Christopher Lee

I’ve been really busy lately spending the last 3 months house hunting for an investment property. From knowing nothing about property & fearing about being in debt, I am now a proud owner of a two bedroom apartment! I think what’s stopping a lot of people from getting into the property market is fear of the unknown or more so fear of a misconception. Let’s put it this way, if you can afford to pay $200/week in rent & live comfortably, you can afford your own 2 bedroom apartment with the same weekly repayments (if you lease 1 room out). I never knew owning your own property was that affordable until I started looking into property investing. Given the constant increase in rental prices, it’s not surprising to find rent almost equalling a mortgage repayment.

Buying a property requires intense research and a lot of time which can be emotionally draining. One thing I found annoying and time consuming was jumping back and forth between all the different calculators available online (home loan repayment calculators, tax calculators, holding cost calculators). I wanted one calculator that would combine everything and tell me exactly what I needed to know from a property investor’s point of view – the bottom line cost of owning a property. This brought me to making my own calculator that would tell me the holding cost of a property before rental income, after rental income and after negative gearing (how much you’ll get back from tax). I’ve included the main costs associated with most properties such as strata, council rates, water rates, landlord’s insurance, property management fees & loan interest. It’s a very straight forward calculator, fill in the grey boxes and let the calculator work it’s magic. There are two other tabs that gives you the weekly breakdown of the repayments (based on your loan amount, interest rate & extra weekly repayments). Note that this calculator is based on an interest only repayment.

Here is the link to download the investment property holding cost calculator.

Feel free to leave a comment with questions or any feedback/suggestions.