Empower Blog

Have you taken this critical step to reducing your debt?

Hi, Ben Kingsley here. I hope you've had a great Christmas and a fabulous new year. But now we've got to pay for that joy, don't we? Now, if we've put too much of that on our credit card then, ultimately, we have to be paying off that credit card. Did you know that in Australia, credit card debt sits at around $33 billion! So we do have a problem...

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Merry Christmas From All Of Us!

2017 on the whole has been a positive year for building wealth for our clients.  Property prices have risen, share markets are up and no great change to interest rates.  Also via increased demand for our services Empower Wealth has also grown with another 17 new staff joining the ranks this year. From the entire team at Empower Wealth, we’d li...

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Warning Signs

Ben appears in Money Magazine’s November article, Warning Signs, this time speaking with the prospective of his position as Chair of Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA). Why? As the article title suggests, unfortunately many property investors are falling prey to the spiels and spruiks of “advisors” who are making over-the...

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RBA Rate Decision – December 2017

At the December board meeting today, the Governor and the Board has kept the cash rate on hold at 1.5%. This is the sixteenth consecutive month we've seen the cash rate remain on hold at 1.5%. Now, the big news has been around the announcement of a Royal Commission into the banking sector to try and bring a bit more transparency into what's happen...

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When Should You Renovate Your Investment Property?

In a previous How To Session, Three Cheap Cosmetic Renovations You Can consider, I talked about getting the best bang for your buck when it comes to a cheap cosmetic renovation. In this How To Session I'm going to focus on, “When should I do a renovation on my investment property?” Quite often, from people transitioning their renters, I get ask...

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RBA Rate Decision – November 2017

On the first Tuesday of the month where the nation stops for a horse race called the Melbourne Cup, the RBA have met and they've kept the cash rate on hold at 1.5%. Now, the cash rate hasn't moved since August 2016, so obviously the RBA are feeling quite comfortable where they have the cash rate. The reason for this is the lenders and the regulat...

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Three Cheap Cosmetic Renovations You Can Consider

In this How-To Session, we're focusing on getting the best bang for buck from the cheapest cosmetic renovation you can do on property! The reason we're going to do those renovations could be because we want to get a better valuation; it could be that we want to get a better rental yield from new tenants coming in; or it could be that we may be sel...

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RBA Rate Decision – October 2017

Same old, same old from the RBA today, the cash rate remains on hold at 1.5%. So no real movement.   In terms of economic news, let's look globally first, and the US is probably the main story here. We did see the Trump administration release a Tax Reform package. Now, this tax reform package is all about that one flat tax rate of 20%. T...

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Where to Invest $10k – A Guide to Rentvesting

Ben is a front cover star on this month's Money Magazine issue!!!  So where does he think you should invest $10,000? Well, you can't buy an investment property with $10k, but you can definitely invest in your potential!! This is a golden insight, particularly after his article, A Guide to Rentvesting, the new way to invest, especially for the...

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RBA Rate Decision – September 2017

Today, Governor Lowe and the Reserve Board met and, as widely anticipated — and it's going to be a bit of a broken record — the cash rate remains on hold at 1.5%. So with a cash rate on hold, and basically all the levers doing their thing, I wanted to focus in on jobs —the unemployment story of the Nation — because this is going to be the ...

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Are you investing for the long term?

Hi, Ben Kingsley here, Founder of Empower Wealth. Thanks for taking a moment of your time to watch this video. It's important to understand that as property investors we need to look at the market over the longer term. We've definitely enjoyed fantastic capital growth over this short term period — low interest rates and a reasonably buoyant econ...

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Principal and Interest Vs Interest Only Loans: Why and when should you pay more interest?

In this How To Session, we're going to get technical and start to talk about the pros and cons of interest-only lending when it comes to investment properties. Now, it's really important to understand why you would go interest-only. Because we have seen recently that there is an extra margin the banks are now charging us for the luxury of being in...

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Bad Time for Property Investment?

Ben appears again in Money Magazine’s Special Edition issue, this time in a Q&A surrounding some hard questions about the current market climate for property investors. With the spotlight on changes to borrowing, Federal Budget restrictions and depreciation claims, a light shadow looms on certain investors. Is it a bad time for property inves...

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