Wondering what to do if you’ve got mortgage stress? Consumer advocate, RateCity.com.au, believes COVID-affected customers should not have to pay a higher rate if they can only afford to make interest-only repayments on their home loan when their six-month deferral ends. From September, homeowners on a deferral who can’t resume their repayments can potentially extend…
Articles by Kate Forbes
Kate Forbes is a National Director Property Strategy at Metropole. She has 15 years of investment experience in financial markets in two continents, is qualified in multiple disciplines and is also a chartered financial analyst (CFA).
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I hear it time and time again. A generation locked out of the housing market, a property bubble so inflated it is about to burst. Cue the doomsday music and fretting over escalating home values. Don’t get me wrong, saving for a deposit is a difficult exercise, and it is true that Australian property…
Australians have wiped a staggering $4.2 billion dollars off the national credit card debt accruing interest since the COVID pandemic hit. Figures released by the RBA show that since March, credit card debt accruing interest has dropped by 16 per cent to $22.79 billion, the lowest total since October 2005. This means Australians have knocked…
Paying off your home loan sounds like a great idea. So does investing for your future. If you don’t have enough money to do both – and a lot of people don’t – which do you go for? Most people are actively paying off both the principal and the interest, because that’s what they’ve always done….
Thinking of buying an investment property, but you truly don’t know where to start? You’re in good company: many new investors feel overwhelmed and bamboozled by information and research when they’re deciding where to buy. This can unfortunately lead to costly mistakes, so here’s a handy list of five crucial missteps property investors can make…
Believe it or not…Australia has 46 new million-dollar suburbs despite the Coronavirus induced recession. Melbourne saw median house prices in 24 suburbs exceed the seven-figure threshold this year, while Sydney had 15 and Brisbane, seven. Despite everything that’s been thrown at them, our property markets have remained remarkably resilient. And the upper end of the…
Property investment is not something you should ever enter into lightly. But for some reason, that’s what a lot of people who have dreams of making millions with real estate do. They think, ‘I can go out, buy a house somewhere, stick some tenants in it to pay the mortgage and make a killing! How…
There’s some good news amongst the terrible unemployment figures. In July 12.5% of the workforce (1.79 million Australians) were unemployed. This is a significant drop of 262,000 on June as the Australian economy – with the exception of Victoria – continued to re-open. An additional 1.5 million Australians were under-employed (10.5% of the workforce), up…
There’s no way any of us are going to forget 2020. Each generation has had their defining moments, and it is likely that for Generation Z (born 1995-2009) and Generation Alpha (born since 2010) it will be how COVID-19 took hold of the world in 2020. Cording to leading tomography Mark McCrindle, the age at which we’re…
House prices have fallen nationally by just 2 per cent over the last March-to-June quarter according to the latest Domain House Price Report. Yet some of the headlines in the media say “Property prices plummeting” Far from it! At a time when unemployment is rising and household incomes are shrinking, our housing markets have remained…