Originally posted by DaleGG
HI Dale
We would normally try to have the trust pay as many "personal" expenses as possible to
I was reading your manual the other night and you list some of the personal expenses you can claim, but I noticed that a lot of them are related to Business Expenses. Eg. Gifts to staff members, coffee and Biscuits for Office, etc.
I do not have a Business of my own and therefore a lot of those deductions do not relate to just owning property.
If I had a couple of properties in a trust what are some of the PERSONAL expenses I would be able to claim.
Thereafter. we would distribute income to the family members who have no income at all and thus chew up all of the tax free threshholds, then we would distribute income to people in the 17% tax bracket before moving to the 30% tax bracket.
Sorry, but I find this distributing of income quite uncomfortable.
I was discussing this issue the other day and we came to the conclusion that there is no way we could distribute income to our mums and dads, sisters, brothers, grandmas, aunts, uncles etc.
It just some how does not sit comfortably with me to ask if I could put in $5K of trust income into their tax return so I can save tax. Remember these family members are not getting the physical money, but just the distribution.
This somehow seems unfair, and they might even end up resenting us.
Money does cause a lot of family tension. So I would be hesitant in doing this in fear of the above.
There is a lot of room for confusion with the tax liability on the trust income. This of course would interfere with their own salary and deductions and it is not always easy to explain or show the actual liability on the trust income. I know you mention that you pay the tax liability on the trust income, but as i said there is a lot of room for confusion there.
Please understand there is no confusion for me, but family members would be confused.
Also these days extra income interferes with pensions, family tax benefits, etc, so I feel it is really hard to ask such a big thing of family members just so you can save tax.
I am sorry, but I don't quite click with this idea or concept.
If I have misunderstood this in some way please forgive me.
Marina.
ps - do you have a list of those potential tax deductions that I posted some time ago now? If not, let me know and I will post them here again.