Moving money from fund, tax to pay?

Toki

No as I dont know much about those. Same reason I never bought individual companies shares.

Simple thing for me was the market is down by a huge amount. Once the recession is over the markets historically rebound. I did do my research and thought it was worth the risk. It was nothing like playing poker! That's ridiculous. Mose "experts" were predicting the markets would be a lot higher in x years so I was actually going with the odds not against.

I certainly don't think I am lucky, I did my research and went with my instinct. Of course I knew my investment could have gone down but was almost certain to go back up again in time.

Thanks for the advice, but not thanks.

jon3001

Toki wrote: »

Thanks for the advice, but not thanks.

What advice?

jamesd

How and when to report a capital gain:

If you have to complete a tax return for 2008-09, you must fill in the Capital Gains Supplementary Pages if:

o your total gains for that year before deducting losses, if any, are more than the tax-free allowance (known as the 'Annual Exempt Amount')
o the total value of the assets you sell or otherwise dispose of is more than £38,400

Your sale exceeds £38,400 so on my reading of this you'd have to tell HMRC about the gain if it's more than whatever the limit for 2009/10 is, even though it won't exceed the annual allowance. I'm no expert, though. It's not clear to me whether not going over the annual allowance means that you don't need to file because you made no taxable gain or whether the total value of the sale means you do.

Toki

Thanks jamesd, I may have to look into this further.

artha

Toki wrote: »

No as I dont know much about those. Same reason I never bought individual companies shares.

Simple thing for me was the market is down by a huge amount. Once the recession is over the markets historically rebound. I did do my research and thought it was worth the risk. It was nothing like playing poker! That's ridiculous. Mose "experts" were predicting the markets would be a lot higher in x years so I was actually going with the odds not against.

I certainly don't think I am lucky, I did my research and went with my instinct. Of course I knew my investment could have gone down but was almost certain to go back up again in time.

Thanks for the advice, but not thanks.

Well done. I wish I had been as bullish as you as a newby investor and gone with my gut feelings in the way you did. I had about 250K total savings to play with in Mid March and reckoned that European markets could only start to rise soon (after all Asian markets had already started)

As a cautious starting point I only put a few thousand into the Fidelity Moneybuilder UK Index and Invesco Perpetual Corporate bonds. Both of these are now showing 20-25% paper profit. I've subsequently gradually invested another 60K into much more diversified areas in the intervening period and overall showing about an 8% gain. Hindsight is a wonderfull thing but I wish I'd dumped the money into a couple of funds at the start and then made adjustments with a bit more accumulated knowledge

Toki

artha wrote: »

Well done. I wish I had been as bullish as you as a newby investor and gone with my gut feelings in the way you did. I had about 250K total savings to play with in Mid March and reckoned that European markets could only start to rise soon (after all Asian markets had already started)

As a cautious starting point I only put a few thousand into the Fidelity Moneybuilder UK Index and Invesco Perpetual Corporate bonds. Both of these are now showing 20-25% paper profit. I've subsequently gradually invested another 60K into much more diversified areas in the intervening period and overall showing about an 8% gain. Hindsight is a wonderfull thing but I wish I'd dumped the money into a couple of funds at the start and then made adjustments with a bit more accumulated knowledge

Yes early to mid March would have been a great time to put money in. I'm glad you have made some money as well out of the recession. It's not worth putting that amount of money in a bank IMO.

Of course it's a risk putting money into the stock market but you can pull out at any time if things go massively wrong. However I take the other view, if markets are really far down due to uncertainty, recession and bad company results its a perfect time to invest as when things start returning to growth etc the market corrects itself and goes up substantially as has been proved.

I am no expert by any means but went with my gut instinct. In fact the market went down after I invested some of the money and was showing a loss of £2k but chose to invest more savings at that time. It's not an exact science but so far it's been a good investment.

jamesd

Toki, by the way, one way to manage CGT if you haven't sold yet is to sell enough to reach the allowance and buy another fund of the same type. That will trigger a capital gain on the sale of the first fund, while you stay invested in the second. You can leave some still invested in the first fund if selling that portion would take you over the annual limit. Repeat each year until you've realised all of the capital gain.

The criticism of you seems to have been on two grounds:

1. That it was for the short term. You've since clarified that you intended to hold for the longer term if necessary and may still not have sold, in anticipation of future gains.
2. That your investment lacked diversification, including it appearing to be 100% of your savings. There's some merit to this, since non-UK markets have also done well, particularly Latin America, SE Asia and India. That's cost you some possible profit as well as increasing risk.

I was shifting from low volatility to normal and high volatility gradually in the period from March but using greater diversification. My various pots have increased by these amounts since 1 March, ignoring extra money added:

S&S ISA: + 23% (Also have cash ISA, ISAs as a whole are still 30% in cash)
SIPP: +19%
Work pension: +23% (but started out 14% down, so is only 6% up overall on the old money)

Invested part of property deposit: +8% or so over purchase prices, not since March (some earlier, some later), still 1/3 cautious. Also high risk given the time horizon for this money.
Cash savings, Zopa, whatever their interest rate has been.