Finance News
2019 has been a year of unexpected outcomes. On reflection, if you’d told me 12 months ago that we were going to have three interest rate cuts, Scott Morrison was going to win the election, and the property market was going to boom, I simply wouldn’t have believed you. And yet, here we…
Last Monday marked one month until Christmas day. Christmas is a joyous time of year where we get to catch up with friends and family, and spend stupid amounts of money that we’re not prepared for, which will catch up to us come January. That’s why the time is right to have a…
Millennials cop a lot of flak for spending their cash on smashed avocado and holidays, rather than saving to buy a home. However there’s a new financially-savvy Millennial trend that’s putting the rest of us to shame: buy now, pay later. In the old days, it was called LayBy, but over the last decade or…
To tip? Or not to tip? That is the question. But in my view, it’s got a very simple answer: no. Lots of things in our culture are becoming increasingly Americanised, with Halloween a couple of weeks ago a good case study. But one thing we don’t need to see creeping in is tipping.…
At what point should the value of the family home be taken into account when assessing an individual’s or a couple’s entitlement for the pension? There’s been a proposal from an ACT academic to reduce the pension for older people whose homes are valued at more than $2 million. He says this would save the…
Sometimes you come across a bit of information that makes you just about fall off your chair. Here’s one: this week Australians are going to spend more than $1.6 million buying pumpkins to carve into jack-o-lanterns. Yep, you heard right, $1.6 million! That’s 500,000kg of inedible pumpkin! The reason is that in Australia, Halloween has…
With the banks tightening up following the Banking Royal Commission, money is more difficult to come by than at any time in recent memory. This is proving a challenge for homeowners who want to sell but need to do a bit of work on their house before listing for sale. To solve the problem, the…
Last week I was speaking at a business breakfast, when I asked the room of small business owners whether falling interest rates had had any positive impact on how they’re running their businesses. Not a single had went up. The fact is that low interest rates have not created the high-confidence environment that the…
