Cleardocs Breakfast Seminars - SMSF Borrowing

Danni Kirwan, Marketing Executive

Earlier this week, Cleardocs hosted seminars in Melbourne and Sydney focusing on SMSF borrowing through instalment warrant arrangements. We’ll be posting a video of the seminar on the Cleardocs website in mid August.

We organized the seminars in response to the large number of queries we were getting on our helpline about our new SMSF borrowing products.

The Seminars were presented by Julian Smith, a partner at Maddocks. Some of you may have spoken to Julian over the years on our legal helpline, or seen him present at our previous seminars; Fiona Da Silva from St George Bank in Melbourne, and Wayne Scott from NAB in Sydney.

We had a great turnout from Cleardocs customers keen to find out more about this relatively new opportunity. Our audience proved quite inquisitive, challenging Julian, Fiona and Wayne with some tricky questions — you can see it all on the video.

The banks gave a great insight into their restrictions and considerations for instalment warrant borrowing, and pointed out some of the things commonly overlooked. Did you know:

• that a property held under an instalment warrant arrangement can’t be used to secure an overdraft? And
• that an arrangement using funds borrowed through an instalment warrant can’t be refinanced? Though Julian did outline an innovative solution he arranged with a bank for one client.

One of the points Julian, Fiona and Wayne all made was to allow plenty of time to set up the arrangement – they suggested it takes 6 to 8 weeks for the banks to process an instalment warrant application. So keep that in mind if you’re planning to settle on a property!

For those of you unable to attend the seminars, we’ll be posting a video of the seminar on the Cleardocs website in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can find more information on SMSF borrowing in our previous blog posts, and ClearLaw articles written by our lawyers at Maddocks.

It was great to meet some of our customers face to face at the seminars after talking to so many of you on our helpline. Seminars are also a great way for us to keep you informed about products and issues that are relevant to you.

If you have any questions about SMSF borrowing, or about any of our other products, let us know in the comments section below, and we’ll get back to you. We’d also love to hear about any ideas you might have for future seminar topics. Or, if you were at the Seminar, we’d love to know what you thought.