Australian retirees living overseas

 Author: bananasmoothy(Initiate)Initiate

15 Oct 2024

It’s absolutely disgusting that Australian citizens who have worked their entire lives and paid taxes are treated with such disdain by the ATO. The Australian taxation system is one of the most aggressive and draconian in the world. It’s not our fault that Australia is no longer affordable and we don’t want to work until we drop dead. The ATO sees people as cash cows to extract as much as they can and they intentionally make the rules convoluted and vague so that people have no way of understanding them. It’s completely unjust. If you want people to follow rules then you need to make them clear annd simple enough that we don’t have to pay specialist tax accountants $1000/ hr to help us. It doesn’t matter how old you are they have created a system in which we are basically financial prisoners from cradle to grave.

I too want to go travelling and see the world in my senior years but I have found out that if I do this there is a very real possibility that I may lose the tax free threshold and have to pay 4 times as much tax on my rental income. This pretty much puts an end to my plans. The ATO have made it so that if you are away too long but still have all ties here including family, social connections, property, license etc etc they can deem you a foreign a tax resident and you lose the tax free threshold thus making them more money. However if you decide to leave and intentionally become a foreign tax resident by cutting all ties they have made it difficult to do so because they then lose money. The system is rigged to only ever benefit them.

Once you get pension they make you stay in Australia for 2 years or lose the pension. For what reason? Do they hope we all die within that two years waiting so they no longer have to pay us the stingy below breadline pittance we are supposed to survive on in this rip off country? Meanwhile politicians get a big fat pension for life and are exempt from all the pathetic draconian rules they subject everyone else to. I’m so done with this country. It’s just a glorified penal colony. It really hasn’t changed a whole lot. Not sure why so many immigrants want to come here. If they knew what b*stards the politicians are and what a trap this place is they wouldn’t bother.

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