u/QuantumGremlin

I do maintenance plumbing and the amount of people who expect you to drive across town at eight pm on a Friday just to look at a leaking tap for free is wild. What is your standard rate just to turn up to the door before you even unpack a tool bag and do you charge it upfront to weed out the time-wasters

For a generation, the default Australian financial playbook was: buy a home, leverage up, buy an established investment property, and let negative gearing and the CGT discount subsidize your losses until retirement. Now that the government has systematically targeted both of those levers in a single budget cycle, it feels like the barrier to entry for property has become laughably high compared to liquid equities. For the property bulls on this sub: is there any mathematical justification left to take on an 8.80% variable mortgage for a low-yield rental unit over just pumping cash into a diversified global equities index?

I'm looking at setting up a secondary "Raiz Jar" to separate my holiday savings goal from my main long-term "Emerald" investment portfolio. The app marketing makes it look incredibly clean to have multiple targets tracking side-by-side. But before I pull the trigger, I want to clarify the underlying fee structure. If you run a primary portfolio, a Jar portfolio, and a Kids account under one log-in, are you getting hit with multiplied monthly maintenance fees that eat up your micro-investing returns, or do they cleanly aggregate into a single flat-rate fee bucket?

So the ACCC is greenlighting the jump to $1.85 for a basic stamp from mid-year, and AusPost is already planning to hike it by another 20 cents in 2027 and 2028. Can someone explain the logic of charging more for a service that they have actively made worse? Local letters take over a week now under the "modernized" timetable, and half the time my gas bills arrive after the actual due date. If the letters section is running at a massive loss, maybe stop blowing millions on corporate rebranding and actually deliver the mail.

No quote fee, no deposit, no acknowledgement. Just silence. And then three months later you see the job done by some unlicensed bloke they found on Facebook

With all the infrastructure spending, renewable energy projects, transmission upgrades, mining work and housing demand, which trades do you reckon are actually set up best long term in Australia?

The Treasurer just announced a 30% minimum tax on income distributed from discretionary trusts starting July 2028. This basically kills the strategy of distributing to low-income family members to stay under the 19% or 32% brackets. For those of you with a trust for your share portfolio or small business: are you looking at winding it down, or is the asset protection still worth the "flat tax" hit? Does this make a Corporate Beneficiary (Bucket Company) the only viable move left?

Some incidents genuinely push crews to the limit. Heat, gear, hours on scene, it adds up fast. What job absolutely cooked you?

For me it’s anything with under slab leaks in a post tension slab. Yeah the money can be ridiculous, but the thought of hitting a cable and potentially shifting the whole building just isn’t worth the stress for me

I did a service call last week where the homeowner swore they hadn't flushed anything weird, but I pulled a massive wad of flushable wipes and a plastic dinosaur out of the trap. The smell was enough to make a grown man cry and they still tried to argue it wasn't their fault

Currently using Xero but it feels like overkill for just me and the apprentice. What are you guys using that actually works on-site with shitty reception? Need something that doesn't charge a 3% convenience fee on every payment

My boss wants us to use a price book for every little job, but customers are starting to push back. They see something like 250 bucks for a tap washer and think it’s ridiculous. Is the hourly rate basically done or what?

Just trying to get a rough idea before I start calling around for quotes

House is a single storey 3 bed, 1 bath place, probably 60s or 70s build. Brick veneer with a tiled roof and I think there’s decent roof space access but no underfloor access (slab). Still has older wiring and an old switchboard, so I’m assuming that would need upgrading as part of it. Not looking for anything fancy, just a full rewire to modern standard plus a few extra power points and maybe updated lighting

We’re getting pretty close to the May deadline and I’ve still got a few grand worth of older brass fittings sitting in the van. From what I understand, anything new starting after then is meant to be the lead free WaterMark gear. Are people actually sticking to that or just trying to run down what they’ve got first? Bit torn between not wanting to waste it and not wanting to deal with any compliance headaches later

Things like small warning signs people ignore until it turns into a bigger job. Trying to get a better idea of what to actually keep an eye on around the house so it doesn’t get to that point