Yes, an Estate could sell the shares and pay the CGT and distributed the money. "Discounted" capital gain was in the region of $750-800k. A lot of tax to pay.
But his will stated that 1/4 of his CBA and NAB went to each of the 4 beneficiaries. It was set up this way, so the following happened.
By distribution the shares in the will, each beneficiary receives the shares and pays no CGT. The situation then is - you receive the shares; no tax is paid at that time. The beneficiary's "date of purchase" is the date of death of the deceased and the beneficiary's "cost price" is the deceased person buy/cost price. The beneficiary needs to hold the shares for more than 12 mths from date of death to qualify for CGT discount in the future. When that person sells the shares then CGT applies then. My younger daughter still has the WOW shares she inherited from my father in 2006. He bought them in the WOW float from IEL in 1993 for $2.40.
We have not paid any CGT on the shares we have sold recently, as we have set the capital gains off against capital losses carried forward. The will was partly set up to achieve this. A lot of thinking needs to go into wills.
As you say each person can have very different circumstances to other people. I was just trying to point that out to the person who was pushing to sell when price is high. I'm a useless trader so I have learnt to just hold. Spent many a day/weeks/months looking at the computer screen trying to make money. More to life than that. Cheers - sorry to everyone for going on about all of this.
CBA Price at posting:
$142.09 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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