Retiring Overseas

This is Majenda Insights number five. My name’s Geoff Taylor. I’m a tax accountant and financial planner. And I’ve been advising Australian expats for the last 20 years. And the purpose of this video series was just to really tap into some of the knowledge and experience I’ve had of advising clients during that time. The topic here is ‘Retiring overseas’. Before I go into the detail, I should mention that this is general advice. I haven’t taken into account your personal circumstances, goals, objectives, or any of those things. I’m happy to provide you with personal tax advice as required. But I would need to know about your personal circumstances.

The reason for doing a video on this topic is we do have clients who have retired overseas. And some of them have gone country shopping and looked at places to retire. Typically from my experience, the countries that are trying to attract retirees, wealthy retirees, would run a territorial tax system. They’ll tax the nationals of the country, but then they won’t tax overseas income. Then they may have a special carve-out for wealthy expats. The thing is that you’ve got to work out what are the tax implications for you of that. Do you maintain assets in Australia? Do you still have to pay tax in Australia? Do you optimise your superannuation in Australia? How does that actually work?

And how do you optimise that for tax purposes? And if we take an example, recently the Thai government changed the tax rules regarding expats. You have a situation where a couple may have been living there for some time and have enjoyed a tax-free environment and may, under certain circumstances, now be paying tax. They may have exempt superannuation income and not be paying tax in Australia, being the source country of superannuation payments, but then potentially paying tax on income that was tax-free in the other country, but actually taxable in Thailand where they’re resident. They’re the sort of things that you’ve got to look at when you’re deciding on where you’re going to retire.

You could also retire to a European country and you’ll find that in most cases you are taxed on your worldwide income. That’s a factor. You could go to Portugal’s non-habitual resident tax regime, but even that’s being reduced to some extent. You’ve really got to look at what are the domestic rules of the country that you’re going to and where are you going to hold your investments and how does the interplay work between those countries so that you don’t end up paying too much tax.

This is where we can assist. I’ve got a master’s degree in international tax. I work with overseas specialists in particular countries so we can actually provide holistic advice on tax-related matters. Hopefully this has been beneficial. If you are looking for a country to retire in that’s not Australia and you would like some tax input, we’d be happy to assist. I look forward to seeing you at some point in the future.