Financial Planning for Firefighters

We’re invested in your long-term success. What we do is personal, and we take it personally.

Your financial decisions connect, so we consider the parts of your financial life that are relevant to the advice you need:

• Property & Investing
• Career & Income
• Tax Strategy
• Insurance & Protecting Your Family
• Super & SMSF
• Wealth & Investments
• Life Events & Changes
• Business & Wealth
• Legacy & Future Wealth
• Retirement Planning

This is how we help you make decisions today with your longer-term goals in view.

Everybody’s situation is different, so we listen first, understand what matters to you and explain your options clearly before we make a recommendation.

Not every role carries this cover. Where one does, the answer sits in the award, agreement or scheme that applies, and arrangements differ between services. Some pay eligible members separate benefits for death or incapacity on duty and off duty, and for being unable to do the full range of firefighting duties. Under some arrangements, lump sums reduce with age and benefits stop at a set age, and some members make a once-only election about the cover soon after starting.

Your service’s payroll or human resources team, or your union if you belong to one, can confirm the terms that apply to you. We can read them through with you and plan any personal cover around how those benefits change.

Being unable to do every firefighting duty isn’t always treated the same as being unable to work. Some services’ arrangements treat partial incapacity differently from total and permanent incapacity, with rehabilitation or retraining considered first. A personal TPD policy has its own test: an own occupation definition generally considers whether you can return to your own job, while an any occupation definition asks whether you could work in something suited to your education, training or experience.

The service or the insurer decides any claim under its terms. We can plan your income, cover and super with you for either path, including other work if that’s the direction you take.

Your accountant and financial adviser bring different expertise to the same decisions. Your accountant can advise on tax reporting, structures and consequences; we help you plan how cashflow, debt, super, investments and protection work towards your goals. We can coordinate before important decisions.

What an accountant does

• Prepares and lodges tax returns, BAS and financial statements
• Advises on tax structures such as companies, trusts and partnerships
• Manages bookkeeping, payroll and ATO compliance
• Provides tax advice on the consequences of a transaction

What a financial adviser does

• Sets a long term strategy across retirement, investing and cash flow
• Builds wealth from early in a working life, starting with cash flow, a first home and super
• Recommends specific super funds, investments and personal insurance
• Operates under an Australian Financial Services Licence, which is required to give personal advice on financial products
• Handles retirement planning, Centrelink and aged care strategy, and estate planning considerations

Professional roles and authorisations matter. We provide financial advice within our authorisations and work with your accountant for specialist tax advice and lodgements.

Where they work together

• Tax position. Your accountant confirms your marginal rate, deductions and carried forward losses, which shapes decisions on super contributions, investment structures and the timing of asset sales.
• Business and entity structures. Your accountant advises on the structure itself and your financial adviser works within it for investments, insurance and succession planning.
• Cash flow. Your accountant’s figures can help us understand what’s available for debt repayment, protection and longer-term goals.
• Before key decisions. We can coordinate with your accountant on contributions, asset sales and other material choices in time to consider relevant tax consequences.

Workers compensation schemes across Australia have rules that presume certain cancers in firefighters are work-related once a qualifying period of service is met, unless shown otherwise. The presumption makes a claim easier to establish, and the scheme or its insurer still decides the claim. Who qualifies, which cancers are listed and the periods involved are set by each state, territory or Commonwealth scheme, and some also presume post-traumatic stress disorder in first responders is work-related.

Your scheme, your union if you belong to one, or a lawyer can explain how the rules apply to you. Free, confidential support is available from Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 and Lifeline on 13 11 14. We can plan the financial side around any claim.

Each income protection policy sets its own definition of income and how it’s worked out, so the answer turns on the policy’s terms. A policy usually pays a percentage of your pre-tax income, based on what you earned before you stopped work, and business income may be measured differently from salary, for example after business expenses. What you disclose about each job when you apply matters too.

We can read the definitions with you and compare suitable policies for the way you earn. The insurer makes the final decision on any application.

Each role can come with its own super, insurance and workers compensation arrangements, and they don’t always line up. Under some services’ arrangements, a retained firefighter whose main job already provides defined benefit cover may receive a reduced benefit from the service. The super in your main job may also hold insurance with definitions of its own.

The service and your main employer can confirm the terms for each role. We can set the cover, super and pay from both jobs side by side with you, and plan any personal cover around what they leave out.

A fund’s retirement calculator can be a helpful way to see how contributions and returns might add up over time, based on the figures you enter.

A calculator may not take in how any cover through your service may change with age, income from a business or a retained role, the years before you can reach your super, or how any scheme benefit sits beside other savings. Advice looks at those together, along with what you want from the years ahead.

Running the calculator first is a good start. We can then bring its results into a plan built on your own situation.

You can, and the plan starts with how the years in between would be funded. Preservation age is 60 for anyone born on or after 1 July 1964, and super is generally accessible once you meet a condition of release. Points to plan around:

• Savings and investments outside super, and how long they need to last.
• Paid work after operational firefighting, such as a non-operational role where your service offers one, a business or another career.
• Any scheme benefit, paid under the scheme’s own rules.
• Cover that may end or reduce when you leave.

We can build the timeline with you from where you are now.

Some of it does. Volunteers may be covered by compensation arrangements for injuries while volunteering, which depend on where you volunteer and the rules that apply, and some presumptive cancer rules include volunteers. The ATO says volunteer firefighters can’t claim work-related deductions for their volunteer work, and government assistance payments to volunteers aren’t taxable.

Your paid work, its super and any cover you hold are where we’d start, alongside your volunteering. Your accountant can confirm the tax.

Yes, whether you’re a recruit in your first months or a station officer thinking about the years ahead.

There’s no cost for the initial conversation. Any advice after that is a paid service, with its scope and fee agreed with you in writing first.

It helps to bring a recent payslip, your latest super statement, any summary of the cover your service provides and, if you run a business, its recent figures. We can meet in person or online, around your working hours.