Empower Blog Property & Financial Investment

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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RBA Rates Decision – April 2010

Today the RBA announced it would increase interest rates a further 25 basis point to move the cash rate to 4.25%.  They are trying to take the heat out of the booming housing market, as a threat of a bubble is forming due to the historical low rates implemented during the GFC.   Yet our quick recovery out of the GFC to avoid recession has seen t...

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Property Prices – Where to from here?

Those of us in the Melbourne and Sydney markets are seeing property values grow at an astonishing rate. So much so that at a very near point in time, they may be overvalued. I know the first question that’s coming to mind—”when will this be?” As those of you looking to get into the markets are thinking, I’ll just wait until the right t...

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Negotiation Tactics in a ‘Sellers’ Market – Part Two

3. Establish recent sales to justify your offer Recent sales of comparative properties can help in getting the estate agent to help support your price offer, but you must compare apples with apples, don’t compare weatherboard with Brick or vastly different land size blocks etc.   4.  Start with a long term settlement When you put your...

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Showing the Way…

The most rewarding part of our job is helping our clients create wealth for financial independence through residential property.  I’d like to introduce you to one such client. Renee, (name changed for privacy reasons) is in her early thirties, working as a professional woman.  Since I have been working with her over the past 4 years, she has...

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Don’t Sell the Golden Egg Layer

Real estate agents across the land are complaining they don’t have enough stock to meet buyer demand at the moment. This limited supply is having a positive effect on property values growing quicker than usual. Agents are out there saying they have 10 buyers for every listing they get, especially in the established suburbs. So agents are going...

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Mistakes Borrowers Make

With finance the flavour of this month’s newsletter I thought I’d pen a list of borrower’s mistakes. This list is not specific to investors or owner occupiers; they are basic mistakes or assumptions that lead to mistakes that all borrowers can make..... So let's take a look at them (in no particular order): 1) Going straight to their c...

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Banks Pigeon Hole Their Customers

From my years working in the advertising industry, our Bank clients have always tried to draw a picture of who their target market client is.  You’d be surprised to know that it generally meant that many people were ‘Pigeon Holed’ into the same group and that there wasn’t enough distinctive information that could tell people apart. Have...

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