You will need to work with your accountant and lawyer to draw up the documents and work out the legal structures.

Hope this helps!

If you live and breath Permaculture (as Bill Mollison does, I think…), then you WILL end up giving all the profits from the trading trust to the charitable trust and thus have no personal income to report. Still, you are paying land taxes and purchased taxes, so you give to the system where it’s due.

And good solid advice is always helpful. Thank you for bringing up this point, it’s definitely important!

Saying that a trust isn’t required to pay income tax is a bit of a furphy. Trusts never make a profit (they MUST pass on all profit to beneficiaries every financial year), so of course there’s never any tax to pay. The beneficiaries, however, must declare the income and will pay tax on it.

Doing “clever” things with trusts as outlined in chapter 14 (e.g. having one trust be a beneficiary of another, and donating between trusts) requires that you know exactly what you’re doing. If you transfer money (or property) in the wrong way, or at the wrong time, you can cause yourself a lot of grief and end up with tax problems.

Not saying trusts aren’t useful tools, just that you need to have very good advice – and follow it!