Empower Blog Professional Advice

How Do You Spot a Property Spruiker?

I've been in this Property Investment industry for over 16 years and I'm often asked this question, "How do you actually spot a Property Spruiker?". Lots of people talk about property spruikers but what actually is it? In my view, there's actually three, I guess, people that you can take your information from in this property investment industry. T...

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Who Do You Take Your Advice From? | Free vs Fee

So the question is, who do you take your advice from when you are buying an investment property? There's really two side of the equation in this industry; someone who is prepared to give you the information for free versus someone like a Buyers Agent who is prepared to charge you a fee for service but the difference is this person who is giving you...

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Is Now the Right Time to be Fixing your Loan?

So is now the right time to be fixing your home loan? One thing that I want to talk about today is to try and explain to you how fixed rates works versus how variable rates works. The first part of this story is, variable rates which is obviously the rates that we see changing when the RBA does their cash rate decision is what we set those variab...

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A Vital Skill for Success – Money Management Strategy

For many people, visions of success include launching high-paying careers, having a multimillion dollar property portfolio or hitting the lottery jackpot. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a surgeon or win a lottery to be successful at managing money. Regardless of your career choice or your income level, you can set yourself up for success by le...

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Four Ways an Investor will Pay

It’s always interesting the psychology of property investor when I’m chatting to them the idea of if they are to pay for advice or whether they get the advice for free. Cause in my view, you are going to pay in four ways. First way is to pay through buying the wrong assets, and that is not an egotistical statement. That’s actually from exp...

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What Happens Once the Contract Proceeds Unconditionally?

Once the Contract proceeds unconditionally, we know that our clients got their finance approved or an approval is in place and we now have a settlement date that we must work towards. So the next step for us is we contact the Mortgage Broker or the Banker and provide them with a range of documents we believe they will need to provide to the banks...

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Property Professionals: Who do you Trust?

As a Property Investor, you want to work with the most reliable and trustworthy people to help you build up your portfolio. But how do you know who's in your corner or who's out to get you? In the December 2014 Issue of Your Investment Property Magazine, Miriam Bell interviews a panel of property professionals like Ben Kingsley to ask for their opi...

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Three things to Consider before Setting up a SMSF

The Top 3 things that I ask a client to think about before setting up a SMSF (Self Managed Superannuation Fund) generally is the first thing; can my current Superfund offer the things that I'm actually after. So for example, shares. A lot of the times, I see clients setting up their SMSF because they want control and the flexibility to buy and sel...

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10 Hours a Year

Effectively managing and monitoring your portfolio is hugely important if you want to be a successful investor - but it doesn't need to take as long as you think. In the September 2014 Issue of Smart Property Investment (SPI) Magazine, Ben Kingsley explains that most property investors who stick to the traditional 'buy and hold' strategy will te...

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Improving Financial Literacy

In previous newsletter articles, we looked at the results of an international study which highlighted the high poverty rate amongst older Australians compared to other countries. In this newsletter, we look at a recent international study which casts Australia in a more favourable light. The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (P...

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The Top 3 Myths of Financial Planning

So one of the key myths of Financial Planning is that our role is to minimise your tax or reduce your tax bill. The reality is our job is certainly a lot larger than that. It's about looking at the long term objectives, how do we position your portfolio, your investments and your savings to achieve that. Tax is simply a by-product of that. And the ...

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What is a Tax Depreciation Schedule?

Depreciation is tax deduction for property investors. We invest in property to increase our wealth over time. One thing that we need to do is make sure we claim everything that we are able to claim, one of those thing being depreciation. Items in a property are wearing out over time, the buildings will one day fall over I guess and so the tax offic...

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Three Biggest Mistakes Aspiring Investors make

As Buyer Agent, we are often asked to talk about biggest mistakes investors make. The most significant mistake however is not always the obvious one. People associate property investment mistakes with poorly chosen assets in areas which don’t exhibit capital growth, or financial mistakes (like paying too much), or dodgy buildings… or better sti...

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