Mortgage broking articles & tips

Smoke and Mirrors

Like any other sector, there are tricks of the real estate trade that a property investor needs to be aware of. In order to ensure that you aren’t paying any unnecessary costs when investing into a new property, this article provides tips and analogies of what to avoid and look out for when dealing with real estate agents. In order to help you st...

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RBA Rate Decision – November 2016

On this Melbourne Cup Day, Governor Lowe and his Board met, and they've kept interest rates on hold. It is an interesting time in our economy at the moment because the RBA is wrestling with one big problem and that is the growing amount of household debt. We are starting to see the household debt to GDP ratio increasing, and that is concerning. Wha...

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What is a Family Pledge or Guarantor Loan?

What is a family pledge or guarantor loan? Well in simple terms, what we are saying is that parents or a family member can put up security to help a child buy a property. Now, why is this needed? In Australia, we do know that in the bigger cities, property prices are increasing more and more. And as they increase, it is becoming harder for the chil...

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RBA Rate Decision – October 2016

Today the new Governor, Dr. Phillip Lowe and the Board met and they've kept interest rates on hold. Now this was widely anticipated by most economists. There were, however, a couple of economists who were looking to see a rate cut. I think that had a lot to do with our stubbornly high Australian Dollar with the Fed Reserve in the US not moving on i...

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RBA Rate Decision – September 2016

The Reserve Board met today, and they've kept interest rates on hold. That's after dropping the cash rate by 25 basis points last month. Now they are looking for a lead in terms of where they go next, and most people are predicting that it is going to go down. In fact, before this announcement, 38 economists were surveyed, and they all anticipated ...

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What is The Practicality Test?

Hi, Ben Kingsley here. In this Expert How to Video, I want to talk to you about or introduce another concept which flows on from The Buyers Decision Quadrant. Now you can check out the Buyers Decision Quadrant video in this area of the expert session under our How to Videos but I want to basically bring that further. I want to talk about the Practi...

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RBA Rate Decision – August 2016

As I anticipated last month, the Reserve Bank has moved on the cash rate by dropping the cash rate lower. We are now in a stage where we are effectively in an uncharted territory with the cash rate as low as what we've got. It's an interesting time. So on balance, what they've looked at is the inflation data. Now, usually what they like to see is i...

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Which Loan is Right for you?

For those who are not familiar with the finance side of things, this might be a tricky question. We've previously written about the different types of property loans out there but how do you know which loan is right for you? Especially when there are more discussions these days surrounding principal and interest and interest-only lending options an...

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RBA Rate Decision – July 2016

Wow, to be a fly on the wall at the latest RBA Board Meeting. It would be fascinating as the conversation would have move to the political uncertainty that we currently got in federal politics. Really important to understand that this 'circus' that is happening in Canberra and this new structure of our government, the lower house and the upper hous...

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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...

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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...

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Is interest rate really THAT important?

BH: Today I'm chatting with Simon Gillespie who's the Senior Finance Adviser and an investment savvy finance specialist and we're going to talk about the question: Is interest rate really that important? I must admit Simon I often get that question from clients where they just say - what's the best rate you can get me? It's probably not the best qu...

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RBA Rate Decision – April 2016

As widely anticipated the reserve governor and the board met and they've kept interest rates on hold for another month. Now what are we looking at around interest rates and monetary and fiscal policy? Well there's a lot of things that we're looking at. Firstly, we're coming into an election period and what that means is the reserve bank may actu...

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