SMSF and residential property

Further you need to be careful not to appear as though the fund is trading in property (ie deliberately doing buy, reno, sell, and repeat).  Perhaps acquire something, hang onto it for 18mths or so, then reno and sell…

Good to know Terry, cheers!  The whole SMSF buying property thing is still sufficiently new that trusted professionals in the know are not falling from the sky.  I love your post, a lot!  It makes me very very pleased and thinking about an imminent reno!

I recommend using an SMSF to buy property, especially to help out to increase your wealth for retirement. It's a little more complex to use an SMSF but the tax advantages are there. I think it's much better than a typical super fund, as you have much more control. Personally I really didn't like paying all the high and ongoing management fees for my previous typical super fund.

Yep I'm all over that issue.  Just went through my first ever SMSF tax return and was very on the ball with the contribution caps.

Re borrowing for property in a SMSF, this is the ruling to read:

SMSFR 2012/1

Self Managed Superannuation Funds: limited recourse borrowing arrangements – application of key concepts

http://law.ato.gov.au/atolaw/view.htm?docid=SFR/SMSFR20121/NAT/ATO/00001

(if itnerested)

Hi Terry,

Sure no worries.  My accountant had of course let me know that the cost would be dependant upon complexity of the tax return and how good my record keeping was, and given me a ballpark guide of circa $1000 for a basic tax return and audit for a smsf that has only one property and some cashola in the bank account.  I asked him upfront precisely what he needed so I could give him the lot in one go to keep the time he had to spend on it down to a minimum, and got it right first time.  Mostly to save myself feeling like I had missed something and would be sent to prison by the ATO hahahah.  The spreadsheets I gave him were immaculate if I do say so myself and as such the fee I was charged for the tax return and audit for a total of $660 ($330 audit, $330 tax return).  I was extremely happy with this.

The kinds of spreadsheets I provided him were spreadsheets showing the splits between SGC pre-tax contributions, voluntary pre-tax contributions, and post-tax contributions…. spreadsheets showing how much was contributed into super funds outside of the smsf and inside the smsf so he could clearly see I came in under the $25k limit, and spreadsheets explaining what each and every transaction on the bank accounts was (with each transaction grouped into category columns as well so he could, for eg, total up everything in the "plumber fees" column.  All the accountant had to do was a sanity check and some copying and pasting of totals figures into the tax return software I suppose!  Nice and easy for him, and thus kept the cost low.  If I had just thrown the bank statements at him and expected him to guess what everything was, it would have cost much much more.

I think it is a good idea to tell people precisely what info they have to give you, and maybe provide example spreadsheets that they can use as a base.  Ask them to package all the information onto a cd or usb stick for you so they don't send it through in dribs and drabs which inevitably costs more of your time to sift through.

Hope this helps!