Blog

The Stand Up Desk

30/9/2014

So we all know from a health perspective that we should be moving more and sitting less. Well in our sedentary society where most of us spend the day in front of a computer screen that is easier said than done. Until now. I just came into the office this morning and one of my colleagues has this amazing contraption on their desk which allows them to stand up or sit down very easily.

So for me who has been suffering with back troubles since April I'm so excited to finally find a cheap solution to my problem of sitting.

Check it out, as part of occupational health and safety it would be very hard for an employer to say no to a request for one of these.

Hardship Application now able to be made online

26/9/2014

Just letting our customers know that you can now make a hardship application online. If you've lost your job, work hours have been decreased, you're off work sick or for reasons not mentioned here. Make sure if you're unable to meet your loan payments to contact our office and fill in a hardship application. We will ask for supporting documentation however if you're genuinely in a difficult situation we don't want you to stress unnecessarily about our payments. Just let us know and we will work with you until your'e back on track.

Have a look at how to apply here.

Cash for Grand Final Day - http://bit.ly/1v1zaYc

25/9/2014

Who do you think is going to win the grand final this weekend???

Short on cash and it's Grand Final Day this weekend??? Try our new quick online application and don't be left short on having some serious fun this weekend.

Go Swannies. Do it for Buddy!!

Yes you can be Gen Y and buy property - like everything else it just takes a shift in mindset away from the traditional thinking of owning your own home straight away.

25/9/2014

Apparently this article has been doing the circuit of facebook and the media so I thought it would be something good to address.

It appeared on fairfax websites (see full article) last week and then Lucy from Mama Mia wrote a blog about it.

Tom Whitty wrote:

I’m tired of the weekends spent travelling from one underquoted property to the next, only to be left feeling like an idiot when an auction opens above what would have been our final limit. I’m tired of the car trips back to our rented home, with my hopeful girlfriend talking about how the next property might be the one where we can raise some kids together.

I’m saddened that both my girlfriend and I will have no choice but to work well into our 30s so we can squirrel together a deposit for that two-bedroom dive she’s so sure is just around the corner.

I’m saddened we are being made to delay starting a family, when it’s all she wants. And I’m saddened that so many people who are approaching retirement will react to this with a ”cry me a river” statement, when they know full well they never had it this tough.

Read more at http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/ill-never-ever-buy-a-house-like-ever/#4MHTRztPc7Uak3q6.99

Given this seems to be a big issue for Gen Y's we thought we should tackle this head on. Stayed turned while we put together some useful information that will revolutionise the way you think about owning property.

The Credit Card That’ll Replace All Your Plastic Is Finally Here (Kind Of)

22/9/2014

BY MARCUS WOHLSEN 08.22.14 | 12:00 PM | PERMALINK

When Coin released the first video of its über credit card, the response was enormous.

After 40 minutes, even though it was still just a prototype, 1,000 people had evidently forked over $50 for the super-slim electronic device that stores multiple credit card numbers and lets you use any of them with the mere push of a button. That took the company past its $50,000 pre-order goal. Just a few hours later, it had received a massive 20,000 orders for the device, which slides through checkout-counter card readers much like any other piece of plastic. Within two weeks, more than six million people had viewed the launch video that sent Coin viral. Apparently, there’s an awful lot of pent up frustration over the supposed problem of a wallet stuffed with too many credit cards.

Today, much of that frustration is still pent up. Nine months later, most of those who pre-ordered the device are still waiting for it to show up on their doorsteps. Though the company initially promised a summer 2014 ship date, only about 1,000 customers have received a version of the device that Coin quietly released for beta-testing, mostly in San Francisco. But relief is on the way.

On Friday, Coin announced the launch of a new beta-testing program, open to the first 10,000 customers on the wait list who choose to participate. In exchange for taking part, they get a test version of Coin before the device’s official release, now slated for spring 2015. The bad news is they will still have to pay to get the final first-generation version of Coin when it arrives (though they’ll only have pay $30 for it, a big discount from the regular, non-pre-order price of $100). The good news: WIRED has checked out the beta version of the Coin card, and it actually seems to work.

