Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee has largely declined National’s suggestion to make the bright-line test more user-friendly for parents who help their kids buy houses.
However, it’s agreed to a minor change to the draft legislation for the quasi-capital gains tax, which will offer some relief to the 'Bank of Mum and Dad'.
The Government a year ago decided to extend the bright-line test from five to 10 years, meaning anyone who buys and sells investment residential property within 10 years has to pay income tax on any gains made. It kept the bright-line period at five years for new builds.
While the change became operative in March 2021, the rule's finer details are still being worked through. The bill enacting the change is expected to be passed soon.
Concessions won't be made for parents helping kids
National’s Commerce and Consumer Affairs spokesperson Andrew Bayly was concerned that under the first iteration of the bill, a parent, who co-bought a property (which they didn’t live in) with their adult child, would have to pay tax on gains if they sold their share back to their child within 10 years.
Bayly worried the rule, aimed at preventing property speculation, would harm parents simply trying to help their kids.
Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CA ANZ) advised there should be a carveout in the bright-line rules for family-related transactions.
However, the Committee said 'no' on the back of advice from Inland Revenue.
Inland Revenue said creating such a carveout would be a “substantial shift in policy”.
It also worried the exemption could enable investors to try to minimise their tax bills by transferring ownership of their properties to family members on lower personal tax rates.
Inland Revenue said people could help family members without becoming legal owners of properties. They could, for example, gift them money to help with a deposit or act as a guarantor for a loan.
Re-setting the bright-line clock
The Finance and Expenditure Committee did however make a change to the bill, which both Bayly and CA ANZ advocated for.
Under the updated bill, the bright-line clock won’t be reset if someone sells down their stake in an investment property.
Let’s say a parent and adult child buy a house 50-50 in 2022. In 2025, once the child has had time to save a bit more, the parent sells half their share to the child.
Under the initial bill, the bright-line period connected to the remainder 25% owned by the parent would reset, meaning gains from a sale made within 10 years from 2025 would be taxable.
But under the updated bill, this reset wouldn’t happen. So, gains from a sale by the parent would only be taxable if they sold within 10 years from when they first bought into the house in 2022.
The change to the bill removes an obstacle the parent would otherwise have faced if they progressively sold down their share in the property.
The situation would be different for the child, however. The bright-line clock would be reset on the 25% share they bought from their parent.
Let’s say the child moved out of the house in 2030 (technically turning it into an investment property), before selling it in 2033.
They wouldn’t be taxed on gains related to the 50% share they’d owned since 2022, because they’d owned this stake for more than 10 years. But they would be taxed on gains related to the 25% stake they’d owned for only eight years, since 2025.
The same rules would apply if two friends, rather than family members, bought a house together, and one bought out the other over time.
CA ANZ tax lead John Cuthbertson worried about the complexity of the rules.
An added complication
An added complication under the extended bright-line test is that a property is considered an “investment” if it isn’t someone’s main home for a continuous period of at least 12 months.
Looking at the example above again, the child would need to pay tax on gains related to the 25% share they bought in 2025 and sold eight years later in 2033.
But because they lived in the house until 2030, it was only an investment property for three years. Hence only three eighths of the gain on this stake of the house would be taxed.
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And the complexity arises simply because both National (when they introduced the bright-line test in 2015) and Labour (when they extended it to 10 years) are trying to have a capital gains tax without having a capital gains tax.
And this is because neither want to be seen to be taxing the sale of the family home. Just goes to show - both parties are more than happy to tax the family income, but not the family unearned income.
The irony of it all!
He contradicts himself. He talks about reducing inequality but wants to offer interest deductibility back to the already wealthy. How is that going to work? The focus should be on strategising on how to tap into the ridiculous gains over the last 18 months and use it to build more houses.
