Opinion on using properties for your app.

Question

I have a small application which uses a properties file. I want these properties to be global to my application. Throughout the code I may need to refer to the properties.
I created a singleton class which loads the properties file, and then I created a method for each property. So I access the properties through methods, which return the type I want, such as a String, int, boolean...
public String getProperty1() {
public boolean getProperty2() {
What do you think of this design?

Answer 1

The only problem I thought I saw with doing something like:
MyProps.getInt("age");
Would be that you have all of these hardcoded strings throughout your code. Also, if you make a typo it could create a few run-time bugs. I considered making a static variable and using it like this:
MyProps.getInt(MyProps.AGE);
If I needed to also make a small tweak to the actual property name, I only have to change it in one place.
public static String AGE = "newage";
I guess this really is only useful if you anticipate you may change some of the wording, which probably isn't that common.