Petrol Prices

As the financial crisis hit, oil prices have come down a long way since the highs experienced earlier in the year. The Aussie Dollar has also come down sharply against the Greenback. With these factors, should the price at the pump have fallen? Yesterday, as a silly protest, a petrol station in Blacktown started subsidising petrol, and sold Unleaded at 94.9c a litre for a while. According to 2Day FM, they were subsidising more than 30c off their wholesale price, which means, the petrol stations really don't make that much profit - all the profits goes to the petrol companies. 

I will attempt to post some figures every Wednesday morning from now on and compare the price at the pump, crude oil, and exchange rates. This will hopefully give us a good idea of what is actually happening and how much we're being ripped off.

Unleaded: 140.9c / L

Exchange Rate: 0.6882 USD

Crude: 72.18 USD (104.88 AUD) / Barrel

The price of Unleaded petrol the Shell in North Ryde on Lane Cove Road.
The exchange rate according to Google.
The price for Crude is  from Nymex Crude Future according to Bloomberg.

Are you with ANZ?

Last night I was given a task, that should have been a lot simpler than it turned out to be. I needed to transfer some money into an ANZ account by midnight. If I transferred from another bank, it would take a couple of days to clear. This meant that the money had to come from another ANZ account, one that I don't have. Without thinking, I started messaging my MSN list to see who have an ANZ account. ANZ being one of the big four banks in Australia, I figured this would be easy.

After about 15 minutes and talking to countless people, I finally found one person with an ANZ account. But this person didn't even have any money in that account! The search went on for another 30 minutes, and eventually I managed to find a source, and here I say my thanks. What amazed me though, was that even a future employee of ANZ did not have an account with them. So much for being one of the big four.

Vote for which bank you use on the right!

ATO's Callback Feature Bug

As a result of high interest online savings accounts, many people have earned plenty of interest last financial year. Apparently I did enough to be billed for Pay As You Go instalments for this financial year, even though I won't be earning must interest any more.

So I called up the ATO to vary my PAYG amount down to zero. The automated system took my call and placed me in the queue. To save caller frustration, the ATO have implemented a call back system, whereby, you leave your number, and they call you back when you have reached the front of the queue. They even give you a prediction of how long it will take to reach you. When I got the call back however, I was again placed in the queue, although I only had to wait another two minutes or so. Maybe they should rename it the call-back-and-wait system.

Hello World!

Welcome readers. This will be the blog that will hopefully, eventually make me a rich man, just like every other aspiring blogger out there. I'd like to not have to go to work - not that there is anything wrong with working 40 hour weeks for 40 year although that would make for a pretty boring existence and blog.

Maybe I am a bit late to the blogging party, but we shall see how things go. Random things and thoughts will fill this space, and I will try to make things as organised as possible. So here goes and please be gentle!