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Qantas’ decision to split its international and domestic operations sent shockwaves around the airline in July, but one team was already preparing for the job of splitting IT systems.

The restructure complicated an already nuanced technology operation whose tentacles touch every part of the airline – from freight to frequent flyers. It was also a catalyst for improvement as it exposed weaknesses in outsourcing, enabled the relocation of IT people to where they were needed most and, ultimately, saved $30 million.

It all began when the airline looked to outsource parts of the project, exposing gaps and weaknesses in the technology operations.

”We had many sources of truth and this old state created complexities,” said Qantas IT financial controller Larry Morrissey.

”We had multiple sources of data, which led to lots of reconciliation, and also lack of consistency in what we were reporting to the business.”

So the airline made an early decision to install a project management application in October 2011 that would provide visibility of all legacy systems as well as help with the difficult task of prioritising projects along domestic and international lines, explained Qantas chief information officer Paul Jones.

The CA Clarity PPM system would also ”liberate” the knowledge locked away in spreadsheets and silos.

”By having this single source of truth it allowed us to have a look at the entire portfolio and relating that to which projects make sense in an international and domestic sense,” Jones said.

Qantas now more accurately aligns IT spending with commercial goals, according to Jones, because the project management application centrally stores technology project information such as where it is installed, phases of implementation, and upcoming projects.

”That means it’s easier to take a portfolio view across the entire airline rather than everyone having their own pots of technology,” he said.

The new system also gives visibility to the distributed technology operations where seven outsourcers – IBM, Fujitsu, Telstra, Optus, TCS, Satyam and Amadeus – manage 80 per cent of the carrier’s technology systems and support.

The remaining 20 per cent is provided in-house where, from August 1, IT staff were relocated inside the various divisions – from catering, freight, engineering, international, domestic and loyalty – assembled into mini businesses, each with its own chief executive.

”The airline is very complicated so you need IT people with the customers,” Jones said. ”Every sub-part of the airline [needs] tech people working day-by-day.”

He said five technology strategies added value to the airline: IT staff located within divisions, technology modernisation programs, single project view, employee engagement and IT cost reduction.

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Behind this pile of predictions is a paperless office.NBN Co predicts the country’s new high-speed broadband network will transform the economy by sprouting paperless offices across the country. But, for the immediate future at least, paper is here to stay.

Real estate agency Dougmal Harcourts, on the New South Wales south coast, is counting on becoming a paperless office on the back of its early national broadband network (NBN) adoption. It recently invested in iPads and remotely hosted storage applications, and shifted its offices out of the Kiama CBD – so staff can work from anywhere.

It had previously accumulated 20 filing cabinets of documents to satisfy its licence obligations as it needs to keep records of every transaction for five years.

”The possibility of being able to hold all that data in a safe and secure place with cloud backup is one of the things the NBN enhances,” said Sue Spence, the realtor’s managing director. ”It’s not our main consideration but it’s certainly one of several that led us down this path.”

NBN Co says its high-speed broadband fibre can now support multiple telephone lines, which will allow small businesses to provide more reliable services.

”Ours is still definitely a face-to-face industry but more and more we can run services online that traditionally a real estate agent is doing face-to-face,” Spence said.

But it is the iPad, not the NBN, that is hastening print’s decline, according to Kyocera managing director David Finn.

”Before the iPad erupted onto the scene, the industry pundits were saying the paperless office or reduction will occur in 20 years’ time,” said Finn, whose company continues to sell printing machines. ”Who knows how much that is going to accelerate?”

Increased viewing quality on the iPad and other mobile devices meant people were definitely printing less, he said, but businesses would use paper for at least the next 15 years.

”[NBN Co] has this vision that everyone will be connected, but there will still be people with more devices at home just to receive information and print documents.”

The paperless toilet will arrive before the fully digital office, he predicted. ”The paperless office is a myth.”

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HAWTHORN defender Josh Gibson and Western Bulldogs skipper Matthew Boyd are among the unlucky players who missed out on All-Australian squad selection yesterday.

The 40-man squad, to be trimmed to 22 by the selectors, also did not include Chris Judd, who has been in the team for the past four years. Judd’s four-match suspension in the second half of the season plainly cost him, and there is a slight changing of the guard in the midfield spots.

Gibson has had a fine year across half-back for the Hawks, but was overlooked for the likes of Geelong’s Tom Lonergan and Harry Taylor, Sydney’s Ted Richards, West Coast’s Darren Glass and Fremantle’s Luke McPharlin for a key defensive spot.

