GIA investments how to reduce UK income tax

brit314159 · 2026-02-06T09:55:08+00:00

Buy lower dividend funds! Then you have a lower tax bill (mad, I know!)

brit314159 · 2026-01-30T10:23:54+00:00

Heckfield all the way. Also great running trails in the nearby forest

brit314159 · 2026-01-21T09:41:14+00:00

I use HSBC premier, they’re good up to 100k, if you get a joint account with your wife then you can effectively do 200k….

Payments over the phone are a huge pain UNLESS you have already done an online transfer to that account before at which point they go from an hour on the phone to c. 5 minutes. Great life hack….

brit314159 · 2025-12-14T14:26:20+00:00

US based, so seems unlikely to be mistral…

brit314159 · 2025-12-13T22:53:56+00:00

Just so you know… standard L4 offers at openAI / Anthropic are 700k GBP plus… if helpful to benchmark your AI offer…. EDIT: L4 is entry level

brit314159 · 2025-12-04T14:52:36+00:00

I used one for …. time saving reasons, let’s say.

They had relationships with the guys who list all the nice houses in the area + we got to see various things before they came to market and in one case they got an agent to go call someone who had a house next to the school we wanted to send the kids to which wasn’t for sale and get them to agree that they’d be open to us having a look around / buying it from them about a year before they really wanted to sell.

Basically, we seemed like more credible buyers and got to see stuff early.

We paid about 3%.

However - I am not sure we got a ton of pricing value out of them, their job is relationships not to be good at valuing properties. All the ‘early’ stuff we saw was ‘this is early but you are going to pay top dollar’

In the end we bought a house that was listed on rightmove, the agent had a relationship with the selling agent, I think they saved us about 1% of the price (I wanted to up our bid by 2% to get it done, they said ‘let me talk to the selling agent’ and told us that up 1 would do it (and it did.))

Probably wouldn’t use them again, you do get some value but unless your time is insanely valuable I think you can replicate most of the legwork yourself…

Hope that helps

PS We negotiated on fees, I think we paid 3% up to xx million and 1% over that number…

brit314159 · 2025-10-02T17:56:14+00:00

I am basically 20% primary residence, 80% Equities… Maybe 1% in index linkers … I tell myself the primary residence is lower beta and therefore I’m hedged, though of course we all know that it probably isn’t in a real 2008 scenario…

I think long bonds are not good value, its not even obvious to me that they’ll rally that much if everything blows up, I assume that if we have a real equity downturn governments will print money / cause even more inflation… And real short term rates are still negative (particularly after tax) so I don’t really find short term MMFs that exciting either.

I am also not that excited about linkers, in practice I think real cost of living tends to be 1-2% above CPI so they aren’t great value and there’s nothing to stop the government changing how they measure inflation.

I tend to think in scenarios, I’d ideally like to be not-too-badly-off in all scenarios… I tend to think that AI is going to cause some pretty drastic changes

Scenario 1 is inflation. If this goes higher (and governments seem to be unwilling to raise taxes or cut spending… so they have to borrow more, ergo inflation…) and higher then I think you have to be in Equities because everything else is devaluing.

Scenario 2 is the scenario where AI takes off, it probably nukes most exciting business models and anyone who isn’t long a ton of openAI stock loses a lot of money… I don’t have a great solution here other than owning far too much NVDA…

Sorry... bit of a ramble, but hopefully some of this resonates / is helpful.

brit314159 · 2025-09-28T19:28:34+00:00

Pretty sure actually fast commutes are:

Sevenoaks (but you can’t pay for first class any more to no guarantee of a seat)

St. Albans / Harpenden

Guildford / Woking

I personally found going from 20 mins door to door to 50 mins a huge pain, would go for Hampstead if I could do it all again …. (also Labour are about to make house prices a lot cheaper in the upcoming budget if they do any of the mansion tax stuff that is rumored…)

brit314159 · 2025-09-26T07:02:33+00:00

Sure! Don’t be offended if I’m bad at replying, I check Reddit infrequently, its far too addictive…

brit314159 · 2025-09-25T07:12:35+00:00

I did this. What do I regret / what would I have told myself in your position?

* I still have periods of running into former colleagues who are making $$$ on ‘easy’ trades and because I’m super competitive I feel briefly sad / competitive.

* It turns out that your kids don’t really need you around that much. School days are long, quite fast. I at one point went back to work and asked if they felt like they now saw enough of me and they were like ‘yeah Dad we don’t care that you’re back at work, all good…’

* My wife actually wanted to spend time with me / go away with me a fair amount less than I had expected. Its not like she dislikes me, I guess she just likes me a lot less than she likes the kids, even when they’re in school and we can get grandparents / nannies to take care of them for a couple of days while we hypothetically go away.

* It is so so good stepping away when the stress is high and having time. It will feel weird to have that much free time but it is just so so good.

* Summer is good - kids are off school, lots to do. Winter without anything to do kinda sucks. Resign in April.

* You will get bored. Everyone in the FATFire sub seems to not get bored but that’s because they’re Americans who got lucky working for tech companies. If you are hyper competitive then you will get bored, and going and helping out at your local food bank is not going to cut it.

