DIG85

Plus the wasted stamp duty on re-entry to the Australian market. Being out of the Sydney market for a family home for as little as 18 months in the 2010s is likely to have cost $100k minimum, given house price rises in that decade.

You should be fine for the UK but I'd definitely be checking HK for restrictions - even if just transiting. I wouldn't be transiting anywhere in SE Asia atm due to their zero covid nonsense. I am currently in the UK for a holiday but made sure I transited in Abu Dhabi.

That unemployment is at record lows is surely not unrelated to the fact that we have just come out of a period when the borders were closed for the best part of two years. The labour market has never been tighter; there has never been a better time to be an employee in Australia looking for work or, for many people, a massive pay rise. Businesses are crying out for more workers because the supply of labour is too low, which has driven up wages. I have no doubt that the government will open the floodgates to higher immigration as soon as it can, and the Libs would have done the same had they won the election. After all, a greater population means a greater pool of labour, which puts downward pressure on wages. A greater population also means more customers for businesses, which means more sales, which means more profits, which means more dividends for shareholders. What’s not to like?

If the gain is wholly covered by principal private residence relief, there is no need to declare the gain in the UK.

If the property was still your main home between the grant of probate at the end of 2020 and the exchange of contracts in March 2022 then principal private residence relief should eliminate any gain arising in that period. I didn't make that clear in my OP. The only potential issue is that if it was always your intention to sell the property once probate had been granted, HMRC could argue that the property was held as trading stock and any profit realised on its its sale should be regarded as trading income subject to income tax (as opposed to being a capital asset subject to CGT). This is a very long bow and it would have to be a pretty grumpy inspector who took the point. Assuming it was a CGT asset, the fact you lived in the property between 2015 and 2020 is irrelevant because you did not own the property during that period.

The UK main residence exemption is only available in respect of the period you actually owned the property. This was not until 2020 or even 2021, depending on when probate was granted. However, that does mean you will only be charged to UK CGT on the uplift in value over the one year period you owned it. You should be able to reduce the amount of any capital gain by the annual exempt amount of GBP 12,300. The taxing point for any gain - both in the UK and Aus - is generally when contracts are exchanged (or, in the case of conditional contracts, when the contract goes unconditional), not when money is transferred from one country to another. There should be no Aus CGT because you were not tax resident in Aus when the property was sold. The transfer of the money does not need to be declared in either country.

Without further information, I'm not sure this proves anything. The second person never submitted a valid application in the first place, so him or her being out of the country post application had nothing to do with the application being rejected. The first person's application may also have been invalid if those 3 months outside Australia were prior to the application and they had also spent time outside Australia in previous years, such that their combined period outside Australia exceeded 12 months in the previous 4 years. If the 3 months outside Australia occurred post-application, did he or she inform DHA of their intended absence, as you are required to do? 3 months' absence post-application does not seem like a particularly long period.

I was not aware that DHA could cancel a citizenship application simply because the applicant had gone abroad. My understanding accords with mixology’s - the OP need do nothing because the processing of the application will be resumed on his or her return to Australia. The experience of some of my colleagues is that it often gets approved quite quickly after the applicant’s return to Australia - which suggests that processing continues whilst the applicant is abroad and DHA is just waiting for the applicant to return before they hit the approve button. Obviously that will be different in the OP’s case because he or she has not sat the test, but it could all happen quite quickly now they are back in Aus.

Must have been staying in a hotel for that price!

I always thought that the residency requirement was "frozen" at the date of the application? i.e. it does not need to be satisfied on a go forward basis once the application has been submitted. I also understood that the processing of the application would be resumed on the applicant's return to Australia.

There still is no requirement for a person tax resident outside Australia to inform the ATO of their non-Australian income (which is the OP’s current circumstance). I think confusion has arisen here because, as I said in my previous post, the OP appears to be under a misapprehension or maybe just mistyped his or her belief about Australian tax lodgement obligations.

Yes, PBs can be part of a savings/investment strategy, but they should generally be regarded as akin to cash savings, like money in a bank account. They are not really investments. I've never held any and don't intend to.

Do you mean submit tax returns while overseas for Australian income? A non-resident generally doesn't pay tax on non-Australian income.

Australian tax will generally be payable on earnings from an Australian employer to the extent those earnings relate to duties carried out in Australia, regardless of your tax residence status. Not sure why you would need to apply get an NI number since that usually stays with you for life.

Surprised there is still anything left that is sub-3m on jersey road.

You say you are from the UK but then you go on to mention getting a UK work visa that meets the £18,600 salary requirement. If you are a UK citizen you don't require a visa to work there.

If you're looking somewhere closer to town than Kingston or Norbiton, then maybe look at somewhere like Battersea, which is close to Clapham Junction which has trains to both Victoria (for Westminster) and Waterloo (for the City via the W&C line). Should (just about) be able to get a terrace there for sub GBP2m. If there are moped phone snatchers in Islington then there could be moped phone snatchers anywhere in London tbh.

I have a rule never to invest in regional Australia. Poor transport, poor infrastructure, no prospect of significant increases in real wages and therefore nothing to increase house prices above that could be obtained in the capital cities. I would only invest in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane.

I don't follow your reasoning here. If the annual premium for base level private healthcare (BLPH), taken out solely to avoid the MSL, is lower than the MLS that would have otherwise have been payable, then you have saved money, and the BLPH is therefore worth it it, regardless of the quality of the BLPH. By avoiding the MSL, you do not restrict your access to the Medicare system in any way. Whether it is good public policy to effectively encourage the transfer of taxation revenue to the coffers of private health insurers, is another matter.

No Aus tax.

Even if you do need it or use it, private health insurance will rarely cover everything - there will always almost be some form of co-payment, and it can be a significant sum. Self-funding will almost always work out cheaper in the long run than PHI.

I agree. During summer, Perth probably has the most consistently extreme heat of all the state capitals. Darwin may have slightly higher daily maxima, but it doesn't get the 38C+ days that Perth gets. Obviously it can get a lot hotter inland, but given that 80%+ of Australia's population live on the coast, it is reasonable to say that Perth is hot by the standards that most Australians experience. The nearest contender for extreme summer heat in the state capitals is probably Adelaide, which has a similar Mediterranean climate, but even that city record summer maxima c. 2-3 degrees lower than Perth.

The title of this thread makes me want to weep for the poor kids involved.

If the big 4, lawyers, consultancies or banks want to hire an overseas national, it will be done. You have nothing to worry about.