Why a missed tax benefit isn't a reason to walk away
A lot of investors are treating a tax benefit as gone for good, without checking whether that's actually true. For many, it's a timing question, not a lost cause.
I missed out on more favourable tax treatment on a purchase earlier this year, purely because of delays outside my control. It's the kind of thing that makes people reconsider a purchase entirely, and I'll admit I did too. This genuinely factored into my thinking. I sat with it, ran the numbers both ways, and didn't wave it through without pausing.
What settled it wasn't the tax treatment at all. It was going back to the property fundamentals and asking whether they still held up on their own. They did. My broker is also a close friend I've known for nearly ten years, and that history has built the kind of relationship where we're open, honest and direct with each other. That means he gives me his real perspective, not just what I might want to hear. He asked me a question that stuck: would I look back in twelve months at a higher valuation and regret not buying, knowing what I already knew about the market? It wasn't really a question about price. It was a question about whether I'd still be standing on the sidelines a year from now, no closer to where I wanted to be.
Here's what actually didn't change. The lending was assessed and approved on serviceability, the numbers as they stood, without relying on any tax benefit to make the loan work. If a bank has approved borrowing on that basis, the deal was never contingent on the tax treatment to begin with. A tax benefit is a bonus sitting on top of a deal that already works, not the reason it works.