Family Trust

Hey guys,

Other than knowing the 2 words, I know nothing else about a family trust. I just got a book out from the library about them, and my friends bf works for the ATO, but before I call him and ask him all my questions, I want to have some idea about them. The book went a bit over my head (I am very very stressed out by a lot of things at the moment), and I know I will need to pay for an accountant/financial planner & solicitor to help establish this if we do go ahead, but before paying money for advice I guess I need to know if it will achieve what we want.

Does anyone know online if there is a very simplified dummies version of what they are, what they can do for you etc? Or is the subject to complex to dumb it down and I should just pay straight away.

Pretty much, DH is employed as an employee. I was planning on starting my own business as a sole trader, and still would like to do it a bit next year (like 2 hours a week kind of thing!) if things work out and allow me to do it. I am trained as a massage therapist. I did the course when DS was 1, then had DD and by the time he was 4 we had a diagnosis he was on the autism spectrum.

At the moment his needs are very full on, and we have no external support other than 3 hours a week council respite (which i don't feel like I can leave the person with him anyway, I feel like I still need to be there to help but having her there makes it easier, so it's not true respite in that sense of the words - and even though we pay a reduced rate we still pay for it each week). We are battling with the school to make changes, he needs a lot of therapies (at the moment we have weekly speech, f/n OT & psychology, and about to start weekly social skills group). I would ideally have weekly OT if we could afford it. Most of this we are paying out of pocket as his funding ran out in Dec and doesn't kick in until 1st July. It stops when he turns 7 which is Jan next year, and I don't see him needing less therapies (other than speech perhaps), but I have no idea how we will afford it. We are spiralling into debt (borrowing out of the home loan, which we had wanted to renovate as we need to move him out of a room with his sister as he is waking her up at night from his problems, and we also wanted to build him a therapy room).

I receive $114 a fortnight to care for him. I don't qualify for the larger payment as DH makes too much (but he doesn't earn that much - I think about $75k?). If you look at our taxable income (due to medical expenses) and then divide by 26, we should qualify for the payments, but they don't do it this way, they look at the fortnightly payment without any 'legal' deductions, so we can't get it, but I can't work either as we have so many appointments and until we renovate I can't really have a business in my house, and I'm just exhausted by everything at the moment, especially the financial stress & the lack of respite as a carer.

So then I was wondering if we started a family trust (not that I even know if DH pay can be paid into a family trust), or even if the house can be put into the trust or something so we can qualify to get help as I am a full time unpaid carer and it's just killing us at the moment.

The main reason I want to work a bit is also to have something other than being a carer, I need something else to focus on, and a little extra $$ just to cover the cost of getting the house cleaned or something would be nice. I don't know if me working and having an ABN would help at all?

I don't want to rort the system, I'm not trying to avoid paying tax or anything like that, I'm simply desperate and trying to work out how to play the system to my advantage before we as a family explode. I feel bad for ever posting this - I know financially people are worse off than we are, I know people have more disabled children than DS is. I think it's just like not having money to even get a babysitter for 1 hour so I can shop without dealing with DS have a full on melt down would help me so much and I'm trying to find some way of achieving it.

I hope people don't think badly of me...

Yael, do you have a good accountant, who you trust?

We have a family trust, to protect our assets from DH's business if he ever got sued. We can also disburse funds through the trust.

But I can't answer your questions.

We set it up based on our accountant's advice.

If I were in your shoes, I'd be going to see my accountant and telling him everything you posted above and asking advice. You won't look silly - they are there to provide advice. It's their service.

Sorry I can't be more help hun.

It's a minefield trying to work it all out, we have one too but it wasn't until dh stopped being a sole trader and setup a company that we formed the trust. As a sole trader your assests are able to be used against you if you go bankrupt, once he setup the company we needed the trust to protect the house etc. We take a salary but any profits are disbursed to us and the kids at the end of the year as the trust can't make any money.

We have to do tax returns for the trust as well as person tax returns.

Not sure if i helped or confused you! We have a solicitor and account who run it all for us.

Hiya

I haven't worked in this area for years, but as a bit of an overview, a trust is a separate legal entity that works on the principle that assets are held on trust for the beneficiaries of the trust. A long time ago trusts were used by every man and his dog to divert income through to a lower earning individual, so that they would pay less tax, ie income splitting. Most of the loopholes have closed to prevent people doing this, and as such they are less popular than they used to be.

In most cases, a person who is being paid as an employee, if they switched to being paid through their family trust, would be captured by certain rules whereby the income passes straight through for tax purposes and is allocated straight to him. Ie, there's not much point. I would imagine this being the case, income for centrelink and other purposes would also remain unchanged.

If you were to start up a business you may have tax benefit of putting it in a trust but you would need to satisfy certain criteria. Also bear in mind that all net taxable income in a trust at the end of a financial year must be distributed to another entity (eg individual or company) anyway, so if it was you doing the work of the business any taxable income would need to come out (probably to you) anyway.

As perviously said there can be asset protection benefits to a trust. I'm not sure if having your house in a trust would change your entitlements/benefits from centrelink but I imagine there would maybe be stamp duty transferring the house into the trust - if this was the case it would far outweigh any financial benefit.

As the others have said, speaking to a professional would give you more information. Unfortunately trusts are far less beneficial than they used to be and while are necessary/helpful in certain circumstances they may not be the quick fix you are looking for :(

Wishing you lots of luck, I really hope some comes your way soon x

You definitely need to sit down with a specialist to discuss it - tax lawyer, financial planner or accountant.

As Bug's Mum says, the loopholes that allow people to gain benefit from family trusts, whether that be asset protection, tax offset etc, have been significantly closed by the ATO so they are not what they used to be. The ATO has made a highly concentrated attack on trusts for the last few years. My DH is self employed but we have not bothered with a trust purely because it won't protect diddly squat for us.

And no, I don't feel badly of you. We all need to do what we can to make our financial lives as easy and safe as possible, just like we do the physical and emotional side of things. I hope you can get some advice on how to structure things to work for you.