The following points may be considered by taxpayers before the end of each tax year to help minimise
their annual liability to income tax:

∙ Ensure that you know what your property figures are doing, are you profitable, loss making. For
losses look at seeing if you can create a new company and put the loss into the company as more future
friendly than losses in property. Profits can also be absorbed using a trading company or budding up
with another Property Secrets member who has the opposite issue.

∙ Ensure that personal allowances and basic rate bands are fully utilised. Using personal allowances
and basic rate bands may seem an obvious point, but is surprisingly frequently missed. Unused
allowances are not available to be carried forward, so it is important to ensure that they are utilised
each year. Simple planning can be applied, such as changing ownership of assets or creating an
employment. However, care is needed to escape the anti-avoidance legislation.

∙ Ensure that tax is being paid at the lowest rate on investment income. If a spouse, or civil partner,
pays tax at a different rate, consider transferring income-producing assets to give the income to the
person paying at the lower rate.

∙ Tax-efficient investments are covered in detail in . However, as a general point, a review of bank
and building society accounts should be made before the tax year end. Many people still have large
sums of cash in ordinary accounts paying very little interest when they could be earning over 5% gross
interest from specialist accounts. Make sure that ISA allowances have been fully utilised for all the
family.