Investment special: Tax allowances – use them or lose them

As if to demonstrate that every silver lining has a grey cloud, next month’s top-rate tax cut also means there will be less help in future from HM Revenue and Customs to boost high earners’ retirement funds. So there are just a few weeks left in which people fortunate enough to be able to write a cheque for up to £200,000 can get £100,000 of it back, risk-free, from the kindly taxman.

Such eye-stretching figures demonstrate why it really can be worth the bother of getting to grips with tax planning ahead of the 5 April fiscal year-end. Incentives to wrestle with the detail of annual tax allowances and exemptions extend right down the income scale. But ignorance can prove an expensive mistake when dealing with HMRC. To cite just one example, there is nothing to stop people who have been basic-rate taxpayers — or even non-taxpayers — all their lives, becoming posthumous higher-rate payers.

Inheritance tax is levied at a fixed rate of 40 per cent on net assets at death worth more than £325,000 per person, or £650,000 per couple. Plenty of unremarkable property in the south-east is worth more than that. So buoyant house prices will push rising numbers of basic-rate taxpayers into the 40 per cent tax band after they die — unless they do something about it.

The simplest way to avoid inheritance tax is to give with warm hands. All gifts, whatever their value, are entirely free from inheritance tax, provided they are made seven years’ before the donor’s death. However, no matter how loving the prospective recipients may seem to be, any parents tempted to give away assets they may need later should study King Lear first. The only form of gratitude you can always rely on is a lively expectation of favours yet to come.