The 45-day rule is the ATO's gate on franking credit entitlement: hold the shares at risk for at least 45 days around the ex-date, and be at risk of at least 10 percent of the dividend. Small shareholders with under $5,000 of credits a year are exempt.

45-Day Holding Rule

An account-based pension turns your super into a flexible retirement income stream: you choose how much to draw above the legislated minimums, earnings are tax-free, and the account lasts until it runs out. It does not guarantee income for life - that is what an annuity is for.

Account-Based Pension

After-hours trading is buying and selling outside the exchange's main session - routine in the US, barely existing for ASX retail investors. Overnight news lands in the opening auction, and the gap is the session you did not trade.

After-Hours Trading

The Age Pension is a fortnightly payment from Services Australia for Australians 67 and over, means-tested against your income and your assets. It is the safety net under your super - and the means tests are the reason your home, your drawdown rate and your asset mix all interact.

Age Pension

Allocated pension is the legacy name for an account-based pension - a super account that pays a regular income in retirement with minimum drawdowns by age band. If your paperwork says allocated pension, it maps to the same product the modern rules govern.

Allocated Pension

Alpha is the return a fund delivers above its benchmark after fees - the excess active management promises and the index skips by definition. Measured net of fees and risk-adjusted, it is rarer than the marketing suggests.

Alpha

Ambulance cover is the membership or policy that pays emergency ambulance transport, which Medicare does not cover and which states bill differently. Queensland and Tasmania cover it through their schemes; everywhere else bills roughly $1,000 to $2,000 a transport, and the call-out fee alone is hundreds.

Ambulance Cover

Anchoring is the bias where the first number you see sets the band every later number is judged against - in property, the listing price, the agent's price guide and the first offer all anchor the negotiation. The comparables do not care what the anchor is.

Anchoring

An annuity is a product that turns a lump sum into guaranteed income for a fixed period or for life - certainty the account-based pension does not offer. The trade is flexibility: the capital is locked and the payments rarely move.

Annuity

ASIC bans and disqualifies financial advisers and directors who break the rules, and publishes both on public registers anyone can search. The register takes ten minutes to check; the bad advice takes years to unwind.

ASIC Disqualification Orders

An asset class is a category of investment with its own risk and return profile: cash, fixed income, equities, property and alternatives. The split across classes - not the individual picks - is the biggest driver of your long-term results.

Asset Class

The auction clearance rate is the percentage of auctions that sell on the day or shortly after - the weekly sentiment dial for the property market. Above 70 percent is a hot seller's market; below 60 percent is a buyer's market.

Auction Clearance Rate

A Part IX Debt Agreement is a formal, legally binding repayment plan with unsecured creditors, administered by AFSA under the Bankruptcy Act. Full bankruptcy is the heavier alternative - assets vest in a trustee, the listing is permanent, and the income contributions run at half the excess above the threshold.

Bankruptcy vs Part IX

A bear market is a sustained fall of 20 percent or more from a high - the ASX lost more than half in the GFC and a third in five weeks in 2020. The market recovers; the balances that panic-sold often do not.

Bear Market

Beta measures how much a holding moves when the market moves - a beta of 1.5 amplifies the index's swings by half again. It is a backward-looking statistic, not a promise, and it prices direction, not safety.

Beta

A binding death nomination tells your super fund exactly who receives your super when you die - and super is not covered by your will. The nomination lapses every three years unless your fund offers non-lapsing ones, and an expired one returns the decision to the trustee.

Binding Death Nomination

A blue chip is a large, established, consistently profitable company - the ASX 20 names like CBA, CSL and BHP. The label implies safety, which is exactly the part the GFC and every sector shock since has disputed.

Blue Chip

Strata levies are the quarterly fees every apartment owner pays into the owners corporation - the administrative fund for the day-to-day and the sinking fund for the roof, the lift and the painting. They run from roughly $3,000 to $10,000 a year, and they are the cost the listing never quotes.

Body Corporate / Strata

Bond yield is the return a bond pays relative to its price - the coupon divided by price, climbing as the price falls. When yields rise, prices fall: the same event, two invoices.

Bond Yield

A bond is a loan to a government or company that pays a fixed coupon and returns the face value at maturity. Lower volatility than shares, lower long-run return, and real price risk whenever rates move.

