Worried about buying online? Police's security tips for shopping online.

There are many benefits to online shopping, but it comes with a huge disclaimer: BE VERY CAREFUL!!

You can check out the Australian Federal Police's tips for shopping safely online here. It's also an important read for business owners to make sure they're promoting and encouraging potential buyers to feel secure when using their website.

If you're buying from an unfamiliar website, an additional tip of mine is to trial the website out with a cheaper purchase before you go spending hundreds of dollars on a first purchase. Some questions to ask are:

1. Did the website deliver a quality product? and;
2. Did they deliver the item to you within an appropriate timeframe?

Feel free to share any of your other tips or positive or negative experiences with online shopping in the comment section below.

Looking for spare cash? Lost or unbanked medicare cheques.

With having a baby recently, there seemed to be quite a few medicare cheques getting posted out to me over the last couple of months.  Prioritising going to the bank to bank a $35 cheque amongst everything else that needs to be done in the day, can sometimes be a struggle. I tried getting the husband to bank his medicare cheque, but that just ended in him carrying it around in his wallet for the next two months!

I thought it may have just been our family with medicare cheque banking issues, but I recently spied off a family member carrying around an unbanked medicare cheque from September last year and a business client asking if I could bank their medicare cheque whilst doing some business banking for them.

It seems that I am not the only one having problems with the medicare cheques and a friend even told me that they had quite a few at home that had remained unbanked. 

So, I thought I would update everyone on changes made last year to Medicare payments to make life just that little bit easier for you. Did you know that Medicare can now transfer the payment directly into your bank account instead of posting out cheques? And they are promising that you will receive the rebate within the next business day! 

This is fantastic news. I've already made my phone call to Medicare to update my bank account details. While I was on the phone to Medicare, I also got them to check whether I had any un-presented cheques and there was actually one worth $100. So it definitely pays to give Medicare a call.

To receive your Medicare payments in your bank account call Medicare or complete the form on the link http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/forms/1579a

You should also note that some medical providers also allow you to swipe your debit card to receive the refund straight away!

Tax Scam Alert - Fraudulent ATO emails!

The ATO recently made an announcement that there are a number of tax refund scam emails circulating.

One of my clients received a scam email last year, so beware, it could happen to you or someone you know. Feel free to share this blog post with your family or friends - it could save them a lot of hassle and money if they fell victim to a tax refund email scam.

The scam email my client received to his business email account was fairly sophisticated. I realised it was a scam when I saw that the email was sent from the email address @ato.com [the ATO email address is ato.gov.au]. This was the first alarm bell! I also knew that the client wasn't getting a tax refund and there was no way the ATO paid refunds by entering in his credit card details.

The ATO also highights these important indicators in recognising a fraudulent tax scam email:

• the email asks you to provide personal details - be very suspicious and don't respond to anything by email
• it can sometimes be poorly worded with spelling and grammatical errors (however, the scam email below looks quite professional)

If you get an email that looks suspicious, do not download anything either! If in doubt, call the ATO on 13 28 61 to clarify any issues brought up in a suspicious email.

Remember if the email sounds too good to be true, it's probably a scam. (Unless you recieve a text message saying you have won $1 billion dollars - they're generally legit... haha JOKING!)

Example of a Fraudulent email:

From: "Australian Taxation Office" <refunds@ato.com>
Date: 9 March 2012 12:30:45 ACDT
Subject: Important Notification
Reply-To: noreply@ato.com

Australian Taxation Office 09/03/2012 TAX REFUND NOTIFICATION Dear Taxpayer, After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of 254.33 AUD Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it. To access your tax refund, please follow the steps below: .....- download the Tax Refund Form attached to this email .....- open it in a browser .....- follow the instructions on your screen A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline. Regards, Australian Government

Examples of Tax Scams - this link is from the ATO and has a number of tax scam email examples.


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Salary Sacrificing Tax Strategy - Reminder on the Super Contributions changes!

For those that are salary sacrificing contributions into their superannuation, its important to review the concessional contributions cap for this Financial Year (12/13). The cap has decreased for everyone to a maximum of $25,000 in super contributions per financial year.

The concessional contributions cap includes the before-tax payments into your superannuation such as:

• Employer contributions of 9% of your ordinary times earnings
• Any salary sacrificing contributions
• Personal contributions claimed as a tax deduction by a self-employed person

Even if you have more than one super fund, all your contributions into each super fund will count towards the cap.

Last Financial Year (11/12) the cap for people aged over 50 years was $50,000, but this has changed from the 1st July 2012.

So, if you used to contribute more than $25,000 into your super each financial year and haven't decreased your contributions this Financial Year, now is a good time to review as the tax penalties for going over the caps are quite severe.

The extra contributions over $25,000 are taxed at an additional 31.5% plus the 15% before-tax super contributions which totals a tax of 46.5%.

Its important to remain under the contributions cap of $25,000 for salary sacrificing into your superannuation to be an effective tax strategy.

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