This is interesting. I hope we get some more posts on this.

My view would be that if you were already an investor, making taxable income from buying and selling property, then a business trip purely to look at potential property, backed up with evidence in the form of appointments with agents etc would be deductable.

If however you were just thinking of maybe buying your first property, and all you came back with was a panda tan from the ski trip, then I would say no.

I would love to hear if others shared my view.

Happy Holidays….

Try Caz Van Der Put at Centrepoint Realty in East Perth. She looks after some properties for me and has been excellent.

It's true that the poor work for their money, and the rich have their money work for them. Credit cards are great if used wisely. Mine has a 17% interest, but a great frequent flyer program.

Wait until the day a bill is due then pay on a credit card. Wait until the day the credit card is due then pay it off in full. The difference is amazing, but it takes the right mindset. Me and the wife went to the UK business class on the points.

If you cannot pay off a credit card in full every month, then you really shouln't have one. There are cheaper ways to borrow money.

Credit cards are useful in emergencies, and if everybody oaid them off in full each month Visa and Mastercard would be out of business, so as long as there are plenty of people out there abusing there plastic, the rest of us can take advantage of it.

With 65% of pollies owning negatively geared investment property, I can't see them all voting to remove the tax breaks. The last time they tried it was a disaster and took years to recover.

The above post is correct – remove the tax breaks, the investors get out of the market, resulting in far more people looking to the government to house them. They would be nuts to go down that road again, but who knows, the Kev and Julia show may be about to hit town…..

Mainly for asset protection. It depends how much you are worth and whether you are in an occupation where you have a high risk of being sued for your personal assets. It's a huge subject, but if you buy the Australian Property Investor magazine, there is a section at the back where all sorts of books on the subject are available.

I went to an interesting talk by Brad Sugars , whose strategy was to buy a few low growth, positive cash flow properties and then use the income on these to fund the loss on a negativly geared, high growth property. Set the whole thing up through a trust structure to be self supporting, then go and start again.

Personally, I have a mixture of both positive and negative cashflow properties, and it has worked for me, but each to their own.

Up until I married three years ago I was buying two properties a year. Since then I have bought none. I have a shelf full of books on property investing and wealth management and I tried to get my wife to tead "Rich Dad Poor Dad" but she wasn't interested.

To her our best investment has been the $35000 4WD that she just had to have. At the moment it will take 30 years to pay off for a total of $80000.

I am now under pressure to sell my investment properties as her car is now 4 years old and she can't see why we should not live for the moment.

It's good to hear that there are others who are in the same situation.

Personally I read every book on property investing I can get my hands on, whenever it was written. Another I would recommend is "Building Wealth Storey by Storey" by Jan Somers. She collected a range of stories from all sorts of people and also a couple of horror stories. It's good to see just how many different ways there are to go about creating wealth through property.

If you just read one author it can give you a false impression, and what may work for some may not work for others. The Reno Kings are into value adding through renovation, which may turn a cash negative property into a cash positive one.

Just remember if it was that easy everybody would be doing it, but with the right motivation, a bit of passion, knowledge and research, a lot of money can be made from property.

Oh dear, I'd better stop now before I get the urge to start running seminars.

I went back and read Steve's books again and they are very much of their time, and the market Steve was talking about in "0-130 properties in 3.5 years" is very different to the market today. Also the market in a small mining town would be completely different to say Perth, where a cash positive property would be very hard to find off the shelf, and more creative techniques would be needed.

I wish I had been in the market when those sort of properties were available, but those who can adapt and think a little differently will constantly beat the market.

Good Luck to you.

The reality is that if you want to buy a property in WA you will be borrowing over $500k. There are a lot who say the resourse boom is over, but if you work in the north west you will already know from the ammount of projects planned up there that there are years left in it.

Karratha is still a good place to have property. Just try to get a hotel room there. The largest temporary acconmodation village was recently bought by Woodside for $25million, just to ensure worker's accomodation for the expansion to the LNG plant.

Perth property is taking a breather, as to get the median price past Sydney is a huge psycological hurdle, but there is still a lot of confidence in the market.