Empower Blog Risks

Future of Mortgage Lending in Australia : Risk Profiling and Pricing

Hi Ben Kingsley here, I just want to talk to you about what's going to be the future of mortgage lending here in Australia. Now, before we talk about the future, let's think about what happened in the past. In the past, we used to see mortgages that are like this. We had standard variable rates, and those standard variable rates were the main rates...

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Seven Property Investment Myths Keeping You From Growing

Investing in property can be a bit frightening if you are unfamiliar with what it entails. When considering it, realise that properties can generally be categorised into two groups: active or passive investments. Active investment requires the investors to be on the run and this could be buying a house, fixing it up and then selling it for a profit...

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What Properties are considered Risky by Banks?

I think the answer to this question is having an understanding of what properties the bank would be comfortable letting you have lenders mortgage insurance on, and that's a scenario where if you borrow more than 80% of the purchase price, so 85% - 95% of the purchase price, the bank will actually give you lenders mortgage insurance (LMI). There ar...

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ASIC’s Barriers to Making Good Financial Decisions

It was pleasing to see, as brought to my attention by the editor of Property Observer, Jennifer Duke in her fine article last week – The five factors inhibiting every investor in today's advice-laden world, that ASIC did have a good understanding on consumer investment behaviour when it comes to financial decisions they make.  And the report car...

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How to Mitigate Property Risks?

In my last video, I talked to you about the risks of investing in residential property and they are important things to consider. There were five of them. There was legislation risk, gearing risk, general or what I call value risk, tenancy risk, and liquidity risk. Now I want to talk to you today about mitigating those risks. Now when it comes to ...

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What are the Risks of investing in Residential Property

We can all get really excited about the prospects of creating a great passive income out of property. But one of the big things when we look at 2014 and we see all the hype around property investment is there’s still actual risk involved in investing in property. So today I wanted to share a moment with you in this time and talk about the risks t...

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How to Calculate Profit from Property Investment

You have heard me say this before, Property Investing is not easy.  It involves large amounts of money and carries risks, from picking a good property to managing cash flows and ongoing costs of holding the property, to poor tenants, to legislative changes, to interest rate rises, the list could go on and on.  But what’s really interesting is ...

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Property Investment – Safe and Easy……REALLY?

The early 2013 signs are positive for a return to capital value growth within the residential property sector, as agents report significantly more enquiry and general interest as consumer sentiment improves. Once again the media will add to the potential ‘hype’ as it loves either a falling market or a rising market because it makes for good he...

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Another Look at Risk

In previous articles, we have been looking at the inputs to and outcomes from an investment strategy.  We have looked at the way the amount of money, the amount of time and the amount of knowledge that you put into an investment can influence the outcome, and how the use of other people’s time, money and knowledge ( which we referred to as lever...

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The Impact of Risk

In our previous newsletter, we looked at the impact of the capital growth and the yield of an investment asset by considering an example of an investor owning shares in a fictitious company.  The example looked at the different outcome that would result, depending on whether the investor was seeking an investment which offers the prospect of a hig...

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How Do Lenders Assess Loans?

Gone are the days when you can just go down to your local bank branch and get loan approval because of your longstanding relationship with the manager. These days lenders have become quite sophisticated in their method of assessing loans - it’s now all about Risk Assessment. For years, lenders have been compiling data about every one of their ...

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Control & Influence a Key to My Wealth Building Strategy

Once again the first half of this year appears to be providing my wife and I with some exceptional value increases in our property portfolio and the market for well located inner city properties show strong double digit growth for the first 5 months of the year. What’s even more pleasing for me is the hundreds of clients we have helped find prope...

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