Australians have been hoarding cash, particularly through the first year of Covid-19, despite forecasts that we will be a 98% cashless society by 2024. Even if this prediction from global payments giant FIS comes to pass, some 540,000 Australians will still prefer to use cash. You may recall a flurry of news stories on this topic in March. The research commented on the effect of a de facto ban on cash during the first year…
Fifteen years ago, just after SARS but before the GFC and COVID-19, I opted out of full-time paid employment and started a consultancy business, working from home. This was an era when many large organisations did not want their employees working remotely. The resistance was hard to understand, given that even in 2005, the technology to do so made it easy, particularly for people in the communications industry. Now, in plague-ridden 2020, many employers have…
As we drove 1,200kms in haste from Albury NSW to the Southern Downs, trying to escape Queensland border chaos, I was grateful for readers’ insights into COVID-19 and isolation. First of all we should credit Sandy W with the witty caption for this week’s photo. Realising I’d be spending three days driving home before resigning ourselves to self-isolation, I asked FOMM readers for their thoughts on this health crisis. I was overwhelmed with responses, so…
The small stuff autumn clean-up starts with a simple search of the junk drawer for a missing filing cabinet key. I recently shifted my office downstairs and in the shifting, all the things which were in places known to recent memory have been displaced. But it gives me a good chance to clear out what we call ‘the drawer of drawers’ – a small, deep drawer in which we throw stuff which has no particular…