“The launch received more attention than we thought it would, which was good for us,” Coin founder and CEO Kanishk Parashar told WIRED during a recent visit to his company’s San Francisco offices. “But it also increased the scope of the work we had to finish.”

A Coin for Every CounterWhen all those orders first started rolling in last November, Coin the company spanned about six people working in a small carpeted room downstairs from Dropbox, and Coin the product looked like a white door-key card with a digital watch face built into one corner. Today, Coin has more than 30 employees working in a spacious basement that once housed a meat-smoking operation, and the current version of namesake device looks much like the mock version in the launch video.

Parashar says the main challenge to getting more Coins out the door has been scaling up manufacturing while working to ensure the devices are secure and can work everywhere. In the Coin office, tables teem with credit-card terminals of every make and model, each with its own idiosyncrasies that Parashar says the company is trying to tease out before making Coin available to everyone. “They’re almost the same but slightly different,” Parashar says of the many terminals users might find at checkout counters. “We have to be the super-set.”

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

The beta release is part of that process, he says, an attempt to identify “corner cases” in which users encounter situations where swiping Coin doesn’t work perfectly. Even then, he says, users won’t be left without a way to pay. The app that syncs cards to the Coin device still contain those cards’ numbers and other necessary information, which can be punched in manually. But Parashar says he wants to avoid putting users in a situation where they need the manual option as a fallback. “We want to make sure the experience is top-notch,” he says.

Promises, PromisesOn Coin’s Facebook page, commenters impatient for a firm release date are plentiful. And in general, their angst is not unreasonable. The recent history of crowd-funded hardware is littered with prototypes that never became full-fledged products.

But the version that I saw appeared to function very much as promised. Parashar synced his Coin with the Coin app, to which users upload their cards by swiping them through a reader attached to a smartphone audio jack. The app then uses low-energy Bluetooth to transfer the card data with the Coin itself.

On the front of the device, I used a nearly flat button to toggle through the different cars—multiple Visas, an Amex, a gift card. A small black-and-white screen displayed four-character names—VISA, AMEX, GIFT—to identify the different cards, along with the cards’ last four digits and expiration dates. But the most encouraging moment was the swipe itself. Trying out multiple stored cards on multiple card terminals in the office, the card data showed up. Receipts were printed. Everything needed to use Coin to pay for something seemed to be working as promised.

IF PARASHAR CAN GET ENOUGH COINS OUT THE DOOR, THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL PAYMENTS COULD HAVE ONE MORE CANDIDATE.
A working beta version may or may not be enough to quell the impatience of Coin customers still waiting to shrink down their wallets. But with 10,000 Coins on the way, Parashar and company seem to have figured out not only how to get Coin to work, but how to get Coins made. The next interesting test will be to see how Coin gets used once a bunch of them are out on the streets. Will they end up just another geek novelty, a solution to a “problem” that wasn’t really a problem in the first place? Or will they be the digital-analog answer for how everyone will pay in the 21st century, combining the best parts of paying by phone with the familiar feel of swiping plastic?

Right now, Silicon Valley is sure that traditional ways of paying belong to the past, but no one has quite figured out payments’ definitive future. If Parashar can get enough Coins out the door, that future could have one more candidate.

For those of you investing or thinking of investing in the share market

15/9/2014

I found this article particularly interesting. It seems you might as well find yourself a low cost ASX200 or ASX300 managed fund to put your money into. You're more likely to get a better return.

Source: The low cost of investment success Robin Bowerman | 12 September 2014

Investment researcher Morningstar has consistently found that low-cost share funds are most likely to succeed in the future.

By contrast, past performance is not an indication of future performance, as Smart Investing emphasised recently in The past performance trap.

In a recent research article, Lower your fees, boost your returns, Russel Kinnel, director of fund manager research with Mornngstar in the US, examined what he refers to as the "success rate" of broad-based US share funds over the five years from 2008.

Kinnel defines the success rate as the percentage of funds that "survived and outperformed" in their funds management category over a given period. (He is not referring to outperforming their indices.) "It's important to take into account funds that are liquidated because high-cost funds are more likely to be killed off than low-cost funds," he writes.

