capital gains tax

trishf

Advice please I am a 61 year old housewife a none tax payer living in private rented accomodation for the past 15yrs.
In february 2009 i inherited my late Uncle's house,who died in 2004 and it took the solicitor until 2008 to discover that i existed . Valuation at the time of his death was put at £55k now the value is £87,995.00.
If i sell the house would i have to pay capital gains tax on the profit, if so how much would i pay after deducting my personal tax allowance.
Also are there any other things e,g, solicitors /estate agents costs ect.i can offset against this tax .
If i decided to live in the property would i avoid paying cgt and does a time limit apply for you to take up residency

James_Trimby

HI unfortunately you cannot now amend the value of £55k (if he had found you quicker it might have been possible to replace this figure with the eventual sales value but there is a time limit which you are well past)

In this tax year you can make up to £10100 profit on gains and pay no tax anything after this is taxed at 18% so there would be a tax bill of £4121. BUT you can deduct selling costs from this (Solicitor/estate agent etc) which should drop the tax bill by £500 or so.

If you moved into it it would become your main residence and from that point you would be earning months that would be exempt. The calculation is done on a monthly time basis so you will never completely loose the first period when it was unoccupied. Obviously the longer you live in it the smaller % of the final gain will be taxed but in theory the calculation should still be done. If you are going to move in do as fast as possible ie change addresses etc with officials/electrol roll even if you take a few months to move in properly At present each month extra helps the % along that much faster. Cheers James

00ec25

the OP has duplicated this question, perhaps best to keep the answers in one place to ensure consistency of reply

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=2001285

Jake'sGran

trishf wrote: »

Advice please I am a 61 year old housewife a none tax payer living in private rented accomodation for the past 15yrs.
In february 2009 i inherited my late Uncle's house,who died in 2004 and it took the solicitor until 2008 to discover that i existed .
Also are there any other things e,g, solicitors /estate agents costs ect.i can offset against this tax .
If i decided to live in the property would i avoid paying cgt and does a time limit apply for you to take up residency

Do you believe the solicitor was negligent in taking so long to find you? I always thought that when a person made a will and named a beneficiary, the address of that person had to be mentioned. This is what I have done with my will even though the beneficiaries are all family who live close by. It just occurred to me that your uncle perhaps didn't make a will and the house has come to you as a result of "first in line" of his
relatives. I have posed this question with the idea that it might be possible to sue the solicitor for taking so long. But, the valuation would be the lower figure I assume. Hope it gets sorted to your advantage.

lowbrim

Why dont you just pull the MP's dodge? Go and live in the house for a few months and make it your main residence then sell? No capital gains tax to pay!! If is is good enough for them........

trishf

Thank you all for your replies i am sorry i duplicated my question i did try to delete it when i realized i had posted it twice but i must have done something wrong because it didn't remove it