As budget day approaches, the volume of rumour, speculation and mistruth is stepping up in traditional fashion.<\/p>\n
Of course, there are the old favourites (you know, the things that the media report ‘might’ happen in the budget every single year, but never seem to actually occur) such as the removal of the 25% tax-free cash on pensions and restrictions to pension tax relief (for what it’s worth, I don’t believe\u00a0we are likely to see either at this coming budget).<\/p>\n
Then we have the two new rumours that seem to be doing the rounds, namely the alignment\u00a0of Capital Gains Tax rates with Income Tax rates and some kind of root and branch reform of Inheritance Tax.<\/p>\n
For what it’s worth, once again, I believe\u00a0that both are unlikely to materialise in a few weeks’ time. The reason for this is that almost all suggestions in this respect would require pretty much a complete rewrite\u00a0of that particular part of the tax system and a whole raft of changes to HMRC IT systems – projects that could take years to complete at the best of times.<\/p>\n
That’s not to say that we won’t see some changes to the tax system (the freezing of the personal allowance and basic rate tax band are looking likely at this stage) however, the point is that no one (myself included) really knows other than the Chancellor himself, and even he would not have completely made his mind up at this stage because the budget document is often only finalised in the days leading up to the budget announcement\u00a0itself.<\/p>\n
What I am trying to get at is that it’s important not to delay planning because of what ‘might’ be coming in the budget. There will always be some big financial event on the horizon to wait for (after this budget, I suspect there will be another in the autumn and then in the spring again).<\/p>\n
If you are planning on taking some action that might be impacted by a forthcoming budget, can it be a good idea to\u00a0accelerate<\/em>\u00a0that action – yes absolutely. After all, if you are planning on doing something anyway, why not get it done and then you know where you stand.<\/p>\n However, I would strongly discourage\u00a0people from\u00a0delaying<\/em>\u00a0action based on what\u00a0might<\/em>\u00a0be included in this budget or the next one or the one after that. I have seen too many examples of families learning this lesson the hard way.<\/p>\n It is frustrating enough looking back and thinking that you should have done something historically that you have never thought of before. But, when you look back on today a year from now, how would you feel if you knew that you should have taken action, but didn’t for whatever reason.<\/p>\n The old rules of financial planning say that we plan based on current and\u00a0known<\/strong>\u00a0future tax changes and then we adjust the plan to take any\u00a0future<\/strong>\u00a0unknown\u00a0<\/strong>changes into account. That rule is just as valid in the run up to a budget as at any other time of the year in my view!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As budget day approaches, the volume of rumour, speculation and mistruth is stepping up in traditional fashion. Of course, there are the old favourites (you know, the things that the media report ‘might’ happen in the budget every single year, but never seem to actually occur) such as the removal of the 25% tax-free cash… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,11,18,6,17,9,5,13,2,19,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-estate-planning","category-financial-planning","category-inheritance-tax","category-investments","category-life-planning","category-media","category-news","category-next-generation","category-pensions","category-retirement","category-review","category-taxation","wp-sticky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3042,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040\/revisions\/3042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}