Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Local Administration’ Category

Although most people give this little thought, it’s potentially going to have a major impact on your life in Australia, depending on how close you are to retirement and what arrangements you have put in place ahead of that move.

Final salary pensions (technically called defined benefit pensions) are going to stay in the UK, because they can’t be moved. In some cases, you can have your company pay the pension directly into an Australian bank account, but check the charges before you do that: some may make the payment via Swift which could cost you £25 or more each month in charges, plus charges to exchange the pounds to Australian dollars. Much better it to have it paid into a UK bank account and do the transferring to Australia yourself e.g. if you have an HSBC UK account, you can transfer this instantly for almost no charges to an HSBC Australia account. Final salary pensions will almost always get the increases that you’d have received if you still lived in the UK.

The UK State Pension can’t be moved to Australia but they can pay it directly into an Australian bank account. As above, I’d be more inclined to get it into a UK bank account and do the transfer myself as you know what the charges are going to be. This pension will not increase after you move to Australia so no more triple lock or indeed any increase at all. Worth noting is that Reform are talking about eliminating state benefits for immigrants and they appear to include the state pension in that, therefore it would be prudent to get any non-UK nationals moving with you British citizenship before you move, which currently costs about £1600, but given that it could lock in the entitlement to a UK state pension of £10,000/year or more that seems like a good investment.

Defined contribution pensions, private pensions, SIPPs, and similar pensions generally can be moved to Australia. However, there are limitations applied by both HMRC and their Australian counterpart. HMRC requires any pension to move to a QROPS compliant pension scheme which means in practice for Australia a Self Managed Superannuation Fund (SMSF). This is similar to the UK SIPP scheme but with a lot more administrative overheads and therefore a lot more cost: typically the setup and annual fees run to around A$2000 or so. You can’t use an off the shelf SMSF due to the HMRC regulations, notably that no member of the scheme can be less than 55 (so you can’t transfer the pension until you are at least 55) and you will need to have the SMSF administrator create a scheme meeting those regulations. The other big limitation is that you can’t transfer more than A$120000 (about £60000) per year and can only do this up to age 75, which may mean that your SIPP can’t be transferred in one go and it may not be possible to transfer a larger SIPP in full even over a number of years e.g. a £600000 SIPP would likely take more than 15 years to transfer (not 10 because it will, one hopes, grow in value as time goes on). One way to accelerate the transfer is to transfer, say, £60000/year into your SMSF and simply withdraw another £60000/year, taking the Australian income tax hit on that second £60000, and just put it into an Australian investment account.

Australian state pension is means tested in two ways. The income test means that you get the maximum pension if you’re single and have less than A$109/week (£50), A$170/week (£75) for a couple and is reduced by 50c/25c for each dollar above those amounts, reaching zero when you’ve more than A$1287 (£643) single, A$1967 (£983 for a couple. Given that the UK state pension is currently £230/week, you’re not going to get the maximum Australian pension under the income test. They also have an asset test, so a single homeowner can have up to A$321500 (£160750), A$481500 (£240750) for a couple to get the maximum, reducing to zero when you reach A$714500 (£357250) or A$1074500 (£537250). The asset limits include everything except the home you’re living in, so notably it includes pension schemes of all types. Last, but not least, you need to have been an Australian resident for at least ten years, unless you’re Australian (in which case, you could pop your claim in as soon as you’ve arrived). Unfortunately, the UK no longer has a social security agreement with Australia (it did up to March 2001) so no exemptions from the ten year limit.

ISAs aren’t transferable and there doesn’t seem to be any Australian equivalent unfortunately. You can retain your ISAs but since Australia doesn’t recognise ISAs, they will be taxable; you can’t add any more money to them once you leave the UK. Australian tax law means that capital gains are taxed differently depending on how long you have held the asset, so it may be simpler to move the holdings from your ISA to a dealing account in Australia when you move. T212 operates in Australia in much the same way as it does in the UK, aside from the lack of an ISA and you seem to be able to transfer from a T212 UK account to an Australian one; it seems to be a lot cheaper than local Australian brokers.

