Pete is a Chartered Accountant, Chartered Secretary and has a Financial Planning Diploma. Using a long term approach to building businesses, investing in equities, & owning a portfolio he achieved financial independence at the age of 33. Visit his blog
Later in the year I’ll be speaking at a banking conference, partly on the subject of household debt. Human nature dictates that readers feel drawn to commentary on the subject tending towards the binary: it’s either a complete disaster set to collapse in a heap, or “she’ll be right, mate”. First a quick look at…
When asked about his greatest errors in investing, Warren Buffett could have given a number of responses. Famously he made a number of investments over the years which just didn’t work out as he’d planned. Sometimes this was due to acquiring businesses (or management teams) that he was unable to turn around, and on other…
If you’re interested in property investment you’re probably wondering what in store for property prices, not just this year but in the longer term. There are many theories about what makes property prices move, but in the simplest terms, there are two factors that determine price: supply and demand. These factors are themselves affected by…
Housing finance was again crunched too hard. Some commentary speaks of investors voluntarily pulling back, but this hasn’t been my experience at all – most industry practitioners appear to have people queuing up to borrow and invest, but credit won’t be extended on tighter regulation and criteria. The trend for monthly housing finance was down…
I’ve been consistent on this point – often wrong, but never in doubt! Taxes in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) are far too high for landlords to invest there en masse, which will lead to a rental shortage as the population steadily grows. There are a lot of ‘well, in theory…’ type comments made about this point,…
While it may be a happy new year for most of us, it’s not so much for bankers, with lending growth continuing to flounder. The Reserve Bank’s latest figures showed credit growth slowing to 4.4 per cent, down from 5.2 per cent a year earlier, and broad money growth at fresh quarter-century lows of just…
Are Australia going to age gracefully, or is it all a pyramid scheme? I saw an interesting article via Twitter by John Mauldin about the US ageing crisis this week, Pyramids of Crisis, which showed that by the year 2050 some 22 per cent of resident Americans would be aged over 65. I was (am) chronically jet-lagged,…
The Aussie economy grew by a seasonally adjusted 0.3 per cent in the September 2018 quarter, well below median market expectations of a 0.6 per cent print. Farm GDP has been absolutely smoked in the face of this year’s drought, contracting by more than 8 per cent year-on-year, which contributed to the soggy result (soggy…
Casting my mind back to the year 2000, when I was working as an itinerant delivery driver in the areas around Sydney Airport, the general consensus back then was that Sydney would be ‘a bit of a nightmare’ over the coming months in the build-up to the Olympics. Without the need for much encouragement, I…
The ABS released its population projections figures today, a series that always warrants a fair level of interest. The projections look at different scenarios for migration, fertility, and mortality, and project a range of scenarios from an Aussie population of 37½ million to almost 50 million by the year 2066. New South Wales remains the…
