Apartment Choice

From July 1, NSW doubled the stamp duty on foreign buyers to 8 per cent. THERE are nascent signs Chinese foreign buyers have toned down their enthusiastic buying of Sydney property . There are three pinpointed causes. Firstly, Beijing has narrowed the window for capital outflows to Australia. At the same time, Australian banks have tightened lending criteria to mainland China investors due to APRA regulatory requirements , and in some cases won’t lend to foreign investors at all. This week Chinese local and international estate agents reported a sharp drop-off in sales over the last six weeks as new property taxes took effect after the NSW state budget . From July 1, NSW doubled the stamp duty on foreign buyers to 8 per cent and increased the land tax surcharge from 0.75 per cent to 2 per cent. Chinese local and international estate agents reported a sharp drop-off in sales over the last six weeks. It’s a little too early to say the allure of Australian property has gone, b...

This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org. I suspect that when Americans think about retiring abroad, they focus on Latin American countries , due to proximity and because places like Panama, Belize, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic usually show up on Best Places to Retire Abroad lists . Well, you won’t find any of those four countries in the Top 10 of The World’s Best Places to Retire in 2017 from Live and Invest Overseas . What you will find is a preponderance of Europe (six of the Top 10) plus a smattering of Mexico (two places) and Asia (two places, both in Malaysia). Another surprise: eight of those didn’t even make the Top 10 in the 2016 list from Live and Invest Overseas . “That surprised me too,” said Lief Simon, investment editor at Live and Invest Overseas and husband of the group’s founder and publisher, Kathleen Peddicord. In this year’s Top 10, the Algarve region of southern Portugal ranked No. 1 (for the fourth year in a row). Rounding out the...

Katz’s Deli, the iconic New York deli, has been serving its customers for well over 100 years. Getty Images Elon Musk once compared building a business to “eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” George Orwell, for his part, once described writing a book as a “bout with a long illness,” a sentiment that many entrepreneurs and creatives would agree with. The point is: No one would willingly subject themselves to any of the suffering that goes into building something if they thought their efforts were going to disappear with the wind. Yet the truth is, most businesses and most art does disappear. It might be easier than ever today to start a business—a few bucks on LegalZoom and you’re the CEO of a brand new LLC. What is still hard and what has always been hard it keeping your doors open, staying in business, and keeping customers happy over the long term will never be easy. In a world obsessed with the new and the trendy, we don’t tend to give enough credit to people do ma...