Among the first-time nominations are West Coast’s Nic Naitanui, Adelaide’s Patrick Dangerfield, Sam Jacobs, Brent Reilly and Taylor Walker, Collingwood’s Dayne Beams, Geelong’s Tom Hawkins and Lonergan, Richmond’s Ivan Maric, St Kilda’s Shaun Dempster and Sydney’s Lewis Jetta.

For Maric, it is the climax of a wonderful resurgence as an AFL player, having crossed from Adelaide to Richmond in a trade at the end of last season.

Geelong and Adelaide have the bulk of the squad with five players each.

The Bulldogs, Melbourne, Greater Western Sydney and the Brisbane Lions did not get a single player in the squad of 40.

Boyd, a two-time all-Australian and twice Bulldogs’ best and fairest, has been his steady and reliable self for the Bulldogs this year.

But his team’s malaise appears to have dragged him down in the selectors’ eyes.

Fremantle captain Matthew Pavlich is nominated after a fine season up forward for the Dockers, and he will become the most decorated of current players if he is named in the team, as most observers expect.

Pavlich would be receiving his seventh All-Australian guernsey, overtaking Judd and Matthew Scarlett. He has not been in the team since 2008.

The All-Australian selection panel is Andrew Demetriou (chairman), Adrian Anderson, Kevin Bartlett, Luke Darcy, Danny Frawley, Gerard Healy, Glen Jakovich and Mark Ricciuto.

They will announce a final team on 17 September.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.

IT takes a real man to take another bloke aside and ask them the hardest question for males: ‘‘No, don’t give me that crap, are you really OK?’’

The theme of an upcoming campaign to encourage men to check on mates’ well-being is something some of us have already been doing.

Last year, after the tragic suicide of a man whom others mourning his death had known all their lives, while I met him only a too-short year before, I saw it as my duty to not take ‘‘Yeah, I’m fine’’ for an answer.

Half a dozen times during his wake I ‘‘poked’’ blokes I had also known for only a short time, but already good friends, and said: ‘‘No, are you really all right, and don’t bullshit me?’’

And half a dozen times they unloaded the weight of their anger, sadness and frustration, which was rolled up in a big knot in their guts.

Many were nurses, including intensive care legends, who deal with death every day but fight it, well, to the death.

Yet even they, who watch families fall apart every day when their best efforts to save someone fails, could not deal properly with their mate’s decision without support.

One little bloke, the life of any party, a little wild but a lovely guy, when asked if he was ‘‘really’’ OK, fell into my arms weeping, crying and cursing.

Then there’s a fellow I know, who has made and lost a fortune in something at which he is a genius, seemingly unable to get himself off the booze after his marriage break-up.

Many men, and women in this bloke’s case, tried to confront him – telling him we all loved him, that he is funny and should get back to rebuilding his life.

None of us were doing any good, but the other day a bloke I know told me that despite the recent loss of his mum, he had taken this task on board with a vengeance.

Rules have been put in place regarding all aspects of his life, particularly drinking, with this true mate helping him take tiny steps.

Knowing this man and seeing the voluntary work he does, I had already thought, in the old Aussie vernacular, that he was ‘‘a decent sort of chap’’, who as a first-generation Australian from a strife-ridden part of the world knows a bit about suffering.

Now I want to put this man on

a pedestal. I didn’t kiss him, although I did place a hand on his shoulder to say: ‘‘You are a good man, mate.’’

So if there’s a man in your life, fellas, who you think is a little off kilter, for heaven’s sake, back him into a corner over a quiet ale or squash and don’t take no for an answer.

