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Credit Card Danger
I bought a strata unit with a credit card cash advance once. I’ve used the same technique for a deposit in a hurry. Until recently I was a fan of lots of credit cards with high limits — providing you knew how to manage a bank’s Debt Service Ratio (DSR) calculations. You see, banks assume…
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Someone’s trying to screw you
I just go home from listening to Peter Holmes à Court give a casual talk at the Sydney Chapter of Young Entrepreneurs Organisation. I won’t reproduce his entertaining, inspiring and insightful comments here — if you ever get a chance to hear Peter talk, take it. One point he did make was Someone’s always trying…
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Horse Trading
I sat in on an exchange between two very experienced businessmen today. What an education in five minutes. The Salesman and the Entrepreneur. Entrepreneur: We bought these from you last time at $1.62. Why do you want $2.25? Salesman: I have to pay MGM an 18% royalty on these. Entrepreneur (grabs a calculator): $1.62 +18%…
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Small unit finance
It seems that GE – Mortgage Insurance Services has decided that small units (<50sqm) are not good. This is a relatively new wrinkle as I have seen the lender summaries that brokers use to assess lenders. GEMIS used to do these loans. Anyhow if it was easy everyone would do it and I wouldn’t have…
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Three Small Units
Ok so I’m late on the details. If you were hanging out so much you could have left a comment on the original entry. But it’s ok the logs tell me a lot of you are coming back regularly. The advertising was for a deceased estate auction $160K+ buyers for three 1 bedroom units. I…
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Bidding at Auction
I bought 3 Kings Cross units at auction this evening. I’ll post the details tomorrow. I always get scared when bidding. “What if I this is all a very big mistake?” goes my self talk. I’ve bid at more than few auctions, been under-bidder often but only won an Auction four times before this. Maybe…
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Server Slow
This poor server seems to be struggling a bit. So it will be replaced in the next week. During that time and for about 1 hour the site will be off-line. I’ll post an update before it happens but I don’t know how much notice you’ll get. In the meantime thanks for persevering with the…
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Location Lie
“The past 12 months has seen huge growth in Sydney’s western suburbs, with the top five local government areas for growth Concord (nearly 26 percent), Camden (23 percent), Fairfield (nearly 21 percent), Blacktown (20 percent) and Burwood (nearly 20 percent).” A Current Affair story. So is location^3 a lie? Well, mostly yes. Every suburb has…
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Another bubble measure
Negative gearing has a lot to answer for. I was sent an article with this quote buried deep in it. “If you desire to identify potentially overpriced markets, compare the monthly cost of owning a given home to the monthly cost of renting that same home. After factoring in taxes, if owning costs significantly more…
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Meaning of Median
In Housing Boom I touched on a price-to-income measure for the state of the housing boom. For those who missed it, I simply questioned the disconnect between property prices and household wages. There is a flaw in my logic. Median priced homes are not bought by median income earners in every suburb. In Sydney’s eastern…