Think: paints, cupboard handles, tap fittings, wallpapers (yes, wallpapers going up, not coming down) and the polishing of timber floors. Also light fittings and window treatments. Anything that changes the feel and adds a bit of pizzazz without spending the big bucks.

If that sounds like the ’70s revisited, perhaps it is. Hopefully not with such garish results, though. And yes, if you are thinking, ‘hang on, hasn’t everyone been doing this all along?’ In part you are right. But the difference is the mini-makeover will be used by householders to make do for much longer than in recent years.

Why will we see this replace bigger aspirations – at least for now? It’s a meeting of several forces. First, the property market isn’t going anywhere in a hurry at the moment, so the belief that you can do a big reno and flip the property to make a good quid is quickly dissolving. Second, Australians are saving more than we have in years and there’s a propensity to pay down debt. That means making do with what we have and not taking on huge loans to expand our lifestyles. More broadly, employers continue to report that the biggest thing employees are chasing isn’t dollars but work-life balance. Money is still important, yes, but there’s a greater focus on living a life outside of the office, and people aren’t jumping ship for an extra $5,000 or $10,000 like they were a few years ago.

So if they are working less and aren’t prepared to move for a bit more cash, it’s a fairly reasonable conclusion that people will be looking to make their dollar stretch further by extending the life of their current home.

The Reserve Bank makes its announcement on the first Tuesday of every month and ANZ isn’t wheeling out its move until the second Friday, which means a wait of at least three days . So where does that leave borrowers? Slightly confused? Yes. Powerless? No.

If ever the banks were going to start breaking the cycle for rate rises, now isn’t necessarily a terrible time from a consumer perspective, thanks to the amount of information at borrowers’ fingertips about what rates are available in the market, and the relative ease for many to switch providers and make up the cost of doing so by negotiating a lower interest rate from their new lender.

The administrative pain of getting your documents together, filling in some forms and swapping some direct debits is very small when we are talking thousands of dollars saved over the life of the loan.
The very sweet part is that having switched now to loans that will attract no exit fee thanks to the Federal Government’s ban last year, it won’t be that hard – or expensive – to move again should there be a cheaper or better-suited offering elsewhere.

But anything that breaks the daily grind of washing, sweeping/vacuuming and doing the dishes is welcome. And as it turns out, robotic floor cleaners have come a long way in recent years. After doing some research online, I found out there’s a few leading brands that have decent warranties and a good reputation among forums on the web.

Sure, they may cost a little, but with the floor clean, your house will look a lot nicer (and bigger) 24/7.

With the cash rate sitting at 4.25 per cent it is still in a position other western central banks can only envy, with considerable room to lower rates to stimulate growth should it be necessary.

This pause is then a genuine pause, not the end of the rate-cut program.

The Reserve needs Europe’s recovery to continue, and it needs Australia’s employment situation to stabilise, even as the Australian dollar stays well above parity with the US dollar. This will involve not so much a lowering of the jobless rate, but an increase in employment, which was flat in 2011.

If Europe deteriorates again or job growth continues to flat-line, rate cuts will resume again. And, as the Reserve notes, the inflation outlook gives it room to cut them aggressively if necessary.

The relocation grant scheme was central to the Coalition’s pre-election commitment to create a “decade of decentralisation” in NSW but it had few takers with less than 50 applicants within three months of its start up in July 2011.

Now the acting Premier and the Minister for Services have announced plans to expand the relocation scheme from people buying an existing house to those wanting to build a new one.

The government will launch a publicity campaign to generate interest and raise awareness.

These actions will provide the extra incentives for people to make the sea or tree change. Building new homes in regional NSW will also provide opportunities for locals, creating jobs and growing the local economy.

If this program continues, and our area is included on the list of recommended towns, we may see a boost in the number of people wanting to move to the Far South Coast, and areas like Merimbula, Pambula, Eden, Bega and even Cooma.

In Japan you can get a variable mortgage rate of just two per cent. So could rates really drop that low here?

They have swamped us with TV’s and electronics, and now Japanese super company Sony is planning a raid on our mortgage market.
And it’s not just the Sony bank. There is actually a raft of Japanese banks ready to do battle in the Australian market.