Bonds

Break costs are the fee a bank charges for exiting a fixed-rate home loan early - the bank's economic loss when your fixed rate is above the rate it could lend at today. They can run into five figures, and the trigger is a falling rate you did not predict.

Break Costs

Bridging finance is a short-term, interest-only loan that covers the gap between buying your next property and selling the current one. The lender assesses the combined 'peak debt', capitalises the interest during the bridge, and prices it at a premium to the standard variable rate.

Bridging Finance

A broker is the intermediary between you and the share market - full-service with advice at premium fees, or online with cheap trades. In Australia, how they hold your shares matters as much as what they charge.

Broker

A bucket company is a private company used to cap trust distributions at the 30 percent company rate instead of a beneficiary's marginal rate. The tax is capped, the money stays in the company until dividend, and Division 7A polices everything else.

Bucket Company

A bull market is a sustained rise of 20 percent or more from a low, powered by optimism and carried by rising prices. It delivers most of the long-run return - and it is also where the worst decisions are made.

Bull Market

Buy now pay later splits a purchase into instalments - usually interest-free, always fee-charging - with the money leaving your account over weeks or months. It is credit by another name: applications and late payments now show on your credit report.

Buy Now Pay Later

A buy-write strategy buys shares and sells call options over them, collecting the premium as extra income. The income is real and the upside is capped at the strike price plus the premium - the trade-off in one line.

Buy-Write Strategy

Capital Gains Tax is the tax the ATO applies when you sell an asset for more than you paid for it. The gain joins your taxable income at your marginal rate - and half of it disappears if you held the asset over twelve months.

Capital Gains Tax

A capital loss is the realised loss on an asset sold below its cost base. It offsets capital gains - in the same year or carried forward indefinitely - and never touches salary, dividends or rent.

Capital Loss

Carry-forward contributions let you spend unused concessional cap from up to five earlier years in one lump. The gate is a total super balance under $500,000, and the reward is a big deduction taxed at 15 percent instead of your marginal rate.

Carry-Forward Contributions

The cash rate is the interest rate the Reserve Bank charges commercial banks for overnight borrowing, and it is the lever behind every mortgage, HISA and term deposit rate in Australia. When the RBA moves it, your loan reprices within weeks.

Cash Rate

CHESS sponsorship means your shares are registered on the ASX's official subregister under your own holder identification number - a HIN. If a broker folds, the HIN moves to another broker in days and the shares were always legally yours.

CHESS Sponsorship

The Commonwealth Seniors Health Card is a concession card for people at Age Pension age who miss the pension on means testing. There is no assets test - the income test counts your work income and deems your financial assets, and account-based pension payments don't count as income at all.

Commonwealth Seniors Health Card

The company tax rate is 25 percent for base rate entities - most small companies - and 30 percent for everyone else, flat regardless of profit size. It is the anchor for franking, and the reason company profits can be tax-deferred, never tax-free.

Company Tax Rate

A comparison rate is the single annual rate that folds a loan's advertised rate and most of its fees into one number, which Australian law requires in every consumer loan advertisement. It is the true-cost number the headline rate is designed to distract you from.

Comparison Rate

Compound interest is earning interest on both your original principal and the interest that principal has already accrued. It is the single most reliable mechanism I have for turning modest, regular savings into something worth opening a calculator at 2:13 AM for.

Compound Interest

Concessional contributions are before-tax super contributions - employer guarantee, salary sacrifice and deductible personal contributions - taxed at 15 percent inside the fund. The annual cap is $30,000, and the cap is where the planning happens.

Concessional Contributions

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out, believe and remember information that agrees with what you already hold, and to dismiss the rest. Stock forums are the purest amplifier: the thread that confirms the holding gets upvoted, and the sceptic gets piled on.

Confirmation Bias

A construction loan funds a build in stages rather than one lump - the lender pays each progress payment as the builder completes it. Interest runs on what is drawn, and the full repayments start when the build does.

Construction Loan

Conveyancing is the legal process of transferring a property from seller to buyer - contract, searches, cooling-off and settlement. The paperwork is boring, the searches are the value, and the auction skips the safety net entirely.

