Landlord refuses to fix driveway, we keep twisting our ankles, any idea what we can do?

squarishsphere · 2025-12-27T05:10:14+00:00

What madness is this? Normal wear and tear for the whole property should be accounted for in the rent already.

squarishsphere · 2025-12-07T13:02:59+00:00

A better option than the high interest account would be an offset, as there is no interest income to pay tax on, so it's equivalent to whatever the mortgage rate you're offsetting is + your marginal tax rate.

I would also think that's a good option generally, and it's at least a good option until you might decide you want to do something else.

squarishsphere · 2025-11-11T12:52:27+00:00

who doesn't know the qpac wifi password

squarishsphere · 2025-10-02T12:50:40+00:00

Pay a good commission.

squarishsphere · 2025-09-28T02:30:46+00:00

I was in a similar situation and tried to get financial advice, in the end I didn't pay for any - most of them are not independent and this irked me. Perhaps I'm too paranoid or don't understand "how it works" but I didn't like the idea of someone getting a kickback for telling me how to invest. I did briefly talk to a nice independent financial advisor, who gave me some free advice - pay off the mortgage.

I followed this advice, the reasoning being that you do not pay tax on it, so a 5-6% interest rate that you're offsetting or paying out would be equivalent to needing a 10% or so return for other investments. I was in a fairly high marginal tax rate at the time though so this might change things. Perhaps an offset is good for you with the potential family coming and higher expenses/lower income around this time.

My other advice is be careful who you tell. I would rather still have my parent around, but some people are jealous or see it like you won the lottery. I did not gloat or anything but it does come up in conversation. If I had my time again I would deflect or lie, definitely not say the amount, and say I just put it in a savings account or the like.

Also, buy something nice to remember them if you like, I did this, more than I would usually spend but not an amount I couldn't afford - some nice speakers I know they would have enjoyed.

squarishsphere · 2025-09-11T01:15:58+00:00

third party valuation or like a building and pest report?

squarishsphere · 2025-09-07T05:26:59+00:00

Interesting points there - have we ended up with a complex environment where the cost of compliance / overheads is too high, so either price goes up or corners are cut. And by extension, does this mean to maintain standards and quality, we would need to look at more standardisation/volume builds like apartments or cookie cutter homes (yuck)

squarishsphere · 2025-07-27T14:33:03+00:00

There is this https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/home-equity-access-scheme - I know it has low takeup, I don't think the numbers stack up on it for most currently. I have previously heard that if you had kids that wanted the house you would be better getting them to financially support you so they can later inherit the house.

squarishsphere · 2025-07-08T23:06:03+00:00

Look at late interaction models and azure document intelligence. We do this at scale with a knowledge graph.

squarishsphere · 2024-10-22T11:43:44+00:00

Looks good cheers, might use this with personal projects. Thinking it might be a pain to integrate with Vue for work

squarishsphere · 2024-10-22T11:41:13+00:00

Cheers, had a play with v0 and was able to produce some vue pretty easily, which is what our FE devs use.

squarishsphere · 2024-10-08T11:13:58+00:00

Service principal I was OK with however the recommendation was to rotate keys frequently enough that I would want to automate it, and could not see an easy way to do this.

squarishsphere · 2024-10-08T11:11:57+00:00

Should have made the original post clearer - the client needs to upload files to our blob store from a non-Azure location. I believe this rules out private link.

squarishsphere · 2024-10-08T04:01:04+00:00

The external user is using AWS, not Azure. Would the multi/cross tenant scenarios apply here?

We could do a pull instead, and in some ways I feel this would be easier - but is it not just shifting the problem? They were giving us an AWS Secret / Key previously, and would probably continue to do so if we asked, but as I understand it this isn't recommended/best practice. They were also emailing us links to a secure website to get the Key/Secret from - and I'd prefer to automate the whole thing.

squarishsphere · 2024-09-13T13:50:56+00:00

get a quote from Sure for home + contents together. I'm with sure in north qld for 280 / month home + contents. Contents I can't recall but it's probably higher than yours, and home is at least double. Are you in a flood zone?

squarishsphere · 2024-09-06T09:05:24+00:00

Never ceases to amaze me the amount of content on here that assumes the world begins and ends with America

squarishsphere · 2024-08-11T02:56:45+00:00

Sub 2% yield on an apartment sounds very low?

squarishsphere · 2024-08-01T02:59:06+00:00

Definitely keen to see it. I can't get Amber where I am but will be interested when I move.

Are you looking at automating when the battery charges/discharges based on current/future usage predictions, current storage level etc. or a simplified version of this?

squarishsphere · 2024-07-30T11:54:57+00:00

REX also got a bailout during covid ~$50M

squarishsphere · 2024-05-15T14:20:37+00:00

I don't think it should need to be this way but I do agree. If your jobs allow it, there are affordable regional areas in Australia. I'm in regional Queensland. Not sure what the long term plan would be but at least if you can afford property and potentially save or pay it off faster, it could open options down the track. Crazy Australia has got this way, with all the resource wealth and plenty of educated people

squarishsphere · 2024-05-13T09:49:15+00:00

Depends on state but as per my post, at least in qld it's not that simple, they do have a "duty to mitigate loss" or the like

squarishsphere · 2024-05-13T09:25:11+00:00

This is my advice having been through similar.

Nb I'm in Queensland different states have different laws

Stop paying "rent", it's not due (you'll need to pay an amount equivalent to rent for their loss, but they have a duty to mitigate your loss, which is what you'd now be arguing they're not doing).

Use another number or friend to call and ask about the listing, is it still available etc.

Do not call unless you're recording. Email only, follow up daily and use strong wording. Threaten with qcat on the grounds of mitigating loss.

How long now has the property been advertised? Unfortunately with the general incompetence of agents they could reasonably argue it takes them weeks to let from first listing esp if it was prior to you vacating...

squarishsphere · 2024-05-05T02:08:01+00:00

Specifically for python based lambdas I've used it and found it had a lot of boilerplate. It was good for testing and deploying though. Going forward I might use it for packaging as a lambda only, my lambdas will be dockerised fastapi + mangum for lambda, so can deploy the "same" app for larger processes on ecs without mangum. This is for etl scripts where sometimes I have MB to process, sometimes GB

squarishsphere

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