21 Nov 2023

Your pension is going up -but will you need to pay tax on it?Things are happening at present which could soon mean your tax situation is more complicated than it was in the past. Two particular factors are worth consideration. Firstly, interest rates have gone up in recent times – 14 times since December 2021; the

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Posted by Jon Lawson
4 Oct 2023

In recent years, property has been viewed as an ideal investment asset. In 1980, the average house sold for just £19,273. That compares to £239,927 in 2020 – a staggering 1,145 percent increase. Against that backdrop some investors have begun to assume that property prices only move in one direction: up.And this seemed true, for

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Posted by Jon Lawson
7 Jun 2023

WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS? Inheritance tax aka iceberg tax Here at FiveWays we sometimes refer to inheritance tax (IHT) as an iceberg tax. You don’t always see it coming, but there can be a whole lot of trouble hidden beneath the surface.The first rule of IHT is that you do not usually have to pay it

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Posted by Jon Lawson
22 Mar 2023

Analysing the…Budget for GrowthThe Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Budget last Wednesday (15 March) had one overarching goal: to steady the ship of the British economy amidst banking turmoil in the United States.Hunt’s Budget also provided an opportunity for the Chancellor to distance himself from the disastrous ‘mini’ budget of his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng back in September.Therefore,

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Posted by Jon Lawson
25 Jan 2023

New Year, New Taxes:How to Navigate New Capital Gains Rules Benjamin Franklin famously said ‘Nothing is certain except death and taxes.’ Tax is a part of life, and this year most of us are all going to be paying more of it. Britain has entered a high tax era and it is important for financial

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Posted by Jon Lawson
1 Dec 2021

At the start of 2020, many commentators predicted flat or slightly declining house prices over the year as we waited to see what kind of Brexit trade deal the government struck with the EU. When the pandemic struck and we entered lockdown, the consensus was that prices would fall. Yet as soon as the market opened up in July, when viewings and transactions were permitted again, prices started to rise and in some areas it seems they have risen quite strongly.

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Posted by Jon Lawson
21 Sep 2021

On the 7th September 2021 Boris Johnson made a statement on the long-awaited changes to paying for Long Term Care and funding for the NHS

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Posted by Ian Evans
6 Mar 2021

You might think that a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer would regard his Budget as a success if it was enthusiastically welcomed by the Daily Telegraph. But a Chancellor always has other important audiences. How will they respond to Rishi Sunak’s Budget?

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Posted by Chris Gilchrist
4 Mar 2021

Rishi Sunak wants to be seen as Honest John Chancellor. So he was at pains to signal the big tax rises proposed for 2023-25 – an extra £8 billion a year in income tax and £17 billion a year in corporation tax.

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Posted by Chris Gilchrist
7 Dec 2020

In his Autumn statement, Rishi Sunak reiterated a timeworn Chancellor’s pledge to restore the public finances. Notably, he declared that the financial emergency had only just begun and that public borrowing and debt were clearly unsustainable. These statements, Treasury briefings and forecasts by the Office for Budgetary Responsibility have led analysts to start working out how much taxes need to increase in order to plug a gap of about £40 billion between the government’s revenues and its spending that is expected by 2025. Income tax, National Insurance, VAT, capital gains tax, inheritance tax – which will go up?

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Posted by Chris Gilchrist
9 Jul 2020

Chancellor Rishi Sunak made his July mini-budget seem bigger than it was. But the real new spending he announced was not worth £30 billion but about £20 billion, and this is based on optimistic estimates of job recovery. If that sounds a lot, bear in mind that the government has actually spent £160 billion so far on anti-COVID measures and allocated a further £122 billion to loans and guarantees. And consider that the government has allocated an astounding £15 billion to purchases of protective equipment – more than annual spending on policing in England and Wales – and £10 billion to its test-and-trace scheme.

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Posted by Chris Gilchrist
13 Feb 2018

Budgets are usually much more political than economic. Chancellor Philip Hammond – referred to in Westminster as ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ – is generally seen as a dullish ‘safe pair of hands’ type of chap. But it seems his political antennae are on the blink. He is getting it in the neck not just from the left-leaning media but from from the Tory press (especially the Daily Telegraph) and his own Conservative Party backbenchers, many of whom want him to backtrack on two tax changes he announced in his Budget.

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Posted by Jim Bloodworth
13 Feb 2018

Almost any day some news programme or newspaper carries an item about the crisis in care. NHS chiefs complain about bed-blocking by patients who cannot be discharged because social services cannot find accommodation for them. Care homes teeter on the verge of bankruptcy because the rate local authorities pay them is barely enough and costs have risen due to the Minimum Living Wage. Local authorities’ increasingly desperate pleas for more money from the government have had no response.

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Posted by Jim Bloodworth
18 Jan 2018

In his Spring Budget, Chancellor Philip Hammond reduced the tax-free dividend allowance from £5,000 a year to £2,000 with effect from April 2018. The change came only a year after his predecessor George Osborne had changed the way dividends are taxed and introduced the £5,000 allowance.

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Posted by Jim Bloodworth
18 Jan 2018

From April 2017, we have a new complexity in the tax system to cope with: the Residential Nil Rate Band. This is not down to our current Chancellor Mr Hammond: it was introduced by George Osborne in 2015 as a way of fulfilling a Tory manifesto promise to raise the Inheritance Tax threshold to £1 million without actually raising the tax threshold itself.

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Posted by Jim Bloodworth