Where's my $1,080 tax offset?

If you have completed your tax return and received your refund, you may have been like us wondering if you already received the tax cut that the federal government announced a few weeks ago. The short answer is yes, your refund already includes the change in tax rate.

The amount that you receive will depend on your taxable income - if your taxable income is $125,000 or more, you should see $1,080 in your notice of assessment. The tax cut shows up as a credit under the "Low and middle income tax offset" (in yellow below). You will notice that this line was not in your tax return last year.

How to spend 30 seconds to maximise your NBN speed?

Are you getting slower NBN speeds than you expected? It could be a 30 second fix.

We moved from one internet service provider who was offering 12MBps plan to one that was providing 50MBps for the same price but for some reason while the download speed improved significantly, the upload speed stayed around 1Mbps. Surely switching to a faster provider should also result in a faster upload speed right?

When logging into the modem settings (eg  go to your internet browser and type in 192.168.1.1 or 10.1.1.1  If you get a login screen, login with the default admin login and admin password), there is a section called bandwidth control. In our case the upload speed was set at 970kbps! Unticking the bandwidth control and then running the speed test resulted in the upload speed changing to 20Mbps! If you haven't gotten on to check this, you might want to do this now!

How to get your VOIP phone working when you churn NBN providers (using the old ISP's modem)

We recently moved from ADSL to NBN (I know, right?) with iiNet and in the process, they changed our Toolbox to one which TPG has been using since probably 1990 or something. There was no longer the daily bar charts of data usage and instead an interface that wouldn't even let you change your payment method. This was enough to cause us to shop around, landing with Exetel with their $60 NBN50 month by month offer.

It took about five weeks for them to finally get the VOIP transferred over from iiNet, while we were paying for both iiNet and Exetel. This was when after two hours of digging around in the modem settings, I came to realise that internet service providers are locking people out of the VOIP settings when they give you a modem. The router we had from iiNet which worked perfectly with Exetel's NBN wouldn't let me see the Telephony menu! The only way to overcome this is to find out your super-user login details for your modem. That is, instead of logging in with admin/admin (and then changing your default password), there is a login for example with TP-Link's vr1600v router called su (for super user). The default password for this login is a little tricky to find but once you find it, you can change your SIP settings from iiNet to Exetel as well as the login and password for that VOIP phone line to work.

For the TP-Link vr1600v, this is how you find out the su password.

1. Login to 192.168.1.1 or whatever it is for you (eg 10.1.1.1?) in Google chrome
2. Go to the Advanced menu then click on USB Sharing 
3. Right click on the web page and clicking Inspect
4. Click on the USB Storage Device
5. In the Inspector screen, click on Network at the top and you should see a list of CGI lines. One of them has cgi?5&1&1&5&5&1&5&5&5&5&1 - click on this 
6. You will see the contents pop up in the right hand column.  Now scroll down and you will see something like this 

1. adminName=su
   adminPwd=ygRW52!au8

7. Your super-user login is su and the password is ygRW52!au8
8. Logout of your modem and login using the above
9. You will now see the Telephony option and you can replace the SIP Details with that of your new NBN provider.