88. Savings vs offset vs investing: How each stacks up at 6% interest rates

A few years ago mortgages were under 2% and cash earned you nothing. Now rates sit around 6% and every option looks different: savings accounts are suddenly respectable, offsets feel like a guaranteed win, and borrowing to invest looks scarier than it maybe is.

Dave and Hayden work through how a high-rate environment reshuffles the deck, and the mental shortcuts that lead people astray in both directions.

In this episode we'll discuss:

💸 Savings accounts are back, but interest is taxed at your marginal rate, and plenty of high earners forget that 5% is really more like 3%

💸 A quick test for whether you're carrying too much debt: how nervous do you get before RBA meetings?

💸 Dave's peak-debt confession: millions owed in his twenties, and why a 2% rate rise would have broken the strategy

💸 The offset trap: why "a guaranteed 6% return" isn't permanent (it moves with rates), and why "6% tax-free equals 10% invested" is the wrong comparison. Compare after-tax returns to after-tax returns

💸 Waiting for rate cuts before investing: why asset prices reprice on the way down, and if everyone has the same plan, you need to be early for it to work

💸 Dave's counterintuitive maths on borrowing to invest: how borrowing at 8% into a low-yield growth ETF can still come out ahead after the tax deduction

💸 Why people happily suspend the maths for property ($923 a week in interest on an $800k Sydney apartment) but won't extend the same long-term logic to shares

💸 Hayden's crusade: housing's advantages are mostly structural (CGT exemptions, pension treatment, cheap secured lending), and why he wants mortgage-rate loans against boring index ETFs to exist

💸 A cracking listener tip from Jared: pay a lump sum into the loan and ask the bank to recalculate your repayments. Unlike an offset, it actually improves your monthly cash flow