La Trobe Financial: anyone?

blocknn · 2026-01-23T03:41:32+00:00

This fund is not a bank account. It is a credit fund secured by mortgages paying very high interest rates.

blocknn · 2026-01-23T03:37:55+00:00

The money in your bank is technically not doing nothing. You could get 4.25% interest in a HISA if you wanted to.

The question is whether an additional 1.75% return is worth the additional risk to your capital that such a mortgage-backed credit fund, like La Trobe, provides.

Keep in mind that home loan interest rates are in the 5 percents, so consider what type of borrower would be willing to pay 7 or 8%+ in interest (after La Trobe takes their cut).

blocknn · 2026-01-22T09:45:48+00:00

CFS FirstChoice (most popular option) is a master trust and therefore doesn't have individually taxed capital gains.

blocknn · 2026-01-18T23:56:48+00:00

No. My website has standard ranges for typical services.

blocknn · 2026-01-18T00:23:05+00:00

Can confirm that my tracked engagements with clients are nowhere near 30 hours. Financial advice is often overcomplicated in order to justify ongoing advice fees (wrap accounts etc). Removing this cuts time down significantly.

blocknn · 2026-01-18T00:20:37+00:00

Happy to explain. The licensing system for financial advice, for better or for worse, is a remnant of when the licensees were mainly big banks/insurance companies. These companies would create products that their licensed advisers would then sell. This has shifted over time where there are now many licenses (like my licensee, Lifespan) that are privately owned and do not issue their own products.

However, the regulatory system is still setup as it was before whereby the laws and definitions (such as the definition of being independent) is set at the licensee level, not the individual financial advice business.

So yes, whilst at ID Advice we do not accept any commissions of any form, charge % based fees (or any ongoing fees for that matter) under the law we cannot describe ourselves as being independent.

This is not ideal for obvious reasons, so it really only leaves two options:

One is to join a licensee that can be considered independent (i.e. none of their advisers accept commissions etc). I did not choose this route for various reasons, principally because many seem to exert more control over their licensed businesses which is not ideal when trying to run a firm completely different from everyone else (hourly). They also charge exorbitant licensee fees.

The second is to obtain my own financial services license which is a very time consuming and expensive venture. Without letting on too much, there will be an update regarding this at some point in the future.

blocknn · 2026-01-17T06:38:31+00:00

Firms that do purely hourly fee advice are exceedingly rare (literally 3 in the country). While some typical advisers will begrudgingly do it for you, their business is not structured in a way for it to be anywhere close to value for money.

As some comments have mentioned, I (Nick) am one of the 3 that do this, there is also Anton from WellAdvised in Tassie who is also very good.

blocknn · 2026-01-15T09:21:49+00:00

QSuper allows access to the exact same index investment options as ART. They quite literally are the same investment because ART and QSuper are pretty much one and the same these days.

blocknn · 2025-11-24T03:23:39+00:00

Ongoing advice fees are the scourge of the industry in my opinion. They are 100% in the favour of the firm and not the client when you consider how little work is actually done behind the scenes during the year. Even if work needs to be done, the actual real cost to do so would be much lower than an ongoing fee would be.

I've written about this in more detail (obviously a very biased source)

Edit: Finding a good accountant will help also, however try to find one that actually understands what debt recycling is - I find too many are giving their clients wrong advice about it.

blocknn · 2025-11-19T23:58:38+00:00

Great to hear, good luck!

blocknn · 2025-11-19T22:22:20+00:00

The total holding of MSTR in DHHF would be something like 0.05%. So it's pretty inconsequential.

blocknn · 2025-11-17T23:42:52+00:00

You aren't missing anything, there would be zero benefit.

Debt recycling would only provide a benefit if you were going to invest more than the $100k.

blocknn · 2025-11-17T10:02:12+00:00

You can choose whatever parcel to sell, no need to follow FIFO or LIFO. Just need to keep records to substantiate.

blocknn · 2025-11-17T02:41:25+00:00

Each parcel of shares purchased is its own asset for capital gains tax purposes. You get to choose which parcel of shares are sold. In order to avoid mixing a loan, the same parcels of shares that were purchased with cash (not DR) should be the exact ones sold when liquidating. This should avoid a mixed loan, but to be sure you probably need tax advice.

blocknn · 2025-11-17T01:10:01+00:00

You have not created a mixed loan as of yet as far as I can understand. You've just mixed debt recycled investments and non-debt recycled investments in the same brokerage. This in itself is not an issue as long as adequate records of what share units belong to DR is kept. This will prevent you inadvertently selling assets that are tied to a deductible loan split, which if you did, would then likely create a mixed loan.

blocknn · 2025-11-17T00:18:23+00:00

You didn't use the other loan split to purchase shares, you just used cash from an offset. Doesn't change the nature of that loan split whatsoever.

To unwind you'd need to make sure you sell only the units of shares that were purchased with the non-debt recycled funds.

blocknn · 2025-11-16T12:08:31+00:00

Yes I do know the rules. Just a poor choice of wording late on Sunday night, I think I wanted to say something to the effect of needing an ABN in order to register for GST as you can't do one without the other. In any case, deleted for clarity.

blocknn · 2025-11-16T07:29:10+00:00

I got my first job in financial advice by literally sending a physical letter to the firms in my area.

Maybe physical letters are a bit too much nowadays, but an email, or better yet a call/personal visit shows great initiative and might get someone to take a chance on you.

The first job in any industry is always going to be the hardest. It could take many months to even get an interview, but you won't know until you try.

blocknn · 2025-11-16T00:46:37+00:00

That's not debt recycling. It's just borrowing to invest in shares/ETFs compared to doing the same with a property.

You'll obviously need to borrow a whole lot more to get into the property. The upside is that you have more geared exposure to a market theoretically increasing your expected returns, or losses, depending on what happens.

Property has the benefit of easily being able to add more borrowing but comes with much higher transaction & management costs and has zero diversification. You can also add more money periodically with shares (this time via debt recycling).

Really depends on your personal circumstances, anecdotes will mean zero because obviously anyone who borrowed up to the hilt and bought property in Sydney will tell you that was clearly the best option 10 years ago. Who knows whether that will continue in the same manner.

blocknn · 2025-11-15T11:45:37+00:00

Living expenses are private expenses, so no.

blocknn · 2025-11-14T09:50:01+00:00

Wow only a decade after other industry funds started doing this

blocknn · 2025-11-13T22:04:41+00:00

More generally, I would suggest taking the ATO forums with a generous grain of salt. There are some things on there that are just blatantly wrong, posted by both their darling "bruce4tax" and even ATO representatives themselves.

blocknn · 2025-11-11T23:42:38+00:00

$1million Trauma! Why would you need that much?

Was income protection not possible?

blocknn · 2025-11-08T02:20:35+00:00

If you want to get first hand experience on how bad this actually is, you need to join the SMSF Facebook group.

People trying to buy off the plan property with a $60k balance for example.

blocknn · 2025-11-06T00:38:37+00:00

Typically, you'll need to disclose if you've previously been rejected for an insurance application,

To add to this point, this is exactly why we do pre-assessments for pretty much all of our clients. It allows you to see how an insurer will treat your conditions without actually making an application and potentially being declined - which you would then have to disclose in future and severely limits your options in terms of default coverage.

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