# 8 Ways You Could Save £1,000s of Tax in 2026 (Legally)

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** James Shack
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio
- **Дата:** 04.03.2026
- **Длительность:** 21:12
- **Просмотры:** 65,552

## Описание

Looking for help with your finances?
I am a Chartered Wealth Manager and Partner in a financial planning practice based in the UK. Find out how we can help here: https://go.novawm.com/yt/obxj1LK6Tio

Risk Warnings and Disclaimers

Capital at risk. Past performance is used as a guide only. It is no guarantee of future returns. Different funds and asset classes carry varying levels of risk depending on the geographical region and industry sector. You should make yourself aware of these specific risks prior to investing. SEIS/EIS/VCTs should be regarded as higher risk investments, with some of these there is a risk that investors can lose 100% of their capital. They are only suitable for UK resident taxpayers who can tolerate higher risk and have a time horizon of greater than five years. Owing to the nature of their underlying assets, they are highly illiquid. Investors should be aware that they may have difficulty, or be unable to realise their shares at levels close to or that reflect the value of the underlying assets. 

Prevailing tax rates and reliefs are dependent on your individual circumstances and are subject to change. We do not provide tax advice. Any examples used in the video are for illustrative purposes only and you may get less back than the figures shown. This video does not constitute personal advice. We do not take any responsibility for third party websites and content we may link to from this video. 

Issued on behalf of Nova. Nova is a trading name of Nova Wealth Ltd, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN: 778951) and is a limited company registered in England & Wales (10739796).

James Shack™ property of Shack Media Limited
Copyright © James Shackell 2025. All rights reserved.
The author asserts their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this channel and any video published on it.

00:00 Intro
02:01 The Tax Traps 
05:55 Number 1 - Salary Sacrifice Schemes 
07:52 Number 2 - Tactical Pension Contributions for Optimal Tax Relief
14:12 Number 3 - ISAs (don’t forget flexible ISAs!)
15:00 Number 4 - Voluntary NI Contributions
15:54 Number 5 - GIA Tax Optimisation (CGT, Divs, Savings allowance)
17:34 Number 6 - Make use of other people’s allowances
18:21 Number 7 - Minimise IHT with Gifting Allowances
19:00 Number 8 - EIS, SEIS & VCTs

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio) Intro

I recently had a call with a prospective client, a gentleman in his 50s who had a few questions about investing and saving tax. And it turned out that he was not aware or had misunderstood some of the essential tools and strategies that you can use. So, I spent a bit of time with him on the phone helping him fill in the gaps. And at the end of the call, he said, "Thank you. If only I had known about this stuff 30 years ago, I would be in a completely different position today. " And it's true. If he'd had the knowledge that he has now and acted on it, he might be hundreds of thousands of pounds better off today, perhaps already retired. But instead, he's likely to have to be working for another 10 years, if not more, which, in my opinion, is a travesty. You can have two people who, throughout their lives, earn exactly the same amount, even spend similar amounts, but the amount of tax they pay and when they can afford to retire can be completely different, simply because one person knows the rules and opportunities there are for saving tax and building wealth, and the other doesn't. The other way to look at this is as a tax on financial literacy that can cost the average person thousands of pounds per year simply because they don't know the rules, rules that were never explained to them in the first place. And because income tax bands have been frozen again and we're all having to pay more and more tax, this means that there are even more opportunities to save tax. So, the gap between the average person and someone who is fully optimized is only going to grow and grow. But simply being aware of these tactics is not enough. You need to be reminded of them again and again because not only do they change, but what may seem irrelevant one year and then at the back of your mind may suddenly be really important the next. So, that's what I'm going to do today. I'm going to run you through eight key strategies for saving tax and building wealth, the ones that I am continually reminding my financial planning clients about because they can really move the needle. These are strategies that you can consider at any time of year, but

