Transfer balance cap As the key super reforms (primarily contained in the Treasury Laws Amendment (Fair and Sustainable Superannuation) Act 2016 (Cth)) is now law, it is an ideal time to consider the impact of the superannuation reforms on succession planning. The focus of this article is the interaction between pensions payable to minor children [read more]
Superannuation law is currently undergoing one of the most significant periods of change in almost a decade. This has led to practitioners having to reconsider the conventional wisdom on various issues relating to superannuation. One such area where previous standard practice needs to be revisited is succession planning. In this article I want to focus [read more]
Introduction The Department of Treasury on 27 September 2016 released the second tranche of exposure draft legislation and explanatory material in relation to the Federal Government’s proposed superannuation reforms. These materials provide long-awaited detail on the workings of the $1.6 million transfer balance cap measure. This article explains some key take-away points about this measure. [read more]
Treasury has released the exposure draft of the Bill that would introduce the $1.6 million transfer balance cap. The draft legislation answers a vital question: what does the $1.6 million transfer balance cap mean for succession planning? (Note that this article is premised on the very dangerous assumption that the ultimate legislation will look exactly [read more]
Introduction A member representative is a person appointed under the governing rules of an SMSF to exercise the rights and entitlements of an SMSF member. A member representative can provide a number of advantages including to ensure that a timely payment of a member’s benefit can occur before death. What is a member representative and [read more]
With Daniel Butler, Director, DBA Lawyers Introduction The $1.6 million balance cap proposal adds another layer of complexity to understanding whether an automatically reversionary pension (‘ARP’) is still an appropriate SMSF succession planning strategy. Every client who is likely to be impacted by the $1.6 million balance cap measure should act swiftly and prior to [read more]
With a DBA Lawyers’ SMSF deed, new members can be admitted to an SMSF on a conditional basis. Needless to say, having a DBA Lawyers’ SMSF deed is a pre-requisite for having conditional members since it has all the requisite provisions. Who is a conditional member? The DBA Lawyers’ SMSF deed allows a conditional member [read more]
Given the rising cost of housing, adult children are living with their parents for longer. Also, parents have more in superannuation than ever before. Because adult children might have moved out and then returned, such children are sometimes referred to as ‘boomerang children’. An important question is whether, when their parents die, do such ‘boomerang [read more]
We are about to enter a period of substantial reform. We have therefore prepared a brief ‘stock take’ of what the reform proposals look like as at the start of July 2016. In particular, we consider the proposals announced in the 3 May 2016 Federal Budget by the Liberal Government. We also briefly compare these [read more]
This article looks at whether a parent and deceased child can be in an interdependency relationship for the purpose of satisfying the definition of death benefits dependant in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (Cth) (‘ITAA97’). This article follows the AAT decision in TBCL and Commissioner of Taxation (Taxation) [2016] AATA 264 (‘TBCL’). [read more]
