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22 December 2024
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Absent much higher interest rates and or unemployment, a house price crash in Australia looks unlikely. However, a failure to boost affordability risks a further slide in home ownership and rising inequality.
Despite being richer, surveyed measures of happiness have been flat to falling in Australia. Some suggest we should focus less on GDP and more on broader measures of wellbeing, though there are pros and cons to that approach.
Inflation has peaked and cash rates are about to peak. That means asset price compression is mostly behind us and 2024 should deliver positive returns for all asset classes, especially those skewed towards income.
After three decades of phenomenal growth nationally, it seemed as though Australian house prices would never go down, until they did last year. Here is a look at previous property downturns and what we might learn from them.
The National Seniors Australia (NSA) survey reveals that retirees want access to regular and stable income, even at the expense of lower returns. The need to preserve capital reduces tolerance of losses.
The tightening of credit conditions for home lending driven by the Royal Commission has not fully translated into aggregate statistics, and the slowdown may already be worse than we realise.
Income taxes in Australia are over 2.5 times larger than the 'spending' taxes such as GST, excise, and stamp duties. The latest legislation ignored reforms in taxing spending over saving again.
It’s with heavy hearts that we announce Firstlinks’ co-founder and former Managing Editor, Graham Hand, has died aged 66. Graham was a legendary figure in the finance industry and here are three tributes to him.
Last year, I wrote an article suggesting returns from ASX stocks would trample those from housing over the next decade. One year later, this is an update on how that forecast is going and what's changed since.
Australia is in the early throes of an intergenerational wealth transfer worth an estimated $3.5 trillion. Here's a case study highlighting some of the challenges with transferring wealth between generations.
The Future Fund's original purpose was to meet the unfunded liabilities of Commonwealth defined benefit schemes. These liabilities have ballooned to an estimated $290 billion and taxpayers continue to be treated like fools.
ASFA provides a key guide for how much you will need to live on in retirement. Unfortunately it has many deficiencies, and the averages don't tell the full story of the growing gender superannuation gap.
The Big Four banks have had an extraordinary run and it’s left income investors with a conundrum: to stick with them even though they now offer relatively low dividend yields and limited growth prospects or to look elsewhere.