Last Friday week Mitt Romney made a stupid mistake at 12.23pm before a home town crowd.”No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate,” he said, inadvertently or otherwise associating himself with the dark and loony fringe of his party who still believe President Barack Obama is a Manchurian candidate from Kenya or Indonesia. We know exactly when it happened because within 60 seconds of the words leaving his lips they were tweeted by a Washington Post reporter, and within four minutes of that tweet Politico had the comments online.(Politico also ran an excellent breakdown of the events that I am stealing this timing from.) By 12.41pm the segment of the speech had been loaded onto YouTube and Romney’s campaign had responded. Three minutes later, Obama issued a statement lamenting the comments.That is, at this election candidates and their staff – not to mention the journalists following them – are working to 21-minute news cycles. No wonder they look so tired.The implications of online campaigns are still becoming apparent to the parties and the reporters, not to mention the vast vulture industry that feeds on the whole circus. This year it is estimated that a billion dollars will be spent on TV ads, but it is not quite clear that they are having the impact they once would have.Either way, you can bet that the new media innovations warping the US 2012 campaign will be deployed during Australia’s next general election. Australian political consultants always closely watch American elections.At a forum held yesterday in Charlotte, North Carolina – the town that has just been taken over by the Democratic National Convention – political reporter Major Garrett of the National Journal, which co-hosted the event with The Atlantic, noted that the oceans of money spent on TV ads might not have bought the attention the campaigns expected.According to a survey, people likely to vote in the upcoming election watched 20 hours of video in the past week, but half of that was either watched on DVR or direct streaming. Even more disconcerting – at least to campaign strategists and TV networks – of the 40 per cent of viewers in the key states of Florida and Ohio who watched coverage recorded on DVR or streamed, 90 per cent said they skipped the ads.Meanwhile, many of those who do watch major campaign events – such as Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech or Clint Eastwood’s debate with a stool – do so with one eye on a second screen, a laptop or handheld device.The result, says Garrett, is that we may learn by the end of this campaign that traditional advertising is not working. This could go some way to explaining some apparently contradictory polls that have come out. A Gallup poll found that only 38 per cent of respondents thought Mr Romney’s speech was good or excellent, a figure lower than the past eight acceptance speeches.Moreover, Gallop found the whole Republican Convention had very little impact on voting intentions. Nonetheless, the Huffington Post’sPollster南京夜网 found Romney had crept to within a tenth of one percentage point of Obama nationally.It is too soon to draw conclusions from new media and polling data regarding the Republican National Convention, says Twitter’s head of government, news and social innovation, Adam Sharp, but he notes spikes in approval in mentions in Twitter traffic appear to be presaging polls.It could be that parts of the electorate are bypassing advertising and making their decisions based on recommendations via social media. During the forum, Facebook’s head of policy said research showed that recommendations via social media on purchases carried far more weight with consumers than advertising, and it was likely this would be reflected in political decision-making.According to The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Rute, who addressed the forum, 40 per cent of the online traffic was now coming from social media recommendations. The campaigns are not waiting to find out and have thrown themselves into the new media.Joe Rospars, the Obama campaign’s chief digital strategist, said the Obama campaign was maintaining a presence across at least eight social media venues, including the recent Q and A the President conducted on Reddit南京夜网. He said a new smartphone app allowed supporters to become Obama organisers on the spot, looking up numbers for people to call and seek support or streets to door-knock.Sharp said analysis of Twitter traffic showed that the discussion viewers might once have had with one another as paid pundits began their “post-game” analysis of the major speeches had already spiked and ended before the speaker left the stage.Before Clint Eastwood had finished muttering at the empty stool during the Tampa convention, the President had responded via Twitter, with a picture of himself at his desk in the Oval Office with the caption “This seat is taken”.But Sharp said the scale of Twitter meant politicians who had lost immediate connections with voters as a result of growing population were now able to make direct contact with them again via Twitter.

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The CSIRO has rejected claims made by the coal seam gas industry in a new TV advertising campaign, and asked last week that the ads not be aired.

The commercial includes the statement: “CSIRO [and government studies] have shown that groundwater is safe with coal seam gas”.

However, the national science body said this afternoon that this claim was not true.

“At no time has CSIRO made such a statement, and nor do the results of CSIRO research support such a statement,” the organisation said.

“CSIRO has stated on the public record that coal seam gas extraction is likely to pose a ‘low risk’ to groundwater quality through contamination,” it said.

The TV commercials were produced for the coal seam gas industry body, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, which said it had “taken the CSIRO’s comments on board”.

The ads were aired on Sunday night in Queensland where the gas industry is rapidly expanding, and are part of a campaign that reportedly cost $2.5 million to put together.

“APPEA has created a number of ads for its latest CSG campaign that relate to economic benefit, environmental protection, energy security and technological know-how,” a spokesman for the industry body said.

“All of our ads have been approved as factual by the independent advertising regulator. The ads we run, where we run them, and when we run them, will be determined over the months ahead. However, we have taken CSIRO’s comments on board.”

The statement, released today by the national science body, said: “CSIRO has also indicated that groundwater levels will fall as a consequence of coal seam gas extraction. In some places this could see aquifer levels subside by tens of metres for tens of years; in others it is likely to reduce aquifer levels by several metres for several hundred years.”

