It has been a long time coming, but this week I finally made the time to reacquaint myself with how the Family Tax Benefit really works. Having spent a good couple of days looking at government and other websites, it is no surprise to me that many parents have found themselves in the unenviable position of having to pay back excess payments. In recent years there have been so many minor tweaks to the Family Tax Benefit payments and calculations that it is hard to know which numbers and formulae to use. To confuse matters further, there are even discrepancies between government sites on what the numbers are and how they work. Most of the confusion is simply due to the fact that websites and pages simply haven’t been updated, but sometimes it is hard to tell. So, what I want share with you in this article are the bare bones facts that are relevant as at today (March 2018). There may be extra supplements and twists to the calculations that provide you with a better outcome, but what I will discuss here are the core payments. I will break the article into 4 parts What is Family Tax Benefit? …