Dear Steve,
My partner and I are boomers, summer of love man, enjoying our golden years by the sea. We have three negatively geared properties and $2.9 million in super, about $600,000 in shares and other investments. We receive the disability pension, carers allowance, veteran support payments, the first-home buyer grant, Murray Darling water rights, some nickel royalties and the cotton production offset. We’re thinking of putting in an infinity pool and would like to know if we are eligible for war reparations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And will it affect our super?
Yours,
John and Paulette
Dear Steve,
I’m told the widow’s pension takes a while to process, should I apply in advance? I have all the relevant dates to hand. And will it affect my super?
Yours,
Rose Black
Dear Steve,
John and Paulette again. We forgot a whole other flat we’ve got, a nice little old place — someone painted a mural of old Italia in the kitchen at some point. Does that make the property tax deductible as an artwork? Could it get a cultural development grant from Norfolk Island? Will it affect our super?
Yours,
John and Paulette
Dear Steve,
My wife and I are young boomers, forever young, hahaha, love Mr B. Dylan. We have paid off our house, have about $4 million in accumulated super, four flats as investment properties, a hotel timeshare for those inner-city stayovers, a shack near Lorne, franking credits, a small blue chip portfolio, and of course life insurance. We don’t need any advice, we just wrote in to make younger readers feel bad. Will this affect our super?
Yours,
Investors
Dear Steve,
Regular reader, first-time writer, long-term prisoner at the Long Bay NSW correctional facility. I am building an investment base of Horizon 50s, from a small business distributing toilet-fermented pruno, and, funny story, I come back to the cell and Davo’s smoking one of me darts and I say you right, mate? He says you want it back so I smash the cunt’s head on the toilet rim teeth go ping ping ping get my knee in his socket right and fkn grind till I hear a snap and he hits the matt dead alive who fckn knows. Nah, you can keep it I say good one huh will this and franking credits affect my super?
Yours,
Out in ‘28, watching you, mate
Dear Steve,
Completely forgot about the alpaca farm! How do you forget a whole alpaca farm? We hear the government pays farmers not to grow wheat. What about not growing alpacas? Because all the alpacas are dead. Can we have some money? And will it affect our super?
Yours,
John and Paulette
Dear Steve,
Recently a tracking fund I am leveraging through a credit swap was assessed by the ATO as “avoirdupois” rather than source-deducted, suggesting the possibility of repechage? Should I? Should I huh? You don’t know what that is, do you? I’m much smarter than you.
Yours,
B’alan B’kohler
Dear Steve,
I found this. Looks like it might be worth something? What ya reckon? Yeah come on, yeah it is. Come on. Don’t be a prick. Nah it is. Come on, prick.
Yours,
Sir Rupert Clarke (deceased)
Dear Steve,
My novel about a middle-aged woman whose domineering boat builder father is slipping into Alzheimer’s while her marriage to a timid cartographer is coming apart under the pressure of their eldest child’s denunciation of their transphobia causes her to trek the MacDonnell Ranges with the woman whose husband she had an affair with ending in a rainstorm and the once-in-a-lifetime refilling of a dry lake is just about to be published. Should I put the Miles Franklin prize money into an investment property? And how will it affect my super?
Yours,
Person Next To You in Creative Writing Class
Dear Steve,
I am a journalist of 25 years standing, about to take a redundancy, and MEAA rules state it must be invested in a quixotic and doomed retail outlet. I can’t decide between opening a creperie in Bathurst, a gallery of bad beach landscapes in a seaside town, or an unsettling Hello Kitty-themed B’n’B in the Grampians. Which would you advise would most lead to slow and unrelenting failure consuming my super, bitter regret and angry self-recrimination? And will it affect my super? Oh, I won’t have any.
Yours,
Former Age/SMH editor, but who isn’t?
Dear Steve,
My partner and I have been told that consuming the pituitary gland taken from the brain of a living teenager will extend life by up to 20 years, and that it’s legal for people born between 1946 and 1964 to do that. We plan on stalking our neighbour’s basement-dwelling adult children with our Japanese bonded steel steak knives and, sinking them deep in, with one swift corkscrew motion, extracting and ingesting the glistening life-affirming sweetmeat as we feel their dying life force flood into our reviving cells.
But will it affect our super?
Yours,
Succulent Chinese Meal
Dear Steve,
I am a 34-year-old subeditor of the “Money” section for a major publication you’re familiar with, and I rent with three other young professionals in a sharehouse in Thornbury, with approx $950 in my bank account and a $59,000 HECS debt for an uncompleted masters in “Dance on Film”. I need backing for an apartment deposit and wondered if you knew anyone who might have accidentally CC’d anyone in on their fin sector swingers’ newsletter “Double Entry”. But will it affect the ability to buy me A COFFEE A DAY WHEN I’M 73, of my super?
Yours,
Colleague
Dear Steve,
John and Paulette again! Debentures! We have debentures! What are debentures?
Yours,
The Future