The Japanese banks have a competitive advantage which could see them smash our local rates. The average deposit rate in Japan at the moment is 0.1 per cent.

That’s about 600 per cent less than Australian banks pay for their deposits. They get money more cheaply, so they can afford to give it to us cheaply, which our banks will hate, but home owners will love.

A QR Code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your mobile phone. You may soon see QR Codes in a magazine advert, on a billboard, a web page or even on someone’s t-shirt. The mobile phone needs a QR code reader, and it takes literally 1 minute for someone with an iPhone or Android phone to find and install the reader.

Once read, the QR Code will link the user straight to the Fisk & Nagle website, where they can look at the property of interest, its location, photos and agent details.

The excitement of buying or renting a property can be an overwhelming process, so much so that it is easy to overlook some simple child safety precautions once you move in.

When checking injury prevention around the home, the focus is often on ensuring that children do not have unsupervised access to stairs; to kitchen appliances such as ovens and stoves; and to areas outside including swimming pools and spas. Injury hazards posed by objects such as doors and glass can often be overlooked.

While doors and glass do pose a significant injury risk for children, there are simple steps that you can take when settling into your newly purchased home or rental property to ensure the safety of your children. If you are renting, make sure you have a friendly chat to your landlord about making your homes safer as per current tenancy laws.

Door Safety: Young children are both adventurous and inquisitive as they become more mobile and start to crawl or wander around the house. It is easy for their little fingers to be jammed or crushed in open doors and hinges. Install finger-jam protectors which prevent small fingers from being crushed in door openings. They are easy to install and are an invaluable addition to the home when protecting the safety of your child. Add closers to slow and control the closure of doors in windy locations. Open doors present an opportunity for the jamming of fingers. Adding closers, particularly in windy locations, allows the doors to close slowly and therefore greatly reduce the risk of injury.

Doors can also provide children with unsupervised access to potentially dangerous parts of the home including laundries, garages and outdoor areas. To assist in restricting children’s access to potentially hazardous areas around the home, install door knob covers which fit over door handles and make them difficult for children to open, always have doors that lead on to play areas, garages, other outdoor areas or into driveways closed, preferably self-locking and self closing. This restricts children’s access to areas that pose injury hazards such as swimming pools, garages and sheds.

Glass Safety: Furniture such as glass coffee tables and outdoor settings, sliding glass doors and low windows can all pose an injury hazard for children.

There are a few simple steps that you can take with glass to reduce the risk of injury to your children, including:
• Install safety glass- In the unlikely event that safety glass breaks, it forms small particles not large shards, reducing the likelihood of penetrating injury to children.
• Install safety film- Applying an organic-coated plastic safety and security film is an economic measure to reduce the likelihood of injury from broken glass.
• Place colourful stickers on glass doors and low lying windows (so that children to see that there is glass present, and will assist in preventing them from trying to walk through it). Using stickers of cartoon characters can make this a fun activity for your children as well.
• Avoid the use of glass around children’s play areas to ensure that if children trip or fall while playing, they won’t fall through glass furniture, windows or doors.

As you can see there are many simple solutions that you can take to reduce the hazards posed by doors and glass around the home. Remember to include door and glass safety on your checklist when buying or renting a new home and help reduce the risk of unintentional injuries to your child.

The popularity of social networking websites is forcing real estate agents to adopt new online advertising strategies, including video tours with commentary, blogs, pop-up alerts and mobile phone-compatible web pages. This revamp is all about targeting Generation Y and Generation X customers. People want savvy websites with plenty of detail about properties. Agencies are striving to meet this demand by creating sites that provide increased interaction with the public.

Virtual tours are out-dated and in the very near future will make way for video tours which will include commentary on the features of a property.The video tours are posted on YouTube and are linked back to the real estate company’s website. This provides agencies with an extra form of exposure. Potential buyers gain from the opportunity of a ‘walk through’ experience when the video tour is accessible via the agent’s website. This is particularly useful to those purchasing from overseas or interstate. The secong advantage is gained by the agent’s You Tube account. This is another ‘face’ that the agency can maintain and offers further marketing benefits by engaging a perhaps untapped audience.

