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Well, unfortunately this weeks budget has hit us appreciably hard. No matter if you call it middle class welfare or not, the Family Tax benefit B was actually pretty significant to us, if you follow the Howard Government's reasoning that it was placing a value on a previously unvalued activity (That of one parent being at home and raising children) I can only assume that Mr Abbot and Hockey place a value of zero on my wifes contribution to raising the next generation (My son is about to turn six) Still buggered if I know how we can get her into any useful and productive work as where we are, a school bus is not available so she has to drive him to school and back each day and she has to be home for him when as well, not sure if they reckon that six years old is a good and self sufficient age where he is OK to be home alone for some hours every day of the week. Pretty hard to find work for her when you would have to be asking for a 10 to 2 job, local to home and not during school holidays.
All that at a time when I have to replace my work car, which in itself is going to cost me an extra $2500 or so per year because of the previous governments FBT changes. The work car is a novated lease and the FBT on that will go from 7% of the cars base value to 25% when I turn it over next week and I can not really cut the value of the car and still have it do what we need it to. I have juggled every ball under the sun in the last month to make that affordable by culling most luxury items I have been having over recent years and then had the budget take away every cent I managed to find.
Anyway, the upshot is that an extra $2500 a year (at least, I have not delved into the details to see what else might impact me) has just disappeared from my budget and most of my hobbies just got the chop. I still hope to build a nice obs but it is going to take a lot, lot longer. Hopefully I can still put in permanent piers this year. At least they are relatively cheap as I can keep the main input costs down to raw materials and do everything myself.
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