Around here it's Queensland School holidays and having one still in school, our year pretty much runs by the school terms. The thing is my kids are now 18 and 16 have social lives and part time jobs so they are out and about a lot. I do miss the days when we would hang around the house in our pj's, do some baking and watch movies on school holidays. I can honestly say even though the earlier years of Motherhood are hard, time just goes by so fast and before you know it they'll be out in the big wide world living with their mates. I do know they will be welcome to come home for dinner any night of the week and they love my cooking so that's a positive. My family went to Mum's on Sunday night for roast dinner for over 30 years and has been such a treasured family tradition catching up with everyone once a week.
Last weekend I went down to the Gold Coast to stay with my friend and we had a lovely time walking on the beach, catching up and chilling out. The weather was amazing given that most of the early part of the week it was raining but it wouldn't have mattered although it was lovely having a few sunny days and watching a beautiful sunset.
In Australia ASIC [Australian Securities and Investment Commission] have just released new guidelines for Financial Influencers. All the IG accounts and Blogs I follow who share their money journey about paying off their mortgage, investing in shares and any talk about money in general will incur hefty fines and/or jail unless they are a qualified financial advisor. I totally get where ASIC are coming from to protect the average person from taking advice from people who aren't qualified. However the majority of the bloggers are not scammers and are providing ordinary people with tips about how they did things and navigated through their own personal finance journey. New guidelines are warranted however banning people from sharing their own story about money does seem over kill.
You can talk about cooking, home renovation, fitness, travel and recommend anything with respect to these topics so you might buy recommended cookware because a cook uses it which means they are influencing you to buy something. You are allowed to do that however you can't say you went with a certain mortgage company because of their rates and great customer service. It is designed to protect people being scammed and losing money so that is a good thing however banning talking about money so people don't have access to ordinary people's journeys is not necessarily a good thing. So many of the people I follow are either going to shut up shop, they have to delete all their posts where they give their opinion on a share broker, bank etc. or they will be fined and go to jail. Here is a blog post from Strong Money about the new guidelines. These guidelines only refer to Australia.
It's nearly time for Easter so I got in early and whipped up some lovely Hot Cross Buns for the kids and I and it didn't take long before they were all gone. The time line with proving is long however the hands on time with mixing is very short so we had them for afternoon tea.
Hope you are all staying safe and have a Happy Easter.
A beautiful sunset at the Gold Coast.
