Tips on Leveraging

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By Neal A. Lawrence


To improve your financial returns, Borrowing to buy mutual funds or other form of investment can be an effective way. However, it involves more risk than paying for an investment completely with cash.

"Gearing" is the other term for investing with borrowed money or it can also be called as "leveraging". With this, you earn profit as long as you are investing at a higher rate compared to your borrowing cost.

Home Leveraging

The most common way of leveraging where you use your home's equity as a security for an investment loan is home leveraging. Basically, your property's equity is the difference between its value and what you owe it. Home leveraging is an excellent way to put that equity to carry out. If applied with an effective investing strategy, home gearing can produce high amount of profits. On the other side of the coin, the worst thing that may happen is putting your equity or possibly your home at risk.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Leveraging

Advantages of Gearing:

* Accelerate your wealth creation - build our wealth faster by investing a larger amount of cash than you could have otherwise invested using your own money

* Tax payment reduction - interest and other cost of leveraging may be tax deductable and could potentially reduce your tax income.

* Equity Utilisation - borrowing against your current portfolio can unlock equity. Furthermore, you are able to hold a larger more diversified investment

* Bring forward tax deductions - bringing forward a tax deduction by prepaying interest is possible (for up to 1 year).

Disadvantages:

* Gearing can magnify gains but at the same time it can also magnify losses if investment returns are less than your gearing costs, you may be unable to service your loan.

* Loan cost and interest rate risks. The changes to interest rates and fees change the cost of your loan. Moreover, deciding to terminate your loan can also have additional charges.

* Capital risks are also high because the assets you may invest in may not perform as expected.

* Like any loan, you have to ensure that you can afford the service of it because there can always be income risk. Sometimes, it is not good to rely on your investment because this source may not always enough. Whatever kind of investment you're putting up, you always make sure that your cash flow is sufficient to meet both your living expenses and loan repayments.

* The changes in tax legislation as well as the regulatory framework may reduce the tax advantages of leveraging that can cause legal risk.

While borrowing to invest can be an effective technique to business, it is not for everyone. Ask for an expert financial advice from a reliable and skilled agency whether this type of debt is good for you or not before you invest.




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