Best products from r/AusFinance

We found 23 comments on r/AusFinance discussing the most recommended products. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 28 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the top 20.

Top comments mentioning products on r/AusFinance:

u/CPCPub · 2 pointsr/AusFinance

Growth is good, but you can do better by getting directly into the underlying funds themself. However, if you just choose 'growth' option, you'll be doing a lot better then most people who just ignore super completely and waste away a lot of potential earninigs.

It would be easy for me to say to you "just invest in X Y & Z", but the problem is that it would be much better for you, if you took the time to understand why I would be telling you that in the first place. Learning about investments properly and having a competent understanding will change & improve your life a great deal and will give you a big edge over other people your own age.

I highly recommend that you find & read this book:- https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Teacher-Wealth-Should-Learned/dp/0470830069

I recommend this book specifically because I have found it is very easy to read and not intimidating for anyone from a non-financial background. I used to give this book to staff members who worked for me in a previous job where I had a lot of 18-25 year old staff members reporting to me, and they all said they wish information like this had been taught in high school.

There are other books you could read of course, but I have found this one is the best for people who are "newbies" to dealing with finance, wealth & investments.

Of course, I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have.

u/BigFrodo · 6 pointsr/AusFinance

Disclaimer: I'm mid20s guy with less invested in shares than I have in my super. The following is what I did to get started in investing which sounds like you're about where I was a year or two ago.

First of all; depending on your circumstances be aware that ING Direct's or ME Bank's savings accounts are currently giving 3.00% interest which might be better than your term deposit if you don't want to go whole hog into shares right away. (ING Direct also does $50 bonus referral codes so expect a flood of PMs now that I've mentioned this)

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As for books:
/r/FI's wiki makes some good recommendations from what I've read of them

>Investing

>* The Bogleheads Guide to Investing

  • A Random Walk Down Wallstreet
  • The Four Pillars of Investing
  • The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns
  • Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School -- Suggestion - Ignore Rule 9 regarding individual stock picking.
  • The Intelligent Investor -- Caution - Embark on individual stock ownership at your own risk.

    The lowest barrier to entry would be that "acorns" app but I strongly recommend taking the couple days to make a CMC account or some other online brokerage with low fees and buy ETFS through that instead so that you're actually learning how it all works and not just pressing buttons on an app. Link it up with free Sharesight account for pretty graphs and easy tax reporting and that should teach you more about "having a share portfolio" than the majority of the population.

    Obviously this subreddit and /r/fiaustralia in the sidebar are worth keeping an eye on for insight from people with more skin in the game than me.

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    Now, the other option is you want to ACTIVELY trade that $1k. If you've read some of Bogle's explanations on why that's a bad idea, realised you'll be competing against people with much bigger budgets and a full time job anaysing these things and understand that even at CMC's low $13 flat fee you're losing 1.3% of your $1k packet with every trade then you'll need advice from someone other than me.

    Personally the best investment I think I have made so far was my $1k of "beer money" that I threw into bitcoin. Not because it made a good return, but because after months of careful analysis, frequent trading and keeping an ear to the ground on new alt coins I turned my 3.5 bitcoin into 1.05. I didn't end up losing a cent thanks to other factors but seeing how badly my "high risk, high gain, actively managed portfolio" went I'm ecstatic that I learned my lesson with $1k and not with my self-managed super fund at 57 y/o like several people I know.

    TL;DR: Anything by John Bogle
u/www_enthusiast · 0 pointsr/AusFinance

Not really tax, though I just bought "wealth of nations", been advised its still good 200 years on and its a good foundation for you to build specific / new investment information up on

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side note, one book that has helped myself quite a bit is

https://www.amazon.com/Eight-Pillars-Prosperity-James-Allen/dp/1442119934

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" In *As a Man Thinketh***, James Allen showed how our thoughts and dreams determine the sort of person we become. In Eight Pillars of Prosperity,** he reveals--in great depth and detail--the exact qualities we must meditate upon in order to achieve lasting success.


