Mo Money

Four rate hikes this year, inflation back near 4%, surcharges gone and prices somehow higher. Ben and Siobhan cut through the headlines and get to what it actually means for your money.

On a $1.5 million mortgage, this year's hikes cost about $969 a month, or roughly $22,000 of salary on the top tax rate. They cover the loyalty tax your bank is charging you, why your 5% savings account is still going backwards after tax and inflation, and the ATO backflip that means business owners can keep paying tax by credit card until 30 June 2027. Plus the trust tax election, the 1 July 2028...

Division 296 is live. From 1 July, earnings on the part of your super balance above $3 million get taxed at 30%, and above $10 million the rate is 40%. The narrative is that this is a tax on rich retirees. Ben takes a 38-year-old on $400k with $600k in super, doing nothing more exotic than the standard concessional contribution, and shows them crossing $3 million at 57, three years before they can touch the money.

The episode is about what to do with that. Why 30% inside super is a worse deal than 30% in a company or an investment bond, because those structures let you...

The AFR reckons rentvesting is dead now that negative gearing has been wound back. Jack Henderson reckons the AFR has it backwards, and he's paying $3,700 a week in rent while he says it.

This one moves fast. Jack explains the valuation method most property investors have never heard of, where a property with two incomes on one title gets valued on its rent instead of on what the neighbours sold for, and walks through the duplex where that difference was worth more than a million dollars. He puts a number on what a dollar of rent is...

On 12 May the budget killed the bucket company. A 30% minimum tax on trust income was the headline, but the real damage was underneath it, because that tax came with no credit when the money moved on to a company. Stack the two together and business owners were looking at an effective rate over 60% on profit they had already been taxed on once.

On 3 September the government released draft legislation that changes the picture, and Ben walks through exactly what it does. There is a window, it closes on 1 July 2028, and if you make a fixed election on...

Every second call at the moment ends the same way. The budget has tightened the screws, the pay rise didn't move the needle, so what if we just moved to Singapore? Or Dubai. Or Hong Kong.

Ben and Siobhan ran the numbers, and the first thing they found is that Australia is a lower tax country than the UK, Canada, New Zealand and most of Europe. The catch is where we collect it. Almost 43% of every tax dollar in Australia comes from personal income, one of the heaviest reliances on personal income tax in the developed world...

Hugh Robertson reckons the world changed for Aussie investors on 12 May. For years the playbook
was simple. Earn well, borrow, negatively gear into residential property and let the market do the
rest. The budget took a fair chunk of that off the table, and now a lot of people with money to put to
work are asking the same question. What's the play now?
Hugh runs Centaur Financial Services, sits on the Barron's Top 100 adviser list, and has been a
mate of Ben's for over a decade, which means he doesn't get to be...

Maddy and James are both senior, both earning well, and last year they opened a tax bill with six figures on it and no idea how they were going to pay it.

The problem was never income. It was employer equity. Every vest built the paper wealth and the tax liability at the same time, and they'd been covering it by selling shares and draining savings, three times over. Then they upgraded the house, sold more stock to fund the stamp duty, and the cycle got worse.

This is how they got out of what...

There are more than 70,000 kids' investment accounts sitting on one Australian platform, and it's the fastest growing part of the business. Craig Keary is the new CEO of Raiz, and before that he spent thirty years across HSBC, CBA, Westpac and AMP Capital, plus a stint running Selfwealth.

Craig shares what he's seeing across 350,000 active accounts, including what people actually did with their money through the tariff volatility and the Middle East tensions, and whether the budget changed anyone's behaviour at all. We also get into why younger Australians have almost no home country bias, and the...

Matt Lakajev dropped out of school, got kicked out of home more than once, and worked 25 different jobs before having a breakdown at 27 that sent him back to his parents' place. He then googled how to make the most money without a degree, found sales, and built an audience of more than 100,000 people on the platform everyone claims to hate.

This one's for anyone in a senior role who knows their network matters but has never posted a thing. Matt gets specific on why LinkedIn still converts better than anywhere else, what AI screening is quietly doing...