And that’s it for pensions. You will need to get an adviser to set up an SMSF for you and the main banks have partnerships with companies that can do that (National Australian Bank seems the best offering).

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

This started out reasonably easy but the family have been adding requirements as the months have gone by, some directly from our experiences on our scouting trip a few months ago and some as we’ve collectively looked at properties online and thought some more about what we each need.

The basic requirement are for a house with three or more bedrooms, a few hectares of land, and costing up to A$1,000,000 (about £500,000). Prices will have changed by the time we’re actually moving, but we’re currently using that as a ball-park in our searches.

Location is always important and we’ve two slightly conflicting requirements with this because Wendy and I will essentially be retiring but the boys will be wanting jobs. Therefore it can’t be too far away from employment centres and in that respect we’re thinking of at most 30 minutes drive from either Launceston or Hobart. We all prefer Launceston but most properties in the recent searches are near Hobart.

As in our move to France, we’ll likely turn up with a massive load of stuff in boxes and therefore we want somewhere that we can store it all. That seems not to be an issue as almost all of the properties turning up in our searches come with assorted store rooms and even buildings.

Although three bedrooms is our minimum requirement, many of the properties that we’ve looked at come with four and a couple of bathrooms which is handy as that second bathroom was added as a requirement to avoid the morning rush.

Heating-wise, the houses generally come with “reverse-cycle airconditioning” (heat pumps) and many with log stoves. In a number of instances, the logs would be supplied by chopping down trees on the property itself. Quite a lot of the houses come with solar panels and in some cases enough to run everything, at least during the day (batteries are prohibitively expensive).

Recently, it has come to our attention that internet access isn’t a given in Australia so we’re specifically looking for that now (it’s called NBN there and comes in the usual cable, fibre, and satellite versions). On a related note, it turns out that TV also isn’t a given and some places that are well within our 30 minute range don’t have much, if any, TV reception (you can check this out at Digitalready). This isn’t a showstopper as there’s a subsidised satellite service (VAST) available in those areas, but something to consider. Incidentally, our French approach of just bringing the Sky box along won’t work as the Sky satellite doesn’t point anywhere near Australia so no FreeSat either. Other things that won’t work either are the various UK terrestrial channels via internet as they are region locked to the UK, although a VPN might get around that. On the TV front, we found that Australian terrestrial TV is almost entirely dire and has the feel of just a whole lot of shopping channels (even Wendy agrees with the dire verdict and she’s Australian!).

I’d also like a study/library which doesn’t seem to be an issue as most of the properties we’ve looked at come with a whole range of rooms outside the usual bedroom, living, kitchen, and bathroom categories.

Sounds daft, but in addition to the normal kitchen, it’s been suggested that a kind of ensuite kitchen for the various non-standard kitchen items would be handy (for the air fryer, popcorn machine, blender, etc.). That said, most of the kitchens are much larger than what we’re used to so this isn’t likely to be an issue. Junior #2 suggested a walk-in pantry as we’d be living “in the wilds” which sounds handy and we’d one in France, but we’re probably not going to be living “in the wilds” as such.

There’s also been some requests for things like space for chickens, vegetable garden, and similar but since we’re looking for a minimum of two hectares (four acres in old money), that doesn’t look like it’ll be an issue.

The water supply isn’t something we’d initially given much thought to. Turns out that most of the properties we’ve looked at are on town water. A little further out is tank water which means you’ve a big tank that the local authority fills up for you now and again for a fee. If you’re on tank water, I imagine that you’re also on a sceptic tank which they can pump out too, though you shouldn’t need them to do that if you’ve sized it properly.

We’ve been getting grocery deliveries for a few years now and that service is available from, mainly, Coles and Woolworths in Australia so long as you’re within their service distance (about 20/30 minutes drive from the nearest store). You can check out availability for that by popping in the postcode of the property that you’re looking at. Again, not a show stopper, but nice to know if it’s available before you move.

And that lot is after just a few months of taking the move seriously! I’m sure there’ll be more requirements arising over the time running up to 2027.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

OK, so we’re intending to move to Australia, but where?

