Do other countries have the equivalent of Australia's Negative Gearing?
"I would say similar rules apply in the US.  If you have a net loss from rental property, you certainly can claim that loss against your personal income. There are various rules around this though that make it a bit less clear cut.  If you are a ""real estate professional"", which basicly means you spend at least 750 hours per year working on your rental properties (or related activities), then all losses are deductible against any other ordinary income you have. If you aren't a ""real estate professional"", then your rental income is considered a ""passive activity"" and losses you can count against regular income are limited to $25,000 per year (with a carry-forward provision) and begin to phase out entirely if your income is between $100,000 and $150,000. So, the law here is structured to allow most small-time investors to take rental real estate losses against their ordinary income, but the income phase-out provision is designed to prevent the wealthy from using rental property losses to avoid taxation." In India, where I live, you can: In addition, housing loans are given priority status as well - bank capital requirements on housing loans is lower than for, say, a corporate loan or a loan against other kinds of collateral. That makes housing loans cheaper as well - you get a home loan at around 10% in India versus 15% against most other assets, and since you can deduct it against tax, the effective interest rate is even lower.  Housing in India is unaffordable too, if you're wondering. In a suburb 40 Km away from Delhi, a 2000 sq. foot apartment, about 1500 sq. ft. of carpet area, with no appliances costs about USD 250,000.
As others have shown, if you assume that you can get 6% and you invest 15% of a reasonable US salary then you can hit 1 million by the time you retire. If you invest in property in a market like the UK (where I come from...) then insane house price inflation will do it for you as well. In 1968 my parents bought a house for £8000. They had a mortgage on it for about 75% of the value. They don't live there but that house is now valued at about £750,000. Okay, that's close to 60 years, but with a 55 year working life that's not so unreasonable. If you assume the property market (or the shares market) can go on rising forever... then invest in as much property as you can with your 15% as mortgage payments... and watch the million roll in. Of course, you've also got rent on your property portfolio as well in the intervening years. However, take the long view. Inflation will hit what a million is worth. In 1968, a million was a ridiculously huge amount of money. Now it's 'Pah, so what, real rich people have billions'. You'll get your million and it will not be enough to retire comfortably on! In 1968 my parents salaries as skilled people were about £2000 a year... equivalent jobs now pay closer to £50,000... 25x salary inflation in the time. Do that again, skilled professional salary in 60 years of £125000 a year... so your million is actually 4 years salary.  Not being relentlessly negative... just suggesting that a financial target like 'own a million (dollars)' isn't a good strategy. 'Own something that yields a decent amount of money' is a better one. It would be good to know which country you are in? You are basically on the right track with your last point. Usually when you buy your first property you need to come up with a deposit and then borrow the remainder to have enough to purchase the property. In most cases (and most places) the standard percentage of loan to deposit is 80% to 20%. This is expressed as the Loan to Value Ratio (LVR) which in this case would be 80%. (This being the amount of the loan to the value of the property). Some banks and lenders will lend you more than the 80% but this can usually come with extra costs (in Australia the banks charge an extra percentage when you borrow called Loan Mortgage Insurance (LMI) if you borrow over 80% and the LMI gets more expensive the higher LVR you borrow). Also this practice of lending more than 80% LVR has been tightened up since the GFC. So if you are borrowing 80% of the value of the property you will need to come up with the remainder 20% deposit plus the additional closing costs (taxes - in Australia we have to pay Stamp Duty, solicitor or conveyancing fees, loan application fees, building and pest inspection costs, etc.). If you then want to buy a second property you will need to come up with the same deposit and other closing costs again. Most people cannot afford to do this any time soon, especially since the a good majority of the money they used to save before is now going to pay the mortgage and upkeep of your first property (especially if you used to say live with your parents and now live in the property and not rent it out). So what a lot of people do who want to buy more properties is wait until the LVR of the property has dropped to say below 60%. This is achieved by the value of the property going up in value and the mortgage principle being reduced by your mortgage payments. Once you have enough, as you say, collateral or equity in the first property, then you can refinance your mortgage and use this equity in your existing property and the value of the new property you want to buy to basically borrow 100% of the value of the new property plus closing costs. As long as the LVR of the total borrowings versus the value of both properties remains at or below 80% this should be achievable. You can do this in two ways. Firstly you could refinance your first mortgage and borrow up to 80% LVR again and use this additional funds as your deposit and closing costs for the second property, for which you would then get a second mortgage. The second way is to refinance one mortgage over the two properties. The first method is preferred as your mortgages and properties are separated so if something does go wrong you don't have to sell everything up all at once. This process can be quite slow at the start, as you might have to wait a few years to build up equity in one property (especially if you live in it). But as you accumulate more and more properties it becomes easier and quicker to do as your equity will increase quicker with tenants paying a good portion of your costs if not all (if you are positively geared). Of course you do want to be careful if property prices fall (as this may drastically reduce your equity and increase your total LVR or the LVR on individual properties) and have a safety net. For example, I try to keep my LVR to 60% or below, currently they are below 50%. Can no one read? I never said anything about equivalence, it was an example of an off the books subsidy. And I'll pose the same question to you as the other commenter, do you think that having solar panels on your roof will keep the government from sending our military to other countries? Because if you do, that's truly laughable.   