Homesafe Solutions has welcomed the stamp duty relief for seniors announced as part of the NSW Budget.
The equity release provider described it as an innovative public-policy response to the challenge posed by an ageing population. Peter Szabo, managing director of Homesafe, said: “Retirees should be aware that equity release products can provide them with the financial means to maintain their independence and current lifestyle, without the need to downsize their home. Many seniors have inadequate retirement savings to enable them to enjoy quality of life during their retirement. Equity release products provide a valuable alternative to selling off the family home while providing retirement income.”

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By: Charles and Kim Petty

Your exit strategy is an extremely important part of your real estate investing business. In fact, it is one of the most important parts. Sometimes investors get excited because they learn how to buy properties, they find them and they have the money lined up to purchase them, and they do, But when they get them, they have no idea what they plan to do with them.
You must know your exit strategy when you buy. What do you plan to do with the property? Knowing this allows you to make all types of decisions, from how much to offer, to what kind of financing to us, and more.

What is Wholesaling?
It is simply finding a bargain property and passing it on to a bargain hunter. That bargain hunter will be an investor who will either purchase the property to resell it or purchase it to hold it for rental income. Your profit as a wholesaler should be between $5000 and $15,000 on each house. In some cases it will be higher than $15,000 and on some deals your profit may be a little lower than $5,000. Why wholesale?

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by Ms. CiCi 

Retirement – The majority of us would like to retire rich – that’s an obvious statement. However, if you want to retire rich, you need to start saving and investing early. A “Baby Boomer,” one of those human beings born in the period after World War II and until the early 1960s, seem, in their latter years, (to) give a lot of thought during the last few years about how much longer they will work and what they will do after they retire.

With the likelihood that we will retire with all our faculties intact and fully functioning and with a good number of years in front of us, we now need to take a little more time to plan our retirement years to make sure we get the absolute most out of them. One of the most talk about topic when we mention retirement is the investment that we have made so that we can retire comfortably. With retirement calculators, you can easily foresee the probable amount that you will earn by the time you retire.

Be realistic about how much you should be contributing towards your retirement plans – based on your age now, the age at which you hope to retire, and the lifestyle you hope to achieve in retirement. In the book Risk-Free Retirement: The Complete Canadian Planning Guide, the authors predict that at age 65, 1% of people will be wealthy, 4% of people will have an adequate income to retire on, 36% will be dead, and 59% will be dead broke. This is the secret to being able to retire: you absolutely must know how much INCOME you want coming in to support your lifestyle.

For more important information on retiring and retirement visit:

http://www.agape-internet-marketing/websites/retire

If you want to retire on a budget, you probably will have to downsize the house you currently live in. After having paid on one for seemingly countless years, everyone knows that living without a mortgage is a blissful thought! Whether or not you are planning to retire soon, you should pay off your mortgage as soon as you can. If you are planning on, or in the future, decide to relocate in a secure retirement community having no mortage to worry about will make that transition a lot easier.

And, as you plan your retirement, if you are adventurous, you might consider retiring in a country like Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Peru, Cancun, Mexico, Belize, Hawaii or one of the Caribbean islands. If you prefer the colder climates don’t overlook the outbacks of Alaska. Even though, traditionally, some of these places evoke the necessity of one having ‘deep pockets’ they all have the advantage of living as the ‘locals’ do, and for someone on a retirement budget, it can mean living quite comfortably!