Prosperity rests on eight pillars: Energy, Economy, Integrity, System, Sympathy, Sincerity, Impartiality, and Self-reliance. "A business built up on the faultless practice of all these principles," "

u/khalido · 6 pointsr/AusFinance

the below is a bit disjointed and more like a ELI10, but based on real life ppl I know:

Paying a lot more than you needed to for something is always a bad idea, whatever its for (unless helping a friend with some new business, like buying overpriced breakfast at their new cafe).

Too many ppl think that if you bought a house to live in it doesn't matter what you paid for it since 30yrs later it should be worth more anyways. From a non-Australian perspective, this is sheer madness, and for me a great illustration of how masses of ppl just buy into bad ideas.

A real, concrete, very hard to deal with issue with overpaying for housing is that lots of ppl did so at the extreme utter super duper maximum of what they could conceivably afford if everything went well. But many signs point to that everything might not go swimmingly, from global events (US/China tariffs, climate change) to local things - an Australian recession triggered by one of the many ongoing factors, like a government unable to implement decent policies, slowing construction, slowing demand for Australian exports, yada yada.

there are real life ppl who have committed to humongous mortgages in Australia in the last 2-3 yrs which are already underwater - this means they can't sell their house if they are struggling with payments, or they bought the wrong thing, or they realised (too late) that they don't like having to pay half their income to the bank, and the associated pressures of needed to stay in that high paying job with no option of ever switching to other things they always wanted to do.

To some extent, this is a firstworldproblem, I mean they have their cake (a nice job) and the icing (a nice house) but its still stressful and lowers quality of life for ppl who are otherwise seemingly doing quite well. I'd argue that debt is a huge mental burden for a significant amount of the people holding overpriced mortgages, and there isn't enough discussion in this country about it.

Besides the personal stuff, there are a lot of big picture society level implications of high housing pricing - see Death and Life of Great American Cities for a nice intro discussion on how housing effects ppl living there.

The other thing which has been ongoing in Australia for many years now is that the very fabric of Australia is changing - I don't know of many older Aussies whose kids stay anywhere close to them - except in a few cases where the bank of mum and dad essentially bought the house or rented one of their IP's for cheap to their kids. This doesn't seem very healthy to me.

Its not good for society to form communities based mostly on income. You end up with communities which are very stratified by income and family wealth, and some books argue quite convincingly that this really makes it hard for real close knit communities to form.

In this sub many ppl blame ppl for overpaying for houses but most ppl just do what society, banks, governments, newspapers, everyone is telling them to do - to take out a max loan, put in a little bit more, then buy a house.

Leaving aside the bottom 25% or so and looking at how the middle class to upper ppl live in well off countries, like Europe and USA, nobody (hyperbole but still) has anywhere close to the debt ratio that so many Australians have. Australia has been a "lucky country" in many respects but that doesn't give Australia a magic exemption from debt.

u/Maphover · 33 pointsr/AusFinance

If you're interested in reading about this and other subtle strategies used to influence, I suggest you check out the book influence: the psychology of persuasion. It's one of my faves. It details:

  • Reciprocity
  • Anchoring
  • Scarcity
  • Decoy effect
  • Similarity bias (fear of difference)
  • Small commitment to influence longer term commitment
  • Making efforts difficult to increase eventual satisfaction (Ikea effect)

    All very interesting stuff that you can see in action every day.
u/SerpentineLogic · 1 pointr/AusFinance

The Worldly Philosophers

> The Worldly Philosophers is a bestselling classic that not only enables us to see more deeply into our history but helps us better understand our own times. In this seventh edition, Robert L. Heilbroner provides a new theme that connects thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The theme is the common focus of their highly varied ideas -- namely, the search to understand how a capitalist society works. It is a focus never more needed than in this age of confusing economic headlines.

u/Drop5Stacks · 2 pointsr/AusFinance

At your age, it's more important to set good savings habits, avoid debt and 'lifestyle inflation'. Remember, compound interest means that even small amounts you save/invest now will end up being huge by the time you retire.

