higher tax threshold - where, exactly?

jamescredmond

hi y'all,
I recently went to my branch of halifax for a financial health check. the advisor told me that the ht threshold now stands att k33. is this true? I was given to understand that the figure was more like k36.5. can anyone out there help? methinks she quoted a figure that excluded personal tax allowance.

dunstonh

the Halifax salesman is correct. Although so are you. You are just both interpreting the information differently.

You have your personal allowance where no tax is paid. Then the next £2150 is 10% (lower rate). The amount between £2151 and £33,300 is 22% (basic rate) and the amount over £33,300 is 40% (higher rate).

If you take a typical £5305 personal allowance, that puts the high rate threshold at £38,605.

I guess that's what happens when you see a toy-town adviser.

jamescredmond

dunstonh wrote:

the Halifax salesman is correct. Although so are you. You are just both interpreting the information differently.

You have your personal allowance where no tax is paid. Then the next £2150 is 10% (lower rate). The amount between £2151 and £33,300 is 22% (basic rate) and the amount over £33,300 is 40% (higher rate).

If you take a typical £5305 personal allowance, that puts the high rate threshold at £38,605.

I guess that's what happens when you see a toy-town adviser.

thank you for that. as you say -toytown. It becomes even worse when I tell you that I queried her figures no less than 3 times, which in turn led her to phone another 'advisor' who confirmed the figure as being correct! you can now see how I became confused. does anyone know anything about the quality of halifax's financial advice in general? is it this bad across the country or did I just get unlucky? my confidence in halifax has taken a kicking when they can get something this basic wrong(ish).

dunstonh

. does anyone know anything about the quality of halifax's financial advice in general? is it this bad across the country or did I just get unlucky? my confidence in halifax has taken a kicking when they can get something this basic wrong(ish).

Its tied adviser quality in general. I started life as a tied adviser with a bank. Cant fault the initial training and you think you know it all after a couple of years. You know you have some restrictions and you kid yourself that you are as good as an IFA but not that much. However, once you become an IFA you realise that you actually knew very little apart from being able to sell some rather poor quality products.

I just taken on two tied advisers as IFAs and they cannot believe the difference in knowledge required compared to their tied days. Indeed, another one was going to join us as well but he changed his mind and stayed with the tied company as he didn't feel he had the ability to be an IFA. To be honest, I agreed with him. He is now sitting in a bank giving out low level advice to all the unsuspecting.

Tiggs_2

despite the correct info above....even a muppet in a bank should be able to explain how HRT works!

i also started life as a tied agent (life assurance comp.) but i still knew how to explaing income tax...sounds like you have a dunce adviser rather than an obvious halifax issue (and there are plenty of dunce IFAs as well)

Tiggs_2

double post

Chrismaths

Agreed. But I think the proportion of morons is significantly higher in large businesses - tie, multi-tie or 'independent'. Depolarisation was one of the worst ideas ever. I think that advisers should be seperated into 'salesmen' and 'servicers'. That's where the difference lies.