (US tech)

For diversification I also bought into a NASDAQ composite index — basically a basket of America's biggest tech companies. Amazon, Apple, Google, the usual suspects.

For most of the ride, it was boring in a good way. Slow and steady appreciation. Exactly what the textbooks promise.

Then late 2022 happened.

I was scrolling my phone one night and saw the numbers. The NASDAQ had dropped back to roughly where I'd bought in. More than 60% drawdown from its peak. Three years of gains, vapourised.

I didn't sleep that night. I'm not exaggerating. I've bought hundreds of properties and dealt with plenty of stressful situations — contracts falling through, settlement dramas, builders going under. But nothing prepared me for watching a six-figure investment shrink by 60% in a matter of months with absolutely nothing I could do about it.

I held. Partly because I was too busy with work to sell. Partly because I told myself it would recover. It did eventually. But those few sleepless nights taught me something I'll never forget.

With shares, you have zero control. You can't renovate a share. You can't add a granny flat to your ETF. You can't negotiate a better price after settlement. You buy, and you hope. That's it.

Asset 3: Ethereum (crypto)

Right. This is the one that looks incredible on paper and is the one I'll never touch again.

I bought 16 Ethereum at around $600 USD each during 2020. Total outlay: roughly $10,000 USD. I also ran something called staking — basically you lock up your coins and earn about 10% annually in additional ETH. So the asset compounds. The goose gets fatter AND lays golden eggs.

Ethereum went from $600 to around $4,000. My $10,000 turned into $64,000-odd. Spectacular return.

So why am I telling you not to buy it?

Because the chart I just described — smooth line from $600 to $4,000 — is a lie. The actual price action looked more like a seismograph during an earthquake. Wild swings. 30% drops in a week. 50% crashes followed by 80% rallies. The volatility is genuinely insane.

And here's the killer. The people who lose everything in crypto aren't the ones buying and holding. They're the ones who see a 30% pump, borrow money to buy more (leverage, they call it "contracts" in crypto), and then cop a 10% correction that wipes out their entire position. Game over. Capital gone.

I got lucky. I bought, I held, I didn't leverage. My temperament happened to suit the asset. But I've watched enough people get destroyed by crypto to know it's not an investment strategy. It's gambling with better marketing.

Ethereum has existed for about 15 years in total. That's the entire history of the asset class. Land has been valuable since humans first drew lines in the sand.

Asset 4: Melbourne land (the one that actually worked)

Here's where things get interesting.

I bought a house — really a knockdown — in Melbourne's southeast for $600,000. The building was worth maybe $80,000. The land? About $520,000. A 600-square-metre block in an established suburb with sub-2% vacancy rates 1.

My total cash outlay was roughly $150,000. That's the deposit plus stamp duty (about 5.5% in Victoria 2) plus buying costs. The bank covered the rest at an interest rate that, compared to what you'd pay to borrow for any other asset class, was absurdly low.

"The secret isn't the house," I tell clients all the time. "It's the dirt underneath it. Buildings depreciate at 2.5% a year. Land in established suburbs has never depreciated over any 10-year period in Melbourne's recorded history 3."

I renovated. Light touch. The kind of reno where you're spending $13,000 on paint, flooring, and cosmetic fixes — not moving walls or replumbing bathrooms 4. Rental income jumped. The property now generates enough cash flow to cover the mortgage, rates, insurance, and management fees, with money left over.

Six years on, that property is worth roughly $1,000,000.

Let me spell out what that means in leverage terms.

I put in $150,000. The property gained $400,000 in value. That's a 267% return on my actual invested capital. Not on the property price — on MY money.

And unlike shares or crypto, I was never once kept awake at night. Because even if the property value dipped 5% on paper, the tenant was still paying rent every week. The mortgage was still being covered. The land was still scarce. Nobody was going to margin-call my house.

"I've owned all four asset types. Shares won't make you rich unless you're already rich. Crypto is a casino with a tech wrapper. Property with leverage is the only asset where the bank, the tenant, and the tax system are all working in your favour," says Joey Don, Co-Founder of PremiumRea.

