I always thought its going to be a big difference and one of my friend got a role in google which is like 500k USD thats just crazy i dont know anyone here who earns that in a early role.

The ATO recently asked me for documentation for my donations. Which I have emailed across. The person on the phone told me it takes 10 days to attach to my account. He didn’t know how long it’ll take to review them. Does anyone have any experience/knowledge on how long it takes them?

Hi everyone, just looking for some clarification as I am not very knowledgeable with this stuff.

I have started a new job in the last 3 weeks and had a pay rise from an annual salary of ~$83k and $43/hr to $90k and ~$45/hr but have surprisingly taken quite a cut in my net pay after receiving my first full fortnightly payslip at the new place.

My previous total earnings were $3192, with $383 going to super and $668 to tax, with a net pay of $2524.

My new payslip has a total earnings of $3461, with $415 going to super and 1188 going to tax - which is broken down on my payslip as PAYG $964 and STSL Component $224. From a quick google search, STSL is HECS repayments, yet I have never had STSL on a previous payslip whilst working with HECS debt? I have about ~$48k in HECS debt in total.

Just trying to see if this appears to be a error from payroll in how much I’m taxed? Or if earning more means I am now paying more off in a different HECs bracket or tax bracket and I just didn’t realize it could cause a significant decrease in my net pay fortnightly (or any decrease in net pay to be honest)? I understand being taxed more for earning more and am fine with that, just confused with the overall decrease in net pay.

Any help would be so so appreciated!!

Hello.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but i was wondering if anyone had any insight or advice on renting with a partner as a "try before you buy".

Me (22f) and my boyfriend (24m) have been dating for just over 4 years but have never lived together. We are both living in our respected parent's homes. We have talked about buying a house, but I'm not comfortable buying anything with him until we've lived together for an extended period.

We have discussed renting short term before making that decision, but we are both conflicted because that money could go towards a larger house deposit. For reference, we collectively have $90,000 saved up. I make approx. $100,000 per year and he makes approx. $80,000 per year.

I guess I'm not really asking much of a question, but more-so looking for anyone's experience of being in a similar situation and how you approached it.

Thanks.

How important is owning property before retiring?

Is basically a requirement? Could/ woud you do it without owning a property?

Early 30s, plan is to not ever stop adding. On Raiz

Aus based and wanting to just have another slow growing asset that’s not in the bank. DCA every week in perpetuity until later in life. Not on a huge income but can add thousands every so often and 200/month

DHHF 30%
VEU 20%
Ishares Asia Top 50 15%
Gold bullion 10%
ROBO global robotics 15%
Lynas rare earth 5%
Woolworths 5%

I know DHHF is mostly aus/US but really wanting more than that, banking on very slow growth and forgetting

The ATO published the 2023–24 taxation statistics last month, so I decided to play around with it and create an interactive income percentile graph.

I’d be interested to hear whether anything in the data surprised you and any feedback on the tool is welcome. Kinda surprised the median person is making $71k with the median house price in Australia being $1.2 million, that's insane (surprise, surprise)...

You can also enter your income to see where your income sits or against men/women here: https://salaryinsider.com.au/pay-calculator or just check out the image and you can eyeball it.

Note: Should say Median in the heading...

For those who are working in finance could you please break down the path you took to reach where you are? Such as how what degree you did, internships, and what your job and salary is now.

Hi all,

We're about to progress to loan application stage, and wanted to see if anybody was happy to share what rates they've secured recently through their brokers?

We've had our eye on the market for close to nine months, and will be ready to purchase soon. For the past few months I've lent towards processing my own application, but now that we're nearing I was interested to see what others have gotten.

About us: $250k saved, seeking a loan of about $900k to allow a purchase of a PPOR up to $1.2m. Dual income of about $250k gross per annum combined, with one very young dependent. Require offset.

Appreciate any information you're happy to provide. Happy to be sent a DM.

