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  • What to do after receiving an inheritance (without rushing).

    What to do after receiving an inheritance (without rushing).

    The five-step calm-down framework we walk every new client through — and why the first thing to do is, mostly, nothing.

    An inheritance rarely arrives at a convenient moment. It comes wrapped in grief, paperwork, and a stack of well-meaning advice from people who mean well and don’t quite know your situation. The first thing we usually say at Securinvest is the thing most people don’t expect: slow down.

    The first month — and why doing nothing is doing something

    A lump sum changes the maths of your life. It doesn’t change the rest of you. Decisions you make in the first weeks — paying off the mortgage in one go, signing a contract on a property, lending to a sibling, switching your super — are decisions you’ll live with for years. Reversing them is slow, expensive, and sometimes not possible.

    In our experience, the best inheritances are the ones that sit quietly in a high-interest account for two to three months while the rest of the estate is wound up, the tax position is clear, and you have time to remember what you actually want the money to do. Doing nothing for eight weeks is not laziness. It’s the cheapest, most reversible decision you can make.

    Step 1–2: Park the money, then map the obligations

    Park the cash somewhere safe and boring. A separate high-interest savings account at a major bank is fine. Two reasons: it earns something while you think, and it physically separates the money from your day-to-day spending so you don’t accidentally absorb it.

    Then map the obligations. There are usually three layers: the estate’s — final tax return, super death benefit tax if the deceased had a non-tax-dependant beneficiary, any outstanding debts; the asset-level — capital gains cost base resets on inherited property and shares, ongoing rates / insurance on real estate, dividend reinvestment plans that need redirecting; and yours — does this nudge you into a higher marginal tax bracket this year, does it change your eligibility for any concessions, does it change how you should be contributing to super.

    Step 3–4: Decide what stays (and what changes)

    Now the real conversation. Not “what should I do with the money?” but “what does this let me do differently?” Some clients use an inheritance to retire 18 months earlier. Some use it to clear a mortgage and redirect what was the repayment into super. Some use it to help adult children into their first home in a way that doesn’t blow up their relationship. Some keep it almost entirely invested and treat the income as a quiet upgrade to lifestyle.

    There’s no right answer in the abstract. There is usually a clear best answer once we sit down with your current cash flow, your existing assets, your timeline to retirement, and what you actually want the next decade to look like.

    Step 5: Walk it forward with one person who has the whole picture

    The biggest mistake we see is fragmenting the advice. The accountant tells you to put it in super. The mortgage broker tells you to clear the loan. The friend at the BBQ tells you to buy an investment property. Each of them is right within their own slice — and the combination is often worse than doing nothing.

    A good adviser holds all the slices in one place. Tax, super, debt, insurance, the next five to ten years of your life. That’s the work. The framework is calm; the answer is yours.

    Talk to us. If you’ve recently inherited — or are about to — book a free 20-minute conversation and we’ll walk you through the five steps for your situation. Book a Conversation.

  • Is your business structure still right?

    Is your business structure still right?

    Six questions to ask before another tax year goes by on autopilot.

    The business structure you set up four years ago was right for the business you had four years ago. The question we put to every owner-operator at the start of each financial year is simple: is it still right today?

    The structure question most owners stop asking

    Sole trader, partnership, company, discretionary trust, unit trust, a company-as-trustee-of-a-trust hybrid — the choice you make at year zero is almost always made with one eye on the accountant’s recommendation and the other on whichever option felt fastest. That’s fine. It’s how most businesses start.

    What’s less fine is the slow drift where the structure quietly stops fitting. Revenue climbs. A partner joins. A child becomes a beneficiary. Property gets bought in the wrong entity. A second business line opens up. None of these are problems on their own. Together, they leak tax, complicate succession, and make the next big decision — a sale, a refinance, a generational handover — harder than it needs to be.

    The six questions we walk through

    1. Has your revenue or profit changed materially in the last 18 months? A sole trader earning $90k and a sole trader earning $260k are in very different tax positions, and the rate at which a company structure starts to make sense shifts with both income and what you take out personally.

    2. Has anyone joined or left? A spouse, a business partner, an adult child working in the business — each shifts the income-splitting and asset-protection calculus.

    3. Are you buying or holding assets in the operating entity? Real estate, IP, equipment with significant resale value — operating-entity assets are exposed to operating-entity creditors. They usually belong somewhere else.

