Brett Evans

People have a property to go back to but maybe not the property they want to move into.

So what we find is we have to find them a property that's more of a forever home sometimes.

It's funny how you might live in Melbourne all your time and then you come out of Melbourne and you live overseas for 12 years and then go, you know what, sick of the weather, I want to go to Queensland.

So there's that sort of pre-approval process on the mortgage-breaking side.

You want to use your...

foreign income to help with serviceability um yeah we always say about a 12-month period because then you might have foreign pensions to consider as well too you know three pillars in switzerland you got the uk uh pensions so there's there's a bit of process i mean at a minimum three months no less um but ideally 12.

Look, let's touch on the aggregated approach of foreign pensions.

As far as the OTA is concerned, the only thing it classifies as a foreign pension is the UK pension scheme.

Everything else they view, because there's no preservation basis behind it, as foreign trust arrangements.

So money that you bring out from, say, a Canadian RRSP or a Swiss Pillar pension or a Hong Kong Provident Fund,

That's after-tax money as far as the ATO is concerned.

You can push that money into super as a non-concessional, happy days, no harm, no foul there.

UK is the complicating one because UK have very strict release codes.

So in the past...

It wasn't too difficult to move what they call a QROPS transfer from the UK back to Australia.

Now it's blood and stone, age 55, you can't touch it.

And even then the process of being able to move that UK pension to Australia is very, very labour intensive.

So the best way to describe it is the only way you can really do it is set up an SMSF.

Mm.

It takes HMRC six to nine months to approve that SMSF as a foreign pension account and then you can make that move.