Hi Everyone,

Just managing to squeeze the August newsletter in before the end of the month – but I have many excuses including my birthday!

The trees are budding, spring is near and I have 4 hand reared ring-tailed possums almost ready for release. Anyone want them released in their garden? Still, hand feeding possums whilst watching TV makes the endless election “news” almost bearable. However, not everyone has this privilege, so I have another way for you to amuse yourself. Your challenge this week is to spring clean your mortgage!

The lovely Barry (the friendly independent mortgage broker) has offered to give everyone a free spring mortgage make over. There are no excuses – and no catches – get on the phone and sort it out. Click here for his contact details www.cleverfinance.com.au

Did you know that mortgage rates are at a 53 year low? With this in mind, you might like to consider locking in a fixed rate for any amounts you can’t see yourself repaying in the next three or five years. Three year fixed rates are available for less than 5%. Alternatively, you could borrow and invest the funds in the market – the probability of your returns beating the interest payments are high. Need help with the investments? Give me a call.

Our newsletter has some interesting articles in it this month. Again on the mortgage theme, offset accounts and the way they are treated for tax purposes when investing, are explained. The ATO target audit areas are detailed, and there is an explanation of the new means tested private health insurance rebate. Read it here.

It is in your interest to let you health fund know if you are no longer eligible for the 30% rebate on the cost of your health insurance. If you don’t, you will get a nasty tax bill when you lodge your 2014 tax return and the ATO reclaim the rebate back. Read the newsletter then ring your health fund.

Finally, I have spent a long time this month on various courses and seminars getting my head around the aged care system in Australia, in order to help our clients and their parents navigate this somewhat confusing system. If your parents are still with us, watch this space over the next few months for tips and tricks as to how to get the best outcome for your folks. Of course, if you hear of anyone starting to think about their parents and the aged care system, please give them my number. It is really, really easy to make extraordinarily expensive mistakes which can be avoided with a bit of early planning. Questions that get asked in this emotional time & some ways we can help are detailed here.

On a similar vein, I will also be posting estate planning tips over the next few months, with the hope that as a family unit you work together to stop the tax man taking a slab of the family estate. There is no death tax as such, but structure it wrong and 30% will disappear on death. Let’s avoid that.

However, before we can do that we need to be able to talk about money as a family. So, to help (and this is the reason the newsletter is so late!) I have my first webinar. Yes! I hope you are as excited about this as I am – it took bloody ages! Yet I am sure it will get quicker (and more polished) with practice. So grab yourself a cup of tea and click here. Never realised I had such a pommy accent!

So there we have it.

Please feel free to forward to family and friends, and call me if you want to discuss any of these further: 02 8090 4112 or 07 3103 0771.

Lindsay