The Clever Investor Podcast

Rentvesting is a popular strategy for those who want to build wealth through property investment without sacrificing their preferred lifestyle or location. Essentially, it involves renting a property to live in while also owning one or more investment properties that are rented out to tenants. One of the main advantages of rentvesting is affordability. By renting in a desirable location while stil...

Offset accounts are a type of bank account that can be linked to a mortgage, allowing the balance of the account to be offset against the outstanding balance of the loan. This can help to reduce the interest charged on the loan, as interest is only calculated on the net balance of the loan after the offset is applied. When used correctly an offset account can negate you having to think about repay...

The great mysteries of Repayment frequency Congratulations, you’ve bought that property, your loan is approved and you are now looking at the loan documents. Staring back at you from the pages of the mortgage are all the repayment options and they want to know how often you are going to pay them What do you pick? Weekly, fortnightly, half monthly….monthly, minimum, higher, standard ……………Arhhhhh Yo...

CPI, The consumer price index You will see and hear it abbreviated to C.P.I. This is the instrument used worldwide to measure inflation. It is pretty much the main inflation report for the futures and financial markets. Any unexpected rises in this indicator usually lead to falling bond prices, rising interest rates, and increased market volatility. Now before we go much further into this, it’s im...

Basically, you buy and asset for one price and sell it for another price, the difference between the amounts is your capital gain or if you didn’t make any profit, that’s a ‘Capital Loss’. When we sell an asset, such as investment properties, shares or a business this triggers what’s called a ‘Capital Gains Tax event’ Let go back in time and have a look at what Tax is. Tax has been in the world fo...

With the rises in the cost of living our eyes look towards our bank accounts and the money we have going in and disappearing out.  If you've got some equity in your home, so why not roll all those little annoying debts, like the car loan, personal loans and credit cards into the home loan account?  On the surface this makes great sense doesn't it. You've probably carried the burden of these extra...

I have been teaching adults how to do grown up things for over 29 years and whenever its around investing in property I tell them not to get emotional abut it.....but. I recently read an article written by Fiona McGovern, Head of Client Services at Blue Wealth Property,  " Getting emotional about your investment property"  and its changed the way I present....just a bit. I grabbed Fiona and made h...

With around 97 banking companies offering hundreds and hundreds of differing mortgage products it’s no wonder it makes you dizzy trying to find an ideal solution to fit all your needs. Every day the lenders marketing departments swing into action, bombarding your brain with incentives – be it low advertised mortgage rates, seemingly huge discounts or the current trend of ‘cash-back’ offers. With s...

Are you one of the eight hundred thousand Australian mortgage holders that have a fix interest rate ending this year??  Those 800,000 mortgages are going to need something doing to them, if you don't you are going to be paying your current lenders full standard variable rate....and don't think its all too hard to do and be silly about it. There is no way that you should be paying that much no matt...

With property prices rising across all markets and interest rates starting to rise up, there will still be plenty of Australians questioning whether it’s the best time to sell and upgrade into a bigger home, or do they renovate their existing home. While upgrading into a bigger and better home is quite often a simpler and more efficient solution – it is not always the most cost-effective option. I...

During the early stage of the pandemic years, while the cash rate and therefore the home loan interest rated where coming down, so where fix rates. I have friends that snapped up rates under 2% for 2 or 3 years. Research tells me its estimated that around 46 per cent of all home loans in July 2021 were fixed rate loans. The RBA said recently that it expects about half of all those outstanding fixe...

“Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.” Denis Waitley   Everything we do in life involves some risk. A high-risk activity that, for the large part, is taken for granted every day is driving our cars. Over the last two decades, we have seen an enormous leap in the number of car electromechanical devices to help us...

When we are buying a property, we inevitable need to choose a mortgage and we are faced with so many different features. But the most common question you’ll be asked when setting up investment property finance is “do you want Interest-Only or Principal & Interest repayments?”. For some of you this might well seem like such a basic question and be quite dismissive with your response, but trust me i...

Lets get going and launch into 2023 and remind ourselves the reasons to invest. For some its building long-term wealth, paying off that home mortgage or a better lifestyle later on. Maybe you just don't know why. Are you going to use property, gold, shares? The worlds banks recognise that property, especially residential property is the lowest risk. Why? How are we going to invest in property? Wha...

Over the next few days, while struggling to reinvent what we can do with the remaining 9 kgs of Christmas ham, we also need to start neatly folding up 2022, ready to pop it in our box of memories. What might lay ahead of us in 2023 is for the main part up to us individually.  We can sit back and let it happen around us or run, jump or skip into it with a positive 'I can do this'. So I've grabbed a...

The term 'Gearing' is when you borrow money to invest, and it’s typically talked about in the context of investment properties. The income earned from your investment property is either positively or negatively geared. A property is positively geared when your rental return (the amount of rent you receive from your tenants) is higher than your interest repayments and other property-related expense...

Population growth is a key factor that is proven to be one of the main drivers for long-term property growth.  But what's been happening across this great wide land?  Are we correct to think that after all these lockdowns we'll bounce back?  Do all cities grow at the same rate?  The ABS publish a mass of data on population forecast's and you can sit down with a glass of red wine and google-away fi...

You either must save it or you must grow it. Saving is really code for super, that's the compulsory saving that you have been doing since you first entered the workforce. Money set aside to grow for that mysterious place in the distance called retirement. The only other way to bridge this Gap is to go for growth. So we'll need to use the technique of leverage. To buy something that grows in value...

After Japan and Switzerland, Australia has the third highest life expectancy in the world with the national average of 82. This is only part of a big and growing problem as  many of us start to live longer, healthier and more active. Not having enough in the kitty to last for the 30+ years of retirement is a problem Australians have not faced before. Your income comes from one of two places, your...

Let me start this by admitting that I’m obsessed with motorbikes. I first rode a motorbike when I was about six and haven’t stopped. In my younger years, I raced bikes to some success and eventually became a professional instructor. Part of why I want to build wealth is to buy a massive block of land, build an enormous barn, buy more bikes, and spend my greying years restoring them all. Just like...

“The investor’s chief problem, and even his worst enemy, is likely to be himself.”   All money markets are overwhelmingly controlled by investor emotions. At the bottom, the majority always expect prices to fall lower, maybe crash…and at the top, they expect prices to go higher. This episode we look deeply at how doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behav...

With a firm grip of reality, the hardest part for so many would-be property investors is getting that deposit together, and it’s not easy is it! Being told “you just need to save for it” really doesn’t help. The number one reason most of us grownups don’t have a budget is because we don’t know how. We know why we need to have one but it gets pushed away because it’s all too hard. So this episode w...

Helping your kids into the property market – a easy listing guide to what you need to know I talk to so many young adults that feel that in today's property market, it's going to be impossible for them to a buy property. So this week we look at what ways you can help. Let me take you through some options on how parents can help. Let’s debunk a few of the myths around the thoughts that kids will ne...

Albo and is merry band of government people has unveiled they/there/thems first budget. Well done. Here’s what you need to do. Nothing, its all been done for you but just in case you needed to add to the conversation flow at this weekends family BBQ I have slimmed it down. We don’t expect this to have any long term impact on investment outcomes with respect to property investment (now is still a g...

We peak over the garden fence at the 5 Common mortgage mistakes Aussie make when looking for a mortgage to buy a property. The mortgage market is worth over $68 billion and we have to admit that us Aussies really do love real estate. There are at the moment over 10 million properties in Australia with a total value of around $8.4 trillion and of those  around 6 million have mortgages against them....