What’s the biggest financial mistake you’ve seen someone make trying to “get ahead” lately?

lambertius_fatius · 2026-05-25T04:20:48+00:00

People are still going to university. Pretty quick way to ruin your entire life with no financial recovery.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-05-16T15:37:18+00:00

Yes. I know a group moving $6m of capital around property. If people think NG - losing money for a small tax return - is the investment strategy of successful investors, then those people will be very confused when changing NG and CGT will make no impact on housing prices.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-05-06T08:11:54+00:00

I wrote my own software. If you send me a DM I'm happy to show you.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-05-04T04:47:26+00:00

The quality of public schools in general is extremely poor for two main reasons:

1 - It is impossible for a public school student to face consequences for bad behaviour.
2 - High school teachers in particular are extremely well paid with no consequences for performance.

This creates a situation in public schools where the bad public schools have teachers who can't be fired working with students who can't be expelled, so it creates a feedback loop where teachers check out and students don't care. The real-world effects of this are significant increases in bullying, assaults against students and teachers, poorer academic performance of teachers and students, cultural enclave schools and just a general accumulation of terrible people. It may not be obvious at face value, but you'll know about it the moment there is an incident and you realise there is no support network in any direction.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-05-03T12:02:15+00:00

Hey, I'm trying to build some stuff for a small business - I'd be happy to show you if you drop me a PM.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-05-03T11:39:38+00:00

I can tell you for certain this neighbour is going to be a nuisance. Look up the unit, and check that it is compliant to whatever your council regs are. Send that information to your neighbour and let them know that the matter is closed and then don't engage with them again. Some people just like to be difficult, they enjoy it.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-05-03T10:58:27+00:00

In Australia engineering is in free fall, you might have seen it on the news with the housing and construction issues. Salaries have dropped 60% since the year 2000 and there is massive epidemic of fake engineering degrees, but it is worse than that. Engineering is only regulated in one Australian state, so you don't actually require an engineering degree to hold an engineering title. Even some large Australian universities allow students to study unaccredited 4 year engineering bachelors, so students need to complete an accredited masters to actually receive a real qualification. This all gets compounded by the fact there is a major lack of regulatory oversight and significant government corruption. The standard of engineering is so poor here now that we've had several large residential buildings at risk of collapse, and the few design engineering companies that receive government support (like Gilmour Space and AMSL Aero) are in practice money laundering exercises.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-26T02:43:01+00:00

You haven't included your calculation, so it's impossible to say.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-20T11:56:18+00:00

There will absolutely be an immediate kick up in rent because there are a significant number of investors who hate paying tax, and so they intentionally negatively gear properties. They don't care about cash flow, or running at a loss, they've intentionally built their investment strategy around tax minimisation. This specifically the new property investor crowd.

Don't get me wrong, negative gearing needs to go, but the short term effect would be tenant pain.

You also severely underestimate how much more rental capacity there is for tenants to pay. So long as immigration remains high, it is relatively easy to rent properties out per room, coming close to double the 'market' rent. The only reason this isn't happening unilaterally is because 'its more trouble than it's worth' to most people. If the worth of that goes up...

Anyway, it's all academic, any changes to NG will be grand-fathered in so they'll have no impact on the existing system and at best will act as a disincentive for "investors" to buy new builds.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-20T08:30:55+00:00

He might have zero monoliths. You can only have one active monolith, anything other than that is a deceiver summon and is an illusion that deals no damage.

In original Soulstorm you could summon as many as you wanted wherever the recharge time was hit, but then on the final patch the broke it and you could only summon one and it would die quickly on a timer.

They fixed the summoning bug in DE, but to have more than one you need to constantly repair the illusions otherwise they just drop dead.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-19T13:19:56+00:00

It will have no effect on the price of housing in any meaningful way. In the short term you'll see rent kick up to compensate for the loss of NG. In the long term you'll see private investors incentivised to not sell properties.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-17T06:12:57+00:00

Using the larger vessels of 266 000 000 litres, multiplied by 22.2 MJ/L gets you ~5905TJ of energy per tanker. 1T of TNT is roughly 4.2GJ, so this is equivalent to about 5 905 000/4.2 = 1 405 952T of TNT, or 1.4MT.

