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Lessons From Transitory Inflation
Read more: Lessons From Transitory InflationToward the end of October, Australia’s bond market received a surprise. For most of the first half of the year the Reserve Bank of Australia had been buying up 3 year dated bonds in an attempt to suppress yields and keep them around the 0.1% level. If bond prices are bid up, the yields fall and vice versa. This had been successful until June, when the RBA suddenly started pulling back from the market and the 3-year yields, which play a role in fixed mortgage rates, moved sharply from the 0.1% to 0.4%. Yields again trended downward until September when…
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Dopamine Nation
Read more: Dopamine NationAddictions can be the bane of our modern existence. Getting hooked on something can be quite easy and not readily acknowledged. The range of addictions can stretch from the extreme such as narcotics, to the very simple such as checking the news on a phone. They can be a mild irritant, an imagined way to temporarily blow off steam, or a life altering and ongoing disaster many struggle to escape from. What plays a role in forming addictions? Dopamine. Psychiatrist and Stanford University professor Anna Lembke explores the role dopamine plays in our lives in her new book, Dopamine Nation: Finding…
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2021 Q3 September Quarter Review
Read more: 2021 Q3 September Quarter ReviewEconomic Overview Labour and supply shortages, shipping bottlenecks, COVID delta variant, inflation, vaccine hesitancy. There were plenty of worries in Q3, but markets remained mostly positive across the quarter as economies continued to open and society resumed some normality. This led to an increase in demand in many areas and a struggle to supply that demand. Something governments, businesses and central banks will be dealing with in the year ahead. In the US, the Fed Reserve stated tapering of quantitative easing will be announced at the November meeting and will finish by mid-2022. Interest rate expectations also moved higher. The…
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Home Sweet Home
Read more: Home Sweet HomeIt is the great Australian dream to own your own home. But how does your home affect your age pension or the aged care fees you can be asked to pay? Eligibility for an age pension and liability to pay aged care fees, are both impacted by your assets and income. This includes an assessment of where you live and your ownership status. The Centrelink (or Veterans’ Affairs) assets test starts by identifying you as either a homeowner or a non-homeowner. A higher threshold applies to non-homeowners but homeowners receive an exemption for the home. At first glance it may…
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Wade Vs. Plunge
Read more: Wade Vs. PlungeThe eternal investment question – “do I invest my money all at once or do I invest smaller amounts at predetermined intervals?” Otherwise known as lump sum investing vs. dollar cost averaging, or as our US colleague Jeff Troutner once termed it: wading vs. plunging. What’s the best option? Before that, what’s behind the question in the first place? Fear and uncertainty. Fear of making a financial mistake because of uncertainty about the future. Both losing money and making a mistake can make us feel a little silly, but we need to acknowledge uncertainty is merely life we haven’t yet…
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