Empower Blog Business Confidence

RBA Cash Rate Decision – November 2018

On this Melbourne Cup Tuesday, Reserve Governor Lowe and the board met and they've kept the cash rate on hold for another month. Really, what we're seeing here is no new stories — inflation is just non-existent. The September CPI data came in at 0.4% increase, which took the annual rate to 2%. Now, the market was expecting a 0.5% increase so w...

Watch Video

RBA Cash Rate Decision – October 2018

On this first Tuesday in October, the RBA Board met and, really, the challenge was, “What could they do?” They did very little — probably sipped a bit of tea because there's nothing more for them to do with the cash rate. And this may be the case for several years to come. Now, why is that? Especially considering that the GDP numbers in Ju...

Watch Video

Sky News Real Estate – Budget 2018 and its affect on Home Owners and Investors

Ben Kingsley joins the Sky News panel to discuss the latest Budget announcement, Budget 2018, and its implications to home owners, first home buyers and investors. So, what’s the overall take on the Budget, and what’s it saying about consumer confidence? Importantly, given that $24.5 billion dollars out of an overall $75 billion spending is ...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – May 2018

Note: To download the Money SMARTS Checklist, go to www.empowerwealth.com.au/money-smarts or click here. Today Governor Lowe and the Board met and they kept the cash rate on hold for a 21st consecutive month. So we haven’t seen a change to the cash rate since August 2016. So let’s take a look at what’s happening in the positive side of ...

Watch Video

When you should and should not consider Interest Only Lending?

There's a lot of media noise out there at the moment around interest-only lending, so I thought it's important in this How To Session we talk about why we would and why we wouldn't use interest only lending options.   So I want to start with why we wouldn't use interest only lending. Now, it's logical when you think about it — but w...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – April 2018

Today, Governor Lowe and the Reserve Board met for April and they kept the ash rate on hold at 1.5%. No surprises there as both the Reserve Governor and the Board are flagging to industry and business that they're in no rush to move the rates higher anytime soon.   The reason for that is they still want to see stronger economic growth...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – March 2018

At the March 2018 RBA board meeting, we saw the cash rate remain on hold at 1.5%. No surprises there — we know that the rate has been widely tipped to stay on hold from most economists around the country. This is an interesting point because what Governor Lowe made mention in February was that he doesn't see any strength in moving the cash rat...

Watch Video

What’s APRA’s Next Move?

In this How-To Session we're going to explore what the potential move from APRA might be after the macro-prudential regulations they introduced in late 2014. Firstly, who is APRA? APRA stands for the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority, and their job is to regulate the lenders who lend money out into the marketplace. Now, when you've go...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – February 2018

Today Governor Lowe and the Board met for the very first time in 2018, and they kept the cash rate on hold at 1.5%. Again, no surprises there. The reason for that is because inflation numbers came out last week and the overall year-to-date number for 2017 was only 1.9%. We all know that they want to keep the inflation bandwidth between 2% ­– ...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – July 2017

FACT SHEET: Changes on Government Fees and First Home Initiatives (Effective since 1 July 2017) [gravityform id="23" title="false" description="false"]   Today the Reserved Governor and the Board met and they've kept the cash rate on hold at 1.5% for the start of the new financial year. Let's have a look at some of the economic data tha...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – June 2017

The Reserve Board met today, and they kept the cash rate on hold for another month at 1.5%. Now we saw May 2017 being a very interesting month in regards to the Federal Budget. It came out, and we did see some surprises inside that Federal Budget. Firstly let's talk about the Bank Levy. This is all to do with what they call budget repair and it'...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – June 2016

Today the Reserve Governor and the Board met and they kept interest rates on hold. So the cash rate remained at 1.75% leading into the federal election on July 2. So there’s a couple of things that I want to talk about. Firstly is negative gearing. We know that the Liberal Party is not making any changes to negative gearing but the Labor Party...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – May 2016

On this budget Tuesday, the Reserve Governor and the Board met and they’ve dropped interest rates. Now this is the first interest rate drop since May of last year. So it’s been 12 months but they've decided to pull the trigger on the cash rate and lower in that cash rate. Now what’s interesting about this is, if we actually go back two wee...

Watch Video