Wild for Wealth

Rebecca Spicer discovers how wise advice, good investment choices, a natural affinity with numbers, and dogged determination catapulted Dymphna Boholt to success as a property investor and professional speaker and mentor.

For as long as Dymphna Boholt can remember, she’s been investing in her future. It started when, as a four-year-old, she bought her first cow. And when the budding entrepreneur bought her first herd at the age of six, a wealthy neighbour saw her potential and offered this advice: Wealth comes from accumulation, not trading. That basic philosophy stuck and carried Boholt, now 42, to wealth and the lifestyle she wanted to create.

Finance and business weren’t always her calling. “Initially I wanted to be a vet—as all farm girls do if they get good grades—but when I found out I was going to have to do six years of chemistry and have the type of life a vet really has, I decided it really wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

So she accepted a scholarship to go to Thailand as an exchange student for 12 months, which she says reinforced her entrepreneurial spirit. “I stayed with a family who were business entrepreneurs and I learnt from the inside what really happens on a business front. From there I decided to come back and do a double major in economics and accounting.”

This meant tackling an industry dominated by the opposite sex. “It was, and still is, a very male dominated industry. However, being a woman in business has its advantages as well as disadvantages. You have to learn to work the advantages and get over the disadvantages.”

After graduation, Boholt accepted a job in a large Sydney accounting firm and went on to work as a financial controller in a variety of industries. She decided to branch out on her own in 1986, taking on her own clients. When a messy divorce left her needing to start over, she moved to Queensland’s Sunshine Coast with $40,000 in her back pocket, a babe in arms and one on the way. She walked the streets introducing herself to business owners and gradually built up a client base and set up her own accountancy practice, Active Financial Answers. Today it is a thriving business and has recently expanded with offices in Sydney and Melbourne.