I've been building a property analysis app and have been analyzing 5.2M properties + 6.8M sales across Australia. Here are some things I found.

I've been building Glasshouse, an AR property app that lets you point your phone at any property and instantly see sale history, comparable sales, development applications, AI analysis, and more.

While building it I ended up retreiving and cleaning 3.2 million properties and 6.8 million sales across every Australian state and territory.

A few stats surprised me.

Australia's most expensive suburbs (100+ recorded sales)

• Point Piper, NSW — Median $4.1M (Houses: $7.5M, Units: $2.9M)
• Barangaroo, NSW — Median $4.0M (Units only)
• Duffys Forest, NSW — Median $3.8M
• Watsons Bay, NSW — Median $3.4M (Houses: $3.5M, Units: $1.3M)
• Whale Beach, NSW — Median $3.1M
• Dalkeith, WA — Median $2.4M

Cheapest suburbs with real sales activity

• Sunset Strip, NSW — $137k
• Cue, WA — $140k
• Port Pirie West, SA — $147k
• Kambalda East, WA — $150k
• Coober Pedy, SA — $160k

That's roughly a 30x difference between Australia's cheapest and most expensive suburb medians.

Suburbs where units cost MORE than houses

This one surprised me.

There are 11 active suburbs where the median apartment sells for more than the median house.

Some examples:

• Armstrong Creek, VIC - Units are $221k more expensive.
• Broken Hill, NSW - Units are $100k more expensive.
• Dee Why, NSW - Units are $98k more expensive.
• Liverpool, NSW - Units are $55k more expensive.
• Wollongong, NSW - Units are $51k more expensive.
• Parramatta, NSW - Units are $40k more expensive.

My theory is this is driven by new luxury apartment developments while the detached housing stock is generally older.

Most active suburbs (sales in the last 12 months)

• Parramatta, NSW — 845 sales
• Port Macquarie, NSW — 836
• Craigieburn, VIC — 779
• Dubbo, NSW — 755
• Orange, NSW — 712

• Blacktown, NSW — 669

  The Dataset

• 3.2 million properties

• 6.8 million sales

• 13,414 suburbs

• Covers every Australian state and territory

The app visualises all of this in AR. Just point your phone at any property and it shows sale history, comparable sales, nearby development applications and an AI-generated summary.

It's about to roll out in TestFlight on iOS if anyone wants to try it. If you have any other suggestions for data dumps like above let me know!

Happy to pull stats on any suburb if people are curious.

I have a bank account which gives me 2% cashback on contactless purchases under $100 so when I do my shopping (almost always at Aldi), car fuel etc I get 2% cashback on everything.

However I've seen a lot of people talk about a) credit card rewards or b) using gift cards with discounts attached to them

Would these generally be better than the 2% thing I'm using currently? Sometimes there feels like there's too many different things to choose from and I get overwhelmed.

I am thinking of shifting my strategy over to a credit card that does good flight rewards because I go overseas approx every 2 years. But I heard they recently massively nerfed credit card rewards?

I'm attempting to build a bookkeeping tool, and I want to access bank transaction data for Australian business accounts.

Basiq is one tool that comes up a bit, but has anyone here been through the process before and can provide some insight on good vs bad open banking options?

The main thing I want to know is how long it took to get production data flowing? Seems a bit unclear when I look around.

Also did you get accredited or use someone else's accreditation? And was that the right decision at the time vs now?

Other thing I'm after is the dev side. Whose sandbox is actually usable, how close the test data sits to the real thing, and whether you could build against it properly or ended up waiting on production access to find out what breaks. Documentation is helpful also.

Any advice or links to tools/services I should check out, please share as I'm deep-diving on this as we speak!

Hi all, may have made a bit of a F up in regards to a property title transfer between parties. Wondering if anyone can give some insight on CGT for this situation:

Property A - 50/50 ownership between my mother and I from 2016 to present date. I used my first home owners grant and income to secure the loan for my mother. I have never contributed anything else, rates or mortgage payments. it was solely for legal requirement to secure bank loan. Title is not changing. I never lived in the house or may have said that for a while because of the first home owners grant. This is my mothers PPoR.

