If you have any other debt which isn’t tied to an investment purpose, keep your future IP debt as interest only and instead pay the ‘extra’ amount you would otherwise be paying into that debt. This will result in the same amount of debt reduction with your total liabilities whilst ALSO providing greater tax benefits.

You need to provide security to borrow funds. One way is to do an equity access against a property which has sufficient equity and then use those funds to make a purchase. Nice and simple – but requires you to have the funds available.

As Terry said, it’s quite simple to add a spouse to a title – the real question is whether this is necessary and effective in helping with your goals moving forward, or just increasing risk exposure.

Restumping/repairing foundations can be quite expensive, I wouldn’t be relying on an agent saying 5k. I’ve seen quotes of 25-30k.

Something more important to touch on is that there are MILLIONS of houses in Australia, and many of those are A-Grade. So you have to ask yourself, why pick up a dodgy C/D grade investment when there’s plenty of fine properties already out there.

There certainly is the case that if the property is cheap enough and repair/renovation works will bring it into the A-grade category and allow you profit in the dollars saved with purchase price, BUT this very much needs to be carefully calculated to make sure you’re making profit, not buying a dog investment!

Why do you think rent increases track capital growth rates Dean? There’s no historical evidence of this, and they are impacted by very different market forces.

One option is to put down 10% instead of 20, cop the LMI and then offset the balance of funds. Put the loan as interest only with an offset account and make the equivalent extra principle portion payments into the offset. Once you are ready to buy another house to live in and make the current property an investment, draw the offset funds out as your deposit for your next PPOR.

This will maximise your deductibility, whilst reducing your PPOR loan significantly when you upgrade.

Just about all take on new entrants, but you will need to be mentored – you generally go through the same aggregator as your mentor.

Even then, using the least favourable servicing lenders first will leave you in a spot of bother. As most borrowers don’t have endless cash funds available for purchases, or a singular chunk of equity to start off with to build their entire portfolio they are reliant on accessing their equity to buy further properties. Starting at the lowest end of the spectrum will result in you locking away your equity unless you refinance away – which if you paid LMI to begin with is very inefficient.

All one great big balancing act, but that’s what a good investment based broker is for.

Same with all the buyers agents I know, fixed fee or tiered depending on the price range (a tad different finding a property in the 2.5mil range than a 300k property).

Some lenders will allow you to extend your interest only period through a simple call/email/form which you may here referred to as ‘tick and flick’, others will require an internal refinance. If they won’t allow an internal refi to give an extension, there’s always other lenders.