Term deposits or property investment?

Heard about the 8 per cent term deposit offer from Westpac? Or the Bank of Cyprus offer of 7.85 per cent term deposit for five years?

Are you wondering if you should put your money into bank’s term deposits or invest them into property? Well, it depends on.

Inflation should continue at a rate of 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent over the next few years. An 8 per cent term deposit would give you a real rate of return of 5 per cent or more with very low risk.

If you invest your money to property. Normally the risk is higher – but I don’t think in 5 years time Australian property market will collapse so I would say there is no real difference in terms of risk. The only factor that really matters is the home value appreciation rate.

Suppose you have $50,000 to use. If you put the money as term deposit for 5 years at interest of 7.85%, after 5 years you earn an interest of $19,625 before tax. Download a free term deposit calculator to estimate your return on term deposit.

You can also use the money to buy a property of $200,000 with 20% deposit of $40,000 and the other $10,000 to cover other purchase costs (such as stamp duty etc). Suppose the appreciation rate is 5% per annual (this means the property value will double in 15 years), in 5 years, the property will be worth $255,256. This means you have $55,256 capital gain. After selling costs and holding costs, you might be able to get $30,000 gain before tax. To estimate this more accurately, you can download the FREE Investment Property Calculator provided by Investment Property Calculator.

So which option you are going to choose? For me the answer is quite obviously.

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