### [2:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio&t=121s) The Tax Traps

given that we're only a few weeks away from the end of the tax year, I'm going to focus on the key opportunities that we lost if you don't act on them soon. In the UK, we're supposed to have a progressive income tax system where those that earn more pay more, with the top rate being 45% for those that earn over 125k. But we have this mad system that means that people who earn less often pay more. As an example, I can remember speaking with somebody let's call her Jess, who was earning just over 80,000 pounds per year and paying an effective top rate of tax of almost. Jess had two kids, one 12 and another 18 and still in school, so both would qualify for child benefits, which would total a payment of 2,251 pounds per year. But as her household's highest earner, for every 200 pounds Jess earns over 60,000 pounds, 1% of her child benefit gets clawed back. So her effective rate of tax on the portion of income she earns between 60k and 80k would be about 51% if she was in England, but she's in Scotland, where the income tax rate jumps to 45% after 75k. And add national insurance on top of that, she's paying almost 60% tax on this portion of her income. But it can get even worse than this. For every 2 pounds of income you receive over 100,000 pounds, you lose 1 pound of your personal allowance, which gives an effective tax rate of 60% on the portion of income earned up to 125k, 62% if you include national insurance, and 67% if you're in Scotland. If, however, you're also repaying a student loan, for every 1 pound that you earn over 100,000 pounds, only 29p of that will find its way into your pocket. But we're not done yet. If you have a child under the age of 11, you can qualify for tax-free child care, which is essentially a £2,000 per year contribution from the government to help to pay for childcare. And if you have a child between the ages of 9 months and 5 years old, you can qualify for up to 30 hours of free childcare if both parents are still working. However, if either you or your partner earn over £100,000, you lose both of these benefits. The value of these will depend on which local authority you're in, but based on average nursery fees, the IFS estimates them to be worth about £14,500 per year, assuming you have two children under three who qualify. Which means that your income would need to jump to £134,000 for you to be better off than someone earning £99,000 and still being able to retain those benefits. In London, the estimate is more like £144,000. So, clearly, our income tax system is anything but progressive. But, what can you do about it? Well, the obvious solution is to work less. Take Jess, for example. In effect, she's being paid a much lower hourly rate for that final portion of income that she earns. So, if she has control over her working hours, she may choose to cut back. If she's employed, she's going to have less direct control of her working hours, but she could choose to take unpaid parental leave, which is a little-known right employees in the UK have, where they can take up to 4 weeks unpaid leave a year per child under the age of 18 to spend time supporting them. Of course, both of these options will leave Jess with less money in her pocket, but for someone who expects to earn just over £100,000 and thus lose eligibility for these childcare benefits, they may actually be significantly better off by choosing to work less, which might be a good thing for them, but that's bad for the economy and bad for the government, which demonstrates just how poorly designed the system is. But, there are other strategies that can help you save tax and reduce your taxable income that don't involve working less. Number one.

### [5:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio&t=355s) Number 1 - Salary Sacrifice Schemes

Firstly, there are various salary sacrifice schemes that may be available through your employer. The two big ones being cycle to work schemes or electric vehicle leasing schemes, which allows you to get a bike or lease a car that meets certain emission standards and pay for it out of your gross salary. case, paying for a bike out of her gross salary would give her an effective discount of 58%. With electric vehicles, there are additional benefit-in-kind charges to pay, and these are actually going up. But, depending on your tax band and the car in question, these schemes can still be very tax efficient. You just got to do your research. Another salary sacrifice scheme that you may have access to is a workplace nursery scheme that in effect enables you to pay nursery fees from gross salary, which can be a huge benefit for young families struggling with these costs. However, you can only take advantage of these benefits if, firstly, you're aware of them, and secondly, if your employer has taken the initiative to set them up. And importantly, especially with the nursery scheme, it's got to be done correctly because HMRC has warned that some of these schemes are not set up correctly. This is a classic example of what is so frustrating about our tax system. There are millions of people missing out on potential opportunities to save thousands of pounds in tax simply because no one has told them that they exist or that employers have not set them up, although that's often because employers are not even aware of them in the first place. However, when it comes to salary sacrifice schemes, you just got to be mindful that not only will this reduce your net pay, but you're contractually reducing your salary, which can affect other workplace benefits like insurance and your ability to get a mortgage. The other problem is that these things can take a while to set up. So, if you have just got a bonus towards the end of the tax year that pushes you into a higher tax threshold, then they may not be much use. But, how about this? Number two. Let's

### [7:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio&t=472s) Number 2 - Tactical Pension Contributions for Optimal Tax Relief

