While we’re all getting in the goodwill mood, Australians need to think seriously about this country’s housing problem. There isn’t enough of it to go around and what property is available is often out of the reach of low income households. (Percentage of age groups with mortgages: ABS Surveys of Income and Housing) This is no overnight thing. Tax concessions which favour property investors have led to a big swelling of their ranks –…
Dedicated readers will know by now my penchant for tinkering with numbers, so you won’t be surprised that I have done an inflation-adjusted calculation on my/our travel adventures over 45 years. O.M.G. We could have bought a second home, or a third; a luxury yacht, a Maserati or achieved the mythical $1 million retirement target. New Zealand is Australia’s most popular outbound travel destination – 1.06 million went there in the year to March 2015;…
I’d had a coffee brewing machine at home for about a year before realising the increasingly brackish taste was due to a long overdue need to purge the machine of accumulated mineral deposits. Along the way I also learned that it is a good idea to clean the milk frothing wand after every cappuccino. A barista at our local café looked over her spectacles when I told her I’d just de-scaled our machine for the…
Deck the halls and all that, it’s the lead-up to the silly season, tainted as it is by relentless media reports about bombings, terrorist attacks and can-it-happen-here scenarios. Despite the disproportionate Australian media coverage of the Paris attacks that left at least 129 dead, pretty soon it will dawn on Australians that there are just 33 shopping days to Christmas. You already missed surface mail by two months. Cards need to be sent soon, especially…