Empower Blog Property & Financial Investment

“The best investment I’ve ever made cost me $10”

As well as his cover story Why Negative Gearing Still Works featuring in October’s edition of Money Magazine, Bryce also appears in The Hot Seat! In this one-pager, Bryce explains how flipping burgers for his first job taught him negotiation tactics and why the best investment decision he’s ever made only cost him $10!! As you might be able t...

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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 s...

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Top 5 Considerations when Investing in Sydney

Today I want to talk about Sydney as a place to invest, particularly from the perspective of someone who doesn't live in New South Wales and is considering becoming a borderless investor and buying in Australia's largest city. Being a Perth boy, the contrast between Perth and Sydney is SO great. The density, the population and the lifestyle is v...

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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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Top 5 Considerations when Investing in Melbourne

I'm a big advocate for people becoming a borderless investor — and, of course, Melbourne and Sydney have done really great over the last part of the cycle. But what if you actually don't live in Melbourne and you want to know some of the quirks about investing in Melbourne? What should you be looking for? So I thought I'd give some the top five...

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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, especial...

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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 th...

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Top Seven Negotiation Tactics for Spring

With spring “Selling Season” just around the corner, I thought it'd be a good time to revisit some negotiating tactics we need to employ when we're looking to buy a property in this upcoming season.   The first one is: it's not all about price. We need to find out what the vendor really wants. It takes a bit of digging, and it takes a...

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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 ec...

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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 ...

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Equity: The Power Within

What’s the power within your own home? Equity! As Bryce explains in Money Magazine’s Special Edition issue, using the equity in your existing property allows you to invest without chipping into your own savings and takes the time spent saving for a deposit. Basically, after you release the equity, you can use it to purchase an investment pro...

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Housing Affordability

The latest home price figures confirmed what many of us already know: Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra markets are going gangbusters. But if the dream of homeownership seems to slip further away, savvy investors are looking for a bit of the square to get a foothold on the property ladder. Angelique Donnellan reports. Every morning Rob Cooper ch...

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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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