What's changed?
The change. Who it affects. What to check next.
A proposal is not a law. A passed law may start later. Status is based on the dated source check, not a live legal service.
Site corrections & improvements
— Bank calculations, publisher description and planner clarity
- Corrected the bank-rate picker so ambiguous total-rate rows, prose-only caps and expiry periods cannot produce unsupported combined projections. Account balance limits apply to the whole plan. Saved bank rates require fresh supported data or a newly entered custom rate.
- Excluded explicit business-only and SMSF-only products from the general personal savings comparison. Corrected shared tier-boundary handling and very-small-rate arithmetic in the savings-goal and mortgage engines.
- Made two targeted corrections to the archived TFN guide: lawful TFN recipients and eligibility for the Services Australia application route. This was not a fresh review of every archived instruction.
- Corrected the publisher description by removing an unsupported educational-qualification claim. Howloop does not claim financial-adviser or tax-agent registration.
- Added a reproducible payday and bills example with every starting input. It shows how a positive 13-week finish can still hide an earlier cash shortfall. The figures use the planner's existing calculation engine.
- Made the free planner easier to find in the tool directory and navigation. Guide search now supports multiple words and announces its results; the complete library remains readable without JavaScript.
These are website and explanation changes. They do not advance the financial-rule source-check dates or bank-data retrieval dates shown elsewhere.
Earlier site updates & how corrections work
18 September 2026 — usability and content review: Expanded all eight shorter money lessons with worked examples. Improved amount formatting and total mortgage-payment labels; added explicit base-versus-conditional bank scenarios with welcome-period expiry. Tax preparation now supports optional saving, restoring and clearing on this device. Aligned page addresses and sitemaps, and updated the privacy notice to describe the deployed Cloudflare traffic beacon.
18 September 2026: Added eight beginner lessons, an LVR calculator, source-review dates and a rule-change record. Lessons start with an example and a quick check; detailed explanations remain available below.
— Employee tax return companion
Added a three-step preparation guide with income-year and coverage checks, occupation sources, record reminders, six expense topics, a local expense organiser and downloadable CSV and myTax checklists. Expense arithmetic separates private use and work-use reimbursements; it does not assess tax deductibility. It does not decide deductions, estimate refunds or lodge returns. The guided flow runs without AI; optional AI explanations are disabled until separately configured.
— Australian money tools
- Introduced compound-interest, mortgage and offset, savings-goal and emergency-fund calculators with assumptions and calculation breakdowns.
- Published the bank explorer with dated public CDR product snapshots. Missing or partial data is labelled. Supported base rates are modelled separately from bonus and introductory components.
- Expanded six money guides with worked comparisons, common mistakes and primary-source references.
- Added a starting-point guide, topic navigation and individual article update records.
- Separated older everyday how-to guides into a labelled archive. Their existing URLs remain available; they are outside the current money-guide library.
How a correction is handled
Send the page URL, the part that seems wrong and a source or reproducible example to the address on our contact page. Use sample amounts and leave out account identifiers.
A verified error in a formula, example or explanation is corrected in the affected page. A material change should be recorded here or in the article's update note. Typographical or layout changes do not need to be presented as a new factual review.
What an update date means
A guide's publication date records when it first appeared. Its update date records a material edit; a source-check date records a check of its cited references. Bank retrieval dates describe a separate data snapshot and cannot guarantee a current offer. None of these dates means a licensed adviser has reviewed the page.