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Should I Buy Rental Investment Property - My Personal Experience

When I started to look for rental investment properties, I have tried many property investment calculators. I found they are often too complex and hard to use. They tend to estimate many things for many years by showing seemingly detailed information of each year based on handful pieces of information they ask you to provide. However, I found that the information is neither helpful nor useful for me.

Learn useful Should I buy this property for investment tips.

Before I can make a decision on an investment property, I just want to know:

(1) if I can afford to buy an investment property, and

(2) if I buy such a property and sell it after a few years, can I make a reasonable good return on my investment?

I don't care how much tax I can get back from ATO, I don't care the net presence value of the money that I can get back when I sell the property, I don't care the inflation rate, but I DO care if the ROI on this investment property is higher than the interest rates from the banks! You should be able to follow me on this - if the ROI is even lower than the banks' interest rates it is no point to waste the time and efforts to invest a rental property.

So I believe the simple the calculator is the better it can help me on choosing investment properties.

Just use the example shown in the free Property Investment Calculator. You can download this Investment Property Spreadsheet for free.

Let's start with if I can afford this property. I have to pay $546.71 on a weekly basis for this property. Does my salary can cover this plus all the current living costs even if there is no rental income? It is important to consider the worst case. If I cannot pay without rental income, the property might be seized by the bank. If I don't have enough savings to pay the cost at the worse case that I am out of job and don't receive rental income for 3 months, I will not buy that property.

Now suppose I keep this property for three years and its value is up by 12%, what the ROI will be. The calculator shows the ROI is 95.27% - it costed me about $18,489 in total for the 3 years and brought back about $17,615 net profit (after tax and costs) for me. I believe this is a good return.

Of course, I have to validate the main assumption of 12% value increase by looking at the sold price data of same type properties in the same area. I also need to check with local council to see if there are any plans that might affect the future value of the property. After doing all the works, I believe this property is a good one to buy and then I buy it.

This investment property calculator does not only work with negative gearing properties, it also works with positive cash flow properties. For example, if for the same property you can get a $600 rental income per week, you will have a weekly positive income of $46.40 after tax and costs.

I hope this example can help you to understand this rental property investment calculator better. If you have any questions regarding this calculator, please let me know.

You might want to buy a rental property for investment because someone told you that you can get more tax refund if the property is a negative gearing one (which means you lose money on it). This is SO not true! A negative gearing investment property costs you money no matter how much more tax refund you can get back from ATO (Australian Taxation Office) if you don't get certain amount of capital gain when you sell it.