Meg's Musings | February 2022

Welcome to our first Heffron Highlights for the year!  I hope you were able to see friends and family for at least some of the Christmas break. I expect many of you had a similar experience to mine – plans adjusted at the last minute, some great things you hadn’t expected to be able to do a few months out and some disappointments that the wrong people were close contacts or had positive tests at the wrong time.   

I expect that’s going to be life for a while. I must admit though, I hadn’t realized how much I needed a long break from the hustle and bustle of work (and in particular my computer screen) until I had it. There was something quite glorious about closing the door to my home office for several weeks. I hope many of you have been lucky enough to start 2022 similarly refreshed.

The danger of being refreshed, however, is that you come back to work with plenty of ideas and determined to do them all.

At Heffron, 2022 is shaping up to be an important year.

We were fortunate at the end of 2021 to get the nod from BT that they will be terminating their SMSF administration service and setting up a seamless transfer for their clients to move to Heffron. We’re already enjoying welcoming many new advisers and trustees to Heffron and putting some of the latest developments in our technology and service into action. These include much more educational material for our trustee clients – a monthly newsletter and quarterly webinars all aimed to help them understand their SMSF. If you’re an adviser using our administration service and would like to invite your clients along, please let us know.

As many of you will know we launched our new online CPD program for accountants and advisers last year (“Education Bites”). Thanks to all of those who’ve tried it out – we’ve been thrilled to have so many new clients already turning to our new service for their Superannuation CPD. Don’t forget to tell us what topics you’d like covered in future “Bites” because we release 2 new ones every month. We’d love to prioritise exactly what you and your team want to learn about. Even if you’ve got team members who don’t work directly with SMSFs but you know there’s some super knowledge they need, let us know. We have a stream of Bites for exactly that group.

If you missed your chance to have a free trial, contact our team at marketing@heffron.com.au.

We’ve also got more coming on the Super Toolkit – watch this space in the next few weeks for a rather nifty tool that will help you document your clients’ instructions when it comes to payments from their SMSF. Do they want to just take the minimum amount as pension payments and then treat any subsequent drawings as partial commutations? If so, which pension should be drawn down first? We help you get the documentation right for any strategy.

And what else might this year bring? Certainly a Federal Election and presumably a budget as well – currently timetabled for the somewhat unusual date of 29 March 2022. Whatever it brings, you can bet we’ve got you covered.

Subscribe to Education Bites for just $55/month, with two new 'Bites' added every month. You can find out more about our new learning platform Education Bites here.