The CSIRO said it became aware of the ads last Friday and “requested for the commercial not to be aired”.

The activist group Lock the Gate and the Greens also asked for the ads to be taken off air.

The gas industry in Australia has maintained for years that gas drilling does not significantly affect the underground water aquifers that farmers rely on.

More than 10,000 coal seam gas wells are planned for Queensland, to be drilled over the next decade.

The industry is also expanding in NSW, with at least 4000 wells proposed over the coming decade.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.

Chop and change … divvy up your pay to achieve savings goals. Illlustration: Karl HilzingerSix months ago, a couple went to financial planning group ipac for some advice. Professional people with jobs in upper management, they had a combined income in excess of $250,000. But it wasn’t self-managed super or how their investments were going that was on their minds.

”They had built up $200,000 of debt on several credit cards,” the national manager for advice strategy at ipac, John Dani, says.

It was time to go back to basics – which, in some ways, is the message of the inaugural MoneySmart Week, which began on Sunday.

”We see a lot of people earning a lot of money and spending more than they earn,” Dani says.

People on much more modest incomes can, in fact, be richer, he says, because it’s not how much you earn that determines your wealth but how much you save.

The trouble is that these days maintaining a comfortable lifestyle – at least temporarily – no longer requires good money management, Dani says. ”Easy access to debt basically means people can live it up,” he says.

”But it will eventually come back to bite them. And that’s what happened to this particular couple.”

Dani recalls how, as a young man, his wages came in the form of cash and he would set aside money in separate envelopes for expenses such as rent and for spending.

”It was with the actual transfer of cash into these envelopes that I first started budgeting,” he says.

That physical connection with cash also meant that he thought twice before spending.

”But those days are gone,” he says. ”Budgeting is under direct threat now due to easy access to debt, eftpos, online shopping and our ever-increasing expectations about lifestyle.”

Financial planner and university lecturer Barry Lizmore, author of Take Control of Your Money, also sees rising expectations as an issue, particularly for younger Australians who have known only a growing economy.

”In our parents’ day, people didn’t take out high mortgages and they made do with a second-hand car,” he says. ”We used to holiday [down the coast] or in Queensland. Now we holiday overseas.”

And people are taking on debt to fund this lifestyle, he says.

What’s more, they take on debt under the assumption that they’ll always get a better job and that house prices, for instance, will always go up.

How to get out of this rut? Dani says the first step is to know where your money is going now. For at least a fortnight (or your pay cycle), run everything through a single account or card so you can look at one statement to see what’s happening.

Next, you need to decide on a purpose for your budgeting.

Both Dani and Lizmore suggest visualising your goals. Now you can start divvying up your money.

”I still have those envelopes,” Dani says, ”but they’re ‘virtual’ envelopes in the form of separate accounts.”

Automating the process is the key, he says. The money should move directly from your pay or a central account to the accounts you set up for specific purposes.

The chief executive of Teachers Mutual Bank, Steve James, says most financial institutions will have some form of bonus saver – such as TMB’s Reward Saver – where there’s the carrot of high interest if you deposit a minimum and make no withdrawals each month (in TMB’s case, 4.75 per cent), and a stick of low interest (0.10 per cent) if you fail to maintain your discipline.

These accounts are sometimes criticised for their low base rates, but James says you should only ever deposit what you won’t need.

Finally, Dani says people should stop the constant use of credit cards. If you can’t cut them up, lower the limit so you’re less reliant on them and use a debit card for most of your spending.

If you have a home-equity loan, refinance with a traditional, must-pay-every-month mortgage, he says.

”A home-equity loan is just an overdraft on your home,” Dani says. ”The banks talk about how a home-equity loan will help you pay your loan off quicker, but human nature works against that.”

Tools for the task

As part of MoneySmart Week, ASIC is offering a financial “health check” via an online questionnaire or mobile phone app. You’ll be asked about your goals, budgeting, debt, savings, investments, insurance and retirement planning, with the dial swinging to green, orange or red depending on the extent to which you have things under control.

The online version of the tool then generates an individual report setting out an action plan for the steps you still need to take (the app saves the top five actions).

Then there’s the MoneySmart TrackMySPEND app – for iPhone, with Android on the way – that allows you to monitor spending by category and against limits you set. Its mobile calculator app helps you do your sums on savings, investments, superannuation, loans, mortgages and the true cost of interest-free deals.

Go to moneysmart.gov.au or your phone’s app store.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.