Blogging is huge in the real estate industry in the States and is rapidly growing here. Nowhere better can this be evidenced on the Raine & Horne Neutral Bay website. Diligent bloggers this company has produced a massive blog base stored conveniently in monthly archives. The result the blogs generate to the website is the creation of fresh new content – that Google loves – and the ability to target a far wider range of keywords than would generally occur. You will note that this website ranks extremely well for a wide range of search terms, some of which are not in the remotest range of real estate!

Another feature that is expected to see growth is in the question-and-answer forums for each property listing, where people can post questions about individual houses and agents reply. Other interested buyers can read the comments, ask their own questions and a dialogue is created about the property. Again a great way of increasing the property’s exposure and the agent’s website. Brand building and increased traffic. This is the stuff that those in the real estate business dream about!

Mobile technology is another area that will be targeted to reach customers. Mobile phone use for internet browsing is the fastest growing area in internet usage. Standard websites designed purely for the PC or laptop view poorly on smartphones. Agent’s not spending the extra to have their site designed for smartphones are overlooking a huge growth area for their business.

Fisk & Nagle is abreast of technology changes and our marketing team work diligently to ensure that we stay that way. All six websites are designed for smartphones, each website has a blog page that is updated regularly and comments may be made and are responded to and You Tube is on the future agenda. We just need to discover a staff member that can keep the camera straight!

I shared a bedroom with my older brother until I was a teenager, and my parents were renting a house while building their own. I’m not sure if that was a good or bad thing. Good company? Yes. But her taste in posters was appalling. Jokes aside, there are dilemmas. If you have kids of different genders, when is it appropriate for them to share until? When do you say, ok, time to have your separate rooms, if they haven’t asked yet?

And there’s also another, unexpected, problem Mum and Dad encountered. The dreaded decoration drama. If you think it’s hard choosing between Imperial White and Egg Shell White, try sorting out a kids’ room. I know it sounds trivial against the greater world backdrop of natural disasters, financial meltdowns and overseas conflicts, but when you have a boy and a girl sharing and you want to create a space that they love (and more importantly, that you can convince them they should sleep in, all night), what do you go with?

Despite all this chatter about new-age men and metrosexual teens, when it comes to little boys, things still seem pretty black and white. Pink is yuck, gross, disgusting and only for girls. So, really, not much has changed at all. Animals, planes, trains and automobiles didn’t cut it.

Things have come a long way in the decorating stakes in recent years with the arrival of removable wall decals, those clever vinyl stickers that really can be repositioned. For less than $100 you can overhaul the look of a room without something as permanent as those awful stuck-on borders that permeated the bedrooms of the kids of design-conscious parents 20 years ago.

A good solution was reached: to opt for a universally popular theme. Superheroes, with bold primary colours and a cityscape on the wall with a life-size Superman decal flying through the air, ready to rescue a damsel in distress. But that is where the doubts began.
People worry about the violence associated with superheroes (for example, they are banned at some child care centres). And personally I prefer the retro idols such as Superman to more modern equivalents like Ben 10 because I perceive them to be less violent, even though it’s hard not to notice the 1978 Superman movie has drinking, mild swearing and plenty of sexual overtones.

But my parents were concerned with what sort of messages it sends to a little girl to be surrounded by superheroes that are all blokes? So, the search begins for some female crime fighters to add the mix and even up the gender imbalance. And sadly there are a few superheroes that are girls, but not nearly enough.

Wonder Woman seems a good solution, but then there’s a problem. Is she really a great role model or simply an object of sexual desire that compounds the raft of wrong messages that littlies are already bombarded with? Like bra tops for toddlers. In the real world women can be both sexy and smart, for sure, but perhaps that’s a bit advanced for a two year old girl.

Trawl the blogosphere and opinions seem mixed as to Wonder Woman’s status, particularly given she originally had to perform acts of daring in her undies. And plenty of posters have Wonder Woman intentionally looking more dominatrix than crime fighter.

In the end we ended up with one Wonder Woman (the non-dominatrix version, harder to find than you would think) and one Superman. So while it might not all be equal in the comic world of crime fighting, it was, at least, in our house.