Investment Update Mid 2026 (Another Property Sold!)

Welcome to my latest portfolio update.

This one is a bit more eventful than usual.

We sold another rental property, and now there’s only one more to go.

If you’re new here, these posts are simply to share what’s going on with our investments, explain how things are evolving behind the scenes, and any changes that are being made.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

— Current wealth allocation
— How much dividends we earned for FY26
— Share portfolio breakdown
— Property update + future investing plans

If you want to read my previous portfolio update, you can find it here.  But let’s kick things off with the property news…

We sold another property

As mentioned in my last update, this year we planned to sell our remaining two rental properties in Perth.

Both are 3×2 villas, in different suburbs roughly 10km from Perth.  The first one went on the market in March after the lease expired.

We actually sold a few shares to raise some cash to spend a bit of money on the property.  One of the downsides of keeping a very low cash balance lol.  We had the property painted, carpeted, styled/staged, and a few other smaller things.

People often debate whether doing these things is worth it or not – especially staging with a furniture package.  The truth is, you can never know for sure because you can’t run a live comparison of your property with/without it.

After selling a few properties with and without spending money on presentation, I’ve come to the conclusion that, on balance, it’s usually worth it.  But it does depend on the property itself, price of works, and the target buyer – so there’s no right answer.

Anyway, we hoped to fetch a price somewhere in the high 800s.  We had one serious buyer, and one low-ball offer.  It ended up selling for just over 900k – so we’re very happy with the outcome!

That said, the home opens were much quieter than both ourselves and the agent expected.  And they said it occurred across most of their opens.  By the time settlement rolled around, they told us that things had calmed down big time from the frenzied behaviour earlier this year.

From what I’ve heard from others in the market, the recent budget has only solidified that slowdown.  So it looks like we may have sold just in time.

Now, I don’t think prices are going into freefall.  But when uncertainty creeps in, things can become temporarily depressed for a while.  I had the same experience trying to sell a property back in 2019, when Bill Shorten’s tax policies were announced, the market went very quiet, very quickly.

More on property in a moment.  But now let’s get onto some charts and then I’ll share a few thoughts on strategy and plans going forward.

Current wealth breakdown

As I write this, here’s the rough allocation of our wealth:

The main changes from last time are…

— Investment property equity down
— Super up
— Home equity up
— Cash up

The percentage allocations don’t really move as much as I expected.  But I realised that’s because as the numbers grow larger, it takes more dollars to move the needle.  Plus the remaining assets are moving differently between the updates.

Anyway, we’ve allocated most of the cash from sale, but not all of it.

With the sale proceeds, we used 5 years worth of catchup contributions for Mrs SMA – the same thing we did with our previous sale (in my name) late last year.

There’s also a nice chunk set aside for both our tax bills – which I’ve removed from this calculation.  And still some cash to invest (more on this in a minute).

For those who are new here, the ‘Pearler’ slice does not refer to my brokerage account (as a commenter asked about last time).  It represents a small stake I own in the company 🙂

The ‘Home Equity’ portion is now getting fairly large.  This means there’s probably opportunity here to borrow against our home to invest further – something to consider.

Investment income and share portfolio

Below is the latest chart showing the overall level of income produced for the financial year ending June 2026.

Since the tax statements from the ETFs haven’t come out yet, I’m guesstimating the franking level of VAS for the final dividend at 75%.  I’ll be sure to update this for the next update.

This number is simply dividends and franking credits.

Explainer on our dividend history:

In 2021, we sold an IP and invested a lump sum. So, 2022 income would’ve been much higher, but we then sold a big chunk of shares to buy a house (wasn’t planned before). We then sold another IP and transferred the loan to our current home, giving us a huge pile of cash to invest (explained here). We also decided to become ‘fully invested’ and invest the remaining cash in our offset.

Well, that’s not the ideal direction!  But there’s a few things at play here.

With our increasing allocation to global shares (VGS), and selling two REITs last year, a lower portfolio yield is expected.

Having said that, this year VAS seems to have had a lower distributions (around $3 per unit vs $3.50 ish per unit for the last few years).  Part of that may be slightly lower turnover in the fund, lower dividends from Australian companies, or both.

Of course, given VGS has recently returned an average yield of only 1.5%, we could easily harvest a further 2% income by trimming some of the capital gains.  This would actually take the portfolio income to around $60k.  If we needed the income, that’s exactly what I’d do.

Plans for our final property sale

Alright, so there’s one more property to sell.

With this one, the lease expires in a few months time.  And it’s actually a bit tricky.  We’re tossing up out of three approaches:

1- Wait until the tenant moves out, spend money improving the property, and do the same then sell.  But that takes time.  So that would actually push the selling time closer to the end of the year, when there are less buyers.  Then we run the risk of having a lengthy and expensive vacancy period until the market gets going again in mid January.

