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
As the economy and especially hiring have picked up, so too has immigration, with long term arrivals into Australia hitting a record high 777,440 over the year to September, for a year-on-year increase of +5.5 per cent. Lots of Aussies head overseas too, of course, though ABS research has found that long term departees commonly end up back…
Australian crawl. Ah, mate. Wages grew by just +0.48 per cent in the September 2017 quarter, to be +2.01 per cent higher over the year. Superficially this looks like a bit of an improvement, and at least it can be said that wages are growing a bit ahead of the rate of inflation. Just. And including…
My, there’s been a lot of spirited debate about mortgage stress lately! For what it’s worth, I expect to see reported mortgage arrears rising from here, though it doesn’t automatically follow that the outlook is therefore deteriorating. To show what I mean, below you can see that the sharp rise in the unemployment rate during…
Market myths Property market commentary has become infused with a tsunami of theories as to why the world is ending. Some represent credible threats, of course. Others represent no such hazard, yet have been espoused so frequently they are increasingly being treated as common knowledge. When “everyone knows” something it’s often a good time to…
How much is Australia’s land worth? The answer is about $5.8 trillion, according to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures for the 2017 financial year. That’s well over 3 times the level of Australia’s GDP of around $1.7 trillion. And, at just under $4.8 trillion, about 83 per cent of that dollar value…
Goodness me, a thunderous +371,500 increase in Australian employment over the year to September 2017, for a massive increase of +3.1 per cent in the total number of employed to nearly 12.3 million. That makes it 12 months in a row for employment growth. Meanwhile jobs vacancies have also increased to the highest level on…
Land is arguably the most important part of any property investment. It can’t be removed, relocated, destroyed, or replaced. The Housing Industry Association (HIA) reported today that Australia’s median lot value rose by +8.5 per cent in the 2017 financial year to a record high of $256,683. This came in spite of about a 9 per…
Bill Evans of Westpac put out a prescient note last week entitled “Inflation – an inconvenient truth”, detailing why inflationary pressures would likely remain soft, possibly with a slowing momentum. His conclusion was that rate hikes were neither an attractive nor a necessary option given current conditions. And, by no means for the first time,…
Property market commentary has become infused with a tsunami of theories as to why the world is ending. Some represent credible threats, of course. Others represent no such hazard, yet have been espoused so frequently they are increasingly being treated as common knowledge. When “everyone knows” something it’s often a good time to consider whether…
Immigration shifts. Annual long-term arrivals into Australia hit a record +777,430 in August 2017, +6.5 per cent higher than a year earlier, although the recent record surge does appear to be running out of steam. This trend does have significant implications for the absorption of all those new apartments in the capital cities. The number…
