Educated myself on investment sooner and started in property earlier.Would have had more deep and meaningful conversations with my dad.OTher than that, life is fantastic. Great job, great and growing family and I am at the start of a very exciting financial independence journey.Bring it on!

Great ideaSQM research has a free vacancy and suburb demographics search and reports;http://www.sqmresearch.com.au/residential.phpI haven't tried their full reports, but the sample one seems to have a massive amount of detailed information. If they aren't too expensive, I think I will give them a go.

In further reference to this, see this thread, it is excellent. Also includes comments from various folks that have actually finished building and what the various "finishing" costs were;http://forum.homeone.com.au/viewtopic.php?t=10990&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15Gold.

I found a forum one homeone dedicated to First time builders and home builders. There are excellent blogs in there showing pictures and stories of the entire build process. Anyone new or clueless to building, I highly recommend joining up and reading, there are some really big eye openers.By working through these I am putting together a list of…[Read more]

How did you go with Sketch-up? I took a look at it and decided I would struggle with the time required to learn and put it all together. And I am a computer geek with plenty of experience with Visio.Very interested to hear how another "noob" is going. If it sounds good, I might reconsider the time investment. The other upside is that it gives me a…[Read more]

An update for you folks still tuned in.- the agent never came back to us with any ideas. Guess he didn't want to work for a living- we received our deposit back in full, so only out of pocket for inspection and time.- We have just purchased a large block of land ~1200m2 about 150m from the bay/water. Flat, big, quiet (double cul-de-sac). ~30km…[Read more]

We know they saw the offers as it went back through the solicitors. Not optimal from a negotiation standpoint but clean and necessary.The agent was actually annoyed that he was late (24 hours) in finding out what had happened. This wasn't intentional, just the fact that we were on the last day of the pool inspection clause of the contract and…[Read more]

Update – Agent tells me I am missing out on an absolute bargain. This is to be expected. I told him that if it is such a bargain he won't have any trouble selling it to somebody else in a flash.So he asks me if I want to walk away. I told him that he and the vendor should at least try to come up with a creative solution to entice me. I mean, god…[Read more]

Thanks again for the feedback.Yes, making a decision was critical as we were out of time on the pool clause of the contract. No time to procrastinate.We made the new offers and the vendor is considering over the weekend.If they accept and everything is as cheap to do as you say, we may have negotiated a real bargain. In my profession I have…[Read more]

$20k? Does that include ripping the old one out of the ground? Probably alot of jackhammer and disposal work to do. I would have thought 5k just to pull it out. 15k for a new pool sounds a little on the low side. But I don't really know all that much about it.I don;t know any contractors, but I assume there should be a few on the shelf to pick…[Read more]

eldredni – ~Most were $400-$5000 for the building and pests that I found. I went with a reputable name company to be safe. There was another at around $620 but was more thorough. The pool inspection (recommended to be done separately by the building and pest inpectors) was done by the local pool shop (reputable chain) for around $80.C2, thanks for…[Read more]

Thanks for the advice folks.I have about and extra 80k available. Plan was to sit that in the redraw facility on the IO loan until be find 1 or 2 small investment properties in a couple of hot areas.30k out of that hurts us a bit on the investment front.I don't think I will fill in the pool. Would rather walk away. This is a hot climate (QLD) and…[Read more]

I went to one of these a few months back and do question the value of them. In short, it felt more like a one-on-one seminar where I learn a tonne and got to ask every question I could think of.In short I think the title is misleading. It most certainly was not a financial health check. A more accurate description would be, "One-on-one PIT…[Read more]