Location is something that we’ve thought about a fair bit. As in our move to France, we want somewhere that has a “bumpy” landscape. Bumpy doesn’t mean mountainous, but rather not boringly flat i.e. some hills, but probably not actual mountains or at least not mountains that we need to cross regularly.

We also want it to be not too far from water which could mean near a river, lake, or even the sea. One key think that we found in France is that if you’re more than about a 90 minute drive from the sea then you have a continental climate which, in France, meant very hot summers and very cold winters, whereas within that 90 minute range the weather was quite reasonable all year. Although Australian climates can be quite different, Tasmania is fairly similar to France so that 90 minute or so distance will similarly change the climate: it snows in Tasmania, but mostly in places more than 90 minutes from the sea.

Together, the above still leave Launceston and Hobart in the frame as they’re both in reasonably bumpy landscapes and less than 90 minutes from the sea.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

It’s been a while since the last post here! Turns out that home schooling plus real life plus blogging would require more hours in the day than there are available.

For those missing the final couple of segments of the psychology notes, they’re coming over the next few months.

So, we’re preparing for another international move, to Australia this time. We’re just back from our initial scouting trip which let us look at a few potential locations and an initial look at a few houses that would be along the lines of what we’re hoping to buy in due course. Moving to Australia is a bit more complicated than moving to France was as we (well “I”) need to apply for a visa rather than just turning up as we did when we moved to France.

We started preparations late last year when I created my IMMI account (https://online.immi.gov.au/lusc/login) which is what you use to apply for an Australian visa these days. Unfortunately, there’s no option to produce a printed version of the form so to find out what documents and whatnot you need, you’ll need to go through the whole application adding in “to be added later” or the equivalent in the various text boxes. And, there’s a LOT of information and documents that they want!

One issue that we noted as we moved through the form and looked at what others before us have done is that it’s largely geared up to couples that have been together for a couple of years and, paradoxically, much harder if you’ve been together for 20+ years as we have been. Now, I know you’re thinking that “hey, we’re married and have a couple of kids, it’ll be easy”. Nope. Each child you have just proves that you were together one day nine months before they were born, similarly for that marriage certificate. What they’re looking for is evidence that you’ve been together continuously for all those years, right up to the point when you submit the application. So, for example, the “relationship history” that you each need to write needs to cover the period from when you first met, all significant events since then, right up to the day you hit “submit” on your application.

In practice, we have found that we’re going to need to create the evidence because we haven’t been saving it up all those years. Seeing as they will be looking at this blog as part of the evidence: dear immigration officer, I know that sounds really bad, but honestly we’ve been together for over 20 years as you’ll see from this blog!

The immigration people like to see that you’ve been on holiday together which you’d think would be a doddle to prove. However, it turns out that the airlines don’t keep records going way back and we only have insurance for one holiday naming all of us because we’re on the Nationwide insurance now and it doesn’t work as proof. Accommodation booking only take the name on the credit card so are no use either. Photos sound good, but although we’ve heaps of photos, we’ve very few with both of us in them and have been making a point of doing joint selfies lately to start creating that evidence.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

We sometimes despair of ever getting completely out of the French tax system.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they even acknowledged our letters to them but we have only once ever received a direct reply from them and even that place has started writing to us once again. That’s the basic problem really: all correspondence we send just seems to be ignored.

We’ve been trying for over six years to get a tax refund from them. The tax people we spoke to in France agree that we’re due the refund yet nobody seems able to process it. In fact, they even sent a bailiff once who also agreed and helpfully pointed out that the tax in question was now centralised and that we should be writing to the office in Clermont Ferrand. We wrote to them and they said that it’s actually dealt with in the office in Montepellier who we’d been writing to for the previous couple of years, forwarded our letter to them and, of course, that’s the last we heard about that.

Most laughably is the habitation tax and TV license who are quite content to send their letters to us in the UK yet neglect to take on board that the change of address letter also quite clearly said that we don’t live in France.

Mind you we did read some years ago that to really move out we need to provide a document from our local mairie to say that we now live in their commune. Since there isn’t a local mairie (and, no, the city council doesn’t count) and we don’t live in a commune, it’s not possible to provide said document and the advice to the lady enquiring about it was to just let her mail redirection run out.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.