Expert Estate Planning – Protect Your Family and Your Assets!

Family Trusts

Benefits of using Family Trusts

Discretionary family trusts are useful structures that may provide the benefits of:

  • flexibility of deciding to whom income and capital of the trust is distributed from time to time;
  • the ability to save significant amounts of tax on trust income and capital gains; and
  • the potential to protect the assets held by the trust from claims against the discretionary beneficiaries of the trust.

However, when setting up a Family trust, it is absolutely critical that you get the right trust deed in the first place – otherwise these benefits may not be available.

WARNING: Family Trust deeds are NOT all the same!!!

You should ONLY use an Expert Trusts, Tax and Estate Planning Lawyer to prepare a family trust deed. The laws relating to the taxation of trusts are becoming increasingly complex, and most non-specialist lawyers’ trust deeds are inadequate and out-of-date on tax issues.

Also, due to their lack of trust expertise, many non-specialist lawyers’ trust deeds are completely wrong and invalid from the start – resulting in dire tax and other consequences!

REMEMBER – if you have set up a family trust using a poorly drafted trust deed and have accumulated significant wealth within it, it is usually too late to fix things without incurring significant – often prohibitive – adverse Capital Gains Tax and Stamp Duty consequences!!!

Even worse, if the trust deed has been so poorly drafted that it is invalid from the start (i.e. void ab initio), the only solution may be to seek a Supreme Court order to rectify the trust deed – resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and hearing fees, and with no guarantee that the Court will even grant you the order in the first place!!!

(For more information regarding the pitfalls of obtaining family trust deeds from a non-specialist lawyer (even from “top tier” law firms!), please refer to our feature expert article “Reviewing family trust deeds – It’s not just about tax!” in the August 2012 edition of Taxation in Australia published by The Tax Institute – see https://www.taxinstitute.com.au/resources/journals/taxation-in-australia/2012/reviewing-family-trust-deeds-it-s-not-just-about-tax.)

What Makes A WillWorks® Family Trust Deed Different?

Unlike “ordinary” family trust deeds, a superior WillWorks® Family Trust Deed:

  • is prepared and/or reviewed by an Expert Trusts, Taxation and Estate Planning Lawyer – so you know it will be set up correctly from the start;
  • has a comprehensive, “Bamford compliant” trust income definition – so that it can tax-effectively deal with capital gains;
  • is “Division 7A friendly” – with the ability to tax-effectively deal with Unpaid Present Entitlements;
  • has up-to-date, comprehensive income streaming powers – to ensure that trust distributions can be made as tax-effectively as possible; AND
  • provides maximum Asset Protection for the assets of the trust.

So Why Take The Risk?

Once the trust has been established, it can “live” for up to 80 years, and it is not unusual for it to accumulate hundreds of thousands or even many millions of dollars worth of assets in a short time period – so why would you take the chance of using an inferior (or even invalid!) trust deed?

For more information about how a WillWorks® Family Trust can benefit you, please contact us to discuss your needs.

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