(I’ve consolidated the ‘What’s Been Going’ and ‘How We’ve Been Helping’ pieces from the previous newsletter into one article – it’s my attempt at ‘brevity’!)

It’s been a pretty hectic period and I managed to completely squib the second month of my monthly newsletter commitment. Well, what have we been up to instead?

 

New Work

We have been incredibly fortunate in the last few weeks with the amount of new work that’s come in. The scale of work was quite unexpected, and it’s tested our systems and processes.

In doing so, we’ve found some areas we need to improve, some areas we’re pretty happy with, and some things that make me just shake my head and wonder why I do it like that.

I’m a little proud to say we weren’t overwhelmed and we were able to recognise the signs early enough to take action (we closed our books early in March and added extra resources where they were needed) which has let us get back to a more suitable workload quickly.

This feels a little humblebrag-y, which I suppose it is, but I’m incredibly grateful for every piece of work we get to do for clients – the fact there was more than normal in the last few weeks hasn’t changed that!

Interesting Work

And it helps that the work we’ve been doing has been really, really interesting:

–          Rapid Left-Turn into Retirement

Not one, but two of the people we’ve worked with recently have seen huge changes to their circumstances shortly after our engagement.

These changes have fundamentally changed our advice for them as they race into retirement – mostly for the better, I’m glad to say, but there were some hairy moments!

For anybody thinking of retiring in the next few years, I have to emphasise the value of getting advice as early as you can. Get all your ducks in a row, then let everything play out before getting advice 6-12 months before your final day. It just helps reduce the stress of the whole period.

 

–          Using Super to Pay Less Tax

I want to try and avoid financial technobabble in these things, but this one’s worth hearing I think.

 Everyone has two caps of how much they can put into super – one for pre-tax money (‘concessional’) and one for after-tax money (‘non-concessional’).

 Your concessional contributions cap is $27,500 this financial year and includes your work contributions, any salary sacrifice contributions and any other deductible contributions. If you go over the cap, there are some taxation penalties.

 And it used to be that any cap you didn’t use in the financial year, you lost it. But a few years ago, the government made what feels like a little-known change to the contribution rules – you can reach back up to 5 years and ‘carry forward’ any cap space you haven’t used. (As usual, the ATO has a great rundown of the details).

 We’re getting into the technical weeds now, but what this means is that you could have a ‘balance’ of unused contributions that you could use this year. And one reason we’ve been using that lately is to help people with a Capital Gains Tax (CGT) issue.

 This is an area where you should definitely get advice so if you are thinking of selling an asset with a big capital gain on it and have some unused contributions, get advice about your options.

 

–          The Double-Edged Sword of Inheritance

Few areas of finance are as emotionally weighty as receiving an inheritance from the estate of a loved one.

We’ve advised a few people about their inheritance lately – resolving the myriad emotional concerns that can come with an inheritance, what it means for their financial future, what to do with it and the potential negative impacts.

Because, yep, there can be negative consequences from receiving a lump sum of money – especially if you’re receiving benefits from Centrelink like the Age Pension.

The good news is that there are things you can do to dilute these impacts. But you’ve got to know what the possible impacts are, and how to tackle them – which is where we’ve come in.

–          How to Use Your Business to Fund Retirement

An especially rewarding engagement has been helping a business owner integrate their business and retirement plans into one, coherent strategy.

People who aren’t business owners might be surprised to learn that this is not a common situation – most businesses are run as they’re run, with the money coming out to the owners’ personal finances in an ad hoc, or sporadic, way.

But in this case, we’ve been able to articulate what this owners’ wants from their retirement and translate that into numbers and milestones for them to implement in their business. This in turn helps them set the targets and manage the operations of the business, because now they know what they’re aiming for.

 It’s early days, but it’s exciting to see and I can’t wait for our next progress meeting to find out how they’re going with it!

 

Travels

It was also time for one of my absolute favourite parts of the year – my trip out west. I’m lucky enough to have a (wonderful) clients in Warrnambool, Portland, and Ballarat.

Once a year I head there for a few days of back-to-back meetings with great people in a lovely part of the country.

Any trip with a night in Camperdown, and another in Port Fairy is a fine way to spend a few nights too! (Even more so when they’re also few nights away from my teething one year old, just quietly…).

So – if you know anybody out that way who could do with some financial advice, please pass on my number!

This is from the latest issue of our new newsletter. My aim is to share four things with each, monthly, issue:

1. Something of interest about the financial world for you to read.

2. What we’ve been up to.

3. Something to share .

If you’re not already subscribed, please feel free to join the list for next month’s issue.