Nada and Adrian came to Pivot with one property and a plan to buy another. Adrian also had a list of his own: refinance the house, buy the second property, buy a $130,000 car, then take a holiday. His words for how that would have gone are not repeatable in a description.

Three months in, the plan looks nothing like that. Two weeks after their strategy session the federal budget landed and changed the maths on the second property entirely, so they went back to the drawing board and ended up somewhere they'd never seriously considered. This is...

Same money, same returns, same twenty years. One fund charges 0.2%, the other charges 1%. The difference is more than fifty thousand dollars, and Shani Jayamanne ran the numbers before she walked into the studio.

Shani is an Investment Specialist at Morningstar, co-host of Investing Compass and co-author of Invest Your Way. Morningstar runs a study twice a year comparing what funds return against what the investors in those funds actually get, and the funds win by 1.2% a year. Shani explains where that gap comes from, why Australians are among the best in the world at closing it, and...

Everyone's calling it a crash. Louis Christopher runs SQM Research, one of Australia's biggest property data houses, and he says that word is wrong. What we're in is the largest downturn in 10 to 15 years, but the one ingredient every genuine housing crash has ever needed is missing here.

Louis breaks down where the market actually is, which cities are falling hardest, and which pockets are barely moving at all. We get into what the budget's tax changes are really doing to investor behaviour, why rents have stalled when everyone expected them to spike, and what he'd buy...

This episode of the Mo Money Podcast is a money diary session with a client of ours, Amanda. Amanda talks about her money journey and how she's done reverse rent vesting, essentially sold her home so that she could rent and invest at the same time, and how she's used that strategy to acquire multiple investment properties and build a share portfolio and start making passive income and a transition away from corporate achievable in less than five years.

We get into a bit of the mindset or the things that were happening in Amanda's world at...

In this episode of the Mo Money Podcast, we have a Money Diary session with Nikki, where she unpacks some of the big shifts that she's made with her money over the last little bit, what it was like making some really big decisions about an employer share plan for a company that had just listed on the stock exchange, how she made decisions around creating or replacing her work salary with investment income, streamlining properties, saving a bunch of tax through investing and investing structures, and some of the mindset imposter syndrome stuff that was sort of getting...

In this episode of the Mo Money Podcast, we chat about debt recycling post the budget, what it is as a bit of a refresher, but importantly, how the budget changes or lack of changes around share investing and negative gearing for shares has made debt recycling one of the last real bastions, I suppose, of tax deductions for really any investors moving forward.

So, we get into some of the mechanics, we talk about the budget rule changes and how that impacts or doesn't impact debt recycling, as well as how you can set this up...

On this episode of the Mo Money Podcast, we unpack the budget changes and what it means for your money and investing. We talk about you know the issues and the challenges that have come from the budget, as well as the opportunities that are out there for investors today.

We unpack these newly announced changes to SMSF borrowing and what that actually means for property investors, as well as how to invest without paying any capital gains tax when you're strategic, the power of structures, tax planning on your investments, and the key opportunities, particularly for...

In this episode of the Mo Money Podcast, we chat to Chris Bates from Alcove. He's a mortgage broker that's helped thousands of Aussies buy homes and invest through the property market. We talk through his take on what's going on in the post-budget world for property, what smart property buyers should be thinking about today, and some of the mistakes to look out for if you're wanting to get ahead and using property as part of your plan. This episode is really perfect for anyone that wants to understand property better.

Smarter money moves...

In this episode of the Mo Money Podcast, we chat to Damien Cooley, who's a founder at Cooley Auctions. He's auctioned over 75,000 - in fact, over 80,000 properties, he mentioned - and he talks about the lessons from that, how you can not overpay for property, some of the auction bidding strategies to secure a property at a decent price, as well as what's going on in the property market today in the post budget world with confidence a little bit lower across the premium markets across Australia. This episode is perfect for anyone that wants to understand the property...

