If I wait until I’m 55 to sell, can I avoid capital gains tax?

What’s more, there is no capital gains tax on your family home anyway. The advantage of doing this – yes, if you downsize – is simply to get more money into the sweeter-taxed super realm.

Super opportunity 2: After-tax contribution

This is officially known as a non-concessional contribution. You can pay in $120,000 of after-tax money to super in any given financial year. Or you can if you had less than $2 million in super at the end of the previous financial year (called the transfer balance cap).

These contributions make no difference to any capital gains you’ve made. But you might decide you would like to park money in super purely for the tax perks.

Here’s where I think more confusion started, too: you can use “bring-forward” provisions to pay in three years of after-tax allowances at once – or $360,000.

Remember, you will need to wait until you reach so-called super preservation age to regain access to this money. This was only 55 for people born before July 1, 1960 – for you, it’s now 60 (if you retire).

Which brings us to …

Super opportunity 3: Before-tax contributions

The before-tax – or concessional – contributions you can make come in two types: salary sacrifice and personal.

Salary sacrifice contributions are, obviously, the wages ones you pay in through your employer; personal ones are contributions you make yourself and for which you claim a tax deduction.

These can cut your capital gains liability – the amount you contribute to super is lopped off the top of your assessable income.

So how much can you contribute?

However they are made, before-tax contributions plus the 12 per cent superannuation guarantee that your employer pays in for you cannot add to more than $30,000 in the 2025-26 financial year.

But, provided you had less than $500,000 in your super fund at June 30, you can also mop up unused annual allowances going back another five years.

These are known as a “carry-forward” contributions, and the previous five years of allowances add $137,500 to this year’s $30,000, to total $167,500.

That means that you could save the marginal tax on this much of your property profit if you are prepared to lock the money in super until you can access it at 60. (You will just pay the 15 per cent super contributions tax.)

Or you could if you had these full limits left.

You can find out what’s remaining by simply logging into your myGov account, going to the ATO section and selecting “super”, then “information”, then “concessional contributions”.

You need to make the after-tax super contribution in the same financial year as the capital gains tax event and fill out an intent to claim form with your super fund to change it into a before-tax one.

And you can make before-tax and after-tax contributions with your investment property proceeds up to the respective limits – if you qualify, you make that much, and you choose to.

Nicole Pedersen-McKinnon is author of How to Get Mortgage-Free Like Me, available at www.nicolessmartmoney.com. Follow Nicole on Facebook, X and Instagram.

Advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their own personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.

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