Minimising assets in an estate that is subject to challenge

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Brian Hor at Townsends Law thinks there should be some thought given and preparation around seeking to minimise challenges to an estate by making pre-emptive decisions, such as: Transferring assets

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What is collaborative intergenerational estate planning?

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Example 1: Planning while family is able to decide It’s estate planning which involves thinking outside the immediate family unit and looking at future generations. A key issue is in

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10 ways to protect your SMSF from loss of mental capacity

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If you have a self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF), you need to plan ahead to ensure that it can still keep going if you lost mental capacity due to dementia (or

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Life insurance estate-planning trap with proposal to transfer small accounts

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The Government’s Budget proposal to strengthen the ATO-led consolidation regime by requiring the transfer of all inactive superannuation accounts where the balances are below $6,000 to the ATO.  The aim

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Beware the estate planning transfer balance cap

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So what is this “estate planning transfer balance cap trap” that can arise from adopting the mirror reversionary pension strategy? More importantly, is there a way to avoid it? Well,

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Family trusts – a growing force in the Australian economy

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Family trusts have always been an important structure for business planning, tax planning and estate planning, mainly due to their tax efficiency, asset protection, flexibility and succession possibilities. Increasingly, they

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Are tailored BDBNs the magic bullet for SMSF estate planning?

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A tailored BDBN is one which is subject to special conditions which can make it useful to deal with various modern estate planning issues. One common condition is to impose a

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Family trusts more important than ever

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Family trusts have always been an important structure for business planning, tax planning and estate planning. This is mainly due to their tax efficiency, asset protection, flexibility and succession possibilities.

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Townsends Law response to the Opposition’s comments on discretionary trusts

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To say businesses or families are using family trusts in order to evade tax is absolute nonsense. Overwhelmingly, they use trusts for two main reasons, firstly, for legitimate asset protection.

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BDBNs and life insurance in super: beware the transfer balance cap trap

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Strategic estate planning is key to ensuring flexibility in crises. Although you may not consider yourself at risk of exceeding the transfer balance cap following 1 July 2017, you may

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