Forum Replies Created
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. If you maintain an idea like the Prius but use hydrogen instead of petrol for the boosting then you wouldn’t need a large fuel cell for the hydrogen since it is only an auxillary source.
Another system could use a technology that needs to be worked on more that will allow ‘in vehicle’ conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen. For example say you have a large tank full of water in the car, a setup of solar cells in the roof place the excess power to the converter that slowly replaces the lost hydrogen in another quite small tank.
Or ignore the problematic hydrogen issue altogether and just go electric with solar rechargability, you could have ‘cell’ stations that swap out depleted batteries for fully recharged ones as well or offer ‘quickcharge’ facilities instead of petrol stations as we have it now.
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 inventor who created a 3/4 Water 1/4 Petrol mix engine about 10 years ago had his idea purchased and locked away by the oil companies.
This though doesn’t mean there are no alternatives out there, try science news pages and search for hydrogen engines. Big advances have been made there. Of course the Oil companies are trying to ruin the party, by actually pushing the US government to sponsor Hydrogen research and manufacture by placing a proviso that they can only use oil for the production of Hydrogen, ironic eh?
Electric cars and hybrid technology is currently in theory and practice. Prius (Toyota) is a hybrid car that has been for sale in Australia for about two years or so, it uses an electric motor boosted and recharged by a petrol using unit, even braking recharges the car! Now if they linked solar cells to this vehicle then perhaps even less fuel consumption would be needed. Problems with Electric cars was that they didn’t travel too far before being totally flat.
Interesting that consumption may drop if they include specific technologies such as an aircon unit they developed that ran off even something like human bodyheat.
We have ways to easily navigate around something like that. Of course improved public transport utilising electricity supplied by solar or wind power would remove the majority of the problem in the cities.
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 earn about $17000 a year) and don’t forget the shares/other investments income.
But I believe there was better advice given in those other threads most probably from the beginning of last month on a similar topic.
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 previously. A search might reveal those threads on those situations and possible resolutions.
Of course she might be able to get a decent rental income from the property as well as further income from dividends/interest in the other investments.
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 combination would be to make sure you have the latest Critical Patches from the windows update site, this will require you to restart your pc once downloaded and installed. Next would be to get an effective firewall, as suggested zonealarm is a good solid choice. There is the free version and the ‘bells and whistles’ versions which you have to pay for. Next would be to have programs specifically designed to ‘scrape’ your filesystem and more importantly your registry of entries for the malicious files.
Adaware is excellent though it does not remove all malicious files I have found. Add CWSHREDDER (I think the spelling is correct) to the list.
All above programs have the update ability built in.
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 type in the value of the property and have a heading for each state and have each state calculate the values for you. All you have to do is then look under the relevant state then… its messy but it gets the sheet to do what you want. You can always ‘pretty it up’ later.
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 worse after the cut than before. If I was there I would’ve raised my hand.[biggrin] This budget does not directly affect me though since I earny under 52k and I don’t have any kids yet.
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 doing work in the garden or some other CG (potential) increasing activity.
– a particular issue with the very localised area that means the rental income would be lower. A good example would be a terrible neighbor.
Is there a specific article I could read on this issue to see how it would work for me?
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 CGThttp://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 original block she lived in or refinance using equity (if you have any) would depend on you financial position.
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 spend the extra 30k on the IP but on the PPOR.
Currently 6.99% isn’t the best by far that you can get, see what the brokers on here say [whistle].
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 your above example your calculations would look like this:
100,000 = 80,000 (+1%) + 20,000 (0, where 0 is the lowest interest value)
Best Option I think would be:
100,000 = 100,000 (0) with 100,000 (+1%) for any other investments needed.
Or the reverse of your example:
100,000 = 80,000 (0) + 20,000 (+1%)You have to minimise interest the best you can, so if you can get two LOCs do the maths on what is the best way to limit the amount of interest you end up paying.
Hope that helps.
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 get close to the uni that will be a bonus.
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 insurance. Couldn’t you for example lend a friend $5,000 on a interest rate of say 6% to get them their dream home if you think they can pay you back at least in part over the next couple of years?
Other examples would be where a group purchases a property outright with combined funds and takes an equal share in the ensueing income generated from the venture, I believe this is closer to what RussH was talking about. Still considering the example posted was about the short period of time the group had to raise capital and whether or not the group would be best-off utilising a trust fund to control these things is hard to tell for me.
It would probably work but I would find it hard to talk to a stranger about this, least of all trust them enough with funds to do so.
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 because of the way the wife is asking the hubby to bid one more and they have one or more kid. I probably wouldn’t bid the $5,000. Considering you are down to $1,000 dollar bid there is only so many ‘just one more’ type bids there can be and I hardly think they would be in it for 3 rounds. If they are I would be highly suspicious of the whole setup anyway [hmm]
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 that ultimately can be shown to be reasonable. There is nothing wrong with this and can be chalked up as luck in coming accross that particular house.
