Experience that counts

Lilliputian Financial Services principal Matthew Perry is an ATO-trained accountant and strictly fee for service financial planner with over twelve years’ experience specialising in servicing the financial needs of medical and dental practitioners. Prior to setting up Lilliputian Financial Services in 2014, he was a director of one of Australia’s largest medical-dental accounting/tax/financial planning firms. He has advised hundreds of medical and dental practitioners on the following topics:

 

 

• Efficient practice business structure
• Practice purchase and sale
• Personal services income versus business income
• Tax deductions for multiple cars, including cars with zero business use
• Correct way to engage non-owner practitioners
• Minimising or eliminating Payroll Tax
• Optimal use of trusts and investment companies for asset protection and tax efficiency
• How to ensure government grants are received tax-free
• Using superannuation to reduce tax and build wealth
• Self-managed superannuation funds including buying or transferring practice premises with or without borrowing arrangements
• Simple, effective, low cost and commission-free investment portfolio construction
• Life insurance, income protection and critical illness insurance with no commissions

Matthew draws on a total of over 30 years' experience when advising clients, having commenced work as a teenager in the ATO in 1980. When the superannuation laws changed in the mid-80s (a reform that paved the way for the current superannuation rules), he was asked to specialise in implementing the new law and provide advice on more complex situations to the Victorian Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, as well as federal politicians, Judges and CEOs of public companies. He also gave presentations to administrators of superannuation funds and to the staff of federal public service departments on how the new laws would affect redundancies.

After leaving the ATO in 1987, Matthew became a practitioner in a public accounting firm. In the wake of the 1987 share market crash, Matthew also became a financial planner after being dismayed at how clients were being treated by commission-driven salespeople masquerading as financial advisers. He then set up his own public accounting practice and provided accounting, tax and financial planning services to a range of clients working in various industries prior to making a decision in 2006 to specialise in servicing the medical and dental professions.