The UK's worst tax... stamp duty Blog Discussion

Sparkey_3

Very interesting blog.
We are going to purchase my parents house next spring but are facing a £7k stamp duty!. Is it legal to reduce the asking price to £249,950 and pay the difference by cash to my parents?
Would be v.interested to know.
Kind Regards
Sparkey
:rolleyes:

bendabomb

Sparkey,
not a chance old mate! The chancellor may a conniving old goat, but he isn't quite that daft.
If the house was worth about 260k you could possibly get away with 'buying' the fixtures and fittings separately. All these transactions are subject to review by the tax office, and if they think you have stitched them up they could come after you. Incidentally when we bought at 250k plus 5k for f & f our conveyancing solicitor wanted a list, with values, of everything we were paying for. And these must be second-hand values, not new. If he hadn't been satisfied that our valuation was kosher then he would have refused to proceed, because he could get struck off for aiding and abetting.
Good luck

James_Bond

Agree with most of the stuff written here.

Is there any way whatsoever to have all your assets and money taken abroad so this rich, evil, corrupt scumbags of a government, don't get their filty, greedy little mits on your money when you die?

Any ideas?

James_Bond

Sparkey wrote:

Very interesting blog.
We are going to purchase my parents house next spring but are facing a £7k stamp duty!. Is it legal to reduce the asking price to £249,950 and pay the difference by cash to my parents?
Would be v.interested to know.
Kind Regards
Sparkey
:rolleyes:

Nothing wrong with a good old backhander - go for it!

lynneinjapan

BigBelly wrote:

Cutting stamp duty would just drive house prices even higher. The real problem is high house prices - lower prices would mean that less people would need to pay high stamp duty.

Nobody is proposing that stamp duty be cut, just that it be restructured in a more rational way.

Income tax does already work this way, so why can't stamp duty?

As for IHT being worse - I agree that it's a cruel and evil tax, but at least it's only applied after you die, whereas stamp duty is foisted on people just at the point when they're already stretching their finances to the limit. Sure, your heirs might suffer as a result but you could argue that they should support themselves rather than relying on an inheritance.

overworked_underpaid

Sparkey wrote:

Very interesting blog.
We are going to purchase my parents house next spring but are facing a £7k stamp duty!. Is it legal to reduce the asking price to £249,950 and pay the difference by cash to my parents?
Would be v.interested to know.
Kind Regards
Sparkey
:rolleyes:

I'm not a legal expert or anything, but I don't see anything wrong with what you are suggesting. Paying 7K less on a 257K house isnt really underselling it.

Think of it as a "loophole"! and I think you should take that to your advantage.

overworked_underpaid

pb1 wrote:

I don't understand why the % increases at various price thresholds? Let's say there was a uniform rate of 1% across the board. That's £1,000 on a £100,000 house and £10,000 on a £1,000,000 house. So, if you can afford a house 10 times more expensive than someone else them you pay 10 times more tax. Sounds reasonable to me.

I agree that it should be 1% across the whole board but I somehow doubt that this will ever be implemented.

WilfB

As houses are different from most other investments (in that many people also buy them out of necessity for themselves), would it not make sense to apply radically different stamp duty on first and supplementary homes (regardless of whether the latter are for personal or investment purposes). 2% stamp duty after £350,000 for first homes, and 10% stamp duty regardless of value for the rest, would seem like a reasonable starting point, for exampe.
I know someone will say that landlords provide an essential service to people who want to rent, but this is only necessarily true if we can prove that when an (e.g. buy-to-let) investor puts capital into the market, this leads directly or indirectly to the building of a new home. If this is not the case, all the investor is doing is ensuring that one more house is available to renters and one less to buyers. I am willing to be convinced that this is worthy, but haven't been yet.

So, I open the floor with the following questions:

- do we all accept that the house market is special and should be treated differently from other investment categories?
- do we agree that there is nothing intrinsically worthy in transferring a house from the sales market to the rental sector?
- do we therefore think that there is reason to investigate the economic impact (in terns of house building, house prices and rent levels) of taxing people who are buying a home for themselves less than people buying as an investment?

hannah1979_2

I purchased my flat in 2003 which is in and paid stamp duty of over one thousand pounds, I have recently found out that I should not have paid this as the flat is in a regeneration area and therefore stamp duty exempt.

I contacted my solicitor regarding this and was told that due to being out of a two year period in which you have to claim I am no longer eligible to claim this money back. I am very upset about this matter does anyone have any suggestions? Have thought about making claim in small claims court against my solicitor but have no idea how to start. Is this a lost cause?

[Deleted User]

You could make a claim against you negligent solicitor.. shouldn't this have been picked up in your searches?