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.
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.
At Sapience, we're all about The How.
Quick Federal Budget Summary for 2024-2025
The 2024-25 Federal Budget has a number of highlights relevant to many of our clients, friends, and supporters explored further below.
Here are some important things about taxes and retirement savings from the Budget that can help people and businesses plan their finances.
The risks of getting shown the Red Card as an SMSF Trustee
In soccer, a player who is shown a red card is instantly sent off the field, disqualified from playing for the remainder of the match and cannot be replaced. The red card is issued for serious offences, violent conduct, dangerous play, and any action that brings the game into disrepute.
But in the world of SMSF, a red card from the regulator, the ATO, is much more painful and can be a permanent ban on a person ever being able to be the Trustee of their SMSF.
Managing the burden of student loans
If you’ve ever been a student striving for higher education in Australia, it won't take long before the terms 'HECS loan' or 'HELP loan' are likely to come up in conversation about ways to pay education tuition fees.
Close by are the questions about, 'Should I make voluntary repayments to my outstanding HECS-HELP debt,' and even 'What happens to my HECS-HELP debt if I die?
Plan on leaving something to your kids when you pass away?
Each year as we review the Google web traffic to our site, we regularly see in our top 10 most-read articles our blog article called, 'How to Split an Unsplittable Inheritance'.
Clearly, there's a lot of interest in this ongoing question, particularly now as most families in Australia own property or business assets - all different assets with different values – and these are by nature usually often hard to divide equally between beneficiaries to a Will, without destroying the value of those separate assets.
Christmas Trivia Cheat Sheet 2023 (optimised for discrete reading on your mobile device during a Christmas Trivia Battle!)
It's beginning to look a lot like that time of year when you're sometimes stuck for conversation starters and trivia answers at the Christmas BBQ with family and friends.
Here's 31 of the Best Christmas Trivia questions and answers to have up your sleeve for 2023.
It is a tough year for SMSF Auditors (and it is only going to get tougher)
And like all big legislative changes, as we see the compliance workload increase, so will the associated costs to audit and advise an SMSF increase too.
Two recent legal cases, Cam & Bear and Ryan Wealth Holdings, not only highlight the growing risks to SMSF Auditors, they're also warnings to professional advisers, planners, accountants and lawyers.
- Everyone needs to know more about Diabetes
- Save your First Home Deposit Faster with the First Home Super Saver Scheme (FHSS)
- Getting control of SMSF Liquidity Risk
- Hot Chips, Seagulls, Relatives and the Tax Office
- Only Owning Half the Business Pie
- Six Questions to ask yourself before you buy Crypto
- Planning for Future School Fees (and adult education)
