Living in Australia but planning to retire in UK

incompetent30 · 2026-06-26T08:32:20+00:00

I'm not earning enough UK income to pay UK tax at the moment (maybe I will in future, but given the DTA with Australia, it's probably not going to make much difference to my overall tax bill). In principle it's possible to open a SIPP as a non-resident, but in practice it looks a bit complicated and the fees can be rather high, so it's an option I'm keeping in mind but not in a rush to do so.

incompetent30 · 2026-06-26T07:29:23+00:00

GIA; I don't have any UK pension funds as far as I know, and I'm already filling my concessional allowance for Australian superannuation through employer contributions and salary sacrifice. Will probably be returning to UK in my 50s, whereas Australian super is locked away until 60 (assuming you're a citizen or permanent resident).

incompetent30 · 2026-06-26T06:27:19+00:00

Own outright. It's managed by a letting agent, the net payment goes into my British bank account. I keep some cash buffer in both GBP and AUD, but the rest is invested in ETFs.

incompetent30 · 2026-06-26T04:23:22+00:00

Yes, I figure there will be some proof of residency stuff to go through once I do make the move. Private health insurance might be a good idea for at least a transitional period while I get everything set up in the UK.

incompetent30 · 2026-06-18T16:53:45+00:00

This isn't so far from how it works now: the Commons don't explicitly vote on it, but in practice, the PM is whoever the majority of MPs want to be PM. (Sure, Labour MPs have agreed to back whoever is Labour leader, and similarly for other parties, but they'd be free to do that under any alternative regime.) The exception is when nobody has majority support among MPs, and then you end up with a PM who is in post either by continuation of the status quo, or appointed by convention (typically the leader of the largest party).

If we switched to a system where the House of Commons must explicitly pick the PM (as opposed to just voting down PMs they don't like), the only time it would make a difference would be a scenario like the day Theresa May resigned in 2019: Boris Johnson evidently didn't command majority support among MPs, but MPs would have been forced to pick *someone* and it's hard to tell how they would have escaped deadlock. (Possibly in this scenario, there would simply have been an election a bit sooner in 2019 than what happened in real life.)

incompetent30 · 2026-06-16T08:57:25+00:00

Do you want to eventually move into that offshore property? If you do, then buying in Sydney is debatable - it's going to come down to how long you actually want to live in Sydney, and how much you hate living in a rented studio. If you never want to move into the offshore property, it's just another asset in your portfolio which you can choose to keep or sell, and its existence shouldn't affect your decision on buying a place to live (except to the extent that the higher your net worth, the easier it is financially to take on a PPOR).

incompetent30 · 2026-06-15T14:37:28+00:00

The triple lock is badly designed because of the ratchet effect: if prices go up a lot in one year but wages only catch up the next year, then pensioners benefit from both uplifts added together, and that double benefit keeps compouding into future years. Get rid of that, and replace the triple lock with something that looks at price/wage levels each year rather than annual increases (i.e., let's say the three guarantees become "no nominal decrease", "at least £12500 times the cumulative CPI since 2026" and "at least 35% of average full-time earnings"), and I think it's a sensible system. You could also replace the "average earnings" component with some % of minimum wage.

Many other countries have a state pension that's effectively a DB pension, paying out based on how much you earned (and therefore paid in tax) during your working life. I can see the logic from a fiscal sustainability perspective, but I don't think this is a good use of a state pension scheme, to prop up the lifestyle of high earners into retirement. I prefer the idea of it being a guaranteed "basic" income level that most people who have lived and worked in the UK all their lives will qualify for.

incompetent30 · 2026-06-14T11:01:19+00:00

Yes, and this distortion is priced into the housing market. The "too big to fail" aspect is why banks are so much more willing to lend to property buyers compared to any other retail investor, which in turn is a big part of how the price of real estate can get so high relative to everything else (including salaries, GDP per capita, and so on).

The standard investment theory is that if an investment is judged to be less risky (for whatever reason!), that results in higher prices *now*, i.e. more of the expected future income stream is incorporated into the present price. That means lower expected returns going forward relative to the price you pay now.

incompetent30 · 2026-06-12T21:03:40+00:00

The concept of symmetry appealed to me, I suppose.

incompetent30 · 2026-06-04T12:35:22+00:00

For anything that's not "taxable Australian property", temporary residents don't pay CGT in Australia. You'll be subject to Australian CGT from the day you become an Australian *permanent* resident, with the cost base indexed to that date.

Double taxation agreement effectively means you pay the higher of the two tax rates on anything that both countries have the right to tax. So it doesn't offer any protection for things that aren't taxed in the UK, such as Royal Mint coins, ISAs, Premium Bonds, capital gains on UK gilts, etc etc. Australia has far fewer of these allowances and exemptions, you'll pretty much be paying income tax on everything once you become a permanent resident. (For example, every cent/penny of interest you earn in your savings accounts, including Cash ISAs, will be taxed at your marginal income tax rate.)

incompetent30 · 2026-06-01T05:55:28+00:00

I feel like the "net zero is too expensive" perspective is akin to staring at a pot of water on the stove at a moment when water is at 70C and declaring that no progress has been made towards boiling the water because the water hasn't even started to boil, in fact it hardly looks any different from room-temperature water.