"Thus," Kinnel adds, "failures from high-cost groups are wiped away. If you don't account for those failures, your study is survivorship biased."

In his research, Kinnel ranked broad-based US share funds in June 2008 in accordance to their expense management ratio, ranking their expenses on a scale of one (being the lowest cost) to five.

Kinnel found that share funds in the lowest-cost quintile had a 55.98 per cent "success rate" over the period examined followed by the funds in the second lowest-cost group with a success rate of 45.69 per cent. Funds with average expenses had a 38.84 per cent success rate while the group of the highest-cost funds had a success rate of only 23.57 per cent.

In concluding his article, Kinnel quotes Vanguard's founder Jack Bogle: In investing, "you get what you don't pay for".

In other words, investors who choose high-cost investment funds in the expectation of superior returns are likely to be disappointed. Costs really matter.

Government to force small business to repay tax breaks.

11/9/2014

Source : Government to force small businesses to repay tax breaks

Tens of thousands of small businesses which took advantage of tax breaks associated with the mining tax will have to pay back that money to the Australian Tax Office and face further red tape, after the federal government announced it would retrospectively date the abolition of the measures.

After the mining tax was scrapped last week, Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann yesterday declared five tax breaks linked to the mining tax would be back-dated, including the company loss carry-back measure, which will retrospectively apply from July 1, 2013.

Any business that has claimed the loss carry-back in its 2013-14 return will have to amend its tax assessment.

The ATO said in a statement companies will not be subject to penalties and interest if payments are made within a reasonable time.

The government said it consulted with the ATO on the matter and the move to back-date would stop the loss of $1 billion from the budget.

Other back-dates include:

· Abolition of the mining tax from 1 October 2014 (with taxpayers final Minerals Resource Rent Tax year (even if it is a part year) ending on 30 September 2014);

· Reduction of the instant asset write-off from 1 January 2014;

· Abolition of accelerated depreciation for motor vehicles from 1 January 2014; and

· Abolition of geothermal energy concessions from 1 July 2014.

The instant asset write-off will be reduced from $6500 to $1000.

The dates are the same as those proposed in the original repeal bill, which was defeated in the Senate in July.

A spokesperson for the Finance Minister’s office told SmartCompany these dates were consistent with election promises and dates announced in November last year at the time of the introduction of the first mining tax repeal bill.

Small Business Minister Bruce Billson told SmartCompany the government had been clear and upfront about the tax arrangements and repeal dates throughout delivering its election promise of repealing the miming tax.

“It’s long been known and understood that the repealed measures don’t have the revenue to support them,” says Billson.

Billson, who was visiting China when the tax was repealed, says there are many tax measures he would like support for small business, but such measures needed to be able to be funded.

“That’s simply the reality,” he said.

Head of tax with Taxpayers Australia, Mark Chapman, criticised the new measures, saying as the mining tax itself was not abolished until October 1, 2014 the government appears to be on a “tax grab from small businesses”.

Peter Strong, executive director of the Council of Small Business of Australia, told SmartCompany the action shows a complete lack of understanding of the small business sector by the government.

“It’s unbelievable that anybody would show such arrogance and such lack of respect for small business,” says Strong.

He anticipates anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 small businesses will be affected by the move.

The spokesperson for the Minister for Finance told SmartCompany COSBOA and Strong were disappointed they “didn’t get what they want”.

“But what they want would have cost the government $1 billion,” says Cormann’s spokesperson.

Strong responded by saying, “You don’t change tax laws half way through a financial year.”

“[The loss carry-back] was back-dated before the election, so what they’re saying is, small business should have to predict the election.”

“They expect small businesses to go onto the Treasury website daily to monitor repeals. They are expecting small business to act like big business.”

Strong says he spoke to one small business owner yesterday who has bought his daughter a car through the tax breaks and would now be stung by repaying the concession.

“What it shows is that Joe [Hockey] has not moved on since he was last in power. He showed no time for small business, he’s a man for the big end of town and this proves it.”

Budgeting Tips - why it's not necessarily cheaper to buy in bulk

8/9/2014

Things to remember

Set your weekly shopping limit and stick to it.
Don't get caught up with saving by buying in bulk
Think about exactly what it is you need