#516 The $50,000 Fee Hiding in Your Portfolio w. Shani Jayamanne

Division 296 is live. From 1 July, earnings on the part of your super balance above $3 million get taxed at 30%, and above $10 million the rate is 40%. The narrative is that this is a tax on rich retirees. Ben takes a 38-year-old on $400k with $600k in super, doing nothing more exotic than the standard concessional contribution, and shows them crossing $3 million at 57, three years before they can touch the money. The episode is about what to do with that. Why 30% inside super is a worse deal than 30% in a company or an investment bond, because those structures let you get at the money. Why Siobhan asks everyone rushing into an SMSF the same one-word question. Why a couple gets $3 million each, which makes evening up balances the strategy that matters, and how spouse contribution splitting lets you move 85% of your contributions across years before you can access super. And why Ben would rather land under the cap than over it, because there are no givebacks. WHAT YOU'LL GET OUT OF IT How Division 296 actually works, and what it taxes

The AFR reckons rentvesting is dead now that negative gearing has been wound back. Jack Henderson reckons the AFR has it backwards, and he's paying $3,700 a week in rent while he says it. This one moves fast. Jack explains the valuation method most property investors have never heard of, where a property with two incomes on one title gets valued on its rent instead of on what the neighbours sold for, and walks through the duplex where that difference was worth more than a million dollars. He puts a number on what a dollar of rent is worth in value. He gets specific about the off-the-plan settlements he thinks are about to go wrong, and the capital gains tax bill you can get on a property that never went up. And he ends with the single piece of research he tells every young investor to do before they touch anything. Language warning. Jack talks the way Jack talks. This one isn't for the school run. WHAT YOU'LL GET OUT OF IT Why rentvesting still works without negative gearing, and where it stops making sense

On 12 May the budget killed the bucket company. A 30% minimum tax on trust income was the headline, but the real damage was underneath it, because that tax came with no credit when the money moved on to a company. Stack the two together and business owners were looking at an effective rate over 60% on profit they had already been taxed on once. On 3 September the government released draft legislation that changes the picture, and Ben walks through exactly what it does. There is a window, it closes on 1 July 2028, and if you make a fixed election on your trust before then, the 30% minimum tax doesn't apply. The trade is that a discretionary trust stops being discretionary, forever. Ben runs the numbers on a business making $400k a year and shows a gap of just under $2 million between two owners doing the same thing in different structures. He also covers the strategy the election kills, which is distributing to your adult kids. And he explains why who owns the shares in your bucket company now matters more than it ever has, with a 22-month window that just started. WHAT YOU'LL GET OUT OF IT What a bucket company is and why business owners built their wealth around it

Every second call at the moment ends the same way. The budget has tightened the screws, the pay rise didn't move the needle, so what if we just moved to Singapore? Or Dubai. Or Hong Kong. Ben and Siobhan ran the numbers, and the first thing they found is that Australia is a lower tax country than the UK, Canada, New Zealand and most of Europe. The catch is where we collect it. Almost 43% of every tax dollar in Australia comes from personal income, one of the heaviest reliances on personal income tax in the developed world, and that is exactly why it feels the way it does. From there it gets practical. What you take home on $100k, $250k, $500k and $1 million in Sydney versus Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai. What those countries charge you instead, from a 60% stamp duty on foreigners to private everything. How you actually get in. The tax bill Australia hands you on the way out. And the two residency tests the ATO uses to decide whether you really left, because the people getting caught aren't the ones who moved, they're the ones who pretended to. WHAT YOU'LL GET OUT OF IT Why Australia's total tax take is below the OECD average, and why it feels worse than that

Hugh Robertson reckons the world changed for Aussie investors on 12 May. For years the playbook was simple. Earn well, borrow, negatively gear into residential property and let the market do the rest. The budget took a fair chunk of that off the table, and now a lot of people with money to put to work are asking the same question. What's the play now? Hugh runs Centaur Financial Services, sits on the Barron's Top 100 adviser list, and has been a mate of Ben's for over a decade, which means he doesn't get to be diplomatic. In this one he walks through exactly what his firm changed in client portfolios after the budget, why they've gone underweight Australian shares, and the asset classes they're now allocating to that they never touched before. We also get into the commercial property pitch flooding everyone's feed, and why two emerging markets ETFs can hold completely different countries. Hugh explains what big tech raising debt tells you about where the US market sits, and puts Ben through the maths question about a 50% fall that trips up almost everyone. Then the honest bit on stock picking, why only around one in ten active managers beats the index over a decade, and what Hugh thinks matters most for investors over the next six to 12 months.