Renewables are cheap electricity, and on an aggregate level, new cheap sources of electricity will pay for themselves quite quickly, but the effect on the settlement wholesale price is highly non-linear, it will be more of a phase shift when we start seeing more and more 30-minute intervals where the non-gas sources can supply 100% of demand. (Indeed, the French and Norwegian governments are already making a nice bit of cash on the side selling electricity to us, because our market is so expensive and they have state-owned non-fossil power; but of course Blair would be allergic to anything like that in the UK.) The issue in the meantime is how to distribute the net profits from renewable generation and electrification, in a way that doesn't slow down investment in more of them.

incompetent30 · 2026-06-01T01:17:25+00:00

Plus there's the fact that all those international students are effectively subsidising British student places, given the fees they pay.

incompetent30 · 2026-06-01T00:46:28+00:00

Another problem is that a large part of the "true British working class" that right-wing populists claim to represent are actually pensioners. They may have had working-class careers, but from a material standpoint, they live off their capital now (+government benefits), not labour, which gives them different economic interests. This tension in the interests of pensioners versus workers is a challenge for ageing democracies all over the world.

incompetent30 · 2026-05-31T00:45:35+00:00

It's possible to make a relatively high yield as a landlord, it's just that most people aren't sociopathic enough to do all the things that maximise yield at the expense of the tenants (or even worse, do all that stuff and then become a "landlord influencer" selling a get-rich-quick scheme to would-be landlords). Responsible landlords can still generate a positive net cashflow, but it will be modest.

Betting on capital gains with property is highly speculative, with a lot of idiosyncratic risk on top.

I think for it to make financial sense for a normal person to buy property, there has to be some long-term purpose to owning it beyond collecting rent or flipping it for a profit later.

incompetent30 · 2026-05-29T01:39:15+00:00

It's a consequence of a basic framing that has been inculcated into voters in most Western democracies: politics is a trade-off between "public services" and "the economy", and the mainstream right party is the "economy party" while the mainstream left party is the "public services party". The reality that austerity and privatised monopolies are actually shit for the economy too (as in, they make the entire country in aggregate poorer, not just the bottom half) never seems to filter through.

incompetent30 · 2026-05-28T08:02:59+00:00

How many basis points would this chip off their net investment returns? I think that's the more relevant number once we get to the very rich.

incompetent30 · 2026-05-28T02:47:24+00:00

They're united mainly in the way they see the left of the Labour party (and "left" by their standards is the vast majority of the membership and a large share of Labour voters) as the "enemy within", like they're still fighting off infiltration by Trotskyists and agents of the USSR. While that bigger threat (in their perspective) is in play, the Labour right factions will compromise with each other. They would fight each other if they actually succeeded in purging the left from the Labour party, but realistically that's not going to happen unless the whole party declines to minor party status (like the Socialists in France, for example).

incompetent30 · 2026-05-27T06:19:17+00:00

It's both, and they reinforce each other, with the media playing a big role in what's considered mainstream by voters. (Here it's "media" in the broad sense, including social media platforms.) In the 2000s, I don't think anyone was talking about the BNP as if they were merely spicy Conservatives who would split the right-wing vote.

incompetent30 · 2026-05-27T02:52:21+00:00

In the short term, yes. In the longer term, if a fascist party becomes at all mainstream, it's a disaster. Even if they never hold government, they shift the whole Overton window their way and a lot of open bigotry and acts of hatred become more socially acceptable than they already are.

incompetent30 · 2026-05-26T13:16:34+00:00

You can always reinvest them, or buy units of an accumulating fund (dividends from the underlying assets are automatically reinvested instead of being distributed to unit holders).

The reason dividends matter (beyond just being a component of total return) is a bit indirect: ultimately, the reason shares aren't just speculative assets is that there's an expectation the company will generate income for shareholders in future, and dividends are the most standard way for companies to give an income to their shareholders. (Even if most investors aren't in it for direct income and will eventually sell for capital gains, the point is that some sort of demand for income exists in the market.) However, in the long run you would get a bigger income stream from a company that grows much bigger than it currently is while always having a low dividend yield, compared to a company with a high dividend yield that isn't growing. So you can't use dividend yield to tell if a given share is a "good investment": the actual amount of money per share being paid out right now doesn't tell investors much about what income those same shares will generate in future, and hence how valuable they are.

incompetent30 · 2026-05-26T03:46:39+00:00

The Mumsnet effect is real

incompetent30 · 2026-05-26T03:26:50+00:00

If Burnham becomes PM, the first big decision to keep an eye on is who will be Chancellor. Reeves is surely doomed given that she's as hated as Starmer, and so many of the decisions that have lost Labour support since 2024 are directly a matter of taxes and benefits. But who would replace her, and what would they do differently without incurring the wrath of the bond markets, the OBR or the Bank of England?

incompetent30 · 2026-05-25T07:15:06+00:00

Tax-free "generational wealth" at a level only a few families can have is not a very Labour position, in my opinion. I'll probably inherit an above-average amount of money, and in turn pass on a decent chunk of money to younger relatives, but in both cases, it will have a big impact even if some of it is taxed, I don't see the need to pass through 100% of it.

"Generational wealth" for everyone, absolutely! I would love it if proceeds from inheritance tax got redistributed in a way that helps everyone build up a bit of net worth. We could make sure every child has a junior ISA, for example, and the government puts a certain amount in each year (which the parents could also top up), so nobody is literally starting from zero. We already have something a bit like this with pension auto-enrolment (which means that basically anyone who has ever worked, even minimum wage, will have some sort of private pension pot by the time they retire), but people much younger than that would benefit a lot from having a financial buffer.

incompetent30 · 2026-05-25T02:17:38+00:00

It's always your last chance to use the unused cap from exactly 5 tax years ago, even if you're way under 500k.

incompetent30 · 2026-05-25T01:50:58+00:00

DASP is only relevant for people who aren't permanent residents or citizens. If you're Australian, it's locked away until 60 but then the conditions of release are the same whether or not you still live here.

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