Empower Blog Property & Financial Investment

The Tangible and the Intangible Measure of Money

This month marks the month that we first launched our Private Client Wealth Division to a pilot group of existing customers. Since that date over 80 clients have attended our private dinner function to showcase these new professional services.  So what is our Private Client Wealth Advisory Service? Well, it’s a complete cash flow and wealth crea...

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RBA Rates Decision – July 2010

Today the RBA announced to hold the cash rate for the month of July at 4.5 per cent.  It’s welcome news to all mortgage holders across the country, who have seen their mortgage interest costs on a variable home loan increase dramatically from the historic lows of 3 per cent in early 2009. Let’s take a look at a $300,000 variable, interest-o...

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Rents On the Up

The recent interest rate rises are doing what the RBA had hoped in terms of slowing down the demand in the property market in a general sense. By increasing the cash rate the flow on effect is felt across all facets of the residential market. The first impact is the reduction in borrowing power, as the banks move their lending assessment rates ...

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Control & Influence a Key to My Wealth Building Strategy

Once again the first half of this year appears to be providing my wife and I with some exceptional value increases in our property portfolio and the market for well located inner city properties show strong double digit growth for the first 5 months of the year. What’s even more pleasing for me is the hundreds of clients we have helped find prope...

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RBA Rates Decision – June 2010

Today the RBA announced to hold the cash rate for the month of June. That’s after several recent increases that have, in the view of the RBA moved the cost of money back to historically midpoint levels. The next move on rates will be an interesting debate given the recent events of the Euro zone and the ripple effects this is having on the glo...

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Market Softening a Good Thing

It’s with some relief that I report early signs of a softening in the Melbourne Housing market after a rapid run, where the median house prices grew by as much as 30% in the past 12 months. Increases of such magnitude are unsustainable over an extended period of time, which can lead to bubbles forming and we all know that eventually happens to bu...

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Which Unit is Best – High Density or Low Density?

I’ve been in conversation with a couple of buyers advocates over the past few weeks, and it’s surprising how many of their attitudes differ with regard to investment property, namely whether you should be buying apartments in high density areas (HD) such as CBD locations, or low density (LD) inner city locations. For the sake of a comparison, I...

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Finance Structuring for Investing

Choosing the correct Property is crucial to your future wealth when it comes to property investing. The focus of the investor is obviously on finding the best property and paying the right price. However, just as crucial in your property investing business is making sure that the structure of lending is correct for your portfolio now and for the fu...

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Negative Gearing Lives on Under Labor

The great thing about borrowing money to invest is that it allows you to gain access to a bigger slice of an investment that you couldn’t afford if you were to use your own money.  This is very much the case for investing in property.  Another bonus that can occur from investing in property is the tax advantages associated with negative gearing...

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SPECIAL – Fixed Rate Mortgage Report

HOW ARE FIXED RATES FUNDED? Refresher from my comment in our May 2009 newsletter on fixed rates: Funding Fixed Mortgages - Lenders tend to outsource funding on money markets, via other banks/lenders – swap rates, through government bonds or via fixed savings deposits of similar duration which they collect from their own retail deposits, lockin...

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RBA Rates Decision – May 2010

Today the RBA announced it would increase interest rates a further 25 basis points to move the cash rate to 4.5%. This is the 6th rate rise in the last 7 meetings of the RBA and the cash rate has now risen back to similar levels as December 2008. The focus will again be on the Banks to see if they follow the RBA’s lead or move rates of their own ...

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Why Property Over Salary Sacrifice

Most of you who have been following my monthly commentary and newsletters  over the years understand I have a bias towards investing in residential property, because I have been successful at building a multi-million dollar property portfolio over the past 16 years of investing, yet my compulsory superannuation has grown to only a few hundred thou...

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Lazy Borrowings – Are they costing you?

Recently we saw CUA (the largest Credit Union in Australia) reduce their standard variable rate by 0.25% to 6.62%.  It was a marketing boon for them, as major media picked up on the story as part of what we will see as continued big bank bashing, given their recent profit results and also the overall market share they hold currently. The intere...

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