Conveyancing

Correlation measures how closely two assets move together, from +1 (identical) to -1 (opposite). Diversification works by combining low correlations - and fails in panics, when the correlations rise toward one.

Correlation

The CPI basket is the fixed trolley of goods and services the ABS prices every quarter to measure inflation - housing, food, transport and the rest, weighted by what households actually spend. It is the average, not your bill, and the weights decide the headline.

CPI Basket

A credit rating is a rating agency's opinion on a borrower's ability to repay its debt, graded from AAA down to D. Investment grade stops at BBB minus, and everything below pays a yield premium for the risk.

Credit Rating

A credit score is the number lenders use to price your risk, calculated from your repayment history, debts and applications on a scale of zero to 1,000 or 1,200. Two bureaus hold it, it is free to check every three months, and late payments live on it for years.

Credit Score

The current account is the balance of payments line that nets trade in goods and services against the income flows to and from the world - the dividends and interest Australia pays its foreign lenders. The trade surplus is the headline; the income deficit is the part that runs the other way.

Current Account

A custodian model broker holds your shares in the broker's name rather than on the CHESS subregister under your own HIN. It works fine until a broker folds, a transfer is needed, or the register question is finally asked.

Custodian Model Broker

Debt consolidation rolls several debts into one loan at a lower rate - usually credit cards at 20 percent into a personal loan or the mortgage. It only saves money if the rate drops, the term stays short, and the spending stops.

Debt Consolidation

Deeming rates are the rates Services Australia assumes your financial investments earn, regardless of what they actually earn, when means-testing the Age Pension. The actual interest is irrelevant; the assumed rate - 1.75 and 3.75 percent - decides the pension.

Deeming Rates

A depreciation schedule is the quantity surveyor's report that claims the wear on an investment property - Division 40 for the fixtures and Division 43 for the building itself. It is the deduction most landlords leave unclaimed, and it costs roughly $700 to buy.

Depreciation Schedule

A discretionary trust - the family trust - is a structure that holds assets and lets the trustee decide each year which beneficiaries receive the income. The flexibility is the point; the 47 percent top rate on undistributed income is the price of forgetting to distribute.

Discretionary Trust

Diversification is spreading your money across assets that do not move together, so no single failure takes the portfolio down. It is the only free lunch in investing - and the ASX's bank-and-miner concentration is the reason Australian investors need it most.

Diversification

A dividend is a company paying part of its profit to shareholders, usually cash, twice a year for most ASX companies. It is the income leg of a share's total return - and it arrives with a tax treatment attached.

Dividend

A dividend aristocrat is a company that has raised its dividend for 25 consecutive years or more - consistency as a business model. The label is American; the Australian equivalent is a screen, not an index, and the banks cut in downturns.

Dividend Aristocrat

Dividend imputation is the system that stops company profits being taxed twice in Australia. Companies attach franking credits to dividends, and the ATO credits them against your tax bill - the twist that makes the same dividend worth different amounts to different taxpayers.

Dividend Imputation

The dividend payout ratio is the share of a company's profit paid out as dividends - the number that says whether the dividend survives a bad year. High payout means high yield today and less resilience tomorrow.

Dividend Payout Ratio

A dividend reinvestment plan takes your dividends as extra shares instead of cash, buying more units automatically at zero brokerage. It is dollar-cost averaging the company runs for you - and the tax bill arrives as if the cash had.

Dividend Reinvestment Plan

The dividend yield is the annual dividend divided by the share price - the income a share pays as a percentage of what it costs. It is a ratio, which means the denominator is doing half the work.

Dividend Yield

Division 293 tax is an extra 15 percent on concessional super contributions for high income earners - income for surcharge purposes plus contributions above $250,000. The assessment arrives after your tax return, and the contributions themselves count in the threshold.

Division 293 Tax

Dollar-cost averaging is investing a fixed amount on a fixed schedule regardless of price, so you automatically buy more units when prices are low and fewer when they are high. Your pay cycle already runs the strategy - most people just have not noticed.

Dollar-Cost Averaging

A downsizer contribution lets you put up to $300,000 of your home sale proceeds into super - $600,000 as a couple - without counting against the usual caps. You must be 55 or older, the home must have been yours for ten years, and the money must land within 90 days of settlement.

