Blog
Welcome to our Personal Finance Blog
Money bewilders most of us. How to spend it, save it, invest it, and how to best protect the person who makes it.
These questions we all face daily — a puzzle we all attempt to understand and solve just about every day. Yet despite money's centrality to our lives and businesses, it's something we all grapple with, and mostly in private.
- Money is the 'Lord Voldemort' of topics — feared by most and mentioned by a few. It's oddly uncomfortable to discuss socially and rarely even with our partners, parents, and children.
Perhaps that's because managing our money and life's risks inevitably involves the fusion of both the emotional and practical aspects of our decision-making processes. The most difficult of questions are those with both economic and emotional answers.
At Sapience, we're all about The How.
Our educational Personal Finance Blog is for people who want to grow and remain wealthy. And while the journey toward wealth is clearly marked, you still have to be looking in the right direction.
When can you make a contribution to your spouses super fund and claim a tax credit yourself?
If your spouse (wife, husband, de facto or same-sex partner) is a stay at home parent, is a low-income earner, or not working at the moment, chances are they’re not increasing their super and might have little or no super to fund their retirement.
The good news is if you want to help you can put money into their super, and you might be eligible for a personal tax offset while helping to create a better future.
Feeling guilty about deciding between paying down your mortgage or topping up your super?
After all putting extra money into your mortgage means you can pay off your debt quicker and save interest, but putting extra money into super builds your retirement nest egg.
Sounds like an impossible choice?
The hidden victims of our road toll
We all read about the terrible road tolls that affect our modern life.
Every day the same stark reality of yet another death on the roads tempts us to look away, forcing advertising agencies to use increasingly violent images to get our attention.
But today with modern technologies and advances in trauma medicine, more people now survive car accidents. The cost of surviving can be devastating to the survivor and their family in both personal and financial ways.
The Cinderella like tale of Munro-v-Munro and how a simple preventable mistake, broke the hearts of his two daughters
To really understand this real-life story, to need to understand two simple legal facts about self-managed super funds:
- The trustee of an SMSF has discretion who to give the balance of your SMSF account to when you pass away.
- To remove this discretion and ‘bind the decision of the trustee to follow your instructions’, you need to sign a legally recognised Binding Nomination Form, making your wishes clear and override the discretion of the trustee.
Sounds simple enough, right?
Who's your super beneficiary?
With superannuation now becoming a compulsory part of life, many people soon find they have significant amounts in their super growing at 9.5% per year - the minimum compulsory amount all employers are required to withhold from your income and deposit into your super account, for your retirement.
In reality, if you passed away today, the value of your super account could be significantly higher because of a ‘hidden’ life insurance component.
Are you still living up to your parent's expectations of your own money?
Below are four questions we ask our clients to help them consider could their adult relationship with money today, be unconsciously influenced by their parent's money attitudes from childhood.
- What happens if you unconsciously idolise money?
- What happens if you unconsciously Avoid money?
- Can a person with diabetes get life insurance?
- When young families lose a parent
- The question every blended family wants answered (but never asks)
- What's really at stake when you borrow with others?
- Think before you refinance the mortgage
