Empower Blog Property & Financial Investment

Investor Special

The investor market was one of the success stories of 2013. With Capital appreciation ramping up in many areas during the second half of the year and interest rates remaining at historic lows, Australia's property investment community saw an opportunity and began to come out of the woodwork. Ben Kingsley is featured in this Issue 14.3 of Mortgage P...

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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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Property with $0 Deposit

Saving deposit to buy your first property is one of the hardest things for most of us to achieve, especially if we are paying hefty rents in the meantime. Take, for example, the Sydney property market, where the median dwelling price is $660,000 and you need a hefty $132,000 for a 20% deposit. By the time you save your deposit there's no predicting...

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RBA Rate Decision – April 2014

Today the RBA has left the cash rate on hold at 2.5%. So that's another month where interest rate are at historical low. Now, Glenn Stevens made a parliamentary comment earlier this month, basically saying that they see a period of stable cash rate position and monetary position. Now that's good news for the general economy because what it does ...

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Top 5 Questions on Property Investing

>> Play Audio Here   In this interview with Kevin Turner from Real Estate Talk, Bryce talks about the Top Five Questions in Property Investment. A few of the questions include what stop the average Australians from investing in property and What are some quirks in different parts of Australia that a budding investor would be wise to ...

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Sky-high Vacancies

Many investors look for properties with high capital growth opportunities but fail to recognise external factors that could increase their chances of experiencing rental vacancies. Our team explains more in the March 2014 issue of Smart Property Investment Magazine. As property investors, rental vacancies means a lot - cash flow, mortgage paym...

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What Will Be The ‘Highly Prized’ Property in 20 to 40 Years From Now?

The data is in for the last 40 years and it seems clear who the winners in Australia’s biggest cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are; if you invested your money in the inner city fringe suburbs compared to buying in new estates you would have more than likely doubled and in a lot of cases tripled your money compared to returns from buying ...

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Three Biggest Mistakes Aspiring Investors make

As Buyer Agent, we are often asked to talk about biggest mistakes investors make. The most significant mistake however is not always the obvious one. People associate property investment mistakes with poorly chosen assets in areas which don’t exhibit capital growth, or financial mistakes (like paying too much), or dodgy buildings… or better sti...

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The Four Personal Elements in Building A Property Portfolio

As a property investment advisor, I spend my days designing property investment plans from the next investment purchase to a portfolio of properties. What I wanted to share with you today is part of that process that I go through. So when I’m sitting in front of clients, I want to talk to them about the four moving elements that make up the pers...

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Spot the Illusionists

Some investors don't realise that a large portion of their property purchase price is actually being used for commission payments. In the March 2014 Issue of Smart Property Investment (SPI) Magazine, Ben Kingsley writes about the operators or property investment advisors in the property investment industry who are vying for business and how to iden...

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Sky Business Channel, Your Money Your Call (February 2014)

On this episode of SKY Business News – Your Money Your Call, Ben Kingsley joins Margaret Lomas and Brad Matthews from Rescom to discuss about different aspects of property across Australia. This time, they answered a number of emails and calls from viewers and some of the topics are: The need for a more regulated property investment industry ...

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RBA Rate Decision – March 2014

The RBA has just announced their decision to keep rates on hold. What we have seen from the start of the year where we had lots of economists still tipping a rate reduction, and a cash rate around 2%, we are currently sitting on 2.5% and the commentary is changing. The flavor of the message from the RBA is changing from a 'we still got some furt...

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Whose Responsibility?

If Old age poverty rate were to still be at its current level of 35.5% by 2050, we would be facing the prospect of over 10% of Australians living in poverty at a time when they should be enjoying their desired retirement lifestyle. Would it be the responsibility of the Superannuation or the Age Pension to avoid this? Will they even work? In an e...

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