Maybe you could get some sort of proposal to her showing how much the property you would be interested in renting off her would cost, what rates, land tax etc they would have to pay. And of course you would need to include the amount of rent you would pay to her.

Just make sure that you pay market rent to her otherwise the ATO can get quite narky about this when she goes to claim all of the tax deductions.

Thanks,
Luckyone

I’d ring the tenants board in your state and see what advice they can give you. They can be very helpful in situations like this. In one place we rented the oven had no shelves in it so we couldn’t cook. When we signed the lease, the real estate agent said that the owner had ordered them and it would be a couple of weeks. We didn’t mind that as it was probably going to take that long to get the house organised enough to eat a meal there anyway (we hate unpacking).

Anyway, the 2 weeks came and went, we were hanging for a home cooked meal. Rang the property manager, “oh yeah, they’re on the way, just got delayed in shipment”. Another two weeks later still nothing. Rang the property manager and said we weren’t going to pay rent until we had the oven shelves as that was an essential part of the house. She said we would be breaching the contract and that they would put a black mark on our credit reference.

Rang the tenant’s board. They said we could hold rent as it was a basic neccessity in a house and we had every right to withhold rent until the shelves were replaced. We ended up getting them about 1-2 weeks later.

They really can help you sometimes.

Thanks,
Luckyone

Can’t you put into the contract that the property must come with vacant possession? That way it’s the vendors problem, not yours.

Thanks,
Luckyone

In response to your questions:-

a) If it is a PPOR, you don’t have to pay capital gains tax. If it is an IP you would still have to pay capital gains after owning the property for one year, but it would be at half the rate. ie. Marginal Tax Bracket * 50% * Capital Gain

b) You only have to pay stamp duty when buying a property in the ACT.

A good link is http://www.revenue.act.gov.au

Thanks,
Luckyone

I like Terri Scheer insurance. Their prices are very reasonable.

Thanks,
Luckyone

Would you consider moving out of your PPOR with the huge debt, making it an IP and moving into one of the other places with a much lower debt?

Thanks,
Luckyone

So now that we seem to have worked out that high priced seminars are OK if you get value out of them.

Next question – what is the best seminar you have ever been to and why? Oh, and how much did it cost and was it good value for money?

Thanks,
Luckyone

I have read that it can actually be quite good to rent to people who have pets as it is hard for them to find places and will actually stay longer and take care of the place better as they don’t want to have to go through all of the hard work of finding a place that will accept pets again. Personally, if I had a suitable IP i’d have no problem renting it to people who had pets, but I’d probably charge them a bit extra for the potential damage their pets could cause.

Thanks,
Luckyone

Well people, all I can say is don’t do to your kids what my folks did to me. They let me go through all of the examinations (which were quite a few) for the two private schools I was interested in in year 6 to start in year 7. When the results came in, they told me I had been knocked back to both. Later, when I went back to visit my old primary school teacher, who had spent many hours tutoring me to help me get into my first choice of schools, he asked me why I had chosen to go to public school over the two private schools that I had so badly wanted to go to and worked so hard to achieve. I said “Easy, I didn’t get into either”. He looked very upset and told me I had been accepted to my first choice and got a scholarship to the second and that maybe I should have a chat to my dad as to why they told me otherwise. I did so and they said that they couldn’t afford the education costs at the time. Since I had received a scholarship to the second choice I knew this wasn’t true. I then asked my mother about this when she got home. I was told that since I was a girl my father and her had decided that I didn’t need as much of an education as a boy and therefore they couldn’t justify any extra expense for my schooling (apparently even on a scholarship it still costs more than public education). As you can imagine I wasn’t very impressed, my grades went from being one of the top in the class to one of the bottom and I didn’t regain my enthusiasm for study until I went to university many years later. Even then I still thought it was all worthless as I was a girl.

Very sad. Don’t let this happen to your kids.

Thanks,
Luckyone