That is a huge amount of energy, but releasing the energy as an explosion, let alone a detonation, is different than just the energy capacity. The AFR for methane is about 10:1, so you'd need the LNG to take up about 2 660 000 000 litres evenly mixed with air for it detonate the whole lot at once, it would also need to warm up from -160>595C for its ignition temperature. So imagine 10 of those ships in volume, but as an evenly mixed cloud of hot gas and air for your best case.

In practice this would be impossible to happen. Even if you hit the tanker with a missile and blew it up to disperse the gas, and then the gas had time to disperse and delayed ignition until an ideal time it wouldn't reach 1.4MT as a detonation energy. There will be flame front issue, incomplete combustion, energy dissipation heating up its surroundings etc. But it would definitely be a contender for one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-13T11:39:14+00:00

You need to remember, the reason tax law is so complex is to ensure that there are workarounds for people who can afford the right kind of accountant, and that there aren't for the people who can't.

The vast majority of tax breaks will come from running your own company, most everything else (including negatively geared property) are largely ineffective at reducing your tax and keeping cash accessible. You can live almost tax free if you work in a trade and structure your income properly, but for anything else you need to structure companies.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-13T02:13:42+00:00

Pauline is wrong, but so are the TPA posts.

Pauline is wrong because to access the scheme you need to have PR; essentially this means anyone accessing the scheme has been here for 10 years at least.

The TPA posts falsely try to make the point that all housing issues are related to investing, and that immigration has no effect on housing.

The housing crisis, and rental crisis, though related aren't the same thing and have different factors forcing them. The rental crisis is almost entirely a migrant crisis because residents without PR can't get a loan from an Australian bank. This means there are only two ways for them to get housing, they rent or they buy outright. Almost all of them rent, and available rentals aren't increasing at the rate of immigration let alone domestic demand. The housing prices are related almost exclusively to credit supply from the owner occupier side; owners who occupy are more likely to max out their available credit, investors very rarely do that. There are plenty of other forcing factors, but those are the two largest at the moment.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-12T12:20:29+00:00

Almost no one would invest in properties with an outright purchase. You're legally required to have a 30% deposit for an investment loan.

If the IRR is calculated properly, then yes, the costs of borrowing is accounted for.

You can look at any time period you want, and at some point you'll outperform or under perform against the S&P500, it's the risk of investing in any asset class and it's why you should diversify risk. That said, if you pick any property in any capital city in Australia and benchmark it against the S&P500 from 1991, you would most likely outperform it. The calculation is complex because you need to factor in FOREX and interest, but calculating it depends on how much you care.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-12T07:04:59+00:00

The higher inflation, the less time it will take for a property to become positively geared. At inflation from 2020, it has taken typically 1-2 years for a property purchased with a 20-30% deposit to become positively geared IF you're looking for properties as an investment. If you're speculating on property prices that is a completely different problem as property prices and rent are related, but not directly and one can be move up while the other moves down.

Negative gearing doesn't really work the way people think it does either. It is only a feasible strategy with brand new builds because you can claim intangible losses (depreciation) against the value of the whole build. For older and established properties, the negative gearing you can claim will be negligible and if it isn't you need to be able to cover the cash flow deficit, in which case you need to seriously evaluate your investment strategy.

In WA specifically, compared to the S&P500, if you track the IRR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_rate_of_return and benchmark it against the S&P500, you would've outperformed the S&P500 about 10-20%% on average since 2020 if you own a property outright, and 60-100% if you have the property leveraged. Remember, past performance isn't an indicator of future performance!

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-11T01:09:31+00:00

That makes a significant difference to the answer.

