I have found that in the public service the slackers generally get promoted. I think there are 2 reasons for this.

Reason 1 is that their boss is sick to death of them and because the public service is so adverse to sacking people the only way of getting rid of the dead weight is to promote them somewhere else.

Reason 2 is that a lot of management don’t like having people around them who know more than they do (and often this is not hard). So they promote the losers up to their level so they never feel threatened.

Sorry I’m not normally this negative but this is something that has given me years of frustration.

So Mel maybe you could slack off and get promoted to another department with a better boss? []

Regards,
Namasté

At the risk of P’ing some one off – If you’re a girl you better dress right. Its hard getting REA’s to take you seriously when you are a girl. It helps a bit if you “power” dress though I hate it. A couple of times I’ve taken a male with me only to have the agent direct all the answers to my questions to my male companion!!! I swear, never once replying to me and even turning their body slightly away from me. It’d be nice to just walk away and go somewhere else but if I did that I would be losing 70% of the agents. Same happened when I was buying a car and it’s not just the blokes that do it.

Namasté

Arrggghh!!! I’m confused!

Just finished talking to broker regarding accessing equity in my IP to buy land. Asked about just extending the IP’s mortgage so I can redraw equity as required or using LOC. Ended up with the redraw option because of 2 things. Firstly the interest rate on my mortgage was as good as the LOC’s he showed me (6.2%) and secondly the establishment fee for LOC was between $500-$1000 and the redraw option was only $400. Have I done the wrong thing? I only have one rental IP, one block of land which will eventually become PPoR and want to buy another block of land.

Namasté

Can someone please explain what is the problem regarding landlord insurance if your tenants are no longer on a fixed term lease? How does that make any difference?

My tenants are also asking to go onto a month by month basis once their lease expires.

Thanks.

Namasté

Hi dreamergirl,

I’ve been in Canberra a while now and keep a close eye on both the buy/sell and rental market here so I feel I can give you my opinion. I have my own place and one IP which has never been vacant in 5 years so you can weight my responses against that.

Firstly if you can rent your place in Belconnen for as much as it costs you in interest (or even close) then hold on to it. Canberra over the past 5 years has had an extremely low rental vacancy rate and though the number of vacancies is climbing right now but it usually drops off again after Xmas. Meanwhile the sell rate is dropping off pretty quickly and to sell will cost you heaps in fee’s. Be aware tho’ – there is only one way the interest rate is going for now and that is up. Be sure you have a good margin to cope with this. If you can’t sustain another 1-1.5% then sell.

One disadvantage I can think of when turning a PPoR into an IP is that all the fee’s you paid when you bought it cannot become a tax deduction because you lived in it to start with.

As for claiming the mortgage interest on the portion of the loan you plan to use to buy your PPoR – I believe your financial adviser is right. If you can show that the reno’s where done for the purpose of turning the place into an IP you should be able to claim them but you would want to be careful. You wouldn’t be able to pass off work done 12 months ago as for the purpose of making an income later. If the taxman checked he might disallow such a claim.

I’m not sure what would happen if you got an agent to try to sell it and then changed your mind and decided to rent. But I do know that you can usually make sure the agreement you sign with an agent is for a set number of weeks. If the place doesn’t sell in that time frame you can rent it out instead and not owe the agent anything. Best just ask them.

Melbear is totally right about the pet thing. If you allow pets your chances of always having a tenant will rise significantly. It’s hell trying to get a place when you have a cat, never mind a dog.

Finally this is all just my opinion. I’m not a real estate tycoon (yet . Do your sums thoroughly.

Best of luck.

Namasté
“God in me recognises God in you”