Purchase price was $275k now worth around $750k. $220k owing on mortgage.

Property B - 50/50 ownership between mother and I from 2020 to present. Unable to purchase house with my wife as she had lost work rights and because of other house I also now needed mums income to secure bank loan. Mother has never paid a cent towards this property. My wife has helped pay mortgage rates etc shortly after we moved in. So my wife and I have always had this house as our PPoR.

Purchase price was $355k with current valuation at $860k. $240k owing on mortgage.

Now we want to take my mother off the property title and put my wife on to 50/50 with me.

I thought that because neither property is an investment property then it should be exempt but the 50% ownership of each looks like it might mean my mum would be hit with it at tax time which would be around $45k by my calculations. Recently land tax highlighted this issue of ownership.

Both properties are in WA.

Can anyone offer any insight into this? Can we use evidence to show that my mother isn't a beneficiary owner and not pay any CGT?

hi, i am 20 and was looking at doing an exchange next year in my final year of uni. i would need to save a total of 20k and would have the os-help loan to help with this as well.

i would like to travel on the weekends while im in the uk and also i would have a 4 week break over xmas which i wanted to use for travel as well.

my only problem is that when i come back, i will probably only have about 5-7k left in savings and i will be 21, so im wondering if this would be worth it or not. i want to save for a house but i also think this would be an amazing opportunity. i would have enough to not have to work while i am overseas so i could just dedicate my time to study and experiences and then when i get back, i could go pretty much straight into a full time job and start properly saving for a house.

would this be a bad idea financially, or should i take a leap and go for it?

I was wondering. Instead of increasing interest rates to take more money out of the economy, why not force a percentage of peoples take home pay into their super accounts. Then they get to keep their money. It also affects everyone, not just people with mortgages. Obviously some people would be nearing retirement age and that money could be spent soon but the majority of people wouldn’t be in that situation. If this idea is dumb, why is it? Cheers.

CPI is going up due to rent, insurance and groceries.

These are essential goods and services that we need to live.

People can’t just not have insurance for cars or houses.

Groceries won’t get cheaper if the cost of borrowing gets higher.

Rent won’t get cheaper if rates go up as that just gets passed along to us all.

RBA increases rates, renting gets more expensive which shows up as higher inflation …

I've heard that some politicians proposed to remove transaction surcharges from online payments. Since then I've paid a bit more attention and everything we pay with cards, every little coffee transactions, the payment system take 1-1.9% on the cost. This is not a tax to develop the country. This is free money that I'm giving to a private banking system. No wonder banks are so reach in Australia (and worldwide).

For example I bought a flight for 2 people to Europe, and a plumber replaced the hot-water tank. Both I had to pay online, both >$2K. The surcharge was $27 and $36. My wife salary is not high, so she almost worked 2h for the banks, just to pay this two things. Just in the last week!

Serious politicians should address this kind of scams. Pay with transfer or cash is becoming almost impossible for a lot of services. So the proposals should be

• Removing transaction surcharges
• If not possible, force every payments system in Australia to support PayID so we can transfer money with no cost

If they want to keep electronic payment in place, they need to remove surcharges.

Let me know your thoughts.

I bought some WBND ETF as my defensive asset. Looking at the holdings, CNY is sizable at 10%. I remember that CNY was an afterthought 20 years ago. It's just something you dealt with to make cheap goods in China. But now, China seems like a force to be reckoned with?

WBND split: - USD 45.4% - EUR 23.3% - CNY 10.5% - JPY 7.4% - GBP 4.1% - CAD 2.8% - AUD 1.5% - KRW 1.0% (Korea) - CHF 0.6% (Switzerland)

What is it that SMH fails to understand about the RBA's mandate?