    4. Are you planning to sell, transition, or bring in an investor in the next 5 years? Small business CGT concessions are very valuable and very fiddly. Some structures qualify cleanly. Others don’t, and the cost of fixing it the year before the sale is much higher than the cost of fixing it now.

    5. Has your personal estate plan changed? A new will, a separation, a blended family. A trust deed written before any of that may quietly be distributing income to the wrong people on your death.

    6. What did your accountant raise at the last meeting that you didn’t action? The honest answer to this one usually tells us where the conversation should start.

    When a change is worth it — and when it's not

    Restructuring is not free. There are stamp-duty exposures, CGT roll-over qualifications, deed amendments, ASIC filings, bank covenants to renegotiate. We weigh the all-in cost of the move against the annualised benefit over five to ten years. Sometimes the answer is yes, do it now. Sometimes the answer is: park this until the sale, then capture the concessions in one move. Both are valid; what’s not valid is drifting another year without asking the question.

    A 60-minute conversation can save 18 months of cleanup

    Most of the costly fixes we see were avoidable. The owner just hadn’t sat down with someone whose job is to look at the structure with fresh eyes. We do that as a 60-minute conversation. You bring the most recent tax returns and a rough picture of what the next two to three years look like. We bring the questions and the structuring map.

    Talk to us. If you’re due a structure review — or you’ve never had one — book a free 20-minute conversation and we’ll tell you whether a full review is worth your time. Book a Conversation.

  • When (and why) to review your lending.

    When (and why) to review your lending.

    The three life events that should always trigger a broker call — and the savings most people miss.

    Most Australians look at their home loan when they take it out and barely look at it again until something goes wrong. That’s not laziness — it’s a quiet assumption that the loan that was right at signup is still the right loan today. In our experience, that’s rarely true after the third year.

    Why the "set and forget" loan is the most expensive one

    Lender pricing changes constantly. Cash rate moves, internal funding costs, retention budgets, and the bank’s appetite for new vs existing business all push your rate around — and they almost never push it in your favour without you asking. The “loyalty tax” — the gap between what a lender charges its existing book versus what it advertises to win new customers — is well-documented and substantial. On a $500k loan, the difference between the new-customer rate and the back-book rate is often 0.4–0.7% per year. That’s $2,000 to $3,500 a year in cash, every year, that you don’t notice because the repayment is on autopilot.

    And rate is only one lever. Loan structure — offset accounts, redraw, split between fixed and variable, the IO/P&I balance, the LVR threshold — moves the cost just as much as the headline rate, and almost always in directions you can’t see from a mortgage statement.

    The three life events that should trigger a review

    1. Your equity has crossed a band. When your loan-to-value drops below 80% — and especially below 70% or 60% — you become a fundamentally different borrower in the lender’s eyes. The rate you should be paying drops. The rate you actually pay almost never adjusts on its own.

    2. Your income, household, or job has changed. New job, partner’s return to work after parental leave, a self-employed pivot, an inheritance, redundancy. Each one shifts what you can comfortably service, what features the loan should carry, and which lenders are best placed to look at your file.

    3. A fixed-rate period is ending. Banks roll fixed loans onto their standard variable rate the day after expiry — almost always one of the highest rates on the book. Reviewing 60–90 days before expiry is the single highest-value broker call most homeowners can make.

    What we look at when we sit down with your loan

    We pull three things: the headline rate vs the current new-customer rate at your lender (and the next three competitive lenders), the structure (offset / split / repayment type / direct-debit setup) against your cash-flow shape, and the exit costs — what does it actually cost you to leave if a refinance makes sense. The first two answer “is your current loan competitive”. The third tells you whether moving is worth the friction.

    Often the right answer is not “refinance” — it’s “ring your bank with this number” and a 0.3–0.5% rate reduction lands without changing lender. We coach you through that call or do it on your behalf.

    The cost of doing nothing

    On a 25-year, $600k loan, a 0.5% rate difference is $87,000 over the life of the loan — and the kind of money that should be on your terms, not the bank’s. The call to a broker takes 30 minutes; the review itself takes a day of your file work and ours. The cost of not making the call compounds for as long as the loan runs.

    Talk to us. If your loan hasn’t had a fresh set of eyes on it in the last 12 months — or a fixed period is about to roll — book a free 20-minute conversation and we’ll tell you whether a review is worth your time. Book a Conversation.

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