2- If the market heats up again and things are selling well, just sell it earlier with the tenants still in there.  Settlement would fall after the lease expires, so it wouldn’t deter owner occupiers.  The issue here is not being able to maximise sale price due to selling it ‘as is’ and having the tenant still in there –  versus having it beautifully staged, painted, etc.

3- If the market is a bit soft, or due to point 1, extend the lease for a further 6 months.  Ideally, by this time the market would be stronger due to the ongoing undersupply (there’s still not enough building vs population growth).  This way, there’s no timing issues and we can get the property in its best condition for sale.

While I don’t think prices will boom further from here, I’d like to avoid selling in a period of weakness.  It can make a fairly big difference.  So I think we’ll play it by ear and see how things shape up over the next few months.

Portfolio temptations…

Long time readers will know I used to invest in Aussie LICs.

The old, boring, low cost variety that follows a long term buy/hold strategy, with a focus on providing shareholders with a decent income stream that grows over time.

It came to my attention recently that some are trading at very large discounts to the value of their assets.  To a level that has basically not been seen before.

I think it’s for 3 reasons.  The massive popularity of ETFs, recent decade  underperformance, and high interest rates making term deposits more appealing to retirees than dividends.

Don’t get me wrong, I prefer an index fund as much as the next guy.  But if Argo is trading at a 15-20% discount, then far out it’s tempting.  Especially given it’s also less ‘top heavy’ than VAS.

And yes, they may underperform, but with a discount that large, you’re being compensated for that.  You’d be getting an extra 1-1.5% gross income above the underlying portfolio.  So underperformance would have to be more than this for you to be worse off.  Yes the discount may widen, but there’s a limit to that – and again that would increase the relative attractiveness and underlying cheapness of that basket of stocks.

I have an internal resistance towards adding things to the portfolio, but I’m only human, lol.

Another thing I’m considering is… bitcoin.

While I’ve never been interested in non income producing assets, I have kept a very distant eye on it over the last 5 years or so.

Then, about 18 months ago I posted this on my socials:

Since that time, I read the arguments on both sides and waded through the fanatical talking points.

“It’s going to zero”
“It’s going to take over the world”

The price also happens to be currently down around 50% from the highs.  Anyway, I’ll put together an article on the topic to explain my thoughts on it.

One thing that bothers me about adding things to the portfolio is that I’m an all or nothing type person.  I don’t want to add a small amount of anything – that just seems pointless and almost like clutter.

Small additional holdings add mental load and admin without really moving the needle on performance or diversification.  I understand something that’s wildly volatile can be an exception to this.  But I’d rather not bother unless it’s a decent amount, which adds gravity to the decision and means it needs more consideration.

Final thoughts

I’ve been thinking a bit more about the portfolio these days as it gets closer to becoming 100% shares (when you include super and exclude home equity).  Perhaps that’s why I’m getting curious about other holdings?

After doing my spending article, I realised how our assets are now a real-life snowball.  When I did the numbers, our assets have created 3-4X as many dollars as our part-time work efforts since 2017.

That’s pretty bizarre to think about, and also very exciting.

Only recently I caught up with a reader-turned-friend Mr MND.  Over lunch, we chatted about life, travels, and all sorts of things.  We followed it up with a long walk.  As we walked, we both expressed our child-like amazement at the power of investing that has never gone away even after all these years.

It made me realise how important it is to have people you can talk to about this stuff.  For most people, this sort of approach to life is just never going to be on their radar – even if they could do their own version of it.

There’s perceived safety in the herd.  So for most people, a mix of fear, beliefs, desires, and the good old status quo keeps them on the standard path.

All that to say, no matter where you are on this path, KEEP GOING.

If you just keep doing the right things with your money, month after month, eventually you create a beautiful snowball of cascading benefits that are hard to imagine when you pick up that first clump of snow.

CGT CHANGES, TAX & PORTFOLIO TRACKING

With the upcoming CGT changes I decided to try ​Navexa​ after using Sharesight for about 10 years. 

The main reason is manual parcel selection, which gives you more control around tax outcomes – something that will become more valuable going forward.

It was actually easier than I expected to setup, which is what I was dreading to be honest.  

Which one should you use? 

If you’re just starting out, ​Sharesight’s​ free plan covers basic performance tracking, and their ‘tax pack’ is a cheap and useful add-on. For many people, that’s probably plenty.

That said, Navexa tends to work out cheaper if you want more features, a greater level of tax control, have lots of holdings or multiple portfolios.

If you’d rather just use a spreadsheet and DIY, go for it – but with the new changes I’d say you’re a very brave soul!  I’m far too lazy for that, even in my frugal days, lol. 

By the way, both links above are affiliate links so you’ll get a discount if you sign up that way, and I’ll receive a small kickback. As always, I only ever recommend things I genuinely approve of.