Planning for your financial future can sometimes seem almost as long and daunting as a marathon. The trick to staying on track is understanding the importance of saving – whether it’s your strength for the race, or your money for the future.
Australians are living longer and this has the potential to reshape the way we have traditionally planned for retirement.
Phil, a 31-year-old IT sales and development manager says “life would be impossible” on anything less than his $300,000 annual income. Earning more than three times the national average, it’s hard to feel sorry for Phil … but his story is more common than you might think.
The road to owning your own home used to be a relatively straightforward one. However with recent changes to the way banks assess a borrower’s ability to service home loan repayments, your borrowing capacity may have dropped by up to 40%.
How can you go from earning $150 million in 15 years, to being millions of dollars in debt? Quite easily it seems if you’re American actor Nicolas Cage, whose extravagant lifestyle and eccentric investments left his finances looking more like a horror story than a heroic Hollywood adventure.
I was recently interviewed by Garth Russell on 1233 ABC Radio Newcastle about my thoughts on housing affordability in Australia.