Ken

If you live in Australia, it is an "Authorised Deposit-taking Institution (ADI) limited to providing Purchased Payment Facilities". The only other organisation with this same status is Paypal. Despite their ADI status neither Wise nor Paypal are covered by the Financial Claims Scheme.

Sorry, I'm not up on the rules regarding transferring from one UK provider to another. Presumably it wouldn't be a taxable event as it's still locked up in a pension fund (same with consolidating your funds into one scheme) but I don't know for certain how the ATO looks at it.

If however you take it as a pension, you will receive that pension until you die, not "until exhausted". Unlike Super, pensions do not exhaust the fund, but instead the fund purchases an annuity which pays out for the rest of your life regardless of how long you live, whether you can afford an annuity that pays $18,200 will depend upon the size of your pension pot. Some pension funds will allow you to take as flexible lump sums (perhaps equivalent to say $18,200 each year) annually or monthly as it suits you, and that will be "until exhausted".

Unfortunately, although the UK pension regulations allow it, not all UK pensions allow you to flexibly draw down like that. With some providers the only choices are taking the entire amount as a lump sum, or a pension or a 25% lump sum and a pension.

I actually said "to maximise the amount you can get tax free", but otherwise yes. You don't need to declare the AFE of separate funds that you aren't transferring until a later year when you do so, and by then you'll have more tax free and low tax allowances and Concessional Super Caps available.

To answer a question you seem to have left hanging in the title of this thread "Consolidation" I would advise against Consolidating any pension funds in the UK if you plan to bring them over to Australia. You will save on some day-to-day fees in having the funds consolidated, but you will have a much bigger and more unwieldy amount. Separate funds will all be taxed separately when transferred and this will allow you to better time the transfer to minimise tax, in particular by transferring them in different years to maximise the amounts you can get tax free.

Your processing time started in January. If they got to the point where they needed your health checks, they would have contacted you and paused processing until the health checks were received. The health checks used to be one of the last things before the visa is issued. Unless that has changed then (based on the fact that they haven't issued the visa yet) it seems highly unlikely that they had got to that point in your processing by April.

I was referring to the concessional cap as that is to my mind the only worth using. It depends upon how much your Super balance is and whether or not you used up your full annual contribution in previous years. If your Super balance is under $500K you can use up to 5 years of unused annual contributions. Consequently, while some people are limited to $27,500, others can put in six-figure sums (but not every year).

It occurs to me that perhaps the person spoken to at Virgin Money just didn't understand and thought that a transfer to Wise was an international transaction and not a simple transfer from one UK bank to another.

It occurs to me that I should points that's the limit for living expenses and the like. There is no limit for salary sacrifice to Super other than annual and lifetime limits on Super. If you're coming up to retirement definitely worth piling as much as you can in to Super to pay 15% tax rather than your usual rate as you can take that 85% back as soon as you've retired. Not worth taking your salary right down to $18,200 though - you'll lose the low income offset and so be paying tax you didn't have to!

I've already posted that in this thread. It varies depending on employer but for public hospitals it's $9,010.

The NHS has such large amounts of sick leave due to the large numbers of workplace injuries (e.g. people straining their backs trying to lift patients). In Australia workplace injuries are covered by what is normally referred to as "Workers Comp" which is a compulsory employer insurance scheme overseen by state governments and pays an income to those recovering from workplace injuries.

Yes that's right. Just watch though that when they say $85,000 they mean $85,000 plus Super and not $85,000 including Super as some unscrupulous employers are known to do in their adverts.

A few years ago (I can't remember which year) they changed the rules so that employers have to pay Super on your full salary including any amounts you sacrifice. Before that employers could (and often did) only pay Super on the amount left after salary sacrifice.

Yes, the employer pays to a third party salary sacrifice company (such as RemServ). The salary sacrifice company then distributes the amount and in some cases (in theory they should have evidence that the employee has spent the money on allowable expenses) this involves them transferring it to the employee tax free. For most people there is only a very narrow range of things you can salary sacrifice for, but if you work in the Healthcare or Charity sector (and your employer allows it) there's a very wide range you can salary sacrifice for including ordinary living expenses so it's almost impossible for the employee not to have spent the maximum (which varies by industry but is $9,010 for public hospitals) on allowable expenses.

I'm assuming there will be an inflationary price increase on 1st August but you'll still be able to contribute, whereas in the past (and per the original post here after April 2025) you were restricted to going back 6 years.