say you're earning £60,000 per year and get a £10,000 bonus at the end of the tax year. Firstly, well done you. Secondly, let's work out how much of that is actually going to end up in your pocket. You'll pay 40% income tax plus 2% national insurance. And then let's say you have two children and eligible for child benefits, which would normally pay about £2,251. But, because you're now earning £70,000, half of that is going to get clawed back assuming you're the highest earner of the couple, which means that this bonus would only leave you £4,674 better off. That's an effective tax rate of 53%. But, if you instead decided to make a £10,000 gross pension contribution, it would reduce your taxable income by £10,000, enabling you to retain that child benefit and get income tax relief. How that income tax relief is applied will depend on how you make that contribution. If you sacrifice this bonus into your workplace pension, it would avoid income tax and national insurance. So, you're saving 42% tax there plus reclaiming child benefit. So, the effective cost of this £10,000 contribution is only £4,674. However, unless your employer is really flexible, changes to salary sacrifice can be hard to orchestrate right at the end of the tax year. So, another more flexible option would be to make a personal pension contribution of £8,000 either to a private pension or to your workplace pension if they allow it. The provider will then add basic rate tax relief on top of this, leaving you with £10,000 in your pension. This has the effect of reducing your taxable income by £10,000, which would enable you to reclaim child benefits and as a higher rate taxpayer, you could then reclaim the higher rate tax relief via a self-assessment tax return or by calling HMRC and asking them to adjust your tax code. With personal contributions, you may have to find more cash to make that initial contribution, but after you've claimed back any higher rate tax relief and factored in that you're retaining your child benefit, the effective cost of that contribution comes to £4,874, just slightly more than salary sacrifice because you're not also saving on national insurance. You need to think carefully before making any pension contribution, but alongside getting any employer contribution match, making additional pension contributions during these tax pinch points can be some of the most tax efficient you'll ever make. For example, according to the IFS, someone who lives in London with two children under three and who earns £139,000, they may actually end up with more disposable income by making a £40,000 pension contribution than by making no contributions at all if they're then able to restore these child benefits. Over your lifetime, you're going to be able to save a set amount of money. Let's say that's £100,000 and you use that to make pension contributions along the way. The higher tax relief that you can get when you make those contributions, the further your money is going to go. So, it often pays to look ahead and be tactical with when you choose to make them. And given that income tax bands have been frozen just with inflationary uplifts, people are going to start moving through tax bands much faster. So, opportunities to make contributions and get higher tax relief that may be there today may be gone tomorrow, whilst others might be just around the corner. In most situations, making pension contributions is going to leave you with less disposable income or require you to sell other assets like ISAs to fund them, which is again why it's important to think ahead and make sure that you have the ability to take advantage of these opportunities when they arrive. Although, there's a few things that you do need to consider before you start putting more into a pension. Firstly, you won't be able to access that money until 55 at the earliest, although that is set to rise to 57 in 2028, and could rise even further. Any investment growth or income you receive inside the pension won't be taxed, but you may have to pay income tax when you withdraw it. But, given that at retirement, you can typically draw up to 25% of the value of your pension tax-free, and that most people move down a tax bracket in retirement, the tax that you're likely to pay on withdrawal is likely to be significantly less than the tax relief that you get on the way in, especially if you're getting as high a tax relief as you can in these tax pinch points. The other thing to be mindful of is the pension annual allowance. The maximum that you can personally contribute to a pension each year and receive tax relief is the lower of your relevant earnings or 60,000 pounds. So, if you earned 40,000 pounds per year from employment, the maximum you can contribute is 40,000 pounds. It is possible to carry forward unused pension allowances from the last three tax years. So, if, say, someone had contributed 20,000 pounds into their pension over each of the last three tax years, this person could, in theory, contribute up to 160,000 pounds to a pension this tax year. But, and this is the part that people often miss, they would only be able to do that and get tax relief if they had at least 100,000 pounds of relevant earnings this tax year. You also need to be mindful that for every two pounds of adjusted net income someone has over 260,000 pounds per year, they lose 1 pound of their pension annual allowance. So, if they earn more than 360,000 pounds, the maximum that they can contribute to a pension is just 10,000 pounds per year. Go over this, and you could face punitive tax charges. So, if you think that your career is on a trajectory where your allowance may end up being tapered, you may want to make a larger pension contributions whilst you still can. Most people assume that if you're not working, you can't contribute to a pension. But even if you earn nothing, you can still contribute up to £2,800 per year and get 20% tax relief added on top. This applies even if you are already retired and already drawing money from your pension, which is an opportunity which some people often miss. Pensions are one of the trickiest parts of financial planning. So, if you're unsure about anything and you're looking for advice, there is a link in the description of the video where you can book an initial call with my team and find out how we can help. Number three

### [14:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio&t=852s) Number 3 - ISAs (don’t forget flexible ISAs!)

the other main tax efficient wrapper in the UK is the ISA, within which money can be kept as cash or invested, and whilst it's inside, it's protected from capital gains and income tax. There are multiple different types of ISA and you can contribute up to £20,000 per year as a cumulative amount across them. Unlike a pension, there is no option to carry forwards unused ISA allowances to future tax years. So, if it's appropriate, make use of these ISA allowances whilst you can. And remember that some providers offer flexible ISAs, which means that if you've had to take money out of your ISA this tax year for any reason, perhaps to help you bridge buying a property, you're allowed to put that money back into the ISA and it won't count towards your ISA allowance so long as you do it within the same tax year. Number four

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio&t=900s) Number 4 - Voluntary NI Contributions

from next tax year a full state pension will pay £12,547 per year and that's only set to increase in future tax years. According to the DWP, in 2024, the state pension made up more than half of the income received by retirees who are single and around about 36% of the income received by couples. It's an incredibly valuable benefit, but to qualify for it, you need at least 35 years of qualifying national insurance contributions or at least 10 to get anything. Most people earn these through their working life, but if you think there is a chance that you could be short, it may be worthwhile making voluntary contributions to top up your record, but you can only go back and fill holes in your record over the last six tax years. So, if you have a gap in your record in the 2019/20 tax year, you only have until the end of this tax year to make it up. Number

