Empower Blog Risk and Returns

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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Should You Invest In Property Overseas?

As a Qualified Property Investment Advisor, I often get approached by clients asking me about investing in property overseas. They've been on a recent vacation, and they bring back a brochure telling me about this amazing opportunity they've got in Bali, Spain, the UK or in America. Ultimately, I try to dig into the main motivation for them to inve...

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Is Australia really a good place to grow old?

You may have been pleasantly surprised earlier this month to read in the newspapers that “Australia ranks 14th out of 91 countries in a new index of the best and worst places to grow old, and which warns many nations are ill-prepared to deal with the old age time bomb.  In a rapidly greying world, the Global AgeWatch Index - the first of its kin...

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Another look at Predicting the Future

In a previous article, we discussed one of the key factors in developing a long-term wealth building strategy  -  the need to “predict”, or at least make assumptions about, how key variables affecting the outcome of the strategy will change in the future.  For example, a strategy involving the use of borrowed money will need to include an as...

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Predicting the Future

In previous articles, we have been looking at the inputs to and outcomes from an investment strategy, and have identified the return on an investment asset, generally made up of some combination of growth and yield, as a key measure of the performance of that asset. We are able to obtain information on the recent growth and current yield of diff...

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Another Look at Risk

In previous articles, we have been looking at the inputs to and outcomes from an investment strategy.  We have looked at the way the amount of money, the amount of time and the amount of knowledge that you put into an investment can influence the outcome, and how the use of other people’s time, money and knowledge ( which we referred to as lever...

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Another look at Leverage

In earlier articles in this series, we have been discussing the “inputs” that will be required for an Investment Strategy, talking about the different ways that money, time and knowledge will be required to plan, implement and manage an Investment Strategy and how these factors may impact on the outcome of that strategy. In the previous arti...

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Return on Investment

What defines Return on Investment and how it differs for Property and other Financial Assets? And how do you align your expectation and the reality of the returns? In previous articles we've been discussing the “outputs” that we are seeking from an Investment Strategy.  Most importantly, we will be looking for ongoing capital growth o...

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The Impact of Knowledge

Previously, we've discussed the “inputs” that will be required for an Investment Strategy starting off by talking about the different ways that money and time will be required to implement an investment strategy and their impacts on the outcome of that strategy. Another key input that will be required of any prospective investor is knowledge...

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The Impact of Risk

In our previous newsletter, we looked at the impact of the capital growth and the yield of an investment asset by considering an example of an investor owning shares in a fictitious company.  The example looked at the different outcome that would result, depending on whether the investor was seeking an investment which offers the prospect of a hig...

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How Does a Property Investor Ensure that they Buy Well?

Every aspiring property investor is gripped with fear about the impact of their selection when I first meet with them. Their questions range from "where should I buy?" to "what do you think of off-the-plan apartments?" The answer is simple - there are MANY factors that you need to take into consideration to ensure that you buy well; it's not JUST a...

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Someone Took a Calculated Risk

Question: How many generations can you trace your family back to? 2, 3 or 4 maybe..... Now looking at your family’s wealth base how many of you can easily see the millions of dollars within the family estates in property, cash, shares etc? What....... your family doesn’t have all those tens of millions in the family estate? (Don’t worry I�...

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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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