The Hunt budget changes Ermine plans slightly

…but not too much.

Jezza tells us we will all pay more tax. Fixing the value of the personal allowance in a 10% inflation environment naturally means you get to pay more income tax year by year, if your income is above 12.5k which mine is. However, the hazard and arguably the opportunity for Ermine action lies in a different area. I regard the current dire straits of the UK economy partly Putin, but the particularly worse performance relative to our peers is a Brexit phenomenon, now Covid is no longer covering it. And I didn’t vote for Brexit, so if this screws the economy, well, Brexitards, you voted for it, you own it. I don’t feel a moral obligation to help dig you out of the shit, and if you voted for Brexit and feel skint, well, don’t say people didn’t tell you it’d cost you.

Bailey clearly uncomfortable talking about Brexit but Swati Dhingra pulls no punches.

“It’s undeniable now that we’re seeing a bigger slowdown in trade in the UK than in the rest of the world. That’s showing up despite the statistics being much worse than they used to be.” pic.twitter.com/2eJYv7HToh

— Lizzy Burden (@lizzzburden) November 16, 2022

According Jacob Rees-Mogg it’ll take 50 years to see the economic benefits of Brexit, and I don’t think that many 20-year-olds voted for it, so hopefully most Brexitards were big on sovereignty, because they’ll be long gone before they see the economic sunlit uplands. I don’t have an issue with people who thought it was a price worth paying for sovereignty – freedom always comes at a cost, and presumably you are rich enough to carry the Brexit malus on GDP, which is part of the fiscal hole Jezza wantes to fill.

Income tax changes

I am probably never going to be a higher rate taxpayer. Well, until Jeremy Corbyn comes into power. While over the 12500 level I am far enough off the 50k income mark to feel safe from higher rate tax for a while. I never earned enough to be endangerered by the additional rate, so if that’s you then while I hear your pain, it’s not my problem. I would suggest you research  salary sacrifice if you can, and if you are already over the pension LTA then your are rich enough to afford professional advice, as well as caviar and champagne.

I’m not even that exercised about fiscal drag on the thresholds, because I am old enough to remember that Mrs Thatcher took a much higher tax take out of a much higher proportion, about 2/3 ISTR of the younger Ermine’s pay packets at the start of my working life. The current personal allowance is still quite high, historically. You lot don’t know you were born. OTOH there’s some argument to say that government services worked better back then, you don’t get ‘owt for n’owt.

I struggled to find any useful information on the tax changes as they apply to me, because most of these are in the dividend and CGT arena. Most media don’t talk about that, because the vast majority of their audience presumably don’t have that sort of income/assets. Let’s face it, if you are investing up to 20k a year your shouldn’t have that sort of assets either, as Monevator keeps on telling you. Use your ISA allowances, as you were. I have not picked up any signal about changing the ISA threshold, so aim to fill your boots in the next couple of years, I could see that regime getting tougher with a change in government.

 

whatcha lookin’ at, punk?

Due to the dearth of information about my oddball bias I am going on this Which summary. I didn’t listen to the budget since while it’s within my circle of concern it’s not within my circle of influence, a walk in the countryside snatched between the showers seemed to be a more constructive use of my time. I saw this bad boy perched on some rugby poles. Indeed I spent so much time watching him I pissed him off so much that he turned his back on me.

I pointedly ignore watching mustelids…

before he dive-bombed something in the pitch.

something got it, there

Or I could have spent an hour watching this old buzzard instead

I was taking the line that a walk round a buzzard-filled countryside was doing a teeny bit for keeping my sorry ass out of the way of the NHS, because it seems to be needed for keeping the young’uns noses at the grindstone, and the buzzard on the telly was going to do what he was going to do anyway.

Dividend tax changes and capital gains tax changes.

They’re coming for your rentier earnings, capitalists. The amount of dividend you can earn tax-free drops from £2000 this TYE2023 to £1000 TYE2024 and £500TYE2025. The latter is likely to be irrelevant since I don’t think the Tories will be in power. You won’t have ANY tax-free dividend allowance in two years, at a guess. Note that at this stage you pay a lower rate of tax on dividends over the tax threshold than you do on earned income, 10 8.75% for shares as opposed to 20/32% on earned income. I would not bet on that persisting after two years.

This pretty much wipes out my plan to pay for the increase in power bills through dividends held in my GIA (so outside the ISA). I may pause my Vanguard ISA next year and reactivate my iWeb ISA, I hold the GIA with iWeb (which is terrible from a FCA compensation angle) so  I will see what they can do about Bed and ISA transfers, from memory they only charge you one side of buy/sell transactions. I have time to boot these dividend payers into the ISA, or sell them out.

Capital Gains tax

The allowance here falls in future, first to 6k TYE2024 then 3k TYE2025 Curiously that makes the carry over of some CGT losses I have more valuable; while you can’t carry allowances forward you can carry the losses. CGT is generally a fight you can choose the time of battle. Not always, some corporate actions trigger CGT gains or losses.  Obviously you don’t aim to make a CGT loss, in the event say that I observe a gain is my holdings of Invesco  SGLP gold I will sell them and buy Ishares SGLN (first checking Invesco isn’t owned by Blackrock or the other way round. I would need to qualify the cost of the turn and spread, natch. This would circumvent the 30-day rule – same underlying asset, different ETF share instrument. Like dividend tax, a basic rate taxpeyer pays a lower 10% rate of tax on shares CGT over the threshold. Again, I would not assume that applies after two years.

In the big picture, my GIA will end up full of SGLP and SGLN and I will move income assets into the ISA over the next couple of years. I will move all gold holdings out of my ISA, probably swapping this for more VWRL and index funds. I will probably clear down most of my Vanguard ISA into the Hargreaves Lansdown ISA, to kill off percentage fees (I am at the HL cap on shares, I hold no funds).

So yeah, at the edges I will be one of those paying more tax. But not too much more. Because unlike people who get most of their income by selling their time or skills for money I am on the side of capital, and capital always has more choices than Income. Since I didn’t vote for Brexit, I feel no particular moral obligation to compensate for the 4% loss in GDP. I also think it would be only A Very Good Thing if the OBR’s 10% house price fall forecast comes true. Houses are far too dear in the UK as it is. Rather than pissing around trying to facilitate people to be able to afford to pay more, the best way to make anything more affordable is to reduce the price of it. Flushing out BTL landlords are all the other good folk that try to invest in houses rather than to live in the buggers could also work wonders, though we could do well to remember that many people are just too poor to be able to buy houses.

Note that this is relatively short and ill thought out because its’ only been two hours since the buzzard on the telly has stopped talking. E&OE particularly on that single-sourced piece on the changes in CGT and dividend tax, and the ISA allowance being the same.

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