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First congratulations and well done in both your salary and investment. Hopefully there will be more of this in the future.
First I applaud your initial approach. Give some, spend some, save some. The disagreement with your wife is standard. One member of a partnership tends to be more conservative than the other; the disagreements help bring balance into ...
53
All else being equal, No
The interest on your debt is quite high and is probably not tax deductable.
Any earnings on your investments would be taxed at about 30% based on your income. To positively gear these you would need a return of about 19.5%. The only investment I know that returns this is a roulette table but the risk profile is rather high.
...
51
Buying individual/small basket of high dividend shares is exposing you to 50%+ and very fast potential downswings in capital/margin calls. There is no free lunch in returns in this respect: nothing that pays enough to help you pay your mortgage at a high rate won’t expose you to a lot of potential volatility.
Main issue here looks like you have very poorly ...
34
What you do with your income, and with your windfall, should be based on your retirement goals, which you have not mentioned.
For many people, a paid-off residence and $1M in the bank would mean retirement could already start. But it seems your lifestyle (young children, Porche 911, etc.), won't quite allow for that. So you acknowledge that you will be ...
24
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but you are quite wrong in thinking that your investment returns will "probably" be greater than how much you are paying on your debt. Only someone trying to sell you something would lead you to believe that a normal investment, on average, will earn that kind of return. There are periods where reasonable ...
22
Ideally you would negotiate a car price without ever mentioning:
your intentions around financing
whether or not you work for the car company
whether you've recently graduated
any trade-in you might be bringing or lease you need to get out of
And other factors that affect the price. You and the dealer would then negotiate a true price for the car, followed ...
20
To confirm: you say you have credit card debt of $18,000 with min. repayment of $466.06, plus on top of this you are also paying off a car loan and another personal loan.
From my calculations if your monthly interest on your credit card is $237, the interest on your credit card should be about 15.8% p.a. Is this correct?
Balance Transfer
If you did a ...
19
Yes you tell them. I can say that I pay cash for all my cars and always get cars for lower than the TrueCar low-end. There are basically two steps:
go test drive, negotiate fully, leave (unless you are given a mind-blowing offer). This may take you one to many dealerships. It depends on how well you know what car you want and how much a dealership will ...
18
Victor addressed the card issue with an excellent answer, I'd like to take a stab at the budget and income side.
Your question clearly stated "I am left with no extra money" each month. Whenever I read such an assertion, I ask the person, "but surely, X% of people in your country get by on a salary that's 95% of yours." In other words, there's the juggling ...
answered Mar 15 '14 at 12:02
17
I'm going to be a bit practical here. Good for you for wanting to give to charity, but I'm going to ask you to hold off for a bit.
Warning, Will Robinson, Warning! As happens occasionally on this site, people are scammed into thinking they are getting a bunch of money and aren't actually going to get that money. Don't spend Any money until you get paid ...
14
Simple. Do not buy that newish vehicle, and do not even try to obtain finance. Instead, buy an older vehicle (of a reliable manufacturer like Honda or Toyota) for whatever cash you have - or even less. Drive it until either your financial situation improves, or it breaks.
While I don't know the Australian used-car market, in the US you can easily find ...
13
Yes, this is scam. Absolutely and 100%.
The details of the scam may vary, but are largely irrelevant as far as the correct course of action goes - which is to cut all communications with this person, and stay away.
As a side note, no one ever needs to know your banking password, and you'd never need to know theirs.
10
The idea of an index is that it is representative of the market (or a specific market segment) as a whole, so it will move as the market does. Thus, past performance is not really relevant, unless you want to bank on relative differences between different countries' economies. But that's not the point.
By far the most important aspect when choosing index ...
10
All they should need is authorization to do a one-time query of your balances from the bank, to confirm that the balance statement you're showing them is correct and not forged. (If that.) If they ask for more access than that, walk out and find someone else.
10
Talk about coincidence, we just recieved letters from our bank saying that our interest only loans will be going up by 0.46% and if we want to keep our lower rate we will need to change early to P&I. Now our Interest only periods end in 6 months to about 16 months anyway.
We have decided to change to P&I early and save on our interest expenses.
Why?...
9
There are a lot of things you can do to get a better tenant. This answer relates specifically for Sydney Australia.
