There is not much you can do to help really. You could buy a house and offer it to her to rent at a reduced rate – but you say you don't have much cashflow. You could wrap a property to her, that is you buy it and sell it to her on an installment plan. She pays you off over 25 years with a margin on the interest rate so you make a small profit. Maybe later her financials will improve and she may be able to refinance with a bank and pay you out.

Another variation is rent to buy. You charge her higher rent and in return she gets to buy the place off you for a discount. ie part of the rent goes to reducing the price she will pay.

What was loan 3 used for? Sounds like it was used for the deposit and costs for the IP. If so and your move into the IP it will no longer be an IP and then loan 3 wouldn't be deductible.

Normally you would wait till your have paid off the loan on your main residence and then you could start paying PI on the investment loans. But I would still suggest IO with offset is better. You will get equity by the increase in value of the property and the increase in the savings in the offset account. You can use this at any time to pay down the loan – but again I wouldn't suggest you do that. better to use the money for the next one etc.

Don't worry about paying off loans – other than your home loan. Just keep on investing and you will be better off as long as the investments are returning more than the interest.
Actually you may worry if you are the kind of person to just spend money. paying PI can be a form of forced savings.

These days 10 year interest only is readily available. Either way, I would suggest you extend the IO period another 10 years – or the maximum. You won't pay more interest overall if you keep saving in an offset. You will if you squander the money.

I would never have a PI for a loan. even owner occupied.

Yep, sounds like a good strategy, but…

The only potential problem is you are paying down tax deductible debt. Say you put an extra $100,000 into the loans and then later decided you wanted to buy a place to live in. That would mean you would have all your money tied up in the investments and you would have to borrow another $100,000. that is another $6,000 pa in interest which you could not deduct.

On the other hand say you put an extra $100,000 into a 100% offset account. You would be saving the same interest as the first method without paying the loans down. You then go an buy your home, you have $100,000 deposit, which is taken from the offset. You are now saving $6000 in interest off the home loan, but increasing the investment loan interest by $6,000 (as the offset is no longer there).

If you were on the top rate that is approx $2,600 in tax saved. Without any effort. Imagine if the figure in the offset was higher.

The only time i would not recomend this is if you will be tempted to spend the money in the offset – some people need to spend every cent they can get their hands on and a PI loan is a way of forced savings.

Sounds like your scared of making money??

Put the rent up as high as you can. thats what it is all about.

There are plenty of +ve proeprties out there, but ususally they are in 'bad' areas and suffer from lack of capital growth. These are not worth touching.

ideally you will find one in a major city or other area with growth prospects. There are still some around in Sydney for example – but maybe not for long with the rate rises.

get the rent paid into your offset account attached to your home loan, not the investment (unless you home is paid off). This will save you non-deductible interest. From there you can get the repayments on a direct debit. make sure you investment is interest only too.

If you have to ask then you probably don't have one – you should know about it.

Always pay off private debt first and then reborrow to invest. You will have the same amount available but more deductions.

Mistresses (and the male equivalent?)
cousins
step children
step grand children
adpoted children
any company in which a beneficary is a shareholder, director or secretary
any trust in which a beneficiary is appointor of, trustee or or unit holder of
etc

Most deeds will be worked broadly so all these, or most, are included already

From lender POV, just be careful with naming beneficaries. Some lenders (the evil ones) require every adult named beneficiary to guarantee the loan. You may set up the trust so the wife has nothing to do with it, but is listed as a benefiary by her name. The lender may ask for a guarantee from her. You don't want this as it will hurt her serviceablity and adds to your risk.

or worse . You could have set your trust up, gotten a pre-approval and then exchanged contracts. You then go for a full approval and then the lender suddenly asks for the details of Mr X, a son of yours, who is named in the deed as a beneficiary. X has bad credit and doesn't want to give a guarantee anyway. But the lender won't budge and refuses to go ahead without him giving filling in an app form and giving the guarantee. This actually happened to a client of mine with a lender called RAMS. We quicklyhad to rush another application in with a different lender nad he nearly lost his deposit.