Reduction of LVR on Investment property questioned

In my mind, the Loan to Value ratios (LVR) for investment properties should have never been reduced by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand from 35% to 20% and I struggle to understand why it has.

Will probably now join the investing hordes in this Property pile up owing to a decade of a dearth of any real investment opportunities. There’s only one or two areas in the South Island of NZ which I feel still presents value, every other area in NZ has gone full euphoric FOMO. May be the continuous money pump will never turn off (or won’t turn off for the foreseeable future) and the pull back of global asset bubbles may not eventuate in any significant sustained scary way. No one knows.

Seems to be also a lot easier today to get pre-approved for a loan in New Zealand than it was say a few years ago, the banks appear to be willingly to lend more (In my view, a jaw dropping and gobsmackingly lot more) and going through the process earlier this week does perhaps make it easier to understand why the Housing Market bubble refuses to burst and instead continues to inflate.

Again, the only risk factors to the asset markets on the radar is food security (which appears to have receded recently) and Civil Unrest which appears to be subjectively growing around the world, but still appears to be relatively benign (not raucous enough to enact any real change). Seems with all other threats the Central banks seem to be able to just add a few zeros at the end of the Global Money supply and “she’ll be right”. But who the flip knows…?

Reduction of LVR on Investment property questioned

Stream of Consciousness Week 30th March 2020

Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…

  • This period, would certainly be a time to learn new stuff. Trying to learn more about general Linux server administration and getting more into the guts of this. More for my own edification mainly for personal projects. In a small way, it may increase, slightly, the opportunities available.
  • The Remuera Golf Course has been closed for golf and has been kindly opened up for public access walking and jogging during the lock-down period. It’s a good large area to walk around and explore and recommend at least 2 hours if you want to stroll the entire area. Though try to stay off any greens that are under maintenance.  Restricted to those local to the area obviously.
  • Snitching on your fellow citizens… RNZ Audio Bite. While could be argued that the new Police form to report CoViD-19 L4 breaches is an essential tool to aid compliance, I am concerned that it may also inevitably breed fear, contempt and distrust of fellow citizenry in one’s community. I am also concerned that some may be treating this like game in that some people may derive a twisted sense of gratification reporting others… Like idiots who repeatedly upload snore-fest videos cataloguing a series of (minor) driving mistakes to YouTube from their Dashcam and acting all virtuous and sanctimonious about it.

Other CoVid-19 thoughts have been rolled up into their own post.

 

Stream of Consciousness Week 30th March 2020

Fibre Broadband ONT Installed

Fibre is finally installed after being convinced by a passing Chorus Man in a Van to get connected. So which provider to go with, I wouldn’t know. Still on my ADSL1 copper connection.

Chorus Fibre Termination point.

After a few false (scheduling) starts, the Chorus Technician managed to eventually come along, lay down the Fibre and install the Optical Network Termination (ONT) box. The job he did looks pretty professional overall.

Probably alone in feeling this way, but would be keen to learn more utilizing Fibre’s potential towards improving people’s lives overall, through initiatives such enabling more to work from home and improving of connectedness between friends and family, etc (and perhaps less about it simply being another means of “Feeding the masses a steady diet of Bread and Circuses” in terms of piping passive Entertainment and Professional Sports into People’s homes).

 

Fibre Broadband ONT Installed

Fieldays 2018 Adult Entry price increase

Update 14/06/2018: Will no longer be attending this year’s Fieldays, everyone who had expressed interest to attend Fieldays with me have all since pulled out. Not worth me driving down there alone from Auckland.

Noticed that the Incorporated Society behind the National Fieldays has increased the Adult ticket price for this Year for those booking online via Stream Ticketing from $20.00 per Adult (+$5.00 booking per transaction) to $30.00 per Adult (+$0.90 booking fee per ticket). This represents roughly a 50% price increase over the preceding year if taking the scenario of booking online for a group of 4-5 together. Continue reading “Fieldays 2018 Adult Entry price increase”

Fieldays 2018 Adult Entry price increase

Matrix RIOT two Month Review.

Have had an Instance of the Matrix “Synapse” Chat Server for two months now (instructions). The system operates alright, but in short, the User Interface for both the Android App and the Web Based user interface I found hasn’t been particularly fast… In fact, it feels a bit lethargic in a way akin to walking through a swamp.

