Have I done the wrong thing?

QI’m retired, aged 66, and a selffunded retiree. I live with my partner, who owns the home we live in. We are financially independent.

I bought a residential investment property 10 years ago and have 20 years left to repay the remaining $200,000. I’ve just read The Barefoot Investor and now I’m concerned I’ve made a big mistake by investing in a residential property, and by having a fixed interest rate. One strategy suggested in the book is to invest in a property trust like BWP Trust.

Should I sell the property and put the maximum amount of money ($1 million) into super, and invest the rest in a property trust? Or do you have any other suggestions for my money?

I’ve known Scott Pape, the author of The Barefoot Investor, since he was a young adult and I like his values, his ethics and his advice. But when you write a book you cannot take every individual’s situation into account. I’ve written plenty of books and you can only provide broad information.

You’ve owned your property for 10 years. How has it performed? A good performance would be around 3% income after running costs and capital growth of, say, 3%-4% a year. If it is doing well, I see no reason to pay selling costs, capital gains tax on any profits and the brokerage fees to re-invest!

If it has performed poorly, sure, getting rid of a bad investment makes sense. But even if you did that, I’d be thinking that a diversified pool of assets would be a much better idea than a single property trust.

Super is a great retirement asset, but here I would want you to seek advice. I don’t see how you could pop $1 million into super these days.

More importantly, though, the real issue is your property. If it is performing nicely and likely to keep doing so, I’d hang onto it.