Wherever you choose to retire, it will indeed be an exciting new beginning in your life. Enjoy it to the fullest! ~ Ms.CiCi ~ http://www.cici-online.com

About the Author

Ms. CiCi, has a gift of teaching, is an accomplished author and world traveler who enjoys sharing her life’s experiences with others, making their life, their world a bit easier. Her writings expose her wealth of “secret information” so derived from her travels as well as drawing from her own personal wealth of wisdom. A great lover of nature, a visit to her website is a true delight. http://www.CiCi-Online.Com

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by Darren Callea 

During your career, one of the most important things that you need to do is plan for your retirement. Although it has become rather a cliche, there is still truth to the old expression:

“Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.” There is really nothing so disappointing as reaching your retirement without having planned for it. To this end, there are a few resources that you need to be considering. So when you are planning for your retirement, take into account some of the following:

1. the financial articles available online and elsewhere

2. engaging the services of a financial planner

3. preparing a long term financial plan

In fact, you should really start your planning now, by at least reading a few financial articles in your spare time. If you can, hire a financial planner to help you put together a detailed financial plan for your future, as part of your over all preparations for retirement.

These three work together to ensure that you have everything that you need for your retirement. If you make appropriate use of all of them, you will be in an excellent position when it eventually does come time for you to retire. You certainly don’t want to end up realizing, after it’s already too late to plan ahead, that you haven’t made provisions for enough money to follow your dreams, or even to support yourself.

Reading finance articles can help you with this, as they will provide you with the basic information that you need to know all your options, and decide what you ultimately want to do. Finance articles range significantly, and will help you in every part of your planning for retirement.

More then that, rarely do people have the necessary experience to work out a plan on their own. Although finance articles will be of great help to you in this, it is definitely worth contracting the assistance of a professional financial planner just so that you can be sure you are covering all the options, and to make sure you don’t miss out on anything that might help you. There are plenty of reliable financial planners, who work especially to provide you with options for your retirement. A specialist such as this could be exactly what you are looking for with regard to your own financial objectives.

In the end, of course, you cannot just randomly guess at your future. Think of the future as a country you’ve never been to- just as you would not head into a physical country without a map, so should you put together a map of the time ahead. So prepare a good retirement plan, that will make sure you get what you want. Read relevant financial articles, and contract a financial planner to help you implement a meaningful plan for your future.

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By Kalinda Rose Stevenson, PhD

The most successful real estate investors understand the difference between good debt and bad debt.

From a consumer perspective, no debt is good debt. The basic consumer goal is to be debt free.

This is not the way that the most creative real estate investors think about debt. They regard debt as an investor’s best friend.

The reason for this is OPM. OPM is a short-hand way to refer to “Other People’s Money.” OPM is just another term for good debt.

In addition to OPM, another way that investors talk about using borrowed money is the word, “leverage.” Consider using a crowbar to move a heavy object. The crowbar allows you to move the heavy object. Good debt is an example of leverage.

With a lever, you can move something you could not move without it. The lever means that you don’t need as much strength to move the object as you would need without the lever.

This concept from physics is relevant to borrowed money. You can use someone else’s money as a lever to accomplish a bigger task than you could accomplish with your own money.

Consider a situation when you don’t have enough of your own money to buy an investment property. When you treat borrowed money as a lever, you can use the borrowed money to buy the property you could not afford with your own money. This is the power of leverage.

This is an example of good debt. You use borrowed money to create wealth. Debt is a tool you can use to buy what you could not buy with your own money. If the investment creates profit, you create profit from the leverage of good debt.

This is not what happens when you take on consumer debt. If you buy an item, such as a plasma TV for $3000, you have taken on bad debt. The TV costs you money. It does not become a means to create profit. This is the difference between good debt and bad debt.

Consumer debt does not give you leverage. It is not a tool you can use to create wealth. This is why consumer debt is bad debt.

The critical distinction between good debt and bad debt is whether or not the debt is a tool to create more money. If you borrow the $3000 and use it as a tool to create profit, this is the definition of good debt.

If you want an example of using debt to create wealth, consider Donald Trump. He carries tremendous debt, which he leverages to build properties that in turn create even more wealth. Some of the richest people on the planet have the greatest amount of debt.

This means that good debt is one of the fastest routes to creating wealth. You can call it leverage or OPM if you want, but these terms mean the same thing. You are using borrowed money to make money.

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