After months of deliberating, I finally made the first step towards buying a property. I applied for an investment loan with Westpac few days ago. Westpac’s assessment of my borrowing power is pretty much in line with how much I want to borrow, so that’s all good. Once we got a loan pre-approval, then we can start to look around for property. Haven’t really looked around what other banks and lenders are offering, but their products probably don’t differ that much.

We have decided to go down the path of investment property ownership as opposed to the home ownership. This seems to be suited well in our situation, as currently we do have some benefits in staying to rent, like rental assistance from the government and our current unit has quite cheap rental. Of course there is the negative gearing benefit as well coming from investment, although frankly I am more comfortable with positively geared investment.

I closed my NAB credit card. Apparently the lower your credit card limit is, the happier the bank is to lend you money. I never maxed out any of my credit cards anyway, I have a few because of the discounts and rewards they have.

Another thing that I closed this week is my CFD account with IG Markets. I decided that I wasn’t really “investing” in the past few months, but in fact I was gambling. I am more inclined to invest for the long term nowadays rather than “trading”. Trading activity requires lots of time and effort, the two things that I can invest somewhere else for the time being.

This buying property thing might requires me to find another job as my current company’s financial situation is not that great.