Brett Evans

Expats, you know, they collect assets like baseball cards when they're overseas.

So foreign pensions and bank accounts and all these sort of things.

You need to assess, well, ideally 12, maybe six months out from returning back to Australia, what you can start to move back.

Because what's going to happen is once you are boots back on the ground, you land at Tullamarine or Mascot and you start filling in that yellow passenger arrival card and you tick that box for the first time that says resident returning, because up until that point, you're always ticking visitor.

just as an audience note because a lot of people make that mistake so you tick resident returning then the clock starts ticking and both your assets in australia and globally are now accessible from a tax point of view so we call it deemed acquisition you're deemed to acquire that asset overseas at whatever the value is on that date of arrival so if you don't want the complicated affairs if you don't want to have to worry about uh filing two tax returns

that bringing their assets home in a very considered and moderate sort of way over that six month period is the best thing.

Then obviously we have the added complications like you touched on before about foreign pensions.

Some foreign pensions you can cash in, you know, provident funds out of Hong Kong, for example, 401 s out of the United States.

But then we've got the UK pensions, we've got the European pensions, and depending on those pensions, some you can cash out early, some you can't.

So you need to do the homework early because no one's going to want to do this a week before they return back to Australia.

You're too busy trying to work out.

how it all works with the airfares and trying to get your shipping container, you know, sort of packed.

And, you know, you need to do this earlier on a weekend, on a Saturday morning, just start looking at, say, write a list on the back of a post-it note, the assets you hold overseas, and then start one by one researching what I can move, what I can't move, and then how that works together.

Why is that now?

The FX rates that banks will charge for their own internal transfers, 3% to 5% margins on those transfers.

Yeah, they make a killing.

So we tend to use currency brokers.

OFX in Australia, ASX listed is a good one.

Wise, CurrencyFair, all those sort of third-party providers.

You're getting 0.4% to 0.5% margins on your FX, which if you're transferring $1,000, we're not talking sheep stations, but if you are transferring $100,000 or $1 million, it could be a huge difference.