Tag: Planning

Time to prepare for tax year end April 2016

Fotolia_91134201_XS Advice

Now you have filed your April 2015 Return (50% will have been filed in January 2016) you only have 2 months left to take action to save tax on your April 2016 tax return.

What should you be doing right now to save tax?

Contribute to your Pension

Transitional rules, for 2015/16 only, mean that there’s an annual allowance of £80,000, although only £40,000 of this can be used between 9 July 2015 and 5 April 2016. You may also have unused annual allowances from the three previous tax years.

These Transitional rules are to align PIP’s (Pension Input Periods) with the Tax Year.

Pensions have huge tax saving advantages

How a family pension scheme will save you tax

Optimise your 2015/16 Salary

You can’t carry forward any unused personal allowances so generally the optimum salary will be £10,600

What is the optimum tax efficient salary 2015-16?

Take Dividends now

When you take dividends has never been more critical due to changes in the Summer Budget 2015, so if you have distributable reserves you might want to take more dividends this tax year.

Dividend tax rates before April 2016

Tax band Effective dividend tax rate
Basic rate (20%) (and non-taxpayers) 0%
Higher rate (40%) 25%
Additional rate (45%) 30.56%

 

This will change from April 2016, see the table below

Dividend tax rates after April 2016

Tax band Effective dividend tax rate
Tax Free £5,000 0%
Basic Rate Tax Payers (20%) 7.5%
Higher Rate Tax Payers (40%) 32.5%
 Additional Rate Tax Payers (45%)  38.1%

 

Capital Gains Tax Allowance

Each year individuals get a capital gains tax allowance, this year its £11,100. If you have capital gains it could worth phasing them to use up the capital gains tax allowance.

Here are some great blogs on how you could transfer a personally owned property or sell shares in a property company to take gains in stages

http://stevejbicknell.com/2014/08/13/how-do-you-give-away-property-in-stages/

http://stevejbicknell.com/2015/08/24/5-reasons-why-you-need-a-property-investment-company/

Other Ideas

steve@bicknells.net

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Business Planning made easy with Apps

Apps

A business plan helps you to:

  • clarify your business idea
  • spot potential problems
  • set out your goals
  • measure your progress

 

Businessman get idea

The problem with Business Plans is that they are time consuming to produce, so business owners put off doing them.

But new Apps might change this and make it much easier to produce high quality Business Plans.

http://www.enloop.com/features

There are other Apps too for example..

Business Plan Premier

StratPad

http://www.sage.co.uk/~/media/markets/uk/images/business-advice/infographic-starting-your-business.gif

steve@bicknells.net

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Will automatic planning consent lead to more homes?

Group of construction workers. House renovation.

Housing and home ownership are a top priority in the UK and last week new proposals were announced in the Productivity Plan (see page 11 section 9)

The UK has been incapable of building enough homes to keep up with growing demand. This harms productivity and restricts labour market flexibility, and it frustrates the ambitions of thousands of people who would like to own their own home. The government will:
  • introduce a new zonal system which will effectively give automatic permission on suitable brownfield sites
  • take tougher action to ensure that local authorities are using their powers to get local plans in place and make homes available for local people, intervening to arrange for local plans to be written where necessary
  • bring forward proposals for stronger, fairer compulsory purchase powers, and devolution of major new planning powers to the Mayors of London and Manchester
  • extend the Right to Buy to housing association tenants, and deliver 200,000 Starter Homes for first time buyers
  • restrict tax relief to ensure all individual landlords get the same level of tax relief for their finance costs

Automatic planning consent on Brownfield sites, when approved, follows a number of other important incentives such as the Starter Homes initiative 20% discount.

The 20% discount is achieved by waiving local authority fees for homebuilders of at least £45,000 per dwelling on brownfield sites.

At the heart of the Starter Homes initiative is a change to the planning system. This will allow house builders to develop under-used or unviable brownfield land and free them from planning costs and levies. In return, they will be able to offer homes at a minimum 20% discount exclusively to first time buyers, under the age of forty.  Under the proposals, developers offering Starter Homes would be exempt from those Section 106 charges and Community Infrastructure Levy charges. The homes could then not be re-sold at market value for a fixed period – making sure that the savings are passed onto homebuyers.Gov.uk

To qualify first time buyers must be under the age of 40 and living in England.

Also the Help to Buy ISA for first time buyers where they could qualify for a £3,000 bonus

Help to Buy ISA

There is also the Help to Scheme where home buyers may only need a 5% deposit

With a Help to Buy: equity loan the Government lends you up to 20% of the cost of your new-build home, so you’ll only need a 5% cash deposit and a 75% mortgage to make up the rest.

You won’t be charged loan fees on the 20% loan for the first five years of owning your home.

– See more at: http://www.helptobuy.org.uk/equity-loan/equity-loans#sthash.Vna08ZpX.dpuf

steve@bicknells.net