About Alex Isaias

Alex brings more than 15 years of experience providing specialist advice, consulting, and coaching across corporate superannuation, group insurance, employee share schemes, financial wellness programs, and complex financial planning. He has significant expertise managing competitive tenders for corporate superannuation and group insurance, ensuring our corporate clients can confidently offer employee benefits that are highly valued by their teams. Alex also chairs our Investment Committee, overseeing Harvest’s strategic portfolio construction and investment research processes.

How can you enhance your borrowing capacity

At at time when property prices have risen strongly, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, many prospective property buyers ask us what they can do enhance their borrowing capacity (the amount of money a lender will be willing to lend them). Today the Reserve Bank of Australia met to review the official cash rate. They

Are Australian Banks still a good investment?

We have experienced some difficult investment market conditions over the last 12 months.  Globally, the key issues which have impacted markets are slowing growth and the need for low official interest rates to stimulate economies. Australian banks performed very well over the period of March 2009 to March 2015, however have pulled back significantly over

How much can I borrow to buy a property?

This is often one of the first questions that we are asked by clients when they are looking to buy a home or an investment property. In this article we focus on some of the recent changes to property loan lending and how they affect the amount that prospective buyers are able to borrow. The

Interest rates outlook

Our interest rates outlook over the next 12 months is for the official RBA cash rate to remain steady at 2.0%. Many market commentators expect the RBA will reduce the official cash rate by 0.25%, and it could be as soon as May 2016. If the RBA does reduce rates by 0.25% we expect

The latest Sydney property market news

We currently assess the Sydney property market to be at the high end of fair value. We expect that it may have peaked during 2015, and if there is a price drop in 2016 that it will be modest. We anticipate the price drop to be in the vicinity of 5%. Our view on

Staying calm during a volatile market

Welcome to the New Year, we look forward to guiding you through the investment market in 2016. 2015 in review At home the broader Australian market (S&P ASX300) finished just 2.8% up for the calender year, trading between 5982 in late April to 4918 in late September. All major commodities continued to fall throughout the

Property purchase: get your ducks in a row

Being prepared at each stage of your property purchase can help to ensure everything runs smoothly, saving you a lot of time and stress. By now we have already discussed building your deposit, getting all the assistance available to you if you are a first home buyer and knowing how much you can borrow.

Investing for income in retirement

A large number of Australia’s population are approaching retirement age and looking for an income stream to fund their retirement. By law retirees aged between 65 and 74 need to drawdown a minimum of 5% of the value of their pension investments each year. Unfortunately, a conservative investment portfolio will generally provide a return below