NZ Herald 27 May 2006
Q&As: All on government’s tax proposals.
The Investor 23 May 2006
Property backers underplay risk. Property backers seem to go in for hyperbole. Two examples from readers’ letters: “Shares are not and have never been as lucrative as property…. We now know why the richest people in the world and in NZ are property investors.”; “The average person can quietly work themselves into a residential property portfolio worth several million dollars with a decade or two of judicious acquisitions…. People putting a portion of their income aside to buy into share funds are left in the dust.”
The Investor 9 May 2006
Index distortion not what it seems. A reader’s point about the ongoing shares v houses debate sounds fair enough. “Your comparisons do not compare like with like,” he writes, “because you are using an index for shares, which only covers some companies, whereas for housing, you are using the average over all houses.”
The Investor 25 April 2006
Shares easier than reader thinks. It’s like a red rag to a bull. A paragraph in a reader’s email started, “Without getting into the share v property argument…” But why not get into it? After all, it’s at the very heart of most New Zealanders’ thinking about long-term investment. The reader, a mortgage broker, goes on to say, “I believe it is good for people to have a dabble in shares with spare cash but use property as their main retirement plan, even if they go hard out paying off just one rental property.
Holm Truths Autumn 2006
Stuff and happiness: Buying things you don’t really need. Also in this issue: From the Mailbox — Should a young man buy himself a house?