Downsizer Contribution

A drawdown is the fall from a peak to a trough before recovery - the max drawdown is the worst ride your portfolio ever printed. It measures the pain, not the average.

Drawdown

Duration measures how sensitive a bond's price is to interest rate moves - a duration of 8 means roughly an 8 percent price fall for every 1 percent rates rise. Longer duration, bigger swings.

Duration

Earnings per share is a company's net profit divided by its share count - the per-share earnings the P/E ratio multiplies. It is the denominator of every valuation story, and buybacks move it without a dollar of growth.

Earnings Per Share

An emergency fund is three to six months of essential expenses held in cash you can reach the same day, sitting in a savings account rather than an investment. It is the buffer that keeps a bad month from becoming a bad decision.

Emergency Fund

Excess contributions tax is what happens when concessional contributions pass the annual cap - $32,500 for 2026-27 - and the excess is taxed at your marginal rate, not 15 percent. Since 2021 there is no interest charge, but the extra tax lands in your next return either way.

Excess Contributions Tax

Exchange traded bonds - XTBs - are ASX-listed units that give retail investors access to wholesale bonds, matching the underlying bond's coupon and maturity. They trade like shares and carry the credit and price risk of the bond inside.

Exchange Traded Bonds

An exchange traded managed fund is an actively managed fund that trades on the ASX like an ETF - a manager picking the holdings, wrapped in exchange-traded plumbing. In Australia they are usually just called active ETFs.

Exchange Traded Managed Fund

An exchange-traded fund is an index fund that trades on the ASX like a share, priced continuously through the day. It is the wrapping, not the strategy - and the cheapest way most Australians can own a diversified portfolio.

Exchange-Traded Fund

Family Tax Benefit is Services Australia's means-tested payment for families with dependent children, paid in fortnightly instalments. Part A is paid per child and Part B supports single parents and one-income couples, with both reconciled against your actual income after the tax return.

Family Tax Benefit

FOMO investing is buying because everyone else is, at the moment everyone else is buying - the group chat euphoria, the barbecue tip, the auction fever. It is the entry price paid at the top, and the cycles record the tuition.

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

FIRE - financial independence, retire early - is the movement of saving aggressively to build a portfolio worth roughly 25 times your annual spending, then living on it. The arithmetic is simple; the saving is the hard part, and super is locked until 60.

FIRE

The First Home Guarantee - now the Australian Government 5% Deposit Scheme - lets first-home buyers purchase with a 5 percent deposit and no lenders mortgage insurance. The government guarantees the lender the shortfall to 80 percent, and the premium you never pay runs to five figures.

First Home Guarantee

The First Home Super Saver Scheme lets you save a home deposit inside super - up to $15,000 a year and $50,000 in voluntary contributions - and withdraw it taxed at your marginal rate minus a 30 percent offset. The 15 percent envelope does the work.

First Home Super Saver Scheme

Fiscal policy is the government's spending and taxation - the budget's deficits and surpluses - and it is the lever the treasurer holds while the RBA holds the cash rate. Deficits are borrowed rather than taxed, and the bill lands as interest in future budgets.

Fiscal Policy

Fixed vs variable is the choice between a mortgage rate locked for one to five years and one that moves with the market. Certainty costs you break risk; flexibility costs you volatility - and the wrong guess is expensive either way.

Fixed vs Variable Rate

A franking account is the company-side ledger that tracks tax paid and available to frank dividends - every dollar of company tax adds a credit, and every franked dividend spends one. The account is the constraint on franking, and over-franking triggers franking deficit tax.

Franking Account

Franking credits are the tax a company has already paid on your dividend, attached so the same profit is not taxed twice. At low marginal rates the credits come back as a refund - the part of the system most people miss.

Franking Credits

Free float is the portion of a company's shares actually available to trade - excluding government stakes, strategic holdings and locked-up shares. Index weights are built on it, and the liquidity of the stock is a function of it.

Free Float

Future value is what today's money becomes at a given rate over a given time - compounding run forward. It is the arithmetic behind every super projection and every 'start now' argument, including mine.

Future Value

GDP is the total value of goods and services an economy produces, published quarterly by the ABS. It is the headline the radio quotes - and the per-capita version, which divides by population, is the one that says whether the average household is actually ahead.

