The past week has certainly been one of the most hectic that I’ve experienced around SMSFs in quite some time. You would have to go back a decade to when the Simpler Super reforms were announced on Budget night in May 2006 to find measures that had such an impact. The simpler super reforms at the time were a clear reflection of a booming economy – move ahead 10 years and you can see that the claw back of those measures is clearly a reflection of the headwinds that the economy is facing today.
We can argue about the fairness of the measures, in particular focusing on the retrospective approach to non-concessional contributions, however the Government has really zeroed in on the fact that superannuation is for retirement and not an estate planning tool. The combination of measures with the lifetime non-concessional contribution cap, pension transfer cap amount of $1.6m and the removal of anti-detriment goes along way to removing many of the estate planning benefits that you could obtain.
You can read more about the proposed measures on TheDunnThing blog,
With more than 280 attendees to our Federal Budget webinar last week, we continue to get plenty of questions about the impact of these proposed measures. This Friday(12 May) at 12pm AEST, Aaron will be running a Facebook ‘live’ Q&A session about the proposed superannuation changes. This event will run for approx. 30 minutes.
To watch the Facebook Live event, you will need to visit The SMSF Academy Facebook page at 12pm – we encourage you to ‘like’ our page so that you can access this live event and future live events which are to become a common feature in sharing thoughts and issues around areas impacting SMSFs.
Visit The SMSF Academy Facebook Page
Since our April 2016 update, we have wrapped up our SMSF Days across Australia. With more than 140 attendees across these events, we were delighted with the feedback about the benefits they got from the day. Here is just some of the feedback below:
- 77% said the SMSF Day was better than expected!
- 96% said the format was good to awesome!
- 84% are very likely to return for a future SMSF Day!
For those unable to attend the SMSF Day events, we now have available the SMSF Day online course for people to purchase. Having recorded the Melbourne event, it provides a great opportunity for you and your staff to access valuable training around the areas of contributions, investment strategies, pensions and estate planning. Each of the sessions includes a one hour presentation, plus case studies for users to work through (including model answers). You can take the quiz to obtain CPD points for the SMSF Association, FPA and to apply for CPE hours for the major accounting bodies.
You can watch this video on the setup of SMSF Day online course
Another event later in 2016…
Given the changes ahead to superannuation, we are now likely to revisit the SMSF day later in the year once we have a better understanding of the impact of the elected Government and their proposed measures. We will keep you posted of this in the coming months…
Upcoming webinar
Whilst on the topic of training, this month’s webinar will be taking a look at the topic of arm’s length dealings and non-arm’s length income (NALI). With a growing focus by the Regulator on activities that may not be entered into and maintained on commercial terms, the session will take a detailed look at tax rulings, case law, taxpayer alerts and more on where the Commissioner may look to apply the NALI provisions.
We are providing a bonus checklist for all attendees to this event.
For more details visit the event page, https://smartersmsf.wpengine.com/event/2016-05-arms-length-dealings/
Campus Documents
The past month has seen a range of new (and updated) tax and compliance documents added into Campus, including:
- Rollback of Account Based Pension
- Convert TRIS to Account Based Pension
- TRIS Reg 995.1.03 election
- Work test minutes (new & improved)
We are currently working on the following documents with an expected release progressively through the remainder of May 2016:
- LRBA refinance (to meet PCG 2016/5 safe harbour)
- Deed of debt forgiveness (allowing lender to forgive part or all of loan as a contribution)
- Partial commutation (elect for payment as lump sum)
A reminder that these documents are available through our silver and gold membership levels, plus all other members (bronze & free) can purchase any of these SMSF documents on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) basis. You can read the previous article on the release of the PAYG option for our SMSF documents, https://smartersmsf.wpengine.com/new-payg-option-for-smsf-documents/
We will be adding the BGL Simple Fund 360 integration to the above documents to allow you to seamlessly populate information from the software to complete your order. You can read our previous article on the release of the BGL Simple Fund 360 integration, https://smartersmsf.wpengine.com/bgl-simple-fund-360-integration/
You can find out more about the benefits of our Campus membership platform by adding one of our free and regular product updates.
See our upcoming calendar of events
