Media release: Have you considered the estate planning consequences?

Could your tax or structuring decisions be negatively affecting or undoing your client’s estate planning? This is the question that will be posed to professional advisers at Cooper Grace Ward’s upcoming Adviser Training Day.

Associate Hayley Mitchell will address commonplace strategies used by advisers and how seemingly unrelated decisions can have unexpected consequences on estate planning outcomes.

‘Many of these strategies will have been chosen with good reason and for a different purpose than estate planning,’ Ms Mitchell said.

‘However, understanding their consequences is vital to ensuring the best strategies are in place to deal with them appropriately’, she said.

’An example is whether a beneficiary loans versus gifts funds to a trust, as this has a very different result for the beneficiary and their estate planning,’ she continued. ‘Decisions like making a pension reversionary or not and whether to make a binding death benefit nomination have a similarly major impact on estate planning and should be thought about seriously as part of the overall estate plan’.

Ms Mitchell will discuss these issues and more at the Adviser Training Day on Friday 24 March. Now in its eighth year, the Adviser Training Day is an intensive full-day technical conference hosted at the Mercure Hotel Brisbane, covering a range of topics designed to assist professional advisers in the issues they face on a day-to-day basis.

It will be accompanied by the Annual SMSF Conference on Thursday 23 March, which includes an SMSF Back to Basics session, update on the previous year in the SMSF space followed by an exclusive workshop addressing SMSF and estate planning issues after the 2016 Budget.

Both the Adviser Training Day and the Annual SMSF Conference will feature presentations from lawyers specialising in tax, revenue, superannuation, estate planning, workplace relations and other areas of commercial law.