‘Forget the word ‘street’,” says collector Andrew King. ”It’s simply contemporary art. If Sidney Nolan was in his prime today, I bet he’d be painting on the streets.”

King was interviewed in the July edition of Leonard, a monthly publication issued by the Leonard Joel auction house in Melbourne.

Auction houses are becoming interested in street art because examples of this style are starting to appear on the secondary market and selling for prices that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.

”In my opinion, art by street artists is the next big art movement, no doubt about it,” King says. ”Most people just haven’t recognised it yet.”

Leonard Joel was the first to hold a mainstream sale of street art when the Andy Mac Collection appeared on May 6. Mac has been collecting this style over the past two decades.

Bestseller was Freeze Muthasticka, a giant collaboration done on 72 panels at the 2004 Big Day Out festival. The work was so big (30 metres long) it had to be divided into three lots. The first two of these sold for $28,000 (hammer price) each. No doubt this is a record.

The growing interest in this style has resulted in some of the more prominent artists creating work in ”collectable” formats. These are the works now being bought on the secondary market by a new generation of art collectors.

Another major collection was sold by Lawsons in Sydney last month.

It was a litmus test for managing director Martin Farrah. This is new territory for him.

”I’m a bit of a brown-furniture man myself,” he laughs. ”I guess I shouldn’t have worn my tweed jacket that day.”

Regardless, he achieved a reasonable 60 per cent sale rate and discovered that the main buyers, bidding online, were from Melbourne. This is the street-art capital. Although the main buyer was in his 50s, most of those on the floor were thirtysomethings looking for something cool to stick on the walls of their inner-west apartments. This is a cheap way to gain a foothold into the fine-art market.

Or was. Prices have doubled or tripled over the past three or four years.

One of Lawsons’ best results was $4000 for a work by the Die Laughing Collective. Another, which is called Murdochracy, sold for $3200. It was one of the few works to have a provenance. Done on nine panels, it was first exhibited at the Melbourne Stencil Festival in 2005 and again in Sydney in 2006, where it was displayed in front of Newscorp’s headquarters.

It’s unlikely Rupert was the buyer.

Finding out what work has investment potential is pretty much a mystery, particularly as most artists prefer to work under code names such as Ghostpatrol and Ha-Ha.

Ha-Ha, aka Regan Tamanui, was certainly hot back in May. One of his Ned Kelly 2003 prints sold for a $1100 hammer price at Leonard Joel, way above estimates of $250 to $350. Many street artists who decorate walls and railway carriages are disdainful of those who exhibit commercially. Others, such as British artist Banksy, have successfully made the transition.

He was perhaps the first to show that what he once did freely on walls – including the laneways in Melbourne in 2003 – now has considerable commercial value.

In February 2007, one of Banksy’s portable works sold for £100,000 through Sotheby’s in London. Another fetched £288,000 through Bonhams in London the following month. For collectors, this is an opportunity to acquire one of the most exciting forms of contemporary art.

There’s also the possibility that what you buy today could do a Banksy and increase tenfold in value overnight.

The head of art at Leonard Joel, John Albrecht, is cautiously optimistic about this emerging scene. He is now planning to hold an annual street-art auction in Melbourne and is also evaluating a couple of prospective collections at the moment.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.

Blind bet … ill-informed CFD investors could find themselves out of pocket.The Australian market in contracts for difference, or CFDs, continues to grow, despite official concerns that even experienced investors don’t fully grasp the risks involved in using these instruments.

According to the latest Investment Trends Australia CFD Report, an estimated 44,000 Australians traded CFDs in the 12 months to May 30, up from 41,000 a year earlier. The 7 per cent increase was up from 5 per cent growth in the 12 months before. ”Against a backdrop of challenging economic conditions, the market has shown resilience,” says Pawel Rokicki, a senior analyst at Investment Trends.

However, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) continues to pay close attention to CFD trading, a year after taking official steps to tighten the rules for providers of over-the-counter (OTC) CFDs.

Last year, the regulator found that most investors didn’t understand how CFDs worked, with many believing they’re buying the underlying security – a share or currency, say – when in fact they’re buying a derivative instrument.

The CFDs allow investors to take a bet on changes in the prices of assets such as equities, share indices, commodities and foreign exchange, using borrowed money to multiply their exposure.

”[They] have been compared with gambling, but CFDs are far more risky than having a punt at the TAB,” the chairman of ASIC, Greg Medcraft, wrote last year. ”Because CFDs are a full-recourse leveraged investment, you can end up owing much more than your initial investment or margin.”

