Empower Blog Property & Financial Investment

The ‘flour jar’ method of saving for a house

Last week, you might have noticed a video of Bryce and Ben circulating around Facebook talking about the ‘flour jar’ method of saving for a house! Yup, that’s right! Our podcast, The Property Couch has partnered with Realestate.com.au to produce a series of videos and articles to help more Australians realise their true potential around money...

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Sky Business News – Your Money Your Call (May 2017)

Ben Kingsley returns to the SKY Business News Channel, Your Money Your Call (YMYC). Joining ‘temporary host’ Lisa Montgomery, Ben and Rich Harvey, discuss sustainable and sensible property investing in Australia. As well as diving into the current property market, the experts weigh in on: Is housing an economic uncertainty? Why do your ...

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Four Essential Levers to Building Wealth

So, I previously spoke about the fact that it's really important you know the number that you need to retire on. The actual income figure for you to live a comfortable retirement lifestyle and, therefore, the worth of an income-producing asset you will need outside of family home. Today, I want to have an extension of this because once I know th...

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Will You Remain Confident In A Changing Market?

I want to talk about confidence in a changing market. Now we've been very blessed to see property prices has grown significantly over the last several years with low-interest rates and a reasonably OK economy in terms of jobs. But we are going to see that potentially change. We are already seeing the regulators and the banks starting to see the ...

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First Home Super Saver Scheme – What is it?

In this How To session, I want to talk about the 2017 Federal Budget. Treasurer Scott Morrison has announced a First Home Super Saver Scheme. Now, this Saver Scheme is all about trying to help first home buyers save for a deposit. Let's look at how it works. Effectively what you can do is, you can salary sacrifice into your super a maximum of $15,0...

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RBA Rate Decision – May 2017

Today Governor Lowe and the Reserve board met, and the kept the cash rate on hold once again in May. That keeps the cash rate at 1.5%, so monetary policy remains on hold, but we now are coming to the month of federal budgets and state budgets. And this is where we start to look at fiscal policy. So what are our state governments and also our federa...

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Should deposits be waived for first-timers with good rental history?

Did you know, according to most recent First Time Buyers Deposit Report published by Bankwest, Australian couples need to save for an average of 4.4 years for a 20% deposit on a median-priced house. Now, would this changed if deposits are waived for first home owners and how will this affect the property market in general? Bryce Holdaway debated...

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What Causes Property Price To Fall?

In this How To Session, we're going to get a little bit more serious, and we're going to talk about what causes property prices to fall. Now property prices are again, similar to any type of economic value setting mechanism where demand and supply plays a role. So when you get low supply and high demand, you usually see values increase. It's not di...

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New Initiatives for First Home Buyers (VIC)

In an effort to address housing affordability, and potentially the political pressure around this topic at the moment; the Victorian State Government has drafted some new initiatives to help first home buyers get into the marketplace. Let's have a look at what they are: If you're buying a property up to the value of $600,000, you will no longer ...

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Four Ways to Make A Real Estate Agent’s Day

When you're engaging with a real estate agent, their job is to negotiate with you and try to extract as much information out of you as they can. So that they can ultimately get a good outcome for their client who is the seller, generally at the buyer's expense by trying to get that extra money out of you. So for today's How to Session, I thought we...

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RBA Rate Decision – April 2017

Today Governor Lowe and the Reserve Board met, and they've kept the Cash Rate on hold at 1.5% for April 2017. Now there is a lot of commentary on the marketplace over the last month around property, and I want to get to that in a minute. Let's just quickly wrap up what's happening in terms of the world market and mainly the US. We did see the Cash ...

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Why I Love Property

I was recently asked by a journalist when they were interviewing me, “Why is it that out of all the asset classes out there, why do you actually love property as a form of investment?” And it's pretty simple. It’s actually leverage. The fact that I can use the cash that I've got and leveraged it to buy a much larger asset, and then I can g...

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Interest Rates 2017: What Investors Need To Know

Ben appeared in Your Investment Property Magazine this April and, as it turns out, there's a whole lot he wants to tell investors about interest rates 2017. Let's face it: interest rates matter. When it comes to your lending capacity and structure, they can make or break how (and when) you invest. Your cash flow can really dive or soar too ... a...

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