Recommendations:

u/will_bah · 3 pointsr/AusFinance

Bond Economics is pretty good blog resource. And the CFA book fixed income analysis is a really thorough read (academic though and made for post-grad study), you can find that at libgen rus or other places around the internet. Also Stephen Moyer has a book on distressed debt valuation is a super good read. That said, to get bonds outside of ETF's you do need a large amount of money and a premium broker.

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EDIT (due to not reading the full Qu's): Vanguard bond ETFs are usually safer than holding one type of bond due to diversification risk. I.e from what I know about XTB you're getting one companies bonds.

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In terms of yields, generally this calced by risk. The riskier the bond the higher the yield. A totally safe bond like a Western governments will have a low yield as investors are confident it will be paid back. A shitty corporate bond with no assets will have a large yield as it is risky.

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There is also where bonds full in capitalisation rank. I.e those secured by assets (that investors can get to in case of default) will have a lower yield than those that are not secured.

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The rabbit hole for how yield is calced goes very deep my man and has many moving parts. This has barely scratched the surface.

u/The_Amp_Walrus · 1 pointr/AusFinance

\> But can our economy really grow that much faster than it currently is?

I'm guessing our most productive workers are in inner-city, and we could improve our productivity (and growth) by getting more Australians closer to our capital city central business districts. I've hear economist Tyler Cowen make a similar argument for the United State's most productive cities, like San Franscisco.

Melbourne is ratfucked in this regard, with sprawl and long commute times. This could have been avoided by building denser housing closer to the city and more public transport capacity.

I'm sitting in my 6 story aparment building in Fitzroy looking directly at the CBD, which is like a kilometer away, and most of what I see is 1-2 story houses. How the fuck did we manage that? People avoid moving in closer to the city because of high rents and land prices: something that could be addressed by the government promoting more inner city housing.

New apartments that have been recently built around Melbourne's CBD are tiny, ugly shitboxes and the towers themselves are apparently shoddily build (eg. Opal tower). This didn't have to happen - builders had a set of government controlled incentives that nudged them into building creaking towers full of tiny apartments.

Then there's Fishermen's bend, where the Victorian govenment gave a "grey gift" to the people who owned the land, at the expense of the rest of the Victorian public, which in turn makes it hard for the government to make it a nice place to live.

That's just one facet of our economy where the government has completely dropped the ball, so yeah I think there's heaps of money on the table in terms of growth in Australia.

Interesting pop-econ books on the subject:

u/Black_Light · 3 pointsr/AusFinance

Feel free not to answer if you don't want to talk about it, but how'd you lose $17850?

In your defense, last week wasn't a particularly good week anyway ... my small portfolio dropped by over 2k

As for the books and stuff, I started by reading this: http://www.amazon.com/Bogleheads-Guide-Investing-Taylor-Larimore/dp/0470067365

The amazon description hits the nail on the head:

> The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing is a slightly irreverent, straightforward guide to investing for everyone.

It's very basic, but a good foundation if you really don't know anything.

u/snrubovic · -6 pointsr/AusFinance

Or ... you could read books that are not based on half-truths and fallacies that will lead you to a range of unnecessary and easily avoidable risks.

Here are a couple of suggestions
The Simple Path to Wealth - J L Collins
The Bogleheads' Guide to the Three-Fund Portfolio

u/BlinBlinski · 3 pointsr/AusFinance

If you want to really understand ETFs i can highly recommend this book

u/rbinary · 2 pointsr/AusFinance

The Armchair Guide to Property Investing is apparently a good read. https://www.amazon.com.au/Armchair-Guide-Property-Investing-Retire/dp/0994256043


They also do a podcast called The Property Couch: https://thepropertycouch.com.au/