On average Melbourne's weather is better than the UK. The problem is that it doesn't stay average (or anything else) for long. In the summer it can be 40 degrees and then drop to 20 in the course of an afternoon. Winters are never what I would call wintry. I've heard stories about giant hail showers but in 9 years in Melbourne I didn't see anything worse than light hail and that very rarely. It does however get very autumnal for 6 months of the year. It's frequently windy (more so than in the UK in my experience) even during the summer months.

If the amount of AFE is relatively small, then there is also the option of transferring it to Australia and paying it in to your own super fund yourself as a voluntary contribution which you are claiming as a tax deduction and then only paying 15% tax on it rather than the full whack. There's a host of things you need to comply with and the amount you can contribute in this way is severely limited, but if your total fund isn't already too large (and you didn't pay in the maximum in previous years already), you can use underpayments from previous years too.

Yes, if you are a permanent resident or citizen the ATO would treat it as taxable income. The value of your pension fund at the date you moved to Australia (or became a permanent resident if later) is not taxable income, but (depending on how you take your pension) the tax-free portion is the last part of your pension that you draw down, so if you're taking lump sums that first 25% would likely be entirely taxable while later lump sums could be partly or wholly tax free. If, however, you commence a pension, and the only lump sum is the 25%, it's a matter of valuing the worth of the lump sum when you moved to Australia separately from the pension. In that case you would get some of it tax-free, as only the growth is taxed. The pension portion wouldn't necessarily be fully taxed either since you are entitled to get the purchased value of the pension (the amount you paid in) tax-free. Unfortunately, unlike with the lump-sum, the tax-free portion is only the amount you personally paid into your pension and all of the growth before you moved to Australia, plus any amounts paid in by your employer would still be taxable. Furthermore, claiming this UPP isn't particularly easy as you have to prove what you paid into you pension decades ago and get the ATO to approve it, and then it's often a tiny amount compared to the growth of your pension so many taxpayers don't bother. Some taxpayers mistakenly believe they can automatically claim an 8% UPP. That however is the rate that the ATO has granted for UK state old-age pension. For a personal pension you have to get the rate agreed with the ATO. As to your other question, if you were residing in a country where tax on overseas income is exempt (and this includes Australia if you are a temporary resident) then you would pay no tax at all on the 25% as that is tax-free in the UK. That would apply whether or not a DTA existed between the two countries. If there was a DTA it's theoretically possible that the other 75% would be tax free in both countries (if taken as a pension and not as lump sums) - but I don't see that working for temporary residents in Australia nor do I think a DTA would be agreed that passed taxing rights on pensions to a country where they would be tax free.

HMRC have recently changed their approach and ruled that lump sums are not pensions under the terms of the double taxation agreement. That's important because pensions are only taxed in the country you are resident in per the double taxation agreement, whereas other income is taxed first in the country they are sourced (in this case the UK) with that tax paid being an offset in the country where you are resident (in this case Australia). You still only have to pay one set of tax, but instead of it all being paid in Australia it's paid in the UK plus a top-up (assuming the Australian tax rate is higher - which it generally will be in you live in Australia as you'll have more income there) in Australia. It's different if you are actually receiving a private UK pension and not lump sums. In that case as @rammygirl has said you complete the forms, send them to the ATO to verify them, who send them to HMRC, who (provided they agree that it's a pension) will eventually inform the pension company not to deduct tax at source.

If VicRoads have already converted your UK licence into a Victorian licence, I don't see them accepting a new UK licence to convert - especially if the date for passing the test is after the date that they have for you becoming resident in Victoria. So, yes, I'd expect it to be an issue. I could be wrong though since the bureaucratic mind does not always work the way you would expect.

No, I only want to backpay missing years, and I can see on the forecast exactly which years they are and how much the cost is (including one that is partly paid). There is however no information about how to pay other than a phone number (there is a payment link but that requires an 18-digit number starting with 60 which is not provided on the forecast). How did you get them to send you a letter?

So how did you obtain the letter?

Obtaining the forecast is easy but they make it make very difficult to actually pay them. You have to phone to obtain an 18 digit reference number before you can do so.

That's much stricter than in Victoria. The Victorian rules (where we got the first home owner concession back in 2016) regarding previous home ownership still are:- You’re not eligible for the FHOG if you or your spouse or partner have already: received the FHOG in Australia owned a home or other residential property in Australia, either jointly or separately, prior to 1 July 2000, or lived in a home in Australia which either of you owned or part-owned on or after 1 July 2000 for a continuous period of at least six months.