Part 1 of a 2-part Book Review
By Casey Louw (IGrow writer)
I had the honour of sitting down with Tanya Haffern for an exclusive interview in April 2025. Our in-depth discussion of her book, “Bricks for Chicks: Property Investment for Women Who Kick Ass!” (which can be bought on Takealot, at Exclusive books, Wordsworth Books or via Tanya Haffern’s website), is covered in a two part Book Review. Chatting to such a successful individual- a property investor, educator, speaker and author was fun and inspiring and I hope you enjoy hearing more from her!
Not only did I learn all about Tanya’s journey in property investment, but I found out what inspired her to write her book. We uncover the secret to property investing and the grit it takes to become an author, with a great dose of humour thrown in. Tanya’s book simplifies the world of property investing, with a special focus on women investors in South Africa, making it a must-read for both property investment beginners and seasoned investors!
Why Tanya’s book is a must-read
- The tone is chatty, modern, and empowering, perfect for anyone who feels intimidated by financial jargon.
- Her book aims to empower both men and women to reach financial success through her property investment techniques and real-life stories you can learn from, but the focus is very female-friendly in an industry that is often male-dominated.
- She places a strong emphasis on acquiring property insights through mentors, mastering your mindset, and setting deliverable goals.
- Her book’s final chapters provide a breakdown of the buy-to-let model into “bite-size actionable steps”. She views this model as a successful property investment tool.
- She explains how securing passive income and long-term property value appreciation through a buy-to-let strategy ensures financial freedom. These tips align directly with the IGrow team’s investment approach.
- Tanya’s thinking aligns really well with our founder and CEO, Jacques Fouché’s, approach.
I hope to leave readers curious enough to buy their own copy of “Bricks for Chicks: Property Investment for Women Who Kick Ass!”
THE INTERVIEW
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Who is Tanya Haffern?
Casey: Tell me a bit about yourself.
Tanya Haffern: I’m Tanya Haffen, mom to two brilliant daughters, aged 18 and 15. My eldest started university this year, and my baby’s still home with me.
I’m an author, speaker, investor, and yeah, I love turning chaos into opportunity.
So, I made the big move from Johannesburg to George in December 2022, trying to add sunset to the story. We made the move when my youngest daughter was heading into high school, which was a perfect time to do it. I always wanted to live at the beach, and then we found it’s so gorgeous here in the Cape!
I really, really love it here, and when I do go up to Joburg to work, one of the things most people say about me is that I’m very “calm”. And that is not a word you would have used to describe me when I was living in Joburg!
Casey: If you compare it to Cape Town, Joburg’s got the fast pace and the business pace way of life.
Tanya Haffern: Yes, and I think you’re a lot more hyper-alert. So now I live here in George, and I think that that threw my life into chaos, and it’s interesting that your life journey can be anything but predictable. But it has taught me that:
“women are wildly capable and can produce financial freedom no matter what the circumstances being thrown at us!“
Casey: How did your career start and continue until you started in property investment? What first piqued your interest in property investing? Was there a specific turning point or a person who inspired you?
Tanya Haffern: I started in IT Consulting, working with project management, that sort of thing. So, I’d been dabbling in property, but not very effectively, and then I met Hannes Dreyer. He started out being my main property mentor to get me into the mindset of property investing. I started working with him and doing a couple of property deals with his teachings.
And then I actually remember saying to Hannes, after spending a weekend with him, I feel so disappointed that there’s so much that I don’t know.
I was just feeling so overwhelmed, and he just laughed at me and said,
“But you have got to start somewhere, because there’s often a mindset of I’ll start when I’m finished school or finished university. I’m never opening another book again. I know everything that I need to know to get through life.”
So to discover that there’s a whole new other world out there felt a little overwhelming. But it’s the same starting anything new in life. And I think that also got me obsessed with this idea of continuous personal development.
You just have to constantly be improving yourself, learning something new, and surrounding yourself with different mentors. I’m a huge fan of that. I’ve got lots of coaches and mentors, and I think that’s the way that you just keep improving your life. Because, otherwise, it’s very easy to live the same year over and over again, and call it a life instead of actively curating your life.
Casey: It is actually something that we are trying to do. We have to help our IGrow investors figure out what their personal goal is to do with their newly created wealth.
Tanya Haffern: The thing is that people become so obsessed with money and financial freedom and all the rest of it. And then the question always has to be, what do you do when you’ve got it? Because there’s always going to be another mountain to climb. And unless you keep giving yourself challenges, life will become very dreary, even for me.
There’s only so much champagne you can drink. At some point, you’ve got to move on to the next challenge, or what are you doing to improve the lives of people around you? So, I think that is a really good angle for you guys to focus on as well.
And then I wanted to start investing in the UK, so I went along to a seminar to find out about investing in the UK and the guy that I met there, Sean Thomson, really impressed me and I signed up with him to go and start investing and just expand my portfolio into the UK. Yeah, he runs a company called “Wealth Trek”, and I still do work with him every now and then.
He helps people go and invest offshore. So I started working with him, and then he got me into property training for “Rich Dad Poor Dad” Education in South Africa by Robert Kyosaki.
Casey: Jacques, our CEO, follows his teachings too.
2. Do you know anything about IGrow?
Tanya Haffern: I do know they send out information on properties that are available, so you can go along and invest in them. Is that correct?
Casey: Yeah, it’s a big Group of Companies, with different divisions. We’ve got bond originators, Chartered Accountants, tax consultants, and the IGrow Rentals property management team. So you can buy your property, and then our property management team will run it for you. So, it’s like a one-stop shop that does everything from the bond application and acceptance, right through to purchase, management and trusts etc.