The report I read said National only plan to move the bottom 3 brackets and not touch the 39% one at all? The goal being to prevent minimum wage earners from being taxed 30% as soon as they work a public holiday or get any sort of overtime pay. Do you have a source for your claim about the tax relief for those earning over 180k only?
They don't make a real profit as they sell at cost to their children. Often the parents buy a house as the bank won't lend to the child. The child lives in the house and pays the mortgage for 5 years. The child now has enough equity and income to get a mortgage and the parents transfer the house to their child for no consideration.
Brightline applies and deemed market price at year 5 used to calculate capital gain compared with the cost of the house when bought.
These transactions are really parents providing equity for their child to buy a house. A guaranty by the parents on a house bought by the child is tax free. But some banks want the parents to be the owners in case they try to challenge a guaranty if the child folds.
B-b-b-b-b-but boomers paid taxes all their lives, they're entitled to carry on working while claiming non-means tested pensions, it's all been funded. Too bad if they occupy jobs that are limiting career advancement for others, they'll have their cake and eat it too.
- Average Life Expectancy: 82
- Couple Annual Super: $35k
- 17 years x $17k (per person): $290k
- Current Median Salary: $57k
- Paye: $10k
- Years to fund 1 Boomer: 29
I know of many people within my industry network (various companies) that are 65+ and "riding the bus" in management roles (branch, area sales, regional, category etc). Seems like once they receive their pay rise courtesy of the tax payer all work ethic disappears.
One dude retired from a role recently due to relocating, and a young fella was promoted from internal sales to branch manager which was very refreshing to see.
China is pushing ahead with a "5 year trial" of a new property tax on homeowners. Their goal is to "guide rational property buying".
That’s just what is needed in order to deter land becoming a speculative vehicle. I and others have urged a policy of land taxation in order to collect the land’s rising site value, so that it will not be pledged to banks for mortgage credit to further inflate china’s housing prices. - Link
This is why the United States cannot industrialize as long as the house prices absorb this high a rate of income, and as long as the banking sector is supporting this, and as long as the political parties say we will not tax real estate so that all of the rising land value will be able to be pledged to banks to pay interest instead of to pay taxes. Essentially, it’s the (lack of) taxing of real estate in the United States that has subsidized the increase in housing prices, because housing prices are worth whatever a bank will lend to buy a house. If you have to go to a bank, and if they lend more and more and this money isn’t taxed away, the price is going to go up. So you have the government policy, the bank policy, all trying to promote this high diversion of income into paying land rent. Again, this is the exact opposite of what Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and classical economics and the whole 19th century had advocated. This has priced American labor and industry out of world markets.
If you have to pay 43 percent of your income for rent, then even if the government were to give you all of your goods and services for nothing, all of your food, all of your clothing, all of your transportation for nothing, you’d still have to pay so much money for rent and for health care that you couldn’t compete with labor in Asia or the Third World or even Europe. And so this is what has essentially excluded the United States from having a successful empire. It’s the greed of the financial sector, basically, and the takeover of the government by the financial sector here as happened under Margaret Thatcher in England and then Tony Blair. You’ve had both countries essentially enter permanent austerity programs, and the only way to cure this is for housing prices to go down. But if the housing prices go down, then the banks will go broke. That’s why Obama said he had to support the banks: because if he’d actually lowered the housing prices to realistic levels, that would enable America to survive, but the banks would go under. Until you’re willing to restructure the banking system, you’re not going to be able to industrialise the American economy. - Link
Correct, but you will almost never hear about things like that when people propose it in NZ. It's just "other countries have it!" without mentioning things like 'rollover relief' or the kind of thresholds that basically restrict them to plutocrats who can afford to evade them.
Meanwhile, in NZ, we just look for ways to apply more taxes to everyone, because other people did it, and if they jumped off a bridge, we probably would too.
I'm not following this. The parents just transfer the cash into your account and you buy the house with it, The parents have no "Share" in the house and you take the gains. Parents will just shift away from having a legal part share in the property to avoid the tax. Am I missing something ?
