You can save or invest up to £20,000 a year tax free, using a stocks and shares ISA, a cash ISA, or a combination of the two. However, this £20,000 allowance runs until 5 April 2019, so you need to be fast about it if you haven’t already started saving. Any allowance you fail to use won’t be carried over to the next tax year, it will simply be lost.
Each year, you can save £20,000 across the different types of ISAs. But you cannot pay into more than one cash or stocks and shares ISA in the same tax year.
If you’re married and one of you earns substantially more than the other, it can be a good idea to take advantage of each other’s ISA allowance. This means that you can save or invest up to £40,000 between the two of you.
Aside from ISA’s, there are also other ways of boosting your savings before the tax year comes to an end. You can pay a maximum of £40,000 into your pension in a tax year (it’s called your annual allowance) before it becomes subject to tax. This amount includes both you and your employer’s contributions.
For those of you thinking about estate planning, you might have heard about using gifts to reduce your inheritance tax liability. You can give away up to £3,000 each tax year as gifts, so they are no longer included when the value of your estate is calculated. If you’re married, you can make up to £6,000 of gifts between the two of you.
This gift allowance can be carried over from the previous year. So a couple who didn’t make any gifts during the 2017/2018 tax year can make £12,000 worth of gifts this year.
Think that you could use some of these tips to improve your tax efficiency for 2018/2019? At Entire FS, we can offer you guidance about which ISAs are right for you. Get in touch with us to find out more about how we can help.