Apparently that author is clairvoyant enough to announce a 2016 report in an article dated July, 9th 2014. But I'll just assume you didn't actually read any of it. I did, and I'm not saying those figures are wrong, but that report has a clear stated agenda that is anti-oil/coal.  The report I linked was to a US agency that was only making the information available. It may also have inaccuracies, but I'm going to assume that data for identical years in these reports being interpreted wildly differently indicates one is manipulating the information. I'd assume that someone with an agenda would be more likely to manipulate the data than an agency just seeking to publish data.  Regardless, those inconsistencies should have some explanation. First, welcome to Money.SE. If you are interested in saving and investing, this is a great site to visit. Please take the tour and just start to read the questions you find interesting.  1 - even though this is hypothetical, it scales down to an average investor. If I own 1000 shares of the 1 billion, am I liable if the company goes under? No. Stocks don't work that way. If all I have is shares, not a short position, not options, I can only see my investment go to zero.  2 - Here, I'd ask that you edit your country in the tags. I can tell you that my newborn (who is soon turning 17) had a stock account in her name when she was a few months old. It's still a custodian account, meaning an adult has to manage it, and depending on the state within the US, the age that it's hers with no adult, is either 18 or 21. Your country may have similar regional rules.  Also - each country has accounts specifically geared toward retirement, with different favorable rules regarding taxation. In the US, we have accounts that can be funded at any age, so long as there's earned income. My daughter started one of these accounts when she started baby sitting at age 12. She will have more in her account by the time she graduates college than the average retiree does. It's good for her, and awful for the general population that this is the case. "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://www2.gsu.edu/~ecobth/HMW_PuzzlingMultJobHolding_SEJ_2017.pdf) reduced by 99%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; Just as the United States displays substantial differences in MJH across states and regions, Zangelidis finds large variation in MJH rates across countries in the EU, ranging from less than 1 to 9%.6 Livanos and Zangelidis document large differences in MJH rates across regions of Greece with rural areas with large primary sectors having the highest rates, likely due to low labor demand and weak primary 6 Zangelidis also finds that mean weekly hours on the second job average 12.9 hours across the continent, with little variation across countries.  &gt; A quick glance at state rates of MJH show Minnesota with among the highest MJH rates, while New York has a relatively low rate MJH rate as compared to other northern states.  &gt; Our approach is to examine the extent to which controlling for a variety of detailed worker, job, and city attributes can account for differences across labor markets in MJH. To describe the magnitude of MSA differences in MJH, we calculate the mean absolute deviation of MJH across our 259 labor markets based on estimates from increasingly dense individual worker OLS MJH equations using the 1995-2014 urban sample.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6l4ana/the_puzzling_pattern_of_multiple_job_holding/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~158577 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **MJH**^#1 **Job**^#2 **rate**^#3 **work**^#4 **Labor**^#5" "I'm not intimately familiar with the situation in Australia, but in the US the powers that be have adopted an interventionist philosophy. The Federal Reserve (Central Bank) is ""buying back"" US Gov't debt to keep rates low, and the government is keeping mortgage rates low buy buying mortgages with the proceeds of the cheap bond sales. While this isn't directly related to Australia, it is relevant because the largest capital markets are in the US and influence the markets in Australia. In the US, the CPI is a survey of all urban consumers. If you're a younger, middle class consumer with income growth ahead of you, your costs are going to shift more rapidly than an elderly or poor person who already owns or is in subsidized housing, and doesn't spend as much on transportation. For example, my parents are in their early 60's and are living in the house that I grew up in, which they own free and clear. There are alot of people like them, and they aren't affected by the swing in housing prices that we've seen in the last decade." You borrow on  the international makets.  [Moody's predicts Scotland would get an 'A' credit rating](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-27247870)  [Standard &amp; Poors - Independent Scotland could be AAA rated](http://www.businessforscotland.co.uk/independent-scotland-could-be-aaa-rated-standard-poors)  [Credit Suisse report independent Scotland would be ranked four places higher than the rUK.](http://www.newsnetscotland.com/index.php/scottish-news/9637-scotland-ahead-of-ruk-even-without-oil-says-credit-suisse-report)  [An independent Scotland would be a wealthy and financially viable country like New Zealand, but could suffer initial growing pains, according to credit ratings agency Standard &amp; Poor's.](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/27/independent-scottish-economy-viable-slow-first-standard-poors) "But their economy is based on -- built upon -- the very concept of debt, just like the U.S. and most other advanced economies on the planet. Debt itself isn't the problem -- having to borrow to get capital and then *service the debt* is where the problems appear because whilst one group in the economy continues this old pattern of issuing debt and expecting payback with interest, another prominent group has been undercutting the ability of debtors to service their debt by shifting how products and services develop and are used by the public. It's the old ""watch this hand"" trick with the other hand stabbing you when you're not looking.  Simply put, you can't have an economy based upon the debt/return-on-interest model while -- at the very same time -- having an economy based on make-everything-in-China/India production/service model: If you make people have to borrow money to have money, then you *must* give them a way to service that debt; otherwise, you're just a daft bastard who refuses to acknowledge that adding two and two returns four; an imbecile who insists that he can indeed have his cake and eat it too; I could go on but the point is made."