Lowensteins ‘2018 Year in review’

Written by: Evan Lowenstein

2018 has been a very busy year here at Lowensteins. With over 3000 clients all over Australia, it is important to take some time to reflect on what we have achieved.
Lowensteins has striven to offer our best service and quality advice to our clients.
This focus on quality of service has reaped its rewards with a huge increase in new clients coming through the door.
We have lots of additional clients from the Film and TV world and lots of creatives from behind the scenes in theatre and music. Dancers, musicians, actors, stage hands, journalists, weather and traffic reporters are amongst the many occupational groups who have joined our family.
Lowensteins’ outreach program – where I go out to give lectures to many tertiary, university and TAFE students across Australia – has borne fruit. Our scholarship program – which awards scholarships to graduating visual arts students from four tertiary art schools – has also added to Lowensteins’ profile as the pre-eminent financial advisers to the world of arts.
One of my big tax wins for a client was to ensure that a large prize awarded by an international organisation to a wonderful indigenous poet was treated as tax-free by virtue of a private ruling application to the ATO.
This resulted in massive tax savings for the writer and has enabled the client to spend this money on the development of her career.
The other development has been our increasing relationship with SMSFWorks, our superannuation specialists.
Very early on in the piece we realised that superannuation is an area that needed some additional focus because more and more of our clients were approaching retirement age and required some expert service. They can now avail themselves of this expertise within our office by contacting Adam Micmacher, who is managing our excellent service in this growing area.
We also now provide bookkeeping services to our clients to prepare their year end accounts and business activity statements. These fully-integrated services are delivered by Anne, our in-house bookkeeper.
Our expertise in advising on deceased estates and, in particular, the art held in these trusts has also been a growing area. Our Founding Partner, Tom Lowenstein, has many decades of experience in advising artists and their families about trust provisions and estates. Now his authority, combined with the professional skills of our other partner, Adam Micmacher, we have a great team in place.
Please contact me if you would like to avail yourself of any of these additional services.
See also: Lowensteins Announces Prize winners for 2018