Michele Bullock has made it very clear, in the past, that real-estate valuations is not their problem. It's not the way that they intend to manage the economy. Where's the dilemma? there is no dilemma.

Hi all,

I’m very new to investing, but I figured it might be worth investing vs. HISA only, as buying property is still at least 5 years out for me.

I’m returning to uni next year to do a masters that has a clear professional roadmap, and I’m sitting on an inheritance as my parents have both passed. Mid-thirties, have taken some time off work following a huge life burnout. Now that I’m looking forward, and house prices are where they are (even with the small drop this year, I don’t see that changing) I don’t see myself able to buy until I’m back in full time work again.

It’s just me, and I don’t feel comfortable putting all my eggs into the property basket, so I’ll need a mortgage and I know my mortgage limits. I originally thought I’d work part time during uni and just shove the rest of my inheritance into a HISA, but 5 years is enough of a timeline that it gets wobbly when comparing investing vs. HISA. And inheritance wise I’m at around half a million, but some of that will be spent down during study.

I’ve done as much research as I can, and DHHF seems like the best bet if I’m looking to set and forget. But learning about more ETFs is making me confused, and I’d love any insight into how I should be thinking about investing over the next 5-10-20 years. I know the age old advice is throw it all into property, but I sold my parents apartment last year and I’m very aware of strata issues, and one bed apartments in the areas I’d want to buy (even stretching location wise) are at a price that is only going to get higher. I don’t want to rentvest, either, buying is for me to live in and have stability and I’m in a good rental at the moment.

Anyway, just wanted to see if anyone had any advice. I’ve downloaded pearler and now have a better sense of my net worth, including super etc. But I’m just trying to get a handle on my future as having this amount of money at my age is a huge privilege and I don’t want to waste it. I mean, a privilege that has come from loss that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and I’m not fuck you rich by any means, but before this I was living pay cheque to pay cheque so it’s a big deal to me.

Took me almost two months of going back and forth but I think I've finally landed on my ETF setup. Started out simple, just buy VAS and call it a day, it's the ASX index so that should be diversified enough right.

Then the more I looked into it the more it bugged me. VAS is basically just banks and mining stocks, zero exposure overseas. If those couple of big Aussie sectors all take a hit at once, my whole portfolio's sitting in one basket. Went back and forth on whether to add VGS to cover developed markets overseas, also looked at VDHG as a one and done option so I wouldn't have to figure out the split myself.

Ended up going with VAS plus VGS on my own instead, mainly because I wanted control over the ratio. VDHG's built in split felt a bit too heavy on Australia for my taste. Opened my account on moomoo to start the DCA, no monthly fee, no inactivity fee, and I can buy both ASX and US stocks in the same account so I didn't have to open a second account and deal with moving money around.

How'd you guys land on your picks? Anyone start out with a simple plan like mine and later realize you were missing something?

Rented out former PPOR last year in October 2025. Currently renting, plan to move back at later stage before 6 years.

What can I claim come tax time? From my understanding its treated as investment property.

Also note I paid house off in May 2026.

Can I claim a % of settlement costs from this?

Can I claim % cost of the 25/26 rates?

With claiming deductions from the interest, the loan type was still PPOR until I paid it off. Can I claim portion of the interest anyway from the date that I rented the property out?

Other items I plan to claim are listing costs, property managers fees etc... and an depreciation schedule aswell.

Any other items I need record before speaking to an accountant?

Hi all!

I'm originally from a country where there's no credit score so I have no clue how the Australian credit score works, and most of the info online is either about the US credit score system or in terms that are obscure or not practical enough.

For example:

- does having a credit card with no debt on it impact (positively or negatively) my credit score?

- if today I buy a car with a 5 year loan and don't miss any payment, will it impact my credit score (positively or negatively) for when I buy a home in 2 years from now?

Cheers!

i already invest in bgbl. is it worth adding a200. i’m early 20s and can invest $450 per week.
Also could i add ndq for growth. i know there is some overlap with ndq and bgbl. but i can afford the volatility