SMSF advisers are feeling bogged down by all the new super changes and are likely to be working through them beyond Christmas, a specialist sector lawyer has said.
“Advisers have been bedding down all those changes that were announced since May 2016; there are still a lot of changes and a lot of uncertainty there,” DBA Lawyers director Dan Butler told selfmanagedsuper.
“With a lot of advisers I’ve spoken to recently, they’ve said the pressure on them to get through the changes with limited time and without all the information at hand has been the worst they’ve ever had it [compared to previous super legislation changes].
“So from a practitioner’s point of view, it’s been a very difficult period for them to get through these reform measures on top of everything else they have to deal with.
“This is reforms fatigue and the stress levels are high, even for the experts who have spent thousands of hours trying to get their heads around it and stay up to date, so it’s a topsy-turvy time.”
Butler said while the negative effects of the super changes could eventually settle down in a few years’ time, currently the reforms were proving a burden for advisers to digest with the added risk some practitioners’ knowledge of the detail might not be up to scratch.
“I think advisers are going to have a lot of work to do, beyond Christmas, and also not all clients may want to pay for the advice to implement the changes to the extent that the adviser would like to,” he said.
“The big problem [with these reforms] was that it was too much, too fast, without proper consultation, education or implementation.
“It takes a long time for people to get up to speed and for people to get their systems in order.
“This journey has really been an incredible mountain for people to get over, but a lot of firms are in the position of trying to bed things down.”
Commenting on the top three areas that continue to take up advisers’ time, he said: “There’s going to be a lot of time spent on the capital gains tax relief, the commutation of pensions is another big one and also the basic planning for people who are affected by the $1.6 million transfer balance cap.”
