Tax planning

Tax planning: keeping more of what you've earned, without anything clever

Most people don't lose money to tax through anything complicated. They lose it to deadlines they didn't know were there.

An ISA allowance that expires on 5 April. A pension contribution that would have saved higher-rate tax and didn't get made. A gain taken in March that should have waited until April. Money drawn from the wrong pot in the wrong order.

None of it is aggressive. None of it is clever. It's the allowances Parliament and HMRC set outwrote down, used in the right order at the right time.

Where it goes wrong

Allowances that expire. ISA allowance, pension annual allowance, capital gains exemption, dividend allowance, gift exemptions. Each runs on a calendar, and each disappears at midnight on 5 April whether or not you used it. There's no carrying most of them forward.

Drawing in the wrong order. In retirement, the question of which pot to take money from first changes the tax you pay over twenty years, sometimes by a great deal. Pension, ISA, general investment account and cash are all taxed differently. Most people draw from whichever feels easiest.

Thresholds nobody sees coming. The personal allowance tapers away between £100,000 and £125,140, creating an effective marginal rate most people would find hard to believe. Child benefit claws back. Higher rates arrive without a letter. These are the points where a small change in income has a disproportionate effect.

Gains taken without a plan. The capital gains exemption has been cut repeatedly. Selling in one lump rather than across two tax years, or without using a spouse's allowance, is a common and expensive habit.

What we do

We look at your income, your assets, and what you're likely to need over the next few years, then work out the order and timing that costs you least.

Sometimes that's using allowances you didn't know you had. Sometimes it's moving money between spouses so both sets of allowances get used. Sometimes it's changing when you take income rather than how much. For company directors, it's usually the balance between salary, dividends and pension contributions.

We don't build schemes. We use the reliefs that exist, properly, and keep a record of why each decision was made.

Two things this page doesn't cover

Inheritance tax has its own rules and its own timescales, and the April 2027 pension change has reopened questions a lot of people thought were settled.

Tax-efficient investing, including ISAs, bonds and the more specialist reliefs, sits alongside your investment planning.

The point of it

Tax planning is not about paying nothing. It's about not paying more than the rules require through inattention.

The money saved isn't a number on a spreadsheet. It's the extra year you could stop working. It's the help you can give your children without it costing you the holiday. It's the difference between a plan that works and one that nearly does.

Tax rules change, and a plan built on today's allowances may need revisiting. We'll make sure you understand the downsides as well as the benefits before you commit to anything.