You Must Get Your Finances in Order BEFORE You Return to the UK

If you’ve been living it up abroad and enjoying a tax efficient existence overseas, chances are you will have been making hay whilst the sun shone and maximising your expatriate financial advantages.  If your circumstances have now changed and you’re planning on returning to Britain, you have to get your financial house in order before you repatriate.

Whether you’ve been working abroad and a contract has come to an end, or you were retired and have decided to return to Britain for health or family reasons perhaps, you need to know that if you get your finances in order before you move back you can maintain many of the advantages you had when you were overseas.

However, the key here is that you must get your finances in order before you return to the UK…if you leave money matters until after you have repatriated and your tax residency status has changed, you may well lose your ability to access the very real advantages you could have if you sorted everything before you move back.

According to the financial advisory we spoke to, there are products available such as personal portfolio bonds that can be utilised by returning Britons.  If you favoured such a product and it was deemed suitable for you and your situation, did you know that a huge range of investments can be held in such a structure - from the most basic of bank or building society deposits to mutual funds, from unit trusts to capital guaranteed or structured products - even individual stocks and shares.  Depending on who you work with in structuring your repatriation portfolio, you may be able to access institutional funds that are ordinarily only available to high net worth individuals.

Utilising such a product can allow you excellent reductions when purchasing holdings too, with initial charges often reduced to zero in many cases.  Your savings can also grow free of tax and gains made from sales or purchases of holdings within the structure can be tax free, depending on your status and how the repatriation investment solution is organised.

If you’re not quite moving back onshore but are relocating to France perhaps, you can benefit from significant reductions in your potential tax liability when making income drawdown or even ad hoc withdrawals.  And no matter where you are moving to, a well-structured plan can help you with succession planning, ensuring that instructions can be made for transfer of ownership, or automatic payment of regular amounts of even a lump sum to individuals or beneficiaries.

Using such a structure where you manage all of your assets under one umbrella effectively, you clearly benefit from improved efficiency.  Then add on the benefit that when you return to the UK the investment structures can be adapted to become fully compliant with UK legislation, allowing growth to continue free of tax, with 5% per annum tax free income allowance, and you can see how, if you do sort tings out before you return, you can still benefit to the max.  And finally, if such a structure is deemed applicable for you, in the event that an account holder needed to go into long-term care, the government couldn’t force you to use any savings within the structure to pay for the costs if you didn’t want to.

Whether such a solution is appropriate for you and available to you will depend on who you are and your own personal circumstances, but if you want help with getting everything in order before you perhaps contemplate returning to the UK, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and we can put you in touch with an advisory which will assist you.