Growth investing buys earnings that are expanding fast; value investing buys companies priced below what they are worth. The styles rotate in multi-year cycles - and neither one wins forever, which is the part the backtests skip.

Growth vs Value Investing

GST registration is mandatory once turnover passes $75,000 - 10 percent added to most sales, collected for the ATO, and lodged on the BAS. Registering late means the GST is owed anyway, out of the margin that never priced it.

GST Registration

A guarantor loan is a home loan where a family member - usually a parent - uses the equity in their own home as extra security so you can buy with a small deposit. The guarantee protects the bank; the risk sits with the guarantor.

Guarantor Loan

HECS-HELP indexation adjusts your student debt to inflation every June, so a balance you are not repaying still grows. It is compound interest working for the government, at CPI, whether you are earning or not.

HECS-HELP Indexation

The HELP repayment threshold is the income level where compulsory student loan repayments start - $69,528 for 2026-27, with 15 cents in the dollar charged above it. The repayments are marginal, the threshold is indexed every year, and salary sacrifice does not dodge the test.

HELP Repayment Threshold

The HELP family is the ATO's collection of student loan schemes - HECS-HELP for Commonwealth supported places, FEE-HELP and VET Student Loans for full-fee courses, OS-HELP for overseas study, and the legacy SFSS. The debts combine into one balance, index together each June, and repay through the same threshold.

HELP vs SFSS vs OS-HELP

Herd mentality is buying because everyone is buying and selling because everyone is selling - price action treated as evidence. The crowd is the signal everyone reads, and the crowd is always largest at the price where the risk is highest.

Herd Mentality

Home equity is the difference between what your property is worth and what you owe on it - usable equity is the slice a lender will actually let you borrow against, typically capped at 80 percent of the value. It is the part of the mortgage you have already paid, plus the growth you have banked.

Home Equity

Hybrid securities - bank capital notes and convertible notes - sit between debt and equity, paying franked distributions above deposit rates. The tail risk is the conversion to equity, and the Financial Claims Scheme does not cover them.

Hybrid Securities

Income protection insurance replaces up to 70 percent of your income if illness or injury stops you working. It is the policy that pays the mortgage while you cannot - and the waiting period is the part that decides whether it works.

Income Protection Insurance

An index fund buys the whole market in the weights the index sets, for a fee measured in fractions of a percent. It is the boring option the SPIVA scorecards keep proving right.

Index Fund

Inflation is the rate at which prices rise, measured by the Consumer Price Index, and the RBA targets a 2-3 percent band. It is the invisible tax on every cash balance you hold - and the reason a savings account that pays nothing is losing money.

Inflation

Infrastructure investing means owning the toll roads, airports, utilities and transmission grids that everything else runs on top of. The cash flows are regulated, long-dated and often inflation-linked - steadier than shares, slower too.

Infrastructure Investing

An initial public offering is the moment a private company lists on the ASX and sells shares to the public for the first time. The prospectus sets the price; the market sets everything after that - and many floats trade below it within a year.

Initial Public Offering

Input tax credits are the GST a GST-registered business claims back on its purchases, offset against the GST it collects on the same BAS. The credit is the second half of the GST system - the first half is the divide-by-11 you collect.

Input Tax Credits

Instalment warrants are ASX-listed warrants that let you buy a share by paying part of the price now, with a built-in loan covering the rest. Dividends flow to you, franking included, and the gearing is the loan inside the instrument.

Instalment Warrants

The instant asset write-off lets a small business deduct the full cost of an asset in the year it is first used, instead of depreciating it over a decade. The threshold changes almost yearly - checking the current figure is the entire compliance task.

Instant Asset Write-Off

The insurance excess is the amount you pay per claim before the insurer pays anything - and raising it is the cheapest premium cut on the market. The trade only works if the buffer behind the excess exists.

Insurance Excess

Insurance inside super is life, TPD and income protection cover paid for from your super balance instead of your take-home pay. Default cover starts automatically at 25, the premiums come out of your balance, and the cover can end when the account goes quiet.

Insurance Inside Super

An interest rate is the price of money: what you earn for lending it and what you pay for borrowing it. The RBA's cash rate sits at the top of the chain, and every savings account and variable mortgage in Australia moves with it.

The Glossary