Can my mentally ill sister still get a sickness benefit and her inheritance? – Mary Holm

My parents are trying to work out how to pass on an inheritance to my sister without it affecting her benefit. Photo / 123rf

A way to do it

Q: I am sending this on behalf of my elderly parents (in their late 70s). My sister is mentally ill and on a sickness benefit. She is 50 and owns her own unit with help from my parents. They top up her benefit each fortnight to allow a few treats etc.

When they pass, she will get an inheritance. However, if she is on a benefit, the benefit will stop until the money runs out.

My question is: could my parents instruct the money to be paid into her KiwiSaver account so she has an easier retirement with my parents gone, and not affect her benefit? Any help would be much appreciated.

A: This reply will make some people angry. So be it. I’m happy to bring good news for your family!

The rules aren’t as harsh as you think. “Lump-sum payments from a will or estate don’t need to be declared as income,” Graham Allpress of the Ministry of Social Development says. “We consider them ‘capital payments’ instead.“ For more on this see tinyurl.com/NZCapPayments.

“This means if someone receives a lump-sum inheritance, it will not prevent them from continuing to receive main benefit payments, like Jobseeker Support or the Supported Living Payment.

“However, if they’re also getting supplementary payments like the Accommodation Supplement, Temporary Additional Support or Special Benefit, receiving a lump-sum inheritance payment may affect their eligibility for these. They would need to contact us and declare it.”

Allpress adds that if a lump-sum inheritance is invested, “any interest or other earnings from that investment will be counted as income and must be declared. It may also be considered income if the inheritance is received as a series of smaller payments over time”.

So would putting the money into KiwiSaver be beneficial?

“Money paid directly into a KiwiSaver account which is ‘locked-in’ (ie the person can’t access the funds until they are 65), does not impact a person’s benefit,” Allpress says.

“It is not treated as a cash asset and any interest earned from the KiwiSaver fund is not considered income.

“We don’t expect people to withdraw funds from their KiwiSaver account before they qualify for assistance, unless the funds are not locked in – for example, if they’re over 65.”

So your idea would work. If your sister’s inheritance is in KiwiSaver, once she reaches New Zealand Superannuation age, she’ll receive both Super payments and KiwiSaver withdrawals. So she should be comfortable in retirement.

All those questions

Q: I have around $100,000 in shares. As a retired financial guy, I enjoy the challenge in picking the good ones – not always successfully, I might add. I have been gradually building my portfolio up. I am comfortably off financially. My sharebroker has been Jardens. Invest Direct recently took this firm over.

Last week, Invest Direct sent me a letter saying “we want to know everything about you. Your assets/your income/your cash balances – everything you own". The letter heading said “Govt Requirements”. Immediately, I could no longer trade or access my portfolio unless this information was provided. If I wish to dispose of my shares, I can phone them and they will sell. I had no warning of this. Just wondering if you have other information on this subject.

A: Blame it on the law – specifically the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 (AML/CFT Act). And, in turn, blame that on the rise in international financial crime.

Many of us have stumbled across what seem to be unreasonable demands for information when trying to make financial transactions.

Says Invest Direct: “NZ AML laws require Invest Direct to know its customers and assess if their investments represent a risk to the NZ and global financial system (in the form of financial crime), or to their own financial wellbeing.

“The questions sent out to all Invest Direct customers are intended to help us to meet these requirements and while they cover a range of areas relating to income and worth, all answers are selected from broad ranges rather than requiring specific figures.”

The sharebroker adds: “It is estimated that the cost of financial crime globally is in the trillions and across the financial services industry, risk practices are constantly evolving to keep up.

“If a customer wishes to make a complaint then they should do so through our complaints process. We are a member of the disputes resolution process operated by FSCL.”

But if I were you, I would just give your broker the info. Good luck with your portfolio. It’s good to know you have a large amount to invest, so you can easily diversify widely.

A message to charities

Q: I am pleased to see that you support people giving to charities and, in most cases, they go to support the needy in our society.

At 76 years of age, I am increasingly frustrated at the complicated donations websites, where you try and donate your money.

I am sure they are built by young, tech-savvy people who do not bother to ask older people: “Is that easy for you to use? Is anything there that concerns you?”

Furthermore, I got back this year from some donations I made emails from another company I could not link the charity I sent it to. The charity had offloaded it to another company to collect the money and they clip the ticket on the way through.

Secondly, I am frustrated at some websites where you try and make a donation to New Zealanders, but you are told it is going to support the Islands or elsewhere.

I have given up [on] donations to some significant charities and so have some of my friends, and I am sure many other older people have done the same.

Charities could increase their donations significantly if they used the Kiss [keep it simple, stupid] principle, and didn’t make it complicated for us oldies, with kind hearts and wanting to give.

A: I fully agree on overly complicated websites – and not just for giving to charities, but buying tickets and other items. Hey, if you want our business, make it easy!

But I disagree on giving only to New Zealanders. Many people overseas are in far greater need. Let’s open our hearts to them.

Landlords worse off?

Q: Mary, I have to disagree with your recent assertion that most tenants’ lives are harder than their landlords’.