ASIC research also found investors didn’t receive enough information to make informed decisions.

The study showed that some CFD investors traded even though their circumstances suggested they shouldn’t. ASIC estimated about 15 per cent of CFD traders had 50 per cent to 100 per cent of their portfolio in CFDs.

In response, ASIC is taking action in several areas: requiring better disclosure for retail investors; raising the bar on the financial strength of CFD issuers; and trying to keep a lid on advertising claims.

Since March, ASIC has required that CFD issuers meet new disclosure benchmarks. It says all issuers have complied. ”Later this year we’ll conduct targeted, risk-based reviews of the quality of these disclosures,” an ASIC spokeswoman says.

In addition, ASIC has issued a regulatory guide stepping up the financial requirements for issuers, saying the bar needs to be higher ”to ensure licensees have adequate financial resources to properly oversee and manage the operational risks inherent in the OTC derivatives market”.

Two CFD providers have collapsed in recent times. When it failed last year, the New York-based broking house MF Global was the third-largest player in the local CFD market. Sonray, one of the first brokers to advise on CFDs in Australia, was placed in liquidation in October 2010 and its chief executive jailed a year later after a $46 million shortfall was uncovered.

ASIC is also monitoring advertising of CFD products ”to ensure the marketing does not give a misleading impression of the risks or potential rewards of CFD trading,” the spokeswoman says.

Trading questions

ASIC suggests you ask these questions before trading CFDs:

■ What is the financial position of the issuer?

■ What is the issuer’s policy on the use of client money?

■ How does the issuer determine the prices of CFDs it offers?

■ Can the issuer change the price after you’ve placed your order?

■ When processing CFD trades, does the issuer enter into a corresponding position in the market for the underlying asset?

■ If there’s little or no trading going on in the underlying market for an asset, can you still trade CFDs over that asset?

See moneysmart.gov.au/investing/complex-investments/contracts-for-difference.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.

Are you ready? … planning ahead will ensure you get the most out of retirement. Illustration: Warren HackshallThe first question everybody asks on facing retirement is, ”how much do I need?”

There is no simple answer, because the amount depends on a range of variables that include how long you will live, your health, the performance of your portfolio and the rate of inflation.

A general rule of thumb is 12 to 15 times your annual expected expenditure, but the numbers are further complicated because your eligibility for Centrelink benefits increases as your assets reduce.

For instance, a home-owner couple with $950,000 of assessable assets may qualify for a pension of $123.50 a fortnight.

However, if those assets were run down to $600,000, the pension would rise to $648.50 a fortnight.

At the very least it’s important to be up to speed on the rules, benefits and strategies available to you.

ACCESS RULES

Unless you find it necessary to access your super under the hardship provisions, it is locked up until your preservation age.

This is 55 for people born before July 1, 1960, and then rises in steps until it becomes 60 for people born on or after July 1, 1964.

However, even if 55 is your preservation age, you cannot access your funds before 65 unless you trigger a condition of release.

Between the ages of 55 and 60 you need to satisfy the trustee of your fund that you intend to retire permanently and intend never to be gainfully employed for 10 hours or more each week. This does not forever prohibit you from going back to work, because after a reasonable absence from your job you are entitled to have a change of heart and resume employment.

Once you reach 60, you can trigger a condition of release by resigning from a job – it need not be your main job.

At 65 you are free to access your super and can even contribute for the next 10 years if you satisfy the work test.

If you are a part-time worker you must be gainfully employed for at least 10 hours, and less than 30 hours in the week you make the contribution.

TRANSITION TO RETIREMENT

There is a clever strategy that enables people aged 55 and over to access their super prior to their preservation age even if they are working, called transition to retirement.

It was introduced to enable people to reduce their working hours yet stay in the workforce (although there is no need to reduce your working hours to take advantage of it).

It’s simply a matter of increasing your salary-sacrificed contributions to super to the maximum, and then compensating for the decrease in take-home pay by drawing a pension.

Take an employee on $100,000 a year whose employer contributes $9000 in compulsory super.

It is well short of the $25,000 the employee can contribute as a concessional contribution.

Suppose the employee reduces their income to $84,000 by salary sacrificing an additional $16,000 a year to super.

Yes, their take-home pay would reduce by $10,080 but the net contribution to super would be $13,600 after deduction of the 15 per cent entry tax, leaving them $3520 better off.

