Free Parking in Perth City only on one street

As many retail tenants move out of the city, they cite low patronage and high rents as the reasons. If you ask most residents in Perth, the issue is parking fees in the city. Why would you buy something from JB Hifi in the city when you can go to your local shopping centre's JB Hifi which doesn't charge parking fees? Well the City of Perth has started a trial of free parking in the city but it is only on Hay Street between Hill and Bennett Street. A quick Google search only shows one newspaper article alluding to this trial. No official CPP websites seem to mention it which makes us wonder whether they are looking to prove that this trial was unsuccessful. So if you are looking for free parking in the Perth City centre, check this street out and remember to swim between the flags (Hill St and Bennett St).

Free Parking in West Perth 
If you are visiting West Perth, they are also running a free parking trial for Hay Street between Outram and Havelock Streets.

Free Parking in East Perth
The free parking trial is running for Royal Street from Trafalgar Road to Fielder Street.

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!