No. It will hinder you as it is a debt.

I think you are conflating different things. The lawyer is not trying to give business advice when drawing up a deed, but giving advice on the legal issues.

An accountant might be the one to talk about for business advice, but they would need to be a registered tax agent to give tax advice and a lawyer to give legal advice such as who should play what role in a trust, terms of the deed, what happens on death, incapacity, stamp duty effects of the trust etc. Once the trust is set up the accountants can knock themselves out with all the business advice they want.

Since it is illegal for accountants to give legal advice, they shoud get the lawyer to set up the trust directly with the client, they can jointly advise if they want, but the contract would need to be between the law firm and the client. Otherwise no insurance coverage.

WHat happens in practice is an accountant will buy a deed template and fill in names and addresses, often giving illegal advice along the way. I have seen a few of these where the accountant had used cleardocs deeds, which could about $300, and then charged the client $1500. There is no value added and the client would have gotten a better result if they had went directly to cleardocs. The accountant gave legal advice indicating the trust would provide asset protection on divorce, which was wrong, but also the discretionary trust did not have an appointor position, and upon review I found it impossible to vary the deed to add one.

As for succession planning this is also legal advice. I am not sure what a non lawyer could add in terms of trust law, corporations law, superannuation law or succession law. How could an accountant advise on succession? I have 2 masters of law degrees in this area, one in Estate planning and the other in wills and estates, plus the undergraduate law degree.

Accountants should stick to commonwealth tax and accounting.

sorry Amir, I just found your email in the spam folder.

You shouldn’t go to an accountant to set up a trust as this involves legal advice. An accountant, assuming they are a registered tax agent, can only advise on the Commonwealth tax aspects. You would need advice on the structure of the trust, who the trustee should be, injecting funds into the trust, succession on incapacity and death, stamp duty, land tax, asset protection and family law etc – in addition to tax.

See a lawyer

Yes as if separate titles you could finance them with different lenders.

and it will depend on how many units.

-When you own a company or control a discretionary trust the lenders will generally take your income and the company’s income into account. It won’t matter too much whehter the income is $100,000 in the company and $0 in your name or $50,000 each. It all adds up to the same. With trusts it can vary from lender to lender. Some will refuse to take the trust income into account if it is not being received by the applicant, even if the applicant controls the trust. Others are more flexible

Yes this is common. But you might have a few tax issues if you are artificially diverting income to a company.

I agree that doesn’t pass the sniff test!

I am a lawyer specialising in structuring too and have never heard of such a thing!

Trust account?