CENTRELINK AND AGE PENSION

Money in super isn’t counted by Centrelink until the pensionable age is reached. This is 65 for men born before July 1, 1952, and 64½ for women born between July 1, 1947 and December 31, 1948. Where couples have a big age difference they should take advice, otherwise valuable Centrelink benefits could be lost.

Take a husband, 65, and a wife, 58, with assessable assets of $650,000.

Let’s say the wife retires and receives a super payout of $450,000 and starts an account-based pension to enjoy the tax benefits.

As a consequence of this, the husband would immediately lose his Centrelink benefits because her super is now counted.

Had she left the money in the accumulation phase, he could have continued to enjoy a part-age pension.

When assessing eligibility for the age pension, the super balance is assessed under the asset test, while for income-test purposes the income from the fund is based on a formula that takes into account the life expectancy of the superannuant.

Take a couple aged 66 and 65 who have their own home, $25,000 in lifestyle assets such as furniture and car, as well as his super of $300,000, which is now in the account-based pension phase. His life expectancy is 17.76.

The exempt amount for Centrelink income-test purposes is found by dividing his super account balance by his life expectancy.

In this example it is $16,892.

As a result, the first $16,892 of his account-based pension income is not assessed for the income test.

The minimum amount that is currently required to be drawn from his super fund is just $11,250 a year, which means he could draw even more than the required minimum without being affected under the income test.

Anybody who believes they are eligible for the age pension should take advice well before they reach pensionable age.

In some circumstances, it may be appropriate to gift assets to family members or a charity in order to maximise Centrelink benefits, as Centrelink only assesses assets that have been disposed of within five years of applying for the pension.

There is no gift duty in Australia, but the decision to give substantial assets to family members should not be taken lightly, as they can be lost for good if the family members who receive them suffer financial problems such as a relationship breakdown or bankruptcy.

As a general rule it is better to help your children when they are younger as long as they are responsible, rather than make them wait until the parents are 90 and the children are 60, when they should not need it. Each case must be decided on its merits.

STARTING AN INCOME STREAM

Every investment strategy has advantages and disadvantages.

The benefit of starting an income stream is that you move to a tax-free environment, but the price is the requirement to draw an increasing percentage as years pass.

The benefit of staying in the accumulation phase is that you are not required to withdraw any money – the disadvantage is the 15 per cent tax on earnings.

Most Australians will have insufficient funds outside super for them to justify staying in the accumulation phase.

But those with large income-producing assets such as property and shares are better off leaving their super in the accumulation stage if their income from sources outside super exceeds $18,200 a year – the point where the 19 per cent tax rate cuts in.

TAKE IT ALL OUT?

The slump in assets caused by the global financial crisis has led to a flood of questions asking whether it’s better to take the money out of super and ”put it in the bank”.

Super is not an asset class like cash, property or shares, but merely a vehicle that lets you hold assets in a low- or zero-tax area. It is also one of the few assets you can own that is not available to creditors if you find yourself in financial strife.

If you only had a small amount in super, say $200,000, there is little point in staying there and incurring the fees that go with super because you would still remain in the tax-free area, even if the money was withdrawn and invested in personal names.

Advice should always be taken before withdrawing funds from super, as it could cause a loss of Centrelink benefits if you are assessed under the income test and drawing an income stream.

If money is withdrawn to pay off debts such as a home loan, there are no adverse consequences for Centrelink benefits because the money is being retained in the household.

Money spent on personal items such as travel and home renovations do not affect eligibility.

Assets such as a car, caravan or furniture will be assessed under the asset test at market value.

There is no limit on the amount that can be withdrawn from super once you reach the preservation age and have satisfied a condition of release.

Tax treatment of super: how the rules work

Pre-tax contributions to super lose a 15 per cent entry tax; after-tax contributions incur no entry tax. The fund pays 15 per cent tax on its earnings but once an income stream starts, the earnings are tax-free.

Most members’ accounts will have both taxable and a non-taxable components. There is no tax on that portion of the withdrawal that comes from the non-taxable component, but between age 55 and 60 there is a tax of 16.5 per cent (including the Medicare levy) on the taxable component that exceeds $175,000.

Once age 60 is reached, all withdrawals are tax-free.

On death, the taxable component incurs a 16.5 per cent tax if left to a non-dependent child. A spouse is always regarded as a dependant.

Therefore, a person age 60 or over, drawing an account-based pension, is living in a money paradise – the fund itself is tax-free and, at the same time, they are drawing a tax-free income from it.

Anybody drawing an account-based pension (also called allocated pension) has to draw a minimum amount each year (see above) – there is no maximum.

