what are your objectives from budgeting?

sites like http://finance.ninemsn.com.au/money/ will get you started but just asking about budgetting without knowing your short-term and longer-term goals may not get you specific advice that you may want.

However, I believe that creating Hydrogen isn’t (at the moment) very cost effective i./e. it consumes more energy to run the process than the energy produced by the hydrogen.

You could use solar power to do the bulk of the creation of Hydrogen, that way you don’t need to ship any source apart from say water to be split into hydrogen and oxygen.…[Read more]

I first heard of the d-day of fuel consumption about 20 years ago at school. Its not a new issue, nor has it been recently ‘discovered’.

Oil companies know their days are numbered as fuel providers, but that is why they have used (abused) their powers to attain alternative technology and restrict its usage.

Examples such as the Gold Coast…[Read more]

The assumption here is that she needs to buy the retirement unit. There is no reason she has to buy it and should be far cheaper than the rental income she could generate from the IP.

Of course she loses the $200 per 14 days if she keeps the house or holds the full sale value of the house herself (which with a conservative interest rate and would…[Read more]

Firstly, your mother’s home, which is obviously her PPOR is not subject to asset testing, as it is where she lives.

The problem is after she leaves the place to move into whatever unit she ends up in it is no longer her PPOR is it? She will end up with no pension with a property of that value as an IP from what has been discussed on here…[Read more]

Essentially several programs are used to keep your system clean of insidious programs.

A Trojan is essentially what is classed as a ‘backdoor’ program. You have a program on your pc which allows a third party direct access to your pc when you are connected to the net.

Other malicous programs include keyloggers and hijacking programs.

A good…[Read more]

I have a fairly tricky excel spreadsheet for a game I played that I made early last year (with the bulk of the tricky stuff done by a friend). To get about the multiple IFs the CHOOSE and INDEX commands were used. You could probably nest IF statements within that to get around large selections.

The simplest way would be to just have the person…[Read more]

The presenter asked the audience if any of them remember the last tax cut we got and what did we do with the money? He asked if anyone put it onto paying off their PPOR or IP. Noone had.

Those with LOC or Mortgage offset would automatically be paying more off their PPOR (if that is what their loan is on), it depends if their spending habits were…[Read more]

As far as I know you can’t claim on an IP unless it is at market rates. This is especially prevalent if you are renting to relative. The tax office looks very harshly on this.

‘Market Rates’ sounds like a very large grey area. How would they determine the rates for a place that could in fact have reasons for being so cheap to live in.

– rental…[Read more]

How does the tax office view for example,

Say my brother lived in what was my PPOR paying rent and I lived in his property paying rent. The rent paid to each other was well below the average for the area.

Are there any real limits to this method?

transferring titles to my name only, pay SD and CGT

http://www.osr.qld.gov.au/taxes/duties/transfer_partnerships_faq.htm

This might help if you head down the transferring of titles way.

If you are really commited to looking after your mother then perhaps a serious downsize in debt and area she has to look after should be considered. Either a granny flat or a one or two bedroom unit could be considered. Couple this with the earlier suggested rent assistance I could see a fair amount of financial relief.

whether you sell the…[Read more]

From what I have learned from being on here it would entirely depend on what could’ve been done with the other 30k. You don’t truly get the 11 second result since it is on purchase price but after the initial outlay it is nicely +ve cf.

If the 30k could be used to pay off an outstanding PPOR loan then of course the best option would be not to…[Read more]

Maybe he reads this forum [evil4]

Just curious on the logic of taking $20,000 out of the Lowest Interest LOC when you would be best served in doing the reverse…

Use as much of the LOC in the lower interest account as possible and then only keep it paying off the interest (IO) while using the higher interest account for transactions/knocking the amount payable down on.

So in…[Read more]

A quick search revealed the site for the public trustee in Queensland (in relation to house austions). Not sure on other states though.

http://www.pt.qld.gov.au/auctions/houses.htm

Hope that helps.

The gf’s mother has two IPs in Coffs, an apartment which seems to be always in use and her original PPOR which has always seen use as well. From what I could gather there is always room for low-budget accomodation there (due to in the past the high unemployment rate and so on, the gf knew this kind of info growing up there). Of course if you can…[Read more]

Apart from the ’email me for more discussion’ part I really don’t have much of an issue with what RussH was saying as far as sharing in the deal.

Many examples would exist on the ‘helping hand’ where a friend or a family member lends enough money to get a person past the minimum requirements for a deposit so they didn’t have to pay mortgage…[Read more]

I wouldn’t go to an auction to ‘allow’ someone else to out-bid myself unless it went past my pre-set limit otherwise it would be a big waste of time doing so.

I suppose the moral part you could be asking is that should you post $5,000 to knock them out in one hit, show them you have more money than they can ever afford to bid for the house…[Read more]

If it was a situation where the people had seriously undervalued the property and you were deciding to take advantage of them or not then a moral dilemma would occur. This sounds a little bit more straight-forward than that though.

They have an outside source from your control asking them to control the sale, you are going to offer them a price…[Read more]