Having said that, there is a new series of the server in development called “Dendrite” that promises to be faster with more optimal resource usage, but do not know when the developers are going to get around to formally releasing it to the public.

Will keep the current server up for now, but won’t be actively pushing or promoting it beyond family and a handful of friends. If people expressly mention that they are looking for an alternative, will mention it there and then along with my instance of Matrix/RIOT, but generally not before then.

 

Matrix RIOT two Month Review.

Week Beginning 13th November 2017

Note: These are simply quick thoughts that have been jotted down. They have been categorized as “Insignificant” for very good reasons. They may contain hunches which will be unsubstantiated, unqualified and unquantified. Some of these points (each separated into their own paragraphs) may or may not be spawned into more substantial posts.

 

Wayward Email

Appears a Local New Zealand accommodation software and systems provider has fairly recently (within the last year or so) rebranded themselves  as “Nui Software” along with getting a domain nui.global. As a result, I have been getting the odd stray email landing in my catch all inbox from accommodation providers who are inadvertently sending their query to “@nui.co.nz” or “@nui.nz” instead of “@nui.global”. It is an easy error to make.

While I have been advising senders of wayward emails as I find them I may look to put in an auto-responder in (for specific receiving addresses), asking senders to double check they have the correct email domain.

Stoney Creek

Brought a collection of shirts and shorts from the Stoney Creek stand at the National Agricultural Fieldays event about a year and a half ago. They did have rather flashy marketing behind their brand, launched a brand new bold logo and put a lot into their social media presence along with their slogan “it’s in the blood”. Welp, the blooming garments appear to be falling apart only after a few excursions into the bush.  Upon purchasing them, the garments felt as if they were pretty solid and I was somehow (in this case, apparently incorrectly) sure they would last the distance. Even my more recent purchase of shorts, the drawstring completely failed and the blooming thing is stitched right in (Can’t be removed).

Now have to fossick around and find the frigging proof of purchase, which always seems to makes it’s escape from the receipt holder when you most need it. Don’t know if I can be shafted dealing with this.  Feeling is that the Price to durability ratio is quite stacking up for me with this particular brand.

 

Week Beginning 13th November 2017

observations20171001

Note: These are simply quick thoughts that have been jotted down. They have been categorized as “Insignificant” for very good reasons. They may contain hunches which will be unsubstantiated, unqualified and unquantified. Some of these points (each separated into their own paragraphs) may or may not be spawned into more substantial posts.

Photobucket decides to charge for 3rd Party hosting upsetting the Interwebs

Okay, so the decision to start charging users for 3rd party hosting would be a business decision, but to jump from ‘free’ directly to 400 USD without any notification to their users and then not expect a user backlash I feel strongly warrants some sort of sanity check to take place.

 

observations20171001

Week Beginning 20th August 2017

Note: These are simply quick thoughts that have been jotted down. They have been categorized as “Insignificant” for very good reasons. They may contain hunches which will be unsubstantiated, unqualified and unquantified. Some of these points (each separated into their own paragraphs) may or may not be spawned into more substantial posts.

The commentators of Interest.co.nz again

Housing market is deflating?  I’d say given the behaviour of the market in recent years, I believe it’s a little bit too early to call.

Global Liquidity feels bubbly.

There is a perhaps a concern with in me that if something of sufficient size does happen to impact the credit markets negatively to kick off some panic, the resultant domino effect is probably going to be unstoppable.

NZ Clothing brands

I regularly see this on the many clothing labels…

DESIGNED IN NEW ZEALAND

Made in China

Additionally at the Agricultural Fieldays, there were a plethora of merchants that had signs out for exclaiming they had… “100% New Zealand Wool Jumpers”, with the word “made” conveniently omitted.

Bushbuck Sales and Marketing Tactics

I get Bushbuck’s Email Newsletters now and again, I can’t remember why I signed up, it may have been to participate in some raffle at a Fieldays event at some point.

The stated recommended retail pricing (RRP) of their garments I feel appear to be the getting up there, almost the same price as what SWAZI Apparel sell their high quality, locally New Zealand Made equivalents for.  Seems From there, Bushbuck have Sales every now and again which heavily discount off of their RRP which is probably in my view, more discounting back to “normal price”.