### [15:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio&t=954s) Number 5 - GIA Tax Optimisation (CGT, Divs, Savings allowance)

five. Once someone has maxed out that ISA and pension allowances, or at least put in as much as they're happy to type at this point, the next step is often to start investing through a general investment account, an account with no tax advantages. But, that doesn't necessarily mean it can't be tax-free, at least in part. Firstly, depending on which tax band you're in, you may have a personal savings allowance, which means that the first portion of savings income, which includes income from bonds, may be tax-free. You also have a dividend tax allowance of £500 and a capital gains tax allowance of £3,000. Unfortunately, these have been reduced significantly over the last couple of years, but still, if you do find yourself in a position where you've got holdings that have a capital gain, you may want to try and realize those gains to make use of these allowances to prevent you having higher tax bills in the future. The thing to remember is that you can't just sell your holding and then buy it back again immediately afterwards. You need to wait 30 days before you can buy that specific holding back again if you want this sale to count from CGT purposes. You can, however, buy it back immediately if you're instead buying it back within an ISA or a pension. And the 30-day rule only counts for that exact same holding. If, for instance, say you sold an S& P 500 fund from one provider, you could immediately buy another S& P 500 fund from another provider and the gain would still stand just as an example. And remember, transferring assets between spouses does not trigger a capital gain, which makes it relatively easy to make use of each other's capital gains tax allowances

### [17:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio&t=1054s) Number 6 - Make use of other people’s allowances

which brings us to number six, making use of other people's allowances. Remember, if you're married, you have two sets of allowances that you can make use of, pensions, ISAs, personal allowances, capital gains tax allowance, dividends, the lot. So, when you're considering what to do with your money, think about whether a contribution to perhaps your partner's ISA, pension, or perhaps making NI contributions for them could actually be the most effective thing for you guys to do as a couple, or maybe even think further afield to other family members. Yes, there are things like junior ISAs and junior SIPPs that you can use to invest for young children, but if you have adult children who are currently in one of these tax choke points, gifting them the money so that they can make additional pension contributions and potentially reclaim these benefits could be some of the most powerful gifts

### [18:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio&t=1101s) Number 7 - Minimise IHT with Gifting Allowances

you'll ever make. Number seven, if you're concerned about inheritance tax, remember to make use of your gifting allowances. You can gift up to £3,000 per year either to one person or spread across several with this money immediately outside of your estate for inheritance tax purposes. You can also carry forwards unused allowances from the past tax year. So, you may be able to give £6,000 away this tax year or £12,000 if you're a couple, assuming you've not made any gifts over the last 2 years. But other than that, if you don't use these allowances, you lose them. There's also a small gifts exemption that allows you to give up to £250 to as many people as you can, but you can't give one

### [19:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obxj1LK6Tio&t=1140s) Number 8 - EIS, SEIS & VCTs

person £3,000 and then £250. They can't be used in conjunction with the same individual. Number eight, beyond pensions and ISAs, there are other tax-efficient investment schemes that exist. Three of which are government initiatives to encourage retail investors to invest in early-stage British businesses by giving tax breaks. With enterprise investment schemes, investing in qualifying businesses can offer up to 30% income tax relief. So, for example, if you made a 100,000 pounds investment into one of these, it could reduce your income tax bill by 30,000 pounds in the year that the investment was made alongside other benefits like loss relief. Seed EIS schemes target smaller, riskier businesses and offer even larger tax breaks than EIS. Whilst venture capital trusts are private equity funds that invest across a portfolio of early-stage businesses, again offering investors tax relief. Now, I don't have time to go into the pros and cons of these in detail, but I do just want to say two things. Firstly, these are extremely illiquid, high-risk investments where, especially with EIS, there is a high chance that you could lose all of your money. And as a result, they are not appropriate for the vast majority of people. But if you have the investment horizon and risk tolerance and want exposure to smaller companies, they can be an effective way to reduce your tax bill this year. And from the 6th of April, so from next tax year, the tax relief on VCTs is reducing from 30% to 20%. These are not the type of investments that should be rushed. But if you are considering using them, just be mindful that is going to change. So, as you've seen, there's a lot of different ways here that you can invest and save tax. But if, say, you only have 1,000 pounds to invest, you may be wondering, should I be putting this into a pension or an ISA? Or maybe using it to pay down your mortgage? Or perhaps one of these other tax-efficient tools? If that's the case, you need to watch this video here where I reveal what I think is the optimal order for investing money, from the first 1,000 pounds to the first million. I'll see you there.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/53028*