Will Osborne Abolish Tax On Savings Interest?
This is said in this article in The Independent.
Tax on income from savings will be abolished for millions of people in the Budget today as George Osborne woos pensioners and “hard-working taxpayers” ahead of the May general election,The Independent has learnt.
So is the paper right?
It would make a lot of sense.
1, It would certainly encourage saving.
2. Encouraging saving may mean that more money will go into peer-to-peer lending, which will help lower interest rates for borrowers and give the banks a bit of a kicking. So a by-product of abolishing tax on savings interest could be better availability of finance for individuals and businesses.
3. I can see those who provide homes for savings like banks, building societies and peer-to-peer lenders getting increasingly innovate in finding ways to create high-interest, instant-access accounts.
4. It could put a lot of financial advisers out of business, as if say you had a lump sum to invest, you could easily work out what would be the best savings account, to keep the money until you need it.
5. But surely, the biggest benefit will be that as savings will now be held in an account, that doesn’t carry any tax, it will simplify tax accounting and returns for banks, building societies and savers alike.
If he does do it, then just imagine how any party who put it back would fare in an election!
On a personal note, if it does happen, I’ll be putting more of my money into Zopa!
Peer-to-Peer Lending Losses To Be Eligible For Relief
An obstacle to some, who might want to use peer-to-peer lenders to save money, is that any there was no relief for any bad debts. But George Osborne has changed all that and you can read about it in the Guardian. This is said.
And this week the industry received a major boost when George Osborne unveiled a package of measures designed to help it grow. Crucially, the chancellor announced a new bad debt relief which will allow individual investors to offset any losses.
So it seems that peer-to-peer lending is getting less risky all the time.
The Problem With The Mansion Tax
I’ve just been watching Ed Balls on The Andrew Marr Show talking about the Mansion Tax.
I don’t know Andrew Marr’s personal circumstances, but I wonder how many of the commentators like him live in houses that are worth a couple of millions. The Sunday Times today is reporting that Jeremy Paxman is being paid a million for his memoirs. Will he put that into property?
So many of these heavyweight commentators will be passionately against a Mansion Tax.
Incidentally, my view on property taxes is based heavily on the fact we have a housing shortage and it is a serious moral offence to leave a house empty for more than a few days a year.
Have The New Car Tax Rules Killed The Congestion Charge/Parking Fiddle?
Some years ago, I was selling an old Ford Escort Estate that was definitely a runner with virtually a year’s car tax and MOT, on eBay.
I only wanted a few hundred and I thought I had a deal.
When the lady who’d bought it and I talked over the phone, she said that she’d give me cash and deal with all the handover paperwork to save me the hassle. I said no to the latter and she then said, that I could forget the sale.
So I then looked at her purchase history on eBay and found that she’d bought about twenty or so clean cars like the Escort. All seemed to have a reasonably long tax and MOT and cost just a few hundred pounds.
I e-mailed the DVLA, as I thought the whole thing stank. They informed me, that the car would be sold to someone, who needed to get around London without paying the congestion charge. All of the fines and charges would obviously go to the previous owner.
They asked if I could forward all of the details to them.
I never heard any more from the lady, but the DVLA informed me a couple of years later, that they had mounted a successful prosecution.
Having looked at the new car tax rules, I think that the days of this type of scam are dead.
One Tax We Don’t Have To Pay
I was reading an article in the Sunday Times about how Germans are leaving churches in droves as they don’t want to pay the church tax. Here’s the jist.
When it comes to a choice between God and mammon, German churchgoers are overwhelmingly choosing mammon.
Hundreds of thousands of citizens have been leaving the German churches every year, appalled by child sex abuse scandals and outrageous spending by clerical fat cats.
It would appear that for the average wage earner, it could be several thousand euros, which all church members pay to their chosen church.
There’s more about the so-called church tax in Wikipedia and I was surprised at how many countries have one. Here’s what Wikipedia says about the tax in Austria.
Church tax is compulsory for Catholics in Austria, with a rate of 1.1%. This tax was introduced by Hitler in 1939. After World War II, the tax was retained in order to keep the Church independent of political powers.
The Sunday Times said that some Catholics in Germany, who don’t pay the tax might be refused a religious burial. How charitable is that, when apparently the Catholic Church in Germany is said in the article to be worth £341bn.
Many of us moan about tax rates, but at least here’s one tax, that we don’t have to pay.
Not A Good Budget For An Insurance Company Fat Cat Who Smokes Heavily!
I have never understood why pensioners had to buy an annuity to give themselves an income in the last years of their lives.
In fact after hearing Adrian Chiles talking about his ideas for pensions, I vowed that unless it was a capital offence, I wouldn’t buy one!
So George Osborne did the honest thing and has made it that no-one will have to buy one any more. It’s all reported here in Citywire. Here’s the summary.
The government has unveiled a landmark overhaul of pensions drawdown and has abolished the 55% tax on pre-retirement pension withdrawals, meaning no one will have to buy an annuity.
From April 2015 people will be able to access pension savings as they wish at the point of retirement, subject to their marginal rate of income tax, rather than the current 55% charge for full withdrawal.
This had two immediate consequences.
Insurance company shares dropped as reported here in the Guardian.
George Osborne was put on a stop list of those, who aren’t entitled to buy insurance.
But well done George, as he also put the tax up on fags, although he was gentle with beer and cider.
The EU Gives The UK Another £300million A Year
I’m just reading the BBC’s prediction for tomorrow’s Budget. Under the section on VAT, there is this information.
The Budget should enact important changes to the payment of VAT on internet purchases and downloads.
Buyers, for instance of e-books, will now have to pay the VAT rate of their home country, not that of a retailer such as Amazon.
It charges just 3% VAT, the rate in its home territory – Luxembourg.
From 1 January 2015 it will have to charge UK purchasers the 20% British VAT rate – and then hand that money over to the UK government.
It will mean higher charges for some UK internet shoppers who use a foreign service, and it will raise about £300m more each year for the Treasury.
This is an EU-wide change affecting all 28 member countries and will remove the price advantage of some internet retailers based outside the UK.
So due to some EU legislation, you’ll pay more for e-books from Amazon, but then the VAT rules will be fairer and the government will get more tax revenue and hopefully allow UK companies to compete easier.
Is this the start of getting the big multi-nationals to pay their full moral level of taxes, like we plebs do?
I certainly hope so!
Not Everything Goes Up!
I’ve just got my new Council Tax bill. There is no change for Hackney and the London charge has actually fallen by -1.3%, which means my total bill comes down by 0.3%.
Not much, but all contributions are respected.
Scrapping The Car Tax Disc
It has been reported that the government is going to scrap the car tax disc.
It won’t affect me, but I think there will be an alliance of those, who want to keep it.
There will be those, who will object solely on the basis, that the only way to check will be to look it up on a database and this is an infringement on their liberties.
It will also make it difficult for busybodies to report neighbours, who constantly park outside their house, for not having a tax disc.
If the DVLA did the system properly, you would only be able to pay road tax on-line, so that would annoy the Internet refuseniks.
And then there’s the unions, who may complain about the job loses at Swansea and in the Royal Mail.
I’ll be surprised, if they are abandoned it, without a fight from a very odd alliance of troublemakers.
The Anonymous Widower 