Regarding the Application Form:
Name & contact details
Employment details including length of work, name & contact details of HR manager
Current and previous addresses and rents paid, and lengths of time at these addresses
Landlord/...
9
For small amounts I wouldn't be too concerned.
There are two factors I can think of:
The bank going out of business e.g. due to a run on the bank. In most places there is government insurance to cover these situations. In Australia it appears that up to $250k per customer per bank is insured.
Loss of your money due to fraud/illegal access to your ...
9
I think of these things in terms of risk.
Investing in individual stocks is risky, and investing in brand new individual stocks is riskier still. However, the payoff can be quite high.
The fact that you work at the company increases your exposure. If the company goes under, then not only have you lost your investment, but you've lost your job and income ...
answered May 12 '15 at 12:22
Ben Miller - Remember Monica
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9
Crossed Checks don't mean anything over here. As you mentioned, For Deposit Only has the same effect, and that's what banks/retailers look for.
Source: Wife is a former bank teller.
9
Hedging against currency fluctuations
I've considered simply moving my funds to an Australian bank to "lock-in" the current rate, but I worry that this will put me at risk of a substantial loss (due to exchange rates, transfer fees, etc) when I move my funds back into the US in 6 months.
Why move funds back? If you want to lock in current exchange ...
8
Taxes are a tool for achieving social policy goals. While Americans consider "Socialism" to be a curse, the US is in fact quite socialistic. Mostly towards corporations, but sometimes even the normal people, not only the "Corporation are people, my friend" (M. Romney) get some discounts.
The tax deduction on mortgage interest comes as a tool to encourage ...
8
You probably do need an IRS form. Reason being that a US payer must withhold 30% of the payment to you as income tax and remit it to the IRS. You're then expected to file a refund claim with the IRS to get it back, unless your own country will let you deduct it from your local tax liability (and even that only if your local tax liability on that money is at ...
8
Congrats to your GF!
"How much" depends a lot on how stable her income tends to be. If she has stable salary @ $20K plus $5K-$15K in contract work, then having a larger EF is important. If she has a consistent track record of pulling in $35K each year with contract work, then she may still need a somewhat higher emergency fund to tide her over between gigs....
8
If your investment property is worth $900K now and you foresee it going down in value, why not sell it now and buy another one (or two) when the market bottoms out?
Your wife wants to reduce the risk in your life. If it were me, which of the 3 halves of your brain would I listen to? Not #3; saying "to hell with it" and just buying an expensive house where ...
8
The most important thing you did was have the opportunity and discipline to save a significant amount at a young age; this was not a mistake. You might have earned a little more in the next 2 years in a more sophisticated investment, but even if you'd got a great yield of 5%, that is only $4k difference. And if you'd made some unsuitable high-risk investment ...
7
Yes, you can do that, but you have to have the stocks issued in your name (stocks that you're holding through your broker are issued in "street name" to your broker).
If you have a physical stock certificate issued in your name - you just endorse it like you would endorse a check and transfer the ownership. If the stocks don't physically exist - you let the ...
7
The "balance due" is the balance at the end of the last billing period. This is the amount that you need to pay by the due date to avoid any interest charges.
The "total balance" includes purchases that have occurred in the current billing period, after the last billing period has closed. If you were looking at a paper statement, you wouldn't see this ...
answered Jan 12 '15 at 3:30
Ben Miller - Remember Monica
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7
Ditto other answers, but I'd add there's a lot of psychology going on in a sale. If you're paying cash, you presumably have a pretty fixed upper limit on what you can spend. But if you're getting a loan, a large increase in the price of the car may sound like just a small addition to the monthly payment.
Also, these days dealers often try to roll "extended ...
7
In the UK at least, dealers definitely want you to take finance. They get benefits from the bank (which are not insubstantial) for doing this; these benefits translate directly to increased commission and internal rewards for the individual salesman.
It's conceivable that the salesman will be less inclined to put himself out for you in any way by sweetening ...
7
Check with your local bank - you're likely to be able to either deposit it to your account or exchange into more useful form of currency.
Otherwise, you can also check eBay. I'm not familiar with the Australian law, and it may be illegal to do that, but I know that coins from other countries that went out of circulation become quite popular with collectors ...
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