Vicgirl – it is dated from the date of the contract for the land.

As for moving existing properties into a trust, it can still work out worthwhile if you have a large home loan and a small loan on the ivnestment property with heaps of equity. Selling to a trust will effectively allow you to convert non-deductible debt into deductible debt. You then need to compare the interest and tax savings with what the transfer costs will be.

This can get a bit tricky.

It should be pretty straight forward in working out interest. Just assume you have two loans, IO and aportion the interest separately. Calculate it montly

eg, if you took out $7000 on 5th of Oct, you would calculate $7000 x interest rate/365 (for number days in year) x 26 (for number of days left in Oct). That would give you Oct's figure as it is a part month. THen for each full month you would just do $7000 x interest rate/365 x no. days in month.

But if you are capitalising interest it will get a little more complicated. However, you just add the interest at the end of the month to the total for the new month.

The investment portion would be the total interest less this personal use interest.

Beware though as the ATO requires you to apportion each repayment between the two loans. You cannot just have all your extra repayments going to the personal use portion. So if your loan for investment was $93,000 and personal use $7,000, then personal use is only 7% of your loan. So if you make a principle payment of $10,000 only 7% of this can come off the personal use portion.

This is why it is best to have separate loans for Investment and personal use as you would want to pay all the personal use loan off first.

Does this make sense?

A title search will tell you the owner, but not their contact details. But this may lead you to a copy of the transfer and that sometime has useful information such as the soliciitor they used – who may pass on a letter. For that matter, you may want to just try sending a letter to the house address to the owner, and they may have mail forwarding set up.

Costs associated with selling would include CGT, legals, loan application fees (and exit fees?). Add all these up and see what you think when comparing these with the benefits to be received in the years to come. Trusts may also have to pay more land tax than individuals.

The benefits could include less CGT in the future on selling, less income tax on any income such as rent, and asset protection.Another benefit is that you may be able to release equity and make this tax deductible – the trust can borrow to buy the land, paying you and helping you pay down non-deductible debt.

Another thing to watch out for is the fact that trusts cannot distribute losses.

Caveat loans generally a very expensive – they are meant as short term loans and and rate range from 4% to 10% per month. Commercial second mortgages are around 20%- 30% pa and they still want an LVR of 80% or less usually.

Not sure what you mean by accountants who specialise? Your accountant may be able to help you find someone, but they would probably be reluctant to do so in case something goes wrong. If you mean help in setting it up, you would probably be better off to use a solicitor to do the loan agreements etc.

I have a client that is borrowing funds from a person's superfund. Don't know if this is lawful still. He is paying 15% pa.

A lot of the banks are starting to introduce DEFs (deferred establishment fees) – especially if you take a discount. ANZ has a $700 DEF, eg., but they wil reimburse you if you take out another mortgage within 12months. But even $700 is not much when compared with some of the exit fees on the non bank lenders.

I agree with Pud, You cannot usually claim the costs of inspecting properties you are yet to own. These are capital costs and can only be claimed against the sale.

You've got a fair bit of equity, so you could probably buy 3 to 4 more properties if you wanted to. Whether you could afford it or not will depend on your income and rents received.