Empower Blog Interest Rates

Sky Business News – Your Money Your Call (December 2016)

For the December 2016  segment of SKY Business News Channel, Your Money Your Call (YMYC), Ben Kingsley joins the Margaret Lomas and Tony Hayek to discuss what's making news in the property market and more. They answered some emails and calls from viewers and some of the topics are: Will the Melbourne property market soften in 2017? Market se...

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RBA Rate Decision – December 2016

So much to talk about in this December Rates Announcement! Firstly, we'll start with interest rates on hold at 1.50%. The Reserve Governor and the Board met and kept rates on hold. Now, what's fascinating is if we had have waited another day, when our GDP numbers came out in Australia, we could have seen a different result. As you know, there's ...

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Variables to Consider when Modelling a Property Portfolio

In this advanced "How to..." session, I want to talk to you about all the sophisticated cash flow variables that any good cash flow management and property portfolio planning tool should have. So let's start from the top in terms of cash flow management. Naturally, we need to do our budget, and we need to assume that value of the money will incr...

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RBA Rate Decision – October 2016

Today the new Governor, Dr. Phillip Lowe and the Board met and they've kept interest rates on hold. Now this was widely anticipated by most economists. There were, however, a couple of economists who were looking to see a rate cut. I think that had a lot to do with our stubbornly high Australian Dollar with the Fed Reserve in the US not moving on i...

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RBA Rate Decision – September 2016

The Reserve Board met today, and they've kept interest rates on hold. That's after dropping the cash rate by 25 basis points last month. Now they are looking for a lead in terms of where they go next, and most people are predicting that it is going to go down. In fact, before this announcement, 38 economists were surveyed, and they all anticipated ...

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RBA Rate Decision – August 2016

As I anticipated last month, the Reserve Bank has moved on the cash rate by dropping the cash rate lower. We are now in a stage where we are effectively in an uncharted territory with the cash rate as low as what we've got. It's an interesting time. So on balance, what they've looked at is the inflation data. Now, usually what they like to see is i...

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RBA Rate Decision – July 2016

Wow, to be a fly on the wall at the latest RBA Board Meeting. It would be fascinating as the conversation would have move to the political uncertainty that we currently got in federal politics. Really important to understand that this 'circus' that is happening in Canberra and this new structure of our government, the lower house and the upper hous...

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RBA Rate Decision – June 2016

Today the Reserve Governor and the Board met and they kept interest rates on hold. So the cash rate remained at 1.75% leading into the federal election on July 2. So there’s a couple of things that I want to talk about. Firstly is negative gearing. We know that the Liberal Party is not making any changes to negative gearing but the Labor Party...

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RBA Rate Decision – May 2016

On this budget Tuesday, the Reserve Governor and the Board met and they’ve dropped interest rates. Now this is the first interest rate drop since May of last year. So it’s been 12 months but they've decided to pull the trigger on the cash rate and lower in that cash rate. Now what’s interesting about this is, if we actually go back two wee...

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Is interest rate really THAT important?

BH: Today I'm chatting with Simon Gillespie who's the Senior Finance Adviser and an investment savvy finance specialist and we're going to talk about the question: Is interest rate really that important? I must admit Simon I often get that question from clients where they just say - what's the best rate you can get me? It's probably not the best qu...

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RBA Rate Decision – March 2016

Today, the reserve government and the board meet and they have kept interest rate on hold for another month. Now it has been an interesting month, past month, we saw the labor party come out with negative gearing policy changes. What's interesting about this negative gearing policy change is the way they've decided to treat new and existing propert...

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2016 Mortgage and Lending Outlook

Here are the other parts of the 2016 Outlook: Australian Property Market Outlook: Part 1: Sydney & Regional NSW Part 2: Melbourne & Regional VIC Part 3: Queensland, Australian Capital Territory and South Australia Part 4: Northern Territory, Western Australia and Tasmania Global Economy and Equity Market Outlook Part 1: United States E...

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RBA Rate Decision – February 2016

Today the Governor and the Reserve Board met and they've kept interest rates on hold for the first meeting of 2016. Now that keeps the cash rate at 2% and we haven't seen the change in the cash rate since May last year. Now the big news of the turn of the calendar year was actually the share market and the jitters that we saw run through those mar...

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