Happy New Year from the Interretire team!
We hope you all enjoyed the celebrations and wish you a fantastic 2024.
My family and I spent New Year’s Eve with family and good friends in cool and wet Bayside Melbourne.
Traditionally on a warmer New Years Eve we’d all make the short walk from home to our Bathing Box on Brighton beach (home to 95 colourful bathing boxes) for dinner and NYE celebrations. Together with lots of other people on the beach we’d stroll along the beach to get a glimpse of fireworks over the city at midnight (Photo below is from a sunny Brighton Beach today).
Aside from recharging and relaxing over the last few weeks with family and friends, I've also spent the last few days:
→ reviewing my 2023 goals,
→ setting family goals for the year ahead
→ Preparing our Interretire weekly communication plan for the year focusing on sharing tips, repatriation ideas and changes to tax rules impacting Australian expatriates or migrants returning or repatriating to Australia.
On a personal level my family and I went through the expatriate journey from Asia back to Bayside Melbourne in 1998, having worked in Asia, UK, and Channel Islands for 12 years. This experience highlighted how difficult it is navigating Australia’s complex regulatory and taxation environment.
Our focus after 12 years as expatriates was firstly
returning to the Australian Lifestyle and reconnecting with family and friends and developing a strategy to do so in the smoothest and most cost effective manner.
Our starting point was planning for TAX! We sort advice on our tax residency status, particularly the timing of becoming an Australian tax resident (with its significantly higher tax rates compared to those in Asia).
Additionally, we had discussions on appropriateness of holding assets (acquired as expatriates) in offshore legal structures and similarly Australian legal structures such as superannuation and local trusts/companies.
Further to this we reviewed tax effective Australian focused strategies on buying real estate or equities.
Knowing that insurance coverage could have significant taxation and residency implications on our transition we undertook a review of our offshore and onshore health and other insurances and reacquainted ourselves with the Australian social safety net Medicare.
Finally, we sort professional legal advice on both foreign and Australian wills, supporting powers of attorney and appropriateness of testamentary trusts to ensure our family would be looked after on our passing.
There is a lot of complexity to navigate and consider when repatriating or migrating to Australia.
If you have any Australian repatriation topics you would like covered please direct message me.
Regards,
Dale Hoy
m) +61 419 364 994
