Investment Tax Credits

Revanche provides info on her progress in increasing dividend flow from stocks. I can't actually give you that exact information unless I ignored the dividend component of pay outs from managed (mutual) funds, because I haven't kept an exact record of that breakdown, as it isn't needed for tax purposes and doesn't help much for investment management purposes. What I do track is the tax credits associated with dividends. This is a particularly Australian phenomenon. Companies can pass on credit to shareholders for the Australian company tax they paid. These are called "imputation credits" or "franking credits". We can also claim a tax credit for foreign tax withheld on dividends etc. I call the total "investment tax credits". And this is what it has done since the 1997-98 tax year:

There was a big fall off during the Global Financial Crisis, but since then we have seen a steep rise. This year we reached just under AUD 9,000. These credits reduce our tax bill dollar for dollar. We are going to need to multiply this by nine though to wipe out our current tax bill :) It's at about AUD 79k before credits. The yield of tax credits is 1% of the liquid non-retirement assets we have. So, they'd have to reach AUD 8 million to eliminate our current tax bill. That's not going to happen, unfortunately.