Time runs fast and this tax year is no different! Next week is the penultimate week of the 2018 tax year, which ran from 6th April 2018 and ends 5th April 2019.
If you are employed and pay tax under the PAYE system then you should be all set but verify the amount of tax you have paid overall this tax year to make sure you haven't paid too much or too little. If you have had multiple employments or income sources, make sure your tax codes have correctly adjust the tax take for each. You will receive a P60 by May 31st and can see the total gross income and tax deducted for each of your incomes. Check the total gross and tax taken using our tools.
If you are self employed the tax for the tax year will be due 31st January 2020 so you have around nine months to get your tax return completed. Make sure losses from the 2014/2015 tax year are included on this tax return as the right to use them will expire this year. Maximise your allowable expenditure before the end of the tax year to include it for tax relief for your January bill. Conversely, if you can delay any big invoices one week until the next tax year you might be able to sneak under or reduce the amount of tax liable to a higher threshold, or push it into 2021.
Employed people will need to request a tax refund for any allowable expenses - check with our tax expenses calculator for what you can claim, the amount you could receive and how to make the claim.
The 2018 tax year saw the tax-free personal allowance rise to £11,850 and up to £1,185 of this can be transferred to/from a spouse or partner in order to save you tax up to £474 for higher rate taxpayer and £237 for a basic rate taxpayer. If you can take advantage of this and meet the criteria it would be a handy bonus.
Capital gains get an annual exempted amount, which cannot be rolled over, so make sure you use the £11,700 available if you have capital gains to declare.
People on lower incomes and eligible for the government help to save accounts should look into opening one online. The account offers a 50 percent bonus on deposits up to a maximum of £1,200 over a total of four years.
We recommend looking through our tax tips for the year end from last year. Many things we reminded our readers then are still applicable now. We have a number of tools to help minimise your tax bill - such as our tax refund check which highlight a number of ways of reducing your tax bill - so take a look there too.
There are number of tax changes starting from April 6th, including the £650 boost to the personal allowance to £12,500 and an increase to the higher rate threshold by £3,000. Calculate your tax changes for April 2019 onward using any of our tax tools and calculators as all are updated for the 2019/2020 tax year.