As an accountant, I have seen many mum and dad investors buying rental properties because it was seen as a wise investment for their future. These are not well-off people, which is why they are trying to improve their lot.

Usually, they are topping up the mortgage monthly and depriving themselves, and it doesn’t always end well. One couple were forced to sell at a loss when they couldn’t get tenants, ended up with a higher mortgage on their own home, and their marriage didn’t survive the trauma.

A: Sadly, that story is not uncommon. I wish people planning to borrow heavily to invest in rentals would think through how they would cope if interest rates rise, or they lose some or all of their other income, or the rental needs unexpected maintenance, or rates and insurance rise fast, or the tenant doesn’t pay, or they have a period with no tenants.

If one or two of those things happen when house prices have fallen, they can’t bail out with a good outcome.

Like you, I feel for these people. But there are other landlords doing very nicely, thank you.

I’ve contacted several government agencies to get a comparison of landlords’ and tenants’ incomes or wealth. The best I’ve come up with is that in 2023, the total household income of tenants averaged $80,400 a year, compared with $106,400 for home owners and $114,900 for those with homes held in family trusts. The vast majority of landlords would fall into the latter two groups.

In any case, in a country where most people, including landlords, want to own their own home, it’s obvious that those who have succeeded will be, on average, more comfortably off than tenants.

‘Absolutely not – and absolutely’

Q: I’ve found the recent letters about landlords interesting. I’ve been a landlord for 25 years and I have been fortunate enough to build a nest egg from property and really enjoy it as an investment. I have a few thoughts on recent letters you’ve published:

• Vilified Landlords. I’ve seen this claim used whenever regulations change for landlords, eg Healthy Homes Regulations. We are in business. Businesses deal with changing regulations occasionally – it is not a personal attack. What I think people DO hate (at least I do) is when a landlord organisation responds to every change in regulations by threatening landlords will sell up (to who?) and put people on the street.
• Tenants getting a “cheap deal” because they are not covering their landlords’ costs. Should these tenants pay more because their landlord couldn’t do maths and bought a property that was miles underwater on day one? Absolutely not! Again, we are running a business here and our customers are not responsible for our poor due diligence.
• Capital gains tax. My two cents’ worth is that we absolutely should have one. It’s insane that we just keep taxing the working rather than taxing capital gains. A CGT might also drive a bit of investment out of property and into more productive areas.

I look forward to seeing next week’s letters, I love a bit of rage first thing on a Saturday morning!

A: Really? Disagreement – yes. Amusement – definitely. I’m not so sure about rage. But anyway, thanks for your reasonable attitude to these issues. Good on you.

Keeping rents down

Q: I must take issue with last week’s letter headed “same number of houses”. And to your reply to that letter.

This says that when landlords purchase properties to rent, this “adds demand to a limited supply of properties, and helps to raise the price”.

But there is another aspect the writer, and yourself, did not point out. With one more rental property on the market, this adds to rental supply and, multiplied by the number of rentals added to the market, will start a downward movement in per weekly rental charges.

Most letters and your replies seem to have a bias toward home ownership (myself included). But some people, for a huge variety of reasons, prefer to rent. And the more rentals there are on the market, the more downward pressure there is on the rental price a landlord can charge.

A: That’s true, but it doesn’t make last week’s statement incorrect.

As I said last week, “If someone wants to own more than one house – so they can rent one property out – that must push up demand, and therefore prices.”

You’re right to say that, at the same time, we have one more house available for tenants to rent. So that will tend to push rents down, or at least stop them from rising as fast.

By the way, I’m a bit sick of being told I’m biased against rental property. Last week I challenged the final, angry correspondent to tell me when I have shown that bias. She replied, “Historically your bias was always towards shares, and you implicitly or overtly painted residential rental property investment a negative light.” More generalities! Let’s hear about a specific Q&A or two.

That same angry correspondent also wrote: “Just one point about the comments in your ‘Same Number of Houses’ last week. As more people live in a rental home per capita than an owner-occupied home, one does not cancel the other out.”

That’s probably true. But I’m not sure where it leads us. Do we want more properties to be rented and fewer owner-occupied because we can crowd more people into each home?

‘Democracy not dead’

Q: Thank you, Mary, for having the intestinal fortitude to publish the letter “Biased and socialist”. I am sure many, many, people agree with many of the sentiments expressed in that letter. Good that it could be said. It is probably not the accepted mainstream of some sections of New Zealand – the new politically correct and “left-leaning” press.

Again thank you for daring to publish it, and for your response. Democracy is not dead.

A: Any time. I try to almost always run critical letters. Thanks for writing.

* Mary Holm, ONZM, is a freelance journalist, a seminar presenter and a bestselling author on personal finance. She is a director of Financial Services Complaints Ltd (FSCL) and a former director of the Financial Markets Authority. Her opinions do not reflect the position of any organisation in which she holds office. Mary’s advice is of a general nature, and she is not responsible for any loss that any reader may suffer from following it. Send questions to mary@maryholm.com. Letters should not exceed 200 words. We won’t publish your name. Please provide a (preferably daytime) phone number. Unfortunately, Mary cannot answer all questions, correspond directly with readers, or give financial advice.