Nomad Insights
I wanted to write this for my future self.
We’re not the typical nomads. We’re not the typical US investors. We’re not the typical AU investors. We’re not average. We prefer not to become labeled.
As we continue to proceed with our daily lives, I wanted to note the following:
We’ve liquidated both of our 401Ks as we were transitioning to becoming AU PR (Permanent Residents). The reason is because after seeking professional advice, we’ve confirmed that 401Ks treatment would not be the same in AU, so based on our assessment, liquidation prior to becoming AU Citizens is necessary to prevent future tax implications. The 10% early withdrawal penalty is acceptable vs future headaches.
We liquidated our 401Ks into two separate tax years to lower the realized capital gains amounts, as well as, to lower our marginal tax rates during distribution.
We’ve reinvested the 401K funds into the ASX market. We’ve built our EFI portfolio and focused on Dividend ETFs and Income Funds.
We’ve reinvested EFI gains, dividends, and franking credits and purchased our primary residence during COVID. While people were panicking, we purchased property and invested another 150K cash equity back into the ASX buying positions at discounted prices. We stayed invested in the market until dividend payouts, then sold after the market recovered and estimated about 20%+ gains in under a year.
We’ve liquidated all of our Banking positions as the market became hot, and utilized the funds to focus on prepaying our mortgage (PPM). After 2-years fixing our interest rate at around 2.75%, the market interest rate became 6.79%. As of to-date, we have PPM of 335K, saving us 22.75K in mortgage interest in PPM. As for our Offset Acct, we have about 137K, saving us about 9.2K in mortgage interest. Total mortgage interest saved annually is about 32K.
