The Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia recently launched a national awareness campaign of the importance of mortgage brokers and the role they play in getting the best deal for customers. Mortgage brokers are responsible for 55.7% of mortgages written in Australia and that number...
I'm looking in front of me, with 8,000 people watching me. As I approach the coals barefoot to take my turn to walk across them, I can feel the heat and the smoke that has filled the air. I'm feeling a mixture of excitement, anticipation...
When you are young, retirement is usually so far away that you don't even consider it, but it's never too early to start considering what investments you need to make now to have enough income when you retire. This exercise is a powerful way to...
These days we are more conscious about our health and when making lifestyle decisions we tend to be more aware of the benefits or the impacts of that decision on our health. We can see this with the number of gyms opening around us, the...
Yesterday we saw the first major bank increase their interest rates. Read it here. Some smaller lenders have also increased their interest rates over the past few weeks, however Westpac is the first major bank to take the plunge. What's interesting about Westpac's decision is that...
On the weekend, my wife and I spent countless hours moving from Western Sydney to the Inner West of Sydney. We both made a decision to move closer to my office, to avoid the 3 hours I would spend a day, getting to and from...
We have all started a new diet and we all know that there's a period of time it takes to adjust to the new lifestyle, whether it's cutting out the sugar, cutting down on the alcohol or doing more exercise (whether or not we get...
At 11 pm last night, our population hit 25,000,000, you can track this via the population clock provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Why is this important? This is the reason we have a broken public transport system that can't cope, we have roads that can't...
There is no doubt that we have seen the banks tightening their credit criteria after new regulations imposed by APRA and ASIC and more recently the Royal Commission. The banks have changed their focus from literally approving most loans, to basically finding ways 'not' to approve...
When you buy a property to live in, usually the intention is to own your home, not how much it's going to up in value over the next 12 months. Your purchase is full of emotions. Things like where you are going to put the...
