Have you ever been thinking to purchase the investment property? And how do you feel like about it? Easy or Hard? It could be easy as long as you pay attention to the critical things and factors before you make the decision. There are six things you may need to weight up before you get into the market.

1. Motivation - A quality property could be an excellent long term asset that can help you achieve important personal goals like building personal wealth or saving for retirement. Thinking carefully about what your goals are and will a rental property help you achieve them?
2. Long term outlook - There are many costs involved in buying and selling an investment property aside from the weekly mortgage payment. These include stamp duty, legal fees and agent’s commission. All of this can add tens of thousands of dollars to your expenses and it can take time to recoup through capital growth.
3. Comfortable on an investment loan - While investment loans often come with higher interest at least it can be claimed on tax. So be careful and ensure to take into account future interest rate rises which you may need to kick in for.
4. Gap between lease vacancy - Most rental properties experience periods of vacancy from time to time. Be sure your budget can cover these no-rent periods.
5. Maintenance and repairs cost – Thinking to have enough cash on hand to pay for when things go wrong. It will be worth having a slush fund of cash to cover these expenses, or at least a back-up source of funds that you can draw on in an emergency.
6. Don’t be blindsided by tax perks - Negative gearing and other tax concessions and deductions sound great, but don’t let his be the only reason you are investing.

Source: Realestate.com.au/news

You can claim vehicle and other travel expenses directly connected with your work, but generally you can't claim for normal trips between home and work as this is considered private travel.

Trips between home and work are generally considered private travel. However, you can claim deductions in some circumstances, as well as for some travel between two workplaces.

If your travel was partly private and partly for work, you can only claim for the part related to your work.

What you can claim:

• directly between two separate workplaces – for example, when you have a second job
• from your normal workplace to an alternative workplace (for example, a client's premises) while still on duty, and back to your normal workplace or directly home
• if your home was a base of employment – you started your work at home and travelled to a workplace to continue your work for the same employer
• if you had shifting places of employment – you regularly work at more than one site each day before returning home
• from your home to an alternative workplace for work purposes, and then to your normal workplace or directly home. This does not apply where the alternative workplace has become a regular workplace
• if you needed to carry bulky tools or equipment you used for work and couldn't leave them at your workplace – for example, an extension ladder or a cello.

What you can't claim
You can't claim the cost of driving your car between work and home just because:

• you do minor work-related tasks – for example, picking up the mail on the way to work or home
• you have to drive between your home and your workplace more than once a day
• you are on call – for example, you are on stand-by duty and your employer contacts you at home to come into work
• there is no public transport near where you work
• you work outside normal business hours – for example, shift work or overtime
• your home was a place where you ran your own business and you travelled directly to a place of work where you worked for somebody else
• you do some work at home.

However you can count your home as a workplace if you carry out itinerant work.

If you do itinerant work (or have shifting places of work) you can claim the cost for driving between workplaces and your home. The following factors may indicate you do itinerant work:

• Travel is a fundamental part of your work, as the very nature of your work, not just because it is convenient to you or your employer.
• You have a 'web' of work places you travel to, throughout the day.
• You continually travel from one work site to another.
• Your home is a base of operations – if you start work at home and cannot complete it until you attend at your work site.
• You are often uncertain of the location of your work site.
• Your employer provides an allowance in recognition of your need to travel continually between different work sites and you use this allowance to pay for your travel.

Source: Travel between home and work and between workplaces

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