Recent content by Ant

I just love this idea and it's something I remind myself each time we make a bit more money. No one actually makes money. You just increase your slice while reducing someone elses. The number of $'s someone has acrued is meaningless except as a comparison to others. It also adds to the...

True, but becoming a millionaire when a house was worth 30k and milk was thrupence was a bigger deal than becoming one now. Still, I'd not be compliaining if I was a millionaire. :D As for whinging young'uns. Most of my friends (age bracket 24-33) either have a house or are not really...

Yes. (Plus put down a 10k deposit with the R/E agent) At this point the house has settled.. finally after various bank screw ups. (Wrong names on mortgage, entire LOC drawn down when it wasn't needed, etc) In short, it seems we got the short end of the stick from the conveyancer and as...

I couldn't re-edit it for some reason so, as promised, here's my update. The up shot is. It's hard to get into contact with your conveyancer. They all seem very overworked. Their online system doesn't really work (errors on most pages) and is not very useful anyway. Their customer...

Our bank and it's solicitors just paid $400k for a $330k house we settled Tue. :mad: Now my LOC is $0 and there is a $70k cheque floating around in the wind somewhere (slowly making it's way to our door via the post) which I need to access next week. :mad: :mad: Here I thought we'd...

I voted 'Other Software' For the Linux savvy, we use gnucash for all expenditure tracking. Might have to change soon to Quicken or MYOB since thats what the accountant uses. :( Still investigating. We use whatever spreadsheet application is handy (like gnumeric, excel, open office, etc) for...

5 years ago, for me to work in Brisbane (instead of Sydney) would mean a pay cut of $10-20k or more. Now I'm earning the same if not more in Brisbane than I'd expect in Sydney. And this is in the IT industry not resources. It's all a bit anecdotal, but I doubt I'm unique. If jobs in Brisbane...

The house we settled this week was bought from 3 brothers/sisters. So perhaps this isn't far from the truth? Brisbane rent prices are a bit insane IMHO (I rent myself). We have 2 IP's. IP1 Blacktown area of Sydney - $320k - well kept 3BR. Rent is $225/wk but rising (slightly lagging the...

Hi, Can anyone recommend a good PM in Birkdale, QLD.

I don't really purchase by trying to pick the bust times, but rather what I consider is good value for money at any time. You're right though, there is just as much chance of anything I buy dropping in value due to a down turn, but then so will other properties in that area. Sorry, my...

keithj - exceptional! I love those 9 points - printed and stuck to my office wall.

And what happens if you get it wrong? I would also be working out those calculations as a worst case scenario vs best case scenario to see what the potential gain is compared to what could go wrong. Is it really worth a lot of buy/sell churn if your risk is $50k/$100k/bankruptcy? Can you make...

Hmm.. lots of food for thought. Too many posts to quote them all but the generalist/broad nature of my original post is of my own making. The FA has some fairly specific idea's, mostly Managed Funds focussed on blue chip stocks with good returns and only modest risk. He's also long term buy...

It would depend on the product you get from the bank. A broker would be able to tell you for sure. We recently did something similar to what you are describing. We got a global limit (or global debt) worth 80% of our capital. Within that global limit we have 1 normal loan worth approx 110%...

Thanks AnneDe, That was the link I was refering to.