Pressed with time? We have summarized the key points on the new federal budget for you.

Economic parameters: Inflation is expected to peak at 7.75 per cent later this year, then average 3.5 per cent the following financial year before reducing to 2.5 per cent in 2024-25.
Funding for the ATO and ASIC: Both the ATO and ASIC received additional funding on Modernizing Business Registers Program and ATO’s Tax Avoidance Taskforce.
Cost of energy: The budget forecasts power prices to rise 56 per cent over the next two years while gas prices are expected to increase 44 per cent in the same period. Fund allocated for energy transmission and cutting taxes on electric cars, along with solar battery storage for homes.
Affordable housing: National housing to build 1 million homes over five years with the help of the $3.3 trillion superannuation industry. An additional $350 million was announced to deliver 10,000 affordable homes over five years from 2024.
Young families: Extra funding allocated to cheaper childcare and expand paid parental leave to 26 weeks by 2026.
Disaster relief: The government to fund Disaster Relief Australia, and assist in deploying an additional volunteers when future disasters struck.
Higher education: The budget added investment in fee-free TAFE alongside the states and territories to provide 180,000 places
Skills shortages: $42.2 million to speed up visa processing, handle the backlog and raise awareness of opportunities in Australia among skilled migrants.
Tax breaks: The Low and Middle Income Tax Offset has not been continued. Stage three tax cuts have been kept.
Technology: The National Broadband Network will be upgraded with a $2.4 billion spend to extend full-fibre connections to an additional 1.5 million homes and businesses.
Small businesses: $15.1 million for tailored business mental health and financial counselling.
Modern Slavery: Establishing an Anti-Slavery Commissioner to work with business, society and governments to address modern slavery in supply chains.

P.S.: ATO will add more compliance activities to raise extra tax for the government. This will make advanced tax planning advice more important than ever. During the next few months, we will try to deliver different online seminars focused on different topics to help you to save tax. The first one will be at 1pm on 2 November on rental properties. Here is the registration link: 10 things you should consider before buying a property. It will also be relevant to property owners who are considering changing the current ownership structure to save tax. The key takeaways in the seminar could help you to save up to tens of thousands of dollars. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Impact Taxation and Financial Services Pty. Ltd. is a CPA Practice based in the Bankstown area. We are committed to customizing our services to meet your financial needs and help you achieve your visions and goals.

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10 things you should consider before buying a property

Are you considering buying a property? Do you know you could miss opportunities to save thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars if you don’t plan well before the purchase?

Below are a few key considerations:

1. How should you set up your loan structure? If you don’t have a loan offset account for a rental property, after you make extra payments directly to the loan account, you can only claim interest deduction on the remaining balance of the loan. For tax purposes, this deductible balance can’t be changed even if you redraw the overpaid amount later. A good loan structure could also help you to stabilize interest rate and speed up loan repayment by combining a standard variable loan (with an offset account) and a fix rates account.

2. Timing of renovation. You might want to do a renovation right after you have bought the rental property. But do you know for any genuine repair & maintenance included in the renovation, you can claim an outright deduction against the rental income when the property is available for rental? If the work is done before the date when the property is available for rental, you can only claim the deduction against future capital gain when the property is sold. Depend on when you are going to sell, it could take years or up to decades before you can claim the deduction.

3. How should you split ownership? You might want to share the property ownership with a family member. For tax purposes, the percentage of ownership is based on the legal title, regardless of who is paying more on the mortgage. If the property will give you a tax profit, you might want to allocate more
ownership to the low-income earner to utilize the lower marginal tax rate. If it is giving you a tax loss, you might want to allocate more ownership to the high-income earner to utilize the loss. The goal is for the family to pay minimum tax together.

4. Should you use a family trust to purchase the property? There are many pros and cons related to a family trust. The advantages include tax savings on rental profit or capital gain, asset protection and succession planning on family wealth. However, family trust can’t distribute losses. All losses are trapped in the trust to be used to offset future trust profit. Therefore, you can’t utilize any rental loss in a trust to offset other income such as salary & wages. Family trusts also attract high accounting fees on initial setup and annual fees on financial statements and tax returns. State governments also charge much higher land tax on family trusts.

5. Will the income level change in future years for different owners? You might want to forecast the possible income for different owners to understand total tax payment / savings related to the property. This could also impact on your decision making on point 3 and 4 above.

6. Understand when you can treat your property as main residence to receive an exemption on capital gains tax. When eligible, even if you have received rental income, you could still treat your rental property as main residence and receive the exemption. To be eligible, you will need to treat it as your main residence at the beginning. Please check out this ATO link: Treating former home as main residence.

7. Decide whether you need to purchase a depreciation report. Most taxpayers don’t know that the depreciation on the building will need to be added back to calculate capital gains tax when the property is sold. When the property is held for more than 12 months, after applying the capital gains tax discount of 50%, it will effectively cut the tax rate by half at the time of sales. This makes depreciation deductions desirable for high income earners. However, for low-income earners it might not be ideal to claim depreciation as a rental deduction since they could be paying more on capital gains tax in the future. It could get more complicated if the property is under joint ownership between high and low income earners.

8. You might want to consider Centrelink payments for future or existing owners. Most Centrelink payments are income and asset tested. Before attaching a rental property to a family member who is receiving, or plan to receive government benefits, you might want to check the testing thresholds first to see if the Centrelink payment will be impacted. This is also applicable when you are making distributions from a family trust to different family members.

9. Have you considered using your SMSF (selfmanaged super fund) to make the purchase of a rental property? There are a lot of tax saving opportunities with a SMSF since the income tax rate is only 15%. And the capital gains tax rate is effectively only 10% after factoring in the 1/3 discount. The major downside with a SMSF is normally you can’t get the money out until you retire or on compassionate grounds (SMSF does have more flexibilities compared to normal retail super fund. But the choices are still very limited). It could be expensive to set up and operate a SMSF too. There are also strict legal requirements on the trustees. Penalties on incompliance could be severe. Tax law around SMSF is very complicated too. You will need to find a good tax accountant specialized in SMSF to help you to understand the structure, also do a cost-benefit analysis before setting it up.

10. Consider internal ownership changes. For your existing rental properties, you can also consider whether you should transfer the ownership between family members, or between different business structures (this is not applicable for SMSF). You might want to do this when the income level changes with family members, or rental property changes between tax profit and loss. Before the change, you need to consider the cost of transfer including capital gains tax, stamp duty, conveyancer fees, etc. Again, a cost-benefit analysis is a must before the change.

Last but not the least, did you combine all the above strategies and compare your choices? If you haven’t yet, how would you know that you have picked the best strategy to minimize your taxes? We can help you to factor in all considerations, compare different scenarios, also present you with a Property Prepurchase Report with all our findings to help you to make a decision. Contact us today to book in a consultation with an experienced tax accountant!

IMPORTANT INFORMATION
This is general advice only and does not consider your financial circumstances, needs and objectives. Before making any decision based on this document, you should assess your own circumstances or seek advice from your financial adviser and seek tax advice from your accountant.