Certificated shares - is it possible to divide and sell by end of March?

Somerset_Alan

Hi,  

I have a small certificated shareholding which I wish to sell - however the gain will be above the CGT allowance of £6000 (I've been holding them a very, very long time).  I want to double the CGT-free allowance by transfering half of them to my wife, then we can both sell.  I thought X-O would be good for the selling.

However, I'm worried that if I do the transfer by sending the old share certificate to the registrar's appointed administrator, Equiniti, then I will have to wait for them to issue two new share certificates - one for me and one for my wife - before we can execute the sale; and this might take until after Apr 5th, when the CGT allowance is set to go down to £3000. (I wish I'd done this while the allowance was £12000!).

Is there a faster / better way?  Can I deposit my certificate into my X-O account and then do the transfer to my wife (assuming she's also got an X-O account)?  Or can I ask X-O to sell half the shares, before doing the transfer?  Obviously, as an execution only service, I haven't asked X-O for their take on this, but if they have some sort of customer service I can try asking them.

Any thoughts?  (Apart from why have I left it so late, obviously - my excuse is Long Covid.)

spider42

Equiniti are pretty efficient, and based on my experience you should get your split share certificates back from them in about a week (subject of course to the inefficiencies of Royal Mail!). It should be well before 5 April.

My dad died last year, and I've been helping mum with probate etc. Last week, we sent in share certificates and stock transfer forms to get dad's paper certificates transferred from him to mum. Posted to Equiniti on Thursday last week, and new share certificates all received on Wednesday this week (15 different companies). Equiniti sent all of the new certificates by 1st class post (in 15 separate envelopes!).

(Computershare registrars were even quicker - theirs came back on Tuesday.)

Somerset_Alan

@spider42 Thanks; that's reassuring.  Although I have since found out that X-O can arrange a Gift transfer, so I am wondering whether it would be best to simply lodge my entire holding with them, and then execute the gift. 

Does anyone have experience of doing something like that?

Hoenir

Somerset_Alan said:

 Can I deposit my certificate into my X-O account and then do the transfer to my wife (assuming she's also got an X-O account)?  

The shares will be in your name only.  Transferring will not be an option. 

wmb194

I'm unsure of the exact mechanism, it may have been by certificate, but @UncleK wrote last year that he'd transferred shares to his wife via X-O and needed to supply a letter confirming it was a gift between spouses. 

In theory an in-specie internal transfer between accounts held with the same broker should be easy, it's just whether the broker wants the aggravation. You'll just need to ask.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6490420/how-to-correctly-gift-shares-to-spouse-cgt-changes/p4

boingy

Yes, you've got time. About a week to get them back from Equitini and another week and a bit to get them into XO and sell them. Plenty of contingency if you get going on it now. All the forms are downloadable.
Definitely get Equitini to split the shares and issue certificates rather than trying to get XO to split them. 

tetrarch

I would definitely split first and lodge later.

As others have said Equiniti are pretty good at this. They are awful and duplicitous in other areas, but simple unequivocal instructions they seem reasonably efficient

Regards

Tet

Somerset_Alan

tetrarch said:

I would definitely split first and lodge later.

As others have said Equiniti are pretty good at this. They are awful and duplicitous in other areas, but simple unequivocal instructions they seem reasonably efficient

Regards

Tet

My past experience of Eqiniti in other areas is the same - "awful".  But it is good to keep an open mind and I'll keep my fingers crossed for "reasonably efficient"!

Somerset_Alan

Hoenir said:

Somerset_Alan said:

 Can I deposit my certificate into my X-O account and then do the transfer to my wife (assuming she's also got an X-O account)?  

The shares will be in your name only.  Transferring will not be an option. 

Just to make sure I covered all the possibilities, I emailed X-O to ask them.  They stated that I could execute a gift transfer of any shares from my holding to my wife's holding - but there's a charge of £18.

Thanks everyone for your help and advice.