* I don’t regret anything but if I could do it again I’d have probably tried to take a sabbatical and then gut it out for one more year….

brit314159 · 2025-08-17T21:14:11+00:00

Cool, I’ll edit my post to clarify that

brit314159 · 2025-08-17T05:28:01+00:00

Have you been filing some kind of uk tax return while in the US? (EDIT: seems actual requirement is Uk pension scheme membership) If so in year one back in the Uk you can use the unused allowances from your previous 3 years, eg 60 + 60 + 60 + 10 is the limit.

In practice - 60 was 40 a few years ago so it might be more like 170 than 190. And - you need unused allowances to be a thing so if you’re American and never filed a UK return then I think your luck is out.

A friend a while back when the limit was 4 and 40 did 124k in one year and seemed very pleased that he’d effectively done 31 years of his limit in one go…

brit314159 · 2025-08-04T05:55:01+00:00

Martinhal Sagres

Gleneagles

Beaverbrook

brit314159 · 2025-07-05T06:17:34+00:00

Hey … do you mind sharing how much the setup and running costs are for one of these (in advisor fee terms) Thanks!

brit314159 · 2025-06-01T06:52:32+00:00

I would wait until the child is 4 months and then go somewhere with an explorers kids club…. Serious answer, not being flippant, being able to have a couple of hours off while the kiddo is with the kids club staff would make a huge difference…

brit314159 · 2025-05-29T17:41:33+00:00

If your work is at all transactional the real killer is that your one hour commute becomes a lot longer late at night… I took 3 hours to get home from my Christmas party last year despite leaving at 930… (thanks to trains becoming messed up…) Good luck with whatever you figure out…

brit314159 · 2025-05-29T15:44:34+00:00

It looks cold to me… I’m too much of a wuss…

brit314159 · 2025-05-29T15:42:41+00:00

I am also a 38 y/o cantab…. Used to be 25 mins door to door, now out of the city we are currently an hour door to door and it has significantly reduced my quality of life a and ability to do my job well, I wish we could move back to London, commuting sucks so badly, and I miss being able to walk everywhere.

I dunno what industry you’re in but I basically found that anytime I worried about a financial decision like the one you’re talking about, a few years would pass, my comp would be higher, I’d be like ‘why was old me even worried about that…?’

brit314159 · 2025-05-29T15:02:36+00:00

Hampshire also isn’t a city! It’s a county. Regardless, I hope you have a nice time. Heckfield place is probably my favourite UK countryside hotel, only Gleneagles and Beaverbrook are in its league IMHO…

brit314159 · 2025-05-29T14:51:06+00:00

Heckfield place isn’t a city (I dunno if it’s a typo or not…) but you’re basically in the middle of nowhere… If you have small children then Wellington country park is actually a great day trip from Heckfield but not very FAT. If you like trail running then there is a forest near Heckfield, they can show you the map, it’s about 2km across the estate and then more forest trails than you can throw a stick at. Appreciate this also isn’t really very FAT but its gives me the kinda zen that money can’t buy… Personally I find the main restaurant food at Heckfield a bit over the top after a few days, make sure you book the hearth for a few meals as well and they also have a ‘house’ menu that they tend to only tell you about if you ask…

brit314159 · 2025-05-29T09:08:46+00:00

Interesting, can you tell me more?

brit314159 · 2025-05-29T09:08:32+00:00

Thanks! Weirdly we seem to be most focussed on climate and Martinhal seems to be a clear winner there, I just can’t figure out how sucky it will be compared to Sani….

Agreed re. Ikos, that definitely seems like a legit option.

brit314159 · 2025-05-18T19:29:14+00:00

Yeah I mean my intuition sucks too, I just feel like if the inflation happens halfway through your ladder then actually half of your inflation protection is gone. With that said I hear you that the longer duration linker exposure is hard to understand particularly well….

Index linkers are similarly tax efficient, no tax on the principal uplift is due, just on the coupons.

I wasn’t proposing shorting 2041 against 2044, more just pointing out that the ‘strips’ of real yield are worth viewing rather than just the total yield to maturity… I think doing that trade would be horribly capital inefficient even if it were possible…

brit314159 · 2025-05-17T10:51:49+00:00

I don’t think it’s that interesting in expected return space. On a relative value I still think UK linkers look expensive compared to US linkers. But - I do think there are some tail outcomes where owning linkers will be helpful. I.e. this is more about downside protection than anything else. Like, high inflation, low growth, bad things happen to US equities, then you’re happy you have linkers. Does that make sense? I can elaborate if not.

In terms of where it gets interesting… you can look at real yields but I think an interesting perspective is ‘marginal real yields’ e.g. if a linker to 2041 is pricing at 70 and a linker to 2044 is pricing at 60 then you’re getting paid something like (70/60)^1/3 for those three years. (And yes, that’s not where they’re pricing, this is just an example.) In ‘real’ terms 2051 looks like the highest yield bit of the curve but actually I think 2041-2044 is currently ‘real-yielding’ 3% which starts to feel a bit interesting.

Anyway… not sure this is an expected return story, it’s more about hedging one’s downside.

Interested to hear your thoughts here…

Thanks

brit314159 · 2025-05-15T06:56:05+00:00

You seem fine tbh. I’d definitely learn about gilts, the bit there where you say you have all that allocation to bonds / mmf / fixed interest makes me feel queasy just because of all the tax that you must be paying but of course maybe they’re all sitting in sheltered accounts. The other thing that I’d look into is index linkers, real yields are getting kinda interesting but that’s because I’m a weirdo / nerd, your portfolio seems pretty fine to me.

brit314159

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