This episode of the Mo Money Podcast is a money diary session with John and Greta. There are business owners that have been on a journey trying to get more out of the money that they already have. So we chat about how they've set up their finances to be automated, so that they can focus more on their business, how they've aligned as a couple with very different perspectives and approaches and interest levels in their money, and how that's made it easier for them to focus again on improving their business and the things that really matter...

This episode of the Mo Money Podcast is a Money Diary session with a Pivot Wealth client, Tristan, where he shares his journey over the last four years in getting towards buying his first home, which he thought was way out of reach, and the stepping stones that he's used to actually make that happen.

He talks about the shift from being almost embarrassed about his finances to a position where he is automated everything, getting great results, and doesn't even have to think about it too much. So, this episode is perfect for anyone that wants...

This episode of the Mo Money Podcast is a money diary session with one of our clients, Toni. Toni talks about what it was like to set up her financial plan for the first time, coming from a generation where it was drilled into her that saving money in cash and only buying property was the only way that you could actually get ahead.

She talks about what she did to cut tax on her income, as well as the big shifts that she made to feel more confident in her finances and her path forward. This...

This episode of the Mo Money Podcast is a recording of a live event we did on how to cut your tax bill. In the session, we get into the top tax strategies that you can use to reduce your annual ATO donation, as well as some of the mistakes that people make when it comes to trying to save tax so that you can avoid them. This episode is perfect for anyone that doesn't want to pay any more tax than they have to.

Smarter money moves start here.

Learn how to...

This episode of the podcast is a recording with Jessica Brady, money expert and financial coach, where we chat pretty deep about how to get in touch with your money beliefs and values, and why that's actually important when it comes to your saving and investing.

We get into some of the money systems that can hold people back, and particularly talking about women around finance and financial management, and we go through Jess' top tips for high-income earners to really make sure that they're making the most of their money. This episode is perfect for anyone...

This episode of the Mo Money Podcast is a conversation with Jack Henderson, property expert and buyer's agent, where we dive deep into commercial property. We talk about what it is, how it works, who it suits and who it doesn't, as well as some of the mistakes to look out for, how commercial property is valued, some of the big flags to look out for if you're going down this path, as well as his advice for people that think that this might be the next move for them. Now, we get a ton of questions about commercial...

On today's episode of the Mo Money podcast, you will understand exactly what separates a strategic mortgage from just getting the cheapest rate, the mistakes that are quietly costing high income earners serious money, and what to do about it in the current rate environment. I unpack the stories with Malcolm and Matt on what you should be doing, how to think ahead, and there's a lot of things that come into play when it comes to structuring and lending.

Mission Critical to listen to this if you are looking to purchase or refinance anytime soon.

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we talked to Deanna Messina, who's the Deputy Chief Economist at AMP. She's got a bunch of experience with financial markets, and spends most of her days crunching data on inflation, interest rates, what's going on in the property market and the share market as well.

So we get Diana to get her crystal ball out some predictions around what's happening in the property market, what's potentially going to happen in the share market, as well as what might happen with the upcoming federal budget. This episode is perfect...

This episode of the Mo Money podcast is our 500th episode, and it's a milestone that we're pretty proud of. We wanted to do something a little bit different, a little bit special, to talk you through some of the lessons that we've learned over the last six and a bit years in putting out the podcast, some of the rules to live by when it when it comes to your money, the ones that have stood the test of time, and Siobhan puts me on the hot seat to ask me about some of my personal money journey...

On this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we talk about the Home Upgrade trap and the cost that can come with upgrading your home at the wrong time. We talk through how you can think about this decision and make it work in a way that actually works for you, and how to be more strategic with the decisions that you make around what is one of the most important decisions when it comes to your money.

Smarter money moves start here.

Learn how to cut through the noise, avoid expensive mistakes...

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we chat about the "AI bubble" in sort-of inverted commas, and how you can invest when everyone's owning the same sorts of investments. So, we talk a bit about the Magnificent Seven, concentration risk, what that actually means the AI wave, and how that's driving around investor behavior and shifting market dynamics, as well as what you should be thinking about now to make sure that your investments are set up in a way to take advantage of what's happening in markets, but also not leaving you overexposed.

