Archives for June 2007

Family Finances are being Stretched

With house prices solid or rising everywhere except in Sydney, household debt is now almost out of control.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, you saw the highly-geared Business sector collapse as interest rates rose. But now, you’re finding it is households with the high levels of debt.

In 1990, households had (on average) borrowed only 65% of their disposable income. By 2005, that figure had rocketed to 155% of their annual disposable income. And today, it stands at nearly 170%.
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Mind Bender # 7 : The Solution

It’s not quite the end of the month, but those of you wanting to put forward a solution seem to have done so by now. And I deliberately held off posting your proposed answers — so that everyone could submit without any distraction.

But all your answers are up there now.

In posing the Mind Bender for June, I suggested that you need to quickly choose between an Intuitive or Deliberate thinking, in your approach to finding a solution.

Intuitively, you immediately think that, by adding just 2 metres to the length of the rope around the Earth … the gap would be extremely small. It may be large enough to slip a coin under; but certainly not large enough for you to crawl under.

But the solution to this Bender is found by using Deliberate thinking.
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Interest Rates — On hold till late 2007?

In a speech last week, Glenn Stevens (RBA governor) said he “saw no reason to revise its forecast for underlying inflation to settle at around 2.5 per cent in the second half of the year …”

As such, his message is that interest rates are likely to remain unchanged. But not everyone seems to share that view.
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Your Bonus Before 30 June

The response to the Property Workshop DVDs has really been quite amazing – both from those of you who attended, as well as those who were unable to make it on the day.

At the moment, I only have a number of these DVD Sets left — which you can now purchase at a special price, before 30 June. And, because they’re for Investment purposes … that means the cost to you would be Tax Deductible.

You’ll find when you click through, that the stated price for the DVDs will be $97 for the Set. However, I am reducing that to only $85 until 30 June — or until the remaining DVDs are sold!

Just place your order, and the special price of $85 is what you’ll actually pay. But you will need to move on this one.

Happy investing!

Regards … Chris

Mind Bender # 6 : Solution

The idea of introducing these monthly challenges was to help you to stretch your thinking. But sadly, some people are simply using Google to discover the solutions.

This month, the challenge was to come up with the common words that contained five consecutive Vowels and Consonants.

The emphasis being on “consecutive” and “common”
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