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The professionals you need when buying a house

The Professionals You Need When Buying a House When buying a house, there is a lot to consider. You’ll need to secure finance, find properties, organise inspections, deal with legalities, take out insurance, and, finally, move into your new house. Gathering together a great team to guide you through the process will help you achieve your home ownership goal faster, more effectively, and with a whole lot less hassle than if you did it all on your own. “Teamwork makes the dream work.” -...

5 reasons to take out health insurance

Demands on our healthcare system continue to rise. Yet when it comes to health insurance, only around 30% of New Zealanders have cover according to the Health Funds Association of New Zealand. When you are healthy and well, health insurance is the last thing on your mind. It's only when the unexpected happens that you start thinking about your treatment options and where you can access the best care. Many people feel that because New Zealand has publicly funded healthcare they don't need to t...

8 tips for paying your mortgage off faster

Home ownership is a dream of many New Zealanders. Taking out a home loan is the first step to achieving this goal but until you pay back what you borrowed, your home ownership remains in partnership with the lending body. Many people, dare we say most, find it easier to spend than save. Yet saving in the short term can free funds in the longer term. But in this age of instant gratification, we often lose sight of the long game. Why pay off your home loan faster? Living debt free is also a ...

20 tips for protecting your home

We're all familiar with the phrase 'prevention is better than cure' but sometimes we focus on the cure forgetting about prevention. When it comes to protecting your assets, you should work on both prevention and cure. Prevention You don't necessarily have to secure your home tighter than Fort Knox, but there are many things you can to help prevent theft. Start by eliminating opportunities as many burglaries are opportunistic by nature. 1.Leaving items laying around your yard makes for easy...

When Should You Start Saving for Retirement?

It's a good question and one most of us only think about addressing as we approach retirement age. But that's way too late! So when should you start saving for retirement? One could say it's never too early and it's never too late. Having a good financial plan for your retirement can set you up for years of enjoyment with loved ones. Start sooner rather than later The sooner you start, the better off you will be. Retirement seems a long way away when you are in your 20s so most people delay s...

Life expectancy in New Zealand

Do you know what the average life expectancy in New Zealand is? Although, thoughts abound about how humans could routinely live to 130 or 140 years of age, we're not there yet. The average life expectancy has been increasing globally and in New Zealand it's currently 81.6 years. This ranks us at 17 in the world. Interestingly, while women generally live longer than men, on a world scale our females rank at 26 and our males at 10. Ranking higher at number four, our neighbours across the Tasm...

Thinking of Investing in Property?

Property is a popular subject in New Zealand. Buying, selling or investing in property dominates many a backyard barbecue chat. Opinions tend to outweigh investors. All the well-meaning advice can be confusing for the first-time property investor. Why invest in property? The aim of investing in property is to increase wealth and secure your financial future. It's a long-term strategy not a get rich quick opportunity. Property is generally considered a less volatile investment than shares...

Starting a New Business?

The new year brings a lot of new ideas and energy and with that often new business plans are put in place and begin. New Zealanders enjoy the idea of being self employed and managing their own time doing what they love. Its never easy to start a new business and there are a lot of expenses that are hard to plan for, some of these are very important to the businesses future. Yes I am talking about protecting the key person in the business from being unable to work. Most of the time that key per...

Time to Think

Soon most people will have a chance to take some time off work and enjoy life with their family. Hopefully during that time we will get a chance to relax a little and think about our lives and how it may have changed in the past year. Its a great time to consider a review of your insurance in the new year. Why? Well if you, had a child, took on a bigger mortgage, changed jobs or just haven't had a review for over a year, then book in a time to see us. Perhaps you retired from work, paid o...

How will the tax on capital gains effect you?

As many of you may be aware, there are some changes coming in on 1st November effecting the way that capital gains on rental properties are taxed. It's important to remember that these changes are not targeted at owner occupied homes and will specifically be targeted at investors selling properties in this time. However there are a number of grey areas that the average investor can't be expected to fully understand right away. That's why we've got some advice on these changes below from our s...

Don't wait until its too late

Its amazing how many calls we get every month from people looking to get cover for a health event that has already happened. If you have a health problem during your life then getting insurance after that can be very difficult, expensive or just impossible. If you're reading this and you're lucky enough to be healthy and between 25 and 60 years old which are our biggest earning years then you should be considering protecting your income. Don't wait until you have a health problem and then try an...

Healthy Home Loan

May 27, 2015 A few simple checks could save you thousands It always amazes me how the quality of loan structure and interest rates on a Home Loan can deteriorate over time. Your Home loan is like anything, it needs a little bit of love and attention occasionally for it to thrive. Earlier this week I was doing a review for a client who had 4 separate loans. One for a rental property they were just purchasing and the oth...