May be Bushbuck gear is indeed quite good, However in truth, my image of their brand may have been impacted a little when they keyword stuffed their TradeMe auctions with the names of other outdoor gear brand.

Auckland Traffic, specifically South east

Traffic Patterns seem to be different each day, it’s a guessing game as to which route is fastest out of Highbrook / East Tamaki.

Stuffed full of Shopping mailers

A person purportedly by the name of Sandra Young had used the email address: Sandra [AT] young [dot] Kiwi to sign up to several Melbourne retailer mailing lists. As a result, the “Catch All” email address for young.kiwi has been filled up with adverts and promotional mailers.

 

Week Beginning 20th August 2017

Keeping in contact with friends and Family at home and abroad

The often used line for people who sometimes quite vigorously defend (their use of) Facebook is that “It helps me keep in contact with Friends and Family far away (or overseas)!”

Here’s the kicker, People I firmly feel were already freely doing that across the Wider general Internet way before the likes of MySpace and Facebook ever came on the scene.

Many people had their own Personal Homepages (at their ISP, colleges or elsewhere) or Personal Blogs and people would find each other by way of any number of search engines of the time, go to their page and flick them an email or sign their ‘guestbook’. (I know I have reconnected with many people I’ve lost contact with this way.),

RSS and ATOM standards were common place where people could subscribe to each other’s blogs or web pages, using any number of RSS readers and be able to keep abreast with articles from multiple sources, be it from their friends’ blogs, News media publication, or elsewhere in one place, (very much, I feel, in the same way how Facebook’s “newsfeed” operates today, but with far more granular control over what you wish to see than the Facebook newsfeed of today ever offered).

Another often used excuse for relying on facebook is “How can I share my photos with my family and friends overseas?”, Facebook is hardly the only medium or tool to do this. Again, your own blog could fill the same role with NUI.NZ as being my living example.

It’s worth remembering that Facebook as a communication medium is entirely controlled by a single corporation whose natural overarching focus is to maximize profits for their shareholders and is not an inter-operable communication protocol with several (typically competing) providers like how Email is structured.

If some people are serious about reducing their reliance on Facebook, are concerned as I am about the increasingly centralization of power to a few for-profit run silos, and are in favour of supporting open inter-operable web standards, I would kindly suggest that a regular Blog could fill that role as the first stepping stone.

Setting up your own personal blog I strongly feel needn’t be solely the domain of I.T. geeks. There are now blogging services which make it easy to get started as it is signing up for a Facebook Account.

There are several different blogging platforms, including B2Evoluation, WordPress, and many others. WordPress as a blogging platform seems fairly okay in my opinion… if you want a quick start, then suggest as an initial starting point signing up for a free account at wordpress.com at least as a stepping stone to get you on your way (it is very easy to sign up, as easy as it is to sign up for Facebook or any other social network).

Once you outgrow WordPress.com and/or you get sick of the adverts, you can then fairly easily move off on to your own self hosted WordPress blog at any web host of your choice once you’re ready.

What ever blogging platform you eventually get going with (Preferably an open source one that allows you to self-host in the future if not now), you can simply post links on your social media profiles (Faceborg, Google+, etc) back to your blog / homepage and have your blog / homepage as your main (web identity) hub and point of presence on the Internet in which to syndicate / share your content from. Much like what I do with on my own Faceborg Profile.

Keeping in contact with friends and Family at home and abroad

Week Beginning 5th February 2017

Note: these are simply quick thoughts that have been jotted down. They have been categorized as “Insignificant” for very good reasons. Some of these points (each separated into their own paragraphs) may or may not be spawned into more substantial posts.

Urban Exploration Politicking

[Spun out in to it’s own post, follow this link to view article]

Unruly Tenant spray paints “FTP” on door

A good friend reports that his property in Turangi has been trashed with the Gates all gone and the Garage door spray painted with lets say “FTP” to be brief (No, not “File Transfer Protocol”, the other definition… involving the word police) What the hell was the property manager at the 21st Century Turangi office doing? Why was this tenant allowed to stay in the property for 4 whole months of rent arrears before my mate had to take matters into his own hand and demand to the property manager that the tenant be kicked out?

P Epidemic

Growing alarmed within myself about the Prevalence of P Use in New Zealand.

 

Week Beginning 5th February 2017