Why land is the only 'perfect' asset

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what makes an asset class genuinely wealth-building for ordinary people. Not hedge fund managers. Not trust fund kids. Regular people saving $30K to $50K a year.

The perfect asset needs four things.

1. Scarcity. You can mine more gold. You can print more shares. You can create new cryptocurrencies (there are literally thousands). But you cannot manufacture land. When someone buys 3 Smith Street, that piece of the Earth's surface is gone. Permanently. Diamonds used to be scarce — now we make them in labs. Land remains genuinely finite.

2. Leverage at low cost. Banks will lend you 80% of a property purchase at roughly 6% interest 5. Try getting a bank to lend you 80% of a share portfolio. Or 80% of a Bitcoin purchase. They won't. Property is the only asset class where the banking system gives regular people access to 5x leverage at institutional-grade interest rates.

3. Income that covers the holding cost. A well-selected investment property in Melbourne's southeast generates $500-$950 per week in rent 4. That income covers your mortgage interest, council rates ($2,000/year), water ($650/year), insurance ($1,500/year), and property management fees 6. The tenant is literally paying for your wealth accumulation. Shares give you dividends of maybe 3-4%. Crypto staking gives you 5-10% but on a wildly volatile base.

4. Tax advantages. Negative gearing lets high-income earners deduct property losses against their salary. The 50% CGT discount kicks in after 12 months of ownership. Depreciation on the building generates paper losses that reduce your taxable income without costing you actual cash 7. No other asset class in Australia gets this kind of favourable tax treatment.

Apartments don't count, by the way. Neither do House and Land packages in the western suburbs. When I say property, I mean land. Specifically, properties where land value is 80% or more of the purchase price. You buy an $800,000 house where $640,000 is the dirt and $160,000 is the building. That building depreciates. That land compounds. Five years later the land is worth $900,000 and the building is worth $120,000. You've made $260,000 on a $160,000 deposit 8.

The comparison nobody wants to hear

Let me put all four side by side with real numbers.

| Asset | Cash Invested | Current Value | Return on Capital | Control | Can You Sleep? | |-------|-------------|--------------|-------------------|---------|----------------| | Qantas shares | ~$30,000 | ~$60,000 | 100% | Zero | Mostly | | NASDAQ index | ~$50,000 | ~$75,000 | 50% | Zero | Not in 2022 | | Ethereum (16 ETH) | ~$10,000 | ~$64,000 | 540% | Zero | Absolutely not | | Melbourne land (600sqm) | ~$150,000 | ~$1,000,000 | 267% on equity | Total | Yes |

Ethereum has the highest percentage return. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I also can't recommend it to a single client with a straight face. The volatility would destroy most people's mental health. And you can't borrow against it sensibly.

The property has a lower percentage return than crypto — but it was built on leverage. The absolute dollar gain is $400,000 versus $54,000 for crypto. And every month, a tenant is paying down my debt while the land appreciates.

That's the whole game. Leverage + income + scarcity + tax benefits. No other asset gives you all four.

What this means for your next move

If you're sitting on $100,000 to $200,000 in savings and you're trying to figure out where to put it, I've lived through the experiment.

Shares are a good place to park money you don't need for 10+ years. Fine. But they won't change your financial trajectory.

Crypto might make you money. It might also halve your portfolio overnight and there's nothing you can do except stare at your screen. If you've got iron nerves and money you can afford to lose completely, go ahead. I won't.

Property — specifically, land-heavy property in established Melbourne suburbs with strong rental demand and sub-2% vacancy — is the only asset that lets a regular person turn $150,000 into $1,000,000 using other people's money, with the risk underwritten by rental income and a tax system that actively rewards you for holding it.

I'm not saying this to sell you something. I'm saying it because I've put my own money into all four categories, lost sleep over two of them, and built actual wealth from one.

The answer has been the same for 2,000 years. Buy land. They're not making any more of it.