Time to think (fix) long term

We are seeing some amazing fixed interest rates at the moment and I believe now is the time to fix long term. Below I explain the reasons why and give you some methods to help with your own decision making. There are two ways to make decisions about which interest rate is best for you: Option One -Try to predict what the market is doing and where interest rates will go in the future. This is fraught with danger given the variability in world money markets over the last 10 years. When making...

Adding Children to Health Insurance

Its a great idea to add your children to your health insurance as early as possible. Most companies will allow children to be added to your policy in the first three months since their birth just by letting them know the child's date of birth and name. No forms to fill in and most importantly no exclusions. Recently a couple added their baby to their health insurance but because they waited 8 months from the birth they had to fill in a form. Not a big deal but because there were a couple of sm...

Time for a review of your cover

During the summer break a lot of people would have had time to set a few goals for 2015. They may well have also looked at some of the bills they are paying and decided its time to address them. The best thing to do with your insurance premiums is to ask us for a review of your cover so we can make sure you're still covered for the right amounts and you're not overpaying. Its free for us to make sure your cover is still correct and we will do anything possible to help with the premiums going f...

Property Buying Tips

1.Don’t overanalyse the market. If you go online and read the reports every day, you will get confused by all the conflicting information. Knowledge is power but too much can make your head spin and you need to do what is right for you.  2.Drive around the area you are looking at buying in, ensure you check it out at different times of the day, is it a high traffic street at peak/school times? What about night time?   3.Ask about the neighbours – often neighbours will visit open ho...

Breast Cancer Month

October is Breast Cancer month in NZ so we have put together a few statistics around women's health. Did you know? Cancer: Today, 7 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer   This year, 650 will most likely die   Yet 30% of eligible women don't have regular mammograms   And 60% of young women don't know the signs beyond a lump (Source:  www.nzbcf.org.nz)   Women's Heart Disease: Worldwide, 3.4 million...

Property News! Land Types

When buying a property there are references to different types of land ownership.  There are four main types of land ownership in New Zealand: fee simple, cross lease, leasehold and unit title.  Each form is outlined briefly below.   Fee Simple (also known as freehold) A fee simple title is the highest form of land ownership in New Zealand after the Crown and is also the most common.  As the registered proprietor you own the underlying land and any dwellings on the lan...

Election News! How will each party impact housing affordability

With the election less than a week away I thought it would be a good idea to cover off some of the housing policies of the different political parties so that you could see what affect each might have on Interest Rates and also how affordable homes may be with different incentives. Below is a brief summary.  Further detail on policies are available on the websites of the particular parties.  Overall there seems to be a move toward building more houses and helping make purchasing easier...

Interest rates going through interesting period

It has now been a month since Reserve Bank Goverenor, Graeme Wheeler, increased the Official Cash Rate by a further .25% (now 1% higher than it was 12 months ago) but we haven't seen any major shifts in interest rates since then. Naturally all of the major lenders increased their Floating/Variable rates by the same as the increase in the OCR, which has now become standard practice.  However fixed rates haven't moved and we're starting to see some good discounts on the shorter term rates....

Money Printing Machine

If you did happen to have a machine in your home that printed out cash money every week would you look after it? Would you insure it? Of course you would, after all that machine would be able to pay all your bills and give you a great lifestyle. Everyone has this money printing machine! Its you. Each week you make money for your family to pay your bills and to enjoy life with. You are worth insuring. Insure your body against injury and illness, insure your income if you are unable to work a...

What to do when your fixed rate is about to come off your home loan.

In this video, I discuss re-fixing your home loan. When you take out a new loan you might fix that loan for 2 or 3 years and then it comes to the end of its fixed term... what do you do then? Generally, you’ll get a letter in the mail from the bank and they will suggest to fix it for another 2 to 3 years or whatever they’re recommending people to do at that time, or they might just say 'do nothing and you’ll automatically move on to the floating rate.” But there are two r...

Why can Income Protection be so expensive?

I am often asked why income protection is so expensive. There can be a lot of reasons, take these points into consideration: Age Sex Smoking status Job description (manual or office based) There are a number of other points taken into account by the insurance companies but one of the biggest reasons the premiums for income protection can be high is because it can provide a monthly percentage of your income until you are 65 or 70 years old. For example:A 40 year old who is insured for $50,000 per...

Life cover premiums that stay the same each year

Wouldn't it be nice to have the same premium each year on your life cover! Yes it would, especially when the premiums go up each year based on your age, and when you get in your 60's its a massive jump each year. If you plan on keeping your life cover for as long as possible then call us to talk about making your premiums level. You can do this in a few ways and each one may work depending on your situation. You can save thousands of dollars by getting in on this option early and have piece of m...

Interest Rate Update

Nothing ever stands still when it comes to interest rates and the last couple of weeks have been no different with minor tweaks from most banks. With the Official Cash Rate increasing last month the banks were tipped to increase fixed interest rates again but these have remained steady and we have even seen decreases in some places.  The reason for this is that the trading banks have already increased their fixed rates considerably since the end of 2013, because of predicted rises in the ...