Only lawyers can set up trusts legally – speak to a structuring lawyer.

Yes you could use the 6 year rule on property A (providing it meets the other requirements).
But because the absence has been longer than 6 years it will not be totally CGT free. BUt a large chunk of it could be.

I don’t think any state govt department would be endorsing any sort of legal documents. An irrevocable poa might be solid, but it could still be revoked on equitable grounds – such as undue influence, duress, fraud etc

There was a recent case involving a binding financial agreement (prenup) which failed because the husband basically applied undue pressure to the wife by pulling out the doc a few days before the wedding and saying sign this or the wedding was off. This sort of pressure was unreasonable so even though the document was legally valid, it could not be enforced.

Something similar could happen with a POA.

Are you a spender or a saver? Generally it would be better to get the tax savings every paycheck, but not if you are a spender perhaps.

If your estimated deductions are enough you won’t have to pay any tax, but you can’t just go making up figures to artificially reduce the tax paid through wages. If you do there could be penalties imposed.

Yes the cash flow consequences would be entirely different, but here we were discussing serviceability. The lenders will treat any IO loan as if it was a PI loan.

Benny – the maximum available IO period is 10 years now but the loan term maximum is 30 years so it would be a 10 year IO reverting to 20 year PI.
When assessing this the banks will assume it is a 20 year PI loan as the IO period is disregarded.

The only way a IO loan could be better for servicing than a PI loan is if the remaining PI is short

example
Existing loan is PI and has a remaining term of 20 years
The borrower refinances and gets a 5 year IO/25 year PI loan.
Since the new loan has a longer PI period the servicing figures would be better than the existing loan.
But if the borrower went 30 years PI it would be even better still

it will probably improve serviceability slightly because the assessment of existing loans is generally over a term excluding the IO period. e.g. a 30 year loan with a 5 year IO term will be assessed as a 25 year PI loan. Buti f you are 2 years into it and convert it to PI it would be assessed as a 28 year PI loan. The longer the loan period the lower the repayments will be.

You should probably speak to a broker about working out your borrowing capacity before you start looking for deals as if you can’t borrow then you are unlikely to able to buy (without getting creative).

depends. It would be either CGT or income tax depending on the situation.

Don’t forget the GST aspects.

perhaps, but consider what the consequences could be.