We’ve got different qualified people within the company in different divisions that handle each section of the property investment journey. So, it’s quite fun because you don’t have to go get your own bank loan. We’ll help you with that, and that sort of thing.
Tanya Haffern: Yeah, that just takes a lot of the stress off the table. That’s brilliant!
Casey: And also, I think because Jacques started the company in 2006, there’s about 20 years of relationships formed between the bond originators and the banks, as well as the developers. So they trust our team, and it’s probably easier for us to get home loans and property deals than just a random person walking off the street. So it’s very helpful.
Jacques has very interesting philosophies, and he’s very much about getting the everyday person to be able to invest, whether you’re wealthy or not. Education is a big thing for him, too, which is similar to you.
3. About the Book
Casey: What inspired you to write “Bricks for Chicks: Property Investment for Women Who Kick Ass!”?
Tanya Haffern: So when I was training for “Rich Dad Education”, flying around South Africa, training all these large groups of people, and there was a segment that I would train on running the numbers and then you have to start analysing the property and see whether it’s going to make sense or not. Quite often, I would see that at that point, if couples had come along together, the women would kind of fold their arms and sit back and zone out, and then the guys would pay attention.
I thought, “This cannot be the case!” We’ve got to change this mindset that numbers are hard for women, or that the men will take care of that, which is such an outdated philosophy. But I was surprised to see how prevalent it still was in the rooms that I was training in.
Then I would do a segment on what happens when you die. You need to set up your property portfolio. Next, you need to think about what happens when you die, and you need to make sure that both of you are taken care of, and you need to make sure that you’re both rich in your own right. You work together as a team, but it’s very important to make sure that you are taking care of yourselves and that if you are taking care of yourself, you’re taking care of the other person by default. So, it just became this kind of like little mini obsession to me.
And of course, I have two daughters, and I’m absolutely determined to make sure that they are financially independent and can do whatever they want to whenever they want to without being dependent on anybody!
I just decided one day after a personal setback that there’s no way that there’s going to be a boss who’s in charge of whether I get paid or not at the end of the month. I’m going to go out there and figure out a way to make sure that I can look after myself.
Casey: And do you have a partner that also invests with you or are you just a solo investor?
Tanya Haffern: I’m a solo investor. I got divorced when I moved down here, which was unexpected. And yeah… It was another change of life. So we still run a portfolio together. We still have properties in a trust together, we still invest together and still parent together. We just don’t live together.
Casey: I would describe your tone throughout the book as “modern, fun, and empowering”. What inspired that voice? How would you describe your writing tone in your own words?
Tanya Haffern: I think I like to write. I started blogging in property when I was training in property, and then I think as a case of writing all the time, and you’ll know this too… Your own voice starts to come out. And I found that this is how I relate to the world. I’ve got two teenagers, so they’re always keeping me young. And I get quite influenced by the people that I’m around. So I started speaking like them. They find it hilarious. And I also thought that it would be a fun way to write like that, rather than a very dry business-type style. So yeah, just to make it a bit fun.
Casey: And you definitely have a very fun way of wording things.
Tanya Haffern: I wanted it to be a book that you could pick up and maybe have a few laughs, because I strongly believe that if you’re having fun while you’re learning, you’re much more likely to retain that information. If it feels like a drag or if you feel like you’re pulling yourself through it, the information is not going to stick. So, you throw in a couple of stories. The other thing is that people learn through stories.
Tanya Haffern: If you think back to it that’s how that’s how information used to be passed on- sitting around a campfire, everybody telling stories. That’s how we used to learn from each other. Now we are moving away from that to a kind of dry, more formal way of educating when it comes to finance.
So I thought, what if we went back to stories because people remember the stories. You can hang a whole lot of facts onto them. That way people are having fun and being entertained while learning.
Casey: When you chose to address your book from the angle of a female investor, what was your motivation?
Tanya Haffern: “I just wanted to try and speak to women directly and say, you’ve got this, because I think we’re natural planners, we’re nurturers, we’re decision makers. And I think if property were just demystified, then I think women can become unstoppable.”
So I think it’s just that women would approach money differently and are a lot more cautious about money, and perhaps a lot more inclined to hang on to it. I’m speaking very generally here for sure, but to say, everything really is easy to understand when you know how. It’s just like, come with me, let’s talk about it. Let’s figure it out and let’s make it work- that was the idea!
(This is the end of Part 1 of a two-part Book Review Discussion (Questions and Answers) with Tanya Haffern. Keep your eyes peeled for Part 2 of this unique and insightful interview!
Final Thoughts
Our Book Review shows “Bricks for Chicks: Property Investment for Women Who Kick Ass!” is more than just a clever and enticing title. This book uncovers the secret to financial freedom through property investment.
Whether you’re a hard-working mom, a corporate professional, or an individual with entrepreneurial flair, Bricks for Chicks demystifies creating wealth through property investment.
If you’re looking for a book that challenges the norm, motivates you, and supports the IGrow buy-to-let philosophy, this is it! Tanya’s voice is fun, visionary, approachable, and filled with actionable steps.
Don’t forget to keep your eye out on our Blog for Part 2 of the Book Review Interview with Tanya Haffern: “Bricks for Chicks: Property Investment for Women Who Kick Ass!”
Get your hands on a copy, so you don’t miss out!
Follow Tanya Haffern on Facebook and Instagram, or for more information browse her website.
Make sure you contact IGrow’s Property Investment Specialist team for sound guidance and strategic advice for your property portfolio, or if you’re just starting in the property game!