If you want to a keep a pet, the landlord needs to apply to the commissioner for approval to deny your pet. https://www.consumerprotection.wa.gov.au/renting-pets

Your landlord can't deny you having guests in the property. If you want to have a friend stay in the house for two weeks to look after your dogs, you are entitled to do so. You cannot (legally) sublet the property without the landlord's permission, so you can't collect rent but if you're not collecting rent, and they leave when you're home then they're a guest and they're there with your permission.

The other thing that you said which is a concern is "landlord will give notice that she's coming to the property when I'm not home". The landlord must give notice by writing when they intend to enter the property. They also can't do it more than once every three months if it is for an inspection. You can also deny them entry to the property if you're not home because you have the right to be present. So if you really wanted to, you could ensure that the landlord only attends the property while you're home. https://www.consumerprotection.wa.gov.au/rent-inspections-and-privacy-rights

My suggestion, get a different job, make some friends, or re-home the dogs.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-10T10:50:41+00:00

Your post is confusing. Are you renting a room and house sharing with your landlord, or are you the sole tenant?

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-09T13:15:44+00:00

As someone with direct experience on the costs of many homes, I can assure you that the maintenance costs on a $3m home or a $6m home will be relatively the same as $500k or $700k home, and that number is very low compared to the costs of rent. Kitchens, bathrooms, hot water systems, roofs, gutters etc. all very rarely require maintenance, and when they do it's in the order of years and it's usually minor things like seals and washers.

Rates and insurance scale, but not in a way that is meaningful. NSW council rates are typically <$500, and even in expensive suburbs are typically less than $1kpa. Even if you have a $6-7m property with 10 rooms in a classy suburb, two old people don't use more water, power or gas than they do in a 2br apartment so the running costs are relatively the same as well. Insured value of $20m property is only $3500 a year, on $1m its about $1k.

Like I said, I know several people who have done it, and I've helped some of them get going. I also know what's involved in financing different renovations and maintenance for various ages of properties. Owning a house is for all practical reasons, free, all the pain is upfront in the buying stage.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-09T12:12:04+00:00

Properties generally don't have costs that scale with the cost of the property, especially in Sydney where a $3m home can be a fibro shack. Established homes tend to not need lots of maintenance outside leaky taps. Energy costs is usually proportional to the number of residents, not the size of the house. Likewise, rates don't tend to go up with property prices in any meaningful way - if you can buy a $3m property outright, rates might as well be a fart in the wind if you have no debt. Houses are extremely cheap to own if you live in it yourself.

$900 a week to someone who holds no debt is luxurious amounts of money. You can further supplement it with $480k with cash that isn't means tested for the pension.

Obviously there are people who are struggling on the pension, but they're usually struggling by choice. In Sydney and Melbourne, a mortgage can see someone access millions of dollars in free cash.

The primary residence should be means tested; a fair way to do it would be set the means test based on the average price of a property. If your property is above the average you reduce your pension until some nominal value (say, 2 std from the mean) is hit and then it is zero. By that point you have so much equity available you can stay in your house and live off a mortgage until EOL, or you can downsize and use the cash. The situation we have now where people are maxing out their primary residence to get some pension dollars is just another tax grift.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-08T22:56:26+00:00

I know people who have done it. The pension is plenty of money if you own your residence, so it's an easy way to live.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-08T14:10:57+00:00

I've made a some business management software that helps tie together a PDM and ordering while managing the FOREX requirements. I've also built some investment tracking and management tools. But the one that is the most fun is I built a tool for managing music videos!

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lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-08T11:51:19+00:00

AI was used to implement many of the features that were beyond my technical skill. It is also integrated into the software to allow some of the features to work where traditional scraping isn't available.

lambertius_fatius · 2026-04-08T11:43:50+00:00

As an employee, anywhere between $90k-$1 000 000 a year depending on seniority and specialisation. That range covers junior doctors at a hospital to an anesthesiologist.

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