I guess it depends. If the parents aren't well off and have really had to push to the edge to help their child with a deposit, then they may really need that share of house value in the future for their retirement. At the very least they have done something very meaningful to help their child into home ownership.
I guess so. Another way would be the use of a form of offset loan that some banks offer, where one party can offset their deposit onto another parties loan balance. No money trades places, the parents still control their 'contribution', so I couldn't see how it would be disputed in a relation breakup, if that were to happen.
That's what we did - gifted the deposit to daughter, even though the estate agent strongly recommended us to put our names on as co-owners "in case she has a relationship that fails in the future". We ignored that advice as our belief is that our children will inherit from us anyway so we may as well just gift the money a bit earlier. My in-laws did the same for us years ago when we had a young family.
(we were already 64 years old so knew we had enough money to last for our retirement, especially as husband carried on working for another 8 years)
- and No, we don't have any rental properties. All the money we have has been earned - apart from the inheritance from parents.
Nothing to stop you transferring cash to daughter account, recording the loan to the daughter and keep it in the bottom drawer should you ever wish to call it in. You could have several docs.. a loan, a gift, even a trust..whatever you want. Just pull out the one that's eventually needed.
We have done exactly this. It was a gift with a verbal sub-clause. That if either parent was in trouble with their health later in life & needed some expensive surgery for any reason, that she would remember ''the gift'' & be willing to help out if needed. Nothing written down as such, just family trust stuff. I suppose it will come down to ''how much you you trust your family?" I'll keep you posted.
Exactly you can simply transfer the money because the maximum $25K a year "Gift" without notifying the IRD was dropped many years ago now. I guess if the parents are worried about them loosing that in a relationship dispute the house goes into a trust. There are one hell of a lot of NZ houses in a trust anyway.
Off topic, but seriously how useless are this government WRT to housing (and everything else)?
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/kainga-oras-25m-blowout-delay-to-te…
No, but it's potentially symptomatic of poor choices, decisions and management. And I understand this hasn't been managed well.
I would also add, as I have noted many times, that the government should be building modular housing en masse, as was the original plan. Control their own destiny, and build true economies of scale.
But that's very old fashioned isn't it???
What's going to happen when the big construction slump hits and many more building firms go out of business?
So National are going to repeal all labours tax changes to ignite the investment property bonfire again (I mean why should property investors pay any tax right). And on top of that they are going to change the tax brackets inline with the last 4 years of inflation. All up this will cost the government billions in tax revenue a year, so how are they going to pay for it? I imagine by canceling all infrastructure and health improvement spending. But good old dumb arse NZ voters will just see those extra few dollars they will get in tax cuts each week no doubt and not care that it will put the country further into the shit.
Exactly. More of the same crap.
But as you say, many kiwis will lap up this short termist approach. 'ME, ME, ME!!!!!'
BTW I agree with income tax threshold adjustments, though. But not anything else they propose.
Aren't our politicians and their parties depressing? So lacking in strategic, future based thinking and policy making.
Well they could go a long way by cutting much of the increase in the public service which isn't exactly giving us better outcomes. But I agree, even as a high earner, they should be cutting income taxes at the bottom, not at the top. First 14k should be tax free, like many countries like us have.
Almost no scrutiny of Robertson rejecting that idea as it would affect public services, which is a blatant admission that the government pilfers the inflation component of your pay increases to improve their books, which means your pay increases have to come ahead of the rate of inflation at the net value, not the gross.
Pro-tip: If pay rises were keeping pace with inflation, then this wouldn't really be much of a problem, would it?
Someone said the money was to come out of a 6 Billion dollar slush fund that Labour have created by increasing national debt as well as hiring in house experts on a wage instead of consultants who cost 10x as much per hour. Would not hurt to cut spending on things like getting plans for a sky bridge, the 3 waters reform that no one seems to want or the record number of PR consultants that the government now hire.
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