Kate Hill - The Female Investor

Even though the salary gap remains, the number of women investing in property is rising — but more still could be done to secure your personal financial future.

Fundamentally, this book is about women being clued up, taking charge and being proactive with their finances via strategic property investment — at any age.

The truth is that most women have experienced a world in which they were not encouraged to take care of themselves financially.

We want to help change that because it potentially leads to dependency upon a spouse, another family member, continued employment late in life or even the government for financial support.

So, The Female Investor is a rallying cry from women to women — from us to you — to motivate women of all ages to get educated, take charge of your own financial future, and become proactive enough to stake your claim on the property market — now!

Here are some cold hard facts about the financial outcomes for women and men in our part of the world.

While most of these figures are drawn from Australian research, the situation is similar in most countries around the world — and the reality is that women are more likely than not to be financially inequitable with their male partners from the beginning of their relationships.

The lack of financial literacy for young children and teenagers is one reason for this imbalance, but one scary fact is that the financial outcomes for women and men in retirement start to solidify at the beginning of our working lives.

According to the Australian Government's Women's economic security in retirement insight paper (2020), even when women are in their late 20s, their superannuation balances are lower than men's.

The research found that women are on the back foot financially from the beginning of their careers and if they decide to have children, the gap just gets wider and wider, and it will keep growing throughout their lives.

By the time a woman retires in Australia, according to the insight paper, her average superannuation account balance is 17.4 per cent lower than a man's, which reflects the average superannuation account balances of $277 880 for women and $336 360 for men.

Even with Australia's superannuation scheme, which started in 1992, many women in Australia still retire without any funds whatsoever. Sadly, about one third of women wind up with no superannuation at all when they retire.

Superannuation was designed to help more people become financially independent in retirement, but most women and men still rely on the age pension as their primary source of income during that stage of their lives. According to the insight report, in 2017–18 about 70 per cent of women compared to 63 per cent of men relied on government pensions and allowances — these allowances could include payments such as an energy or essential‐medical‐equipment supplement, remote‐area or carers allowance, or other benefit payments to help fund health and medical care.

Do you know how much the age pension is in Australia? In 2021, the maximum rate for a single person is less than $500 per week, including all potential allowances, which is hardly enough to live the life you've long dreamed about, is it?

For anyone under the age of about 50, retirement seems like a long way away, so we don't give it much thought, do we?

Of course everyone should enjoy their life rather than squirrel away every spare dollar for a stage of life that is decades in the future, but you can't ignore the truth forever.

This means that unless you prepare for retirement when you are youngish, including purchasing a strategically selected property (or perhaps two or three), then the outcome for you may be spending your twilight years in poverty. Here are some stark statistics from government research:

Women are more likely than men to re‐enter the workforce following retirement, often due to financial constraints.

Women are twice as likely as men to sell their house and move to lower‐cost accommodation because of tight financial circumstances in retirement.

The Women's economic security in retirement insight paper also reported more elderly women than men are living in poverty in Australia. Therefore, women are far more likely to face higher financial insecurity in retirement than men.

One way that you can help to prevent this dire situation happening to you, as well as ensure you remain financially independent during your life, is to create wealth, security, and freedom through property.

We have written this book as a guide to help women understand how they can make their income work harder throughout their working lives, using property ownership as the vehicle.

While The Female Investor has been written with property investors — or landladies as we like to call them — predominantly in mind, you can apply this information to the purchase of any property, including your home.

The real‐estate sector is riddled with over‐the‐top male references. So, we like to balance these out by taking back the term ‘landladies' for female property investors.

We want every property you purchase to help you achieve superior capital growth over the medium to long term, as well as to assist with your future financial situation.

By understanding the key concepts, you will learn how to buy real estate with an investment mindset. This can help to maximise your returns as well as reduce the risks and kibosh your chances of buying a property lemon!

We believe that if, whatever your age, you understand property investment strategies thoroughly, you will be able to make more informed decisions to improve your financial outcomes in life. On top of that, you will be less likely to be stung by a property spruiker because you are educated (probably more than the spruiker!) about what makes an excellent property investment — and what does not.

Did you know that, according to the Grattan Institute's report Money in Retirement — more than enough , Australians who rent in the private market are more likely to suffer financial stress than homeowners, or renters in public housing? And this problem will get worse: on current trends, home ownership for over‐65s will decline from 76 per cent today to 57 per cent by 2056.

Remember those paltry pension rates we mentioned before? Well, $500 per week probably doesn't seem so bad when most of us believe that we will have our home paid off by retirement. That is, if we even own a home.

Clearly, the scenario becomes much more difficult when a single woman is trying to pay rent out of her pension, even if the government throws her some ‘rent assistance' to ease the financial burden.

There is no question that women have been forging their own paths for more than half a century now, with career progression, motherhood and independent wealth creation all worthy goals for each of us.

But, somewhere along the way, home ownership rates have started to slip, with high property prices likely to be one of the reasons why. However, as you will learn in The Female Investor, even women on modest incomes can (and should) purchase property — and preferably when they are single and in their 20s … but much more on that later.

According to the Women's economic security in retirement insight paper (2020), the largest asset held by Australians in retirement has traditionally been property. However, the number of Australians, including retirees, who own their home has been decreasing.

Across the age groups 15 years and over, the proportion of individuals who owned their home and were not paying a mortgage was 30 per cent in 2015–16, which was down from 35 per cent in 2003–04. Similarly, the insight paper found that 76 per cent of individuals aged 65 years and over were homeowners and not paying off a mortgage in 2015–16, which was down from 79 per cent in 2003–04.