anyone know anything know anything about Australian "salary sacrifice" or "living away from home" tax benefit?

[mogwai]

We are going to Sydney for 12 months. a colleague of mine lived there for 4 years and says she was able to pay their rent directly through gross salary (or something similar) to save money on tax

Anyone know how to go about this?

The HR department in Aus don't seem clued up!

dh does salary sacrificing and it pays our mortgage ( or most of it)

Depends on who you work for - dh works for state health department and was directed to specific financial planners who organise this and set it up ( think they had to be approved iyswim).

I think his are based here in QLD but they may be able to help with NSW.

They are called RemServ based in Brisbane. Can't put my hand on contact details but if you do a search - should find them.

I did salary packaging. I could package up to $15,000 of my annual income and, through an external company, could use this to pay the rent / credit cards / store cards / car loan. We only had rent at the time, so we could only package enough to pay that - you have to check out exactly for what purpose you can use your packaged money.
As a result we were $5000net better off each year. There is a small charge to pay for the service and you may have to wait for it all to kick in. HTH.

My dh salary sacrifices his superannuation. He works for a Qld govt department. Different employers allow different things. Basically it is making the payment to the sacrificed item before the tax comes out, therefore lowering your gross income to a lower tax bracket so less tax to pay iyswim.

Eidsvold would love to be able to do mortgage. dh's dept only allow Super or laptops. grr.

Sounds a bit like the LAFHA - if you claim it then effectively you can deduct your rent and certain living allowances from your gross salary before you pay tax. It can make a big difference and compensates for the fact that you get no other tax breaks at all (eg I can't claim the 30% childcare rebate, have to pay for state schools etc).

It can be hard to claim, companies have to know how to do it, but it's definitely worth making sure that whoever is handling the tax/payroll can do it - it can't be claimed retrospectively so has to be done through payroll.

we are lucky - my sil did it for their new car - that was the other option we had - which would have been fab but the had strict guidelines regarding mileage etc and we would never have been able to meet it despite all the running around I do.

As arfidy said - can be difficult - that is why they recommend a financial body to do it - for dh his payment goes from his pay to this body and then they make the payments to the mortgage.