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we chat RBA higher interest rates and what higher income households can do to be smart with their money in the current environment. So, we chat around the three levers that will move the dial the most when it comes to your situation, and how you can make sure that you're pulling the right ones for you, and importantly, some of the mistakes to look out for that cost people money through a higher interest rate environment.

Smarter money moves start here.

Learn how to...

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we talk about the war that's happening and how that's driving up petrol prices. But importantly, what you can do to be smart in the current climate, maybe save a few bucks at the petrol bowser. But also, more broadly, be smarter with your money, so that you're able to squeeze out a bit of savings, or at least defend the savings that you were before the cost of living has increased, how you should be thinking about your investing today and how you can protect your risk. This episode is...

This episode of the Mo Money podcast is a recording of a live event I did on how to FI/RE without drastic lifestyle sacrifices. So, I absolutely love the FI/RE movement, but one of the biggest criticisms that I have is the fact that a lot of people that that go down this path, they end up sacrificing stuff that's actually truly important to them today and lead, in my opinion, I think that's likely to lead to a whole bunch of regrets in the future.

And so in this episode, we get into what...

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we're talking about tax hacks for higher income earners, particularly coming into the end of the financial year, to help you get more back in your tax refund without getting in trouble with the ATO.

So, we talk through the key areas of tax deductions, what you need to know to take advantage, how some of the more complicated rules work around motor vehicle deductions, claiming tax deductions without keeping receipts, work from home expenses, and the bigger opportunity to save even more tax into the years ahead. So...

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we talk about the average household wealth by age across Australia. We get into the different age brackets, how much money they have, how that's broken down between shares, cash savings, property and even debts. And also cover the key things that you should be focused on at each of these age brackets to make faster progress, as well as how you should be thinking about how you compare, and what that actually means for what you do next. This episode is perfect for anyone that wants to feel more confident...

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we're chatting about the potential changes to the capital gains tax discount on property in Australia. This has been getting a lot of attention, and as more time goes on, it seems more and more likely that it may be included in the budget.

So, we wanted to unpack what's being spoken about, who it actually impacts, what impact it might have on the market, and what it means for the viability of property investing and buying property as a strategy moving forward. And so I think anyone should...

This episode of the Mo Money podcast, we chat crypto and gold and the precious metals and crypto crash that we've just seen, and how smart investors are positioning themselves to take advantage and come through this period of disruption in a stronger position than they went into it.

So, we get into some of the numbers and talk about where markets are at, what's driving that and the factors that influence these prices, how you can set up a strategy that actually makes sense to make you money, and how you can protect your risk so...

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we chat RBA rate hikes and what it means for your money. Obviously a bit of shock in this over the last little while, but we talk about where to from here, what it actually means for investors, and how you can make smart decisions with the current landscape and state of place. So, this episode is perfect for anyone who wants to have a bit more confidence in where they go from here.

Smarter money moves start here.

Learn how to cut through the...

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we talk through the divorce money blueprint and basically how to not torch your financial future. We go through some of the drivers around divorce being a true wealth event, whether you like it or not, and some of the key considerations that you want to make sure that you're thinking about at the very front end,

We cover the classic mistakes that people make with money when it goes through a divorce, and how to avoid them, how to think about the assets and which ones you want...

This episode of the Mo Money podcast is a recording of a live event we did on Family Trust Investing to save tax. So in the event, we cover what a Family Trust actually is, how to set one up, and most importantly how you can use a family trust to save tax when you're investing.

We also cover some of the common Trust mistakes to avoid and what you should look out for if you're thinking about going down this path. This episode is perfect for anyone that wants to use the rules to their advantage...

In this episode of the Mo Money podcast, we talk about inheritances and how inheriting without a plan can create a ton of risk. It also comes with a lot of opportunity, but opportunity that won't just take advantage of itself. And so we go through who should be thinking about this stuff? What happens when you don't plan around an inheritance, and some of the tax consequences and the asset leakage that can happen, as well as how to actually plan and think about getting the money to actually work for you.

We then go into...