Taking a package ?

[Los Endos]

I may take a 'package' at the year-end, almost seems rude not to if its available ( 34 years with a blue chip ).....

Any particular advice on this ?
Fancy contracting till I can access my pension ( 3/4 years time ), what's the market like ( I'm mainly SC Management rather than IT ) ?
Top tips for setting up my business ?
Want to keep the tax man away from my package, any advice apart from £30k is free and the Pension route gets me out of 40% haircut cut ?

Keen to hear any first hand advice from anyone who's taken the plunge ! :-)

[GadgeS3C]

I did similar last year.

Can't help with avoiding tax - the only way I was told I could do it was the pension route, which wasn't an option.

One thing to watch - HMRC may tax any payment on a 0T basis - which can easily mean you pay 50% on your package (assuming it's a decent whack). I don't think there's anyway around it but no-one told me or my colleagues about it.

You can get it back later but it may take a while...

[Los Endos]

Thanks for the heads up on 50% !

Spoke to my accountant and FA, if you put the cash into a pension you get your 40% tax back, of which 20% is available back in cash, the other 20% resides back in your pension.
Bottom line - you can claw back the tax....

[omniflow]

I think there are basically 3 amounts - PILON, the first £30K of redundancy and the remainder of the redundancy, although PILON MIGHT be included in the redundancy package.

If I remember correctly, the PILON was taxed as normal PAYE, the first £30K was zero tax and the remainder was taxed at 20%. This all happened before I got my hands on the cash. I then had to pay the remaining tax owing before the end of January following the end of the tax year in which I received the cash. In my case this was a delay of 21 months.

It MIGHT be possible to save some of the tax by setting up as a sole trader and then incurring losses. Not entirely sure how you can do this legitimately without actually spunking the cash, but there might be a way you set something up where you "invest" the cash straight away, and then get it returned to you in future years. Not really sure it's worth the effort.