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
Did you know that units outperformed houses in 2017? Probably not quite a result to fit the prevailing narrative! But the combined capital city unit price rose by +5.1 per cent in 2017, comfortably outperforming house prices at +4 per cent (with the usual lengthy disclaimers about methodology, margins for error, and mile-wide variations across…
2018 will be a year in which it will pay to shop around, not only for discounts in the ultra-competitive retail space, but also for home loans with mortgage rates now ranging significantly between all the various products. Interest paid on dwellings declined again in the third quarter of calendar year 2017 as further borrowers…
What do fund managers tell us to do? Buy and hold, ride out the bumps, stay invested for the long term. But behind the façade, do they practice what they preach? NO – they buy-sell-buy-sell-buy-sell in a frantic and desperate bid to top the performance tables for the next quarter. That’s why they under-perform the…
We’re creating 1,000+ jobs per day. Following on from the somewhat tedious “jobs and growth”, the Coalition’s latest catchphrase is “a thousand new jobs per day”. In fact, even that bold claim is selling matters short across 2017, with the economy adding a monstrous +383,100 new jobs on a net basis over the year to…
If you’ve ever wondered why house prices can rise faster in desirable school zones, the latest ABS figures on births provided a few clues as to why. Statistics for registered births in Victoria saw a +12.7 per cent leap to 82,892 in 2016. In truth, some of this apparent increase was due to data processing…
There’s an often-aired lament that normally goes something like the following. Well, doesn’t Australia have bugger all to show for its mining boom, even as it enters a 27th year of economic growth? We have way too much dependence on mining and ‘digging stuff out of the ground’, but paradoxically mining is declining as a…
The total seasonally adjusted value of housing finance increased by +0.6 per cent to $32.5 billion in October 2017, led by a modest +1.6 per cent increase in investment loans. Industry data and polled economists had predicted a weak or very weak month for housing loans in October, but it appears that they failed reckon with…
Today I’d like to share a little of what I’ve learned from investing through a number of economic cycles. Lets start back in 1991 What a year that was! “It’s lucky for Spurs when the year ends in one” sang Chas and Dave, and true to form in May of that year my beloved Super…
Interest-only (IO) loans in Australia typically, though not always, have a term of five years. At that point, the loan must either be rolled over, or it flips over to become a principal and interest (P&I) loan. The repayments might be up to ~40 per cent or more higher when the principal payments kick in, so household…
Northern Powerhouse. We all know that employment growth since the peak of the resources construction boom in 2012 has been all about Sydney and Melbourne. Until now! Queensland is suddenly off to the races, with trend employment growth blazing +4.62 per cent higher across the year to October, by far its strongest annual result since…
