Beyond the Budget: How Charlie Viola is approaching building wealth | Ask an Adviser

**Ren** (0:00)
Everything you're about to hear is for education and entertainment purposes only. Whilst we are licensed when not aware of your personal financial circumstances, any advice is general advice. Equity Mates operates under Australian financial services license 540697

**Charlie Viola** (0:15)
The bit that's going to change your life is making some weird decision to stop as a result of that extra 2 or 3% tax rate. The real wealth creation is by virtue of the asset values going up over time and buying good quality assets. That's a significant overreaction from some of the investment community.

**Bryce** (0:31)
Welcome to another episode of Equity Mates, a show where we explore what's possible in the world of investing. My name is Bryce.

**Ren** (0:37)
And I'm Ren. And today we are talking all things federal budget, but we're going beyond the budget and we're talking about building wealth in Australia. Has the budget changed anything and how we should all approach it in 2026 and beyond. To do it, we're joined by one of our favourite returning guests. He's a financial advisor to some of Australia's wealthiest families and business owners. And we're lucky enough to get him in the studio to understand how he is approaching this moment with clients. Charlie Viola, welcome back to Equity Mates.

**Charlie Viola** (1:09)
G'day gents, how are we?

**Bryce** (1:10)
Good to have you here. So Charlie is executive chair and founding partner at Viola Private Wealth. If you would like to speak to Charlie or any of his team head to equitymates.com/advice and we will put you in touch.
But as Ren said, Charlie, there's been so many questions about the budget and what impact it's going to have on the portfolios that we're building, the wealth strategies that we've put in place over the last decade and how it's all going to play out. So we want to pick your brains about it all. So we'll just start with the budget. Have the proposed changes to you exposed any weak spots in just common wealth building strategies?

**Charlie Viola** (1:47)
I don't know if it's exposed weak spots per se, but they're certainly parts of the structures we use especially that we use for most of our clients that are probably a little bit under attack, I guess. So structuring and tax structuring in Australia has always been pretty simple. We've got four simple tax buckets that we can use for investment purposes, super, trust, company, and individual, and virtually all of our clients over a really long period of time, have had this really simple structure that we get as much money as we can into super and we're always mindful of the issues around preservation and accessing the capital. But it's always going to be the most concessionally taxed environment.
Even with DIV 296 changes and the various kind of regulatory stuff that's gone on over the last 400 years on super, it's always going to be the most tax-effective, so that doesn't change. But most of our clients have got more money than they can shove into super, so we've used trusts and beneficiary companies to do that. That's probably been under attack and we can see that the treasurer and federal government have tried to remove a bunch of the tax concessions that go with trusts. Probably contrary to popular belief, we're probably okay with lots of it, just not the double taxation. So what the treasury came out with was to say that there needs to be a minimum tax payable on distributed income of 30 percent.
What we say to most clients is 30 percent of your non-super money from a tax point of view is about as good as it's going to get anyway. We're okay with that.
What we think they've done though or the unintended consequence of not allowing monies to flow back from the beneficiary company and not having the rebuttable tax offset has meant that there's a portion of money down there that gets double taxed. We don't think that that was the intent. We just think that they've probably got that wrong. It's been pretty clear that the CGT changes are being rammed through government, I think, this week. So they feel like they've got that bit right. And this stuff still remains under consultation and they're still reviewing it. We don't think everything there is wrong. It's just that it's going to require us to really understand what it is that they were trying to achieve before we can actually start telling clients and actually start going and changing things.

**Ren** (4:02)
So I guess our next question was going to be what structures should people be reviewing? But maybe what you just finished that answer with there kind of answers that, which is wait and see.