Noel Whittaker is the author of Making Money Made Simple and numerous other books on personal finance.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.

Search and recover … misplaced trust deeds can prove costly. Illustration: Karl HilzingerThe strategy: To find out whether there’s a potential problem with my family trust.

Is that likely? At last count, there were more than 600,000 family trusts in Australia, many of which were set up 20 or 30 years ago. So when was the last time you looked at the trust deed? Do you even know where it is?

A partner with Hall & Wilcox, Emma Woolley, says a growing number of people are looking to review or modernise their trust deeds and are discovering they don’t know where they are. The family may not have retained the original documents, or they may have been left with an adviser such as an accountant or lawyer that the family moved on from years ago, or they may have been damaged at some time.

Even worse, she says, some clients are seeing advisers to have their trusts reviewed, only to find they have matured and no longer exist. This can have significant tax and legal consequences and, ideally, you’d like time to plan for them, but if you don’t know when the trust matures it could be too late.

Why do I need the trust deed? Woolley says family trusts are much less flexible than companies, or even self-managed super funds. The trust deed is the document that sets out what the trustee can do and how the trust should be managed. She says the Bamford court decision of 2010 emphasised the importance of the trust deed in determining how income from the trust could be distributed. Prior to that decision, she says, people assumed all trusts were the same, but they’re not.

The Bamford decision centred around streaming of trust income – paying different types of income to different beneficiaries – and caused many families and their advisers to go back to their trust deeds to find out exactly what they said. But if you don’t have the trust deed, you can’t read it. And if you can’t read it, you can’t find out whether it needs to be updated.

”Some trusts have limitations or require a particular person’s consent to any changes,” she says. ”There’s a real risk that if you don’t know that, any changes you do make might not be effective.”

Woolley says she is also expecting a ”tidal wave” of litigation when trusts mature and family members, who have been tied together by the trust, fall out.

So what should I do? A good start, even if you don’t think the deed needs any changes, would be to track down the trust deed and ensure it is in a safe place. She says even if it doesn’t need any changes now, it may once the government review of how trusts are taxed is completed.

If you can’t find the original deed, Woolley says there is a risk the Tax Office might not believe it existed. In most cases, she says, clients are able to find enough documentation to give comfort that the trust exists. You may be able to find a copy of the original deed or some other form of evidence.

She says in one case, two brothers had established identical trusts at the same time with the same accountant. One brother had later moved his business (and trust deed) to a new accountant and lost track of the trust but had enough evidence to show his lost deed was identical to his brother’s.

If you have no evidence, she says, you can go through the court system to try to establish confirmation of a deed, but this is expensive and potentially risky.

Is it worth having a trust? Woolley says they are still useful vehicles for estate and succession planning, and for protecting an individual’s assets. But they have their own challenges and are ruled by the trust deed. So it’s a document to be taken care of.

Twitter: @sampsonsmh

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.

ST KILDA veteran Justin Koschitzke will remain at St Kilda for at least another season.

Koschitzke, 30 this month, is an unrestricted free agent and could have joined the club of his choice.

But his manager James Pitcher, of Strategic Management Solutions, told The Age the ruckman-forward would remain with the Saints.

“He will remain at St Kilda for at least another year,” Pitcher said.

“I will finalise the paper work hopefully next week.

“I will catch up with the Saints and knock it over. He will be staying a Saint.”

Koschitzke played 19 matches this season but was dropped for last weekend’s final round against Carlton.

He needs only five more matches to reach the 200 milestone.

Earlier, Saints coach Scott Watters said Koschitzke was a required player.

“He offers really good leadership,” Watters said on SEN.

“We’ve got some young key forwards – Rhys Stanley and Jay Lever – who are coming through, and the work that ‘Kosi’ has done behind the scenes with Rhys this year … he won’t get a lot of plaudits for that from the outside, but internally he’s done a great job.

“He’s in a challenge for his spot going forward, as is Adam Schneider, who had some injuries this year.

“But they’re quality players, and it needs to be a challenging environment.

“So I would expect ‘Kosi’ to back up with a really strong pre-season and challenge for a spot.”

Watters said her also expects Brendon Goddard, also off contract, to remain at the club.

“He has been offered a strong and reasonable offer. Ultimately he must make a choice. He is a passionate Saints person with leadership ambitions,” he said.

However, it’s understood Goddard, a restricted free agent, is unhappy with the offer the Saints have made.

This story Administrator ready to work first appeared on Nanjing Night Net.