Wife has bought some shares at work through the company share save scheme. Can anyone give me an easy guide to: –

whether we need to pay stamp duty
cheapest way to sell them
when does capital gains tax kick in and is that on the selling value or the profit?

Cheers.

Could leave it in the bike forum because I know what I want to spend the money on.

buy low, sell high.

That’s the plan. Just trying to work out how high they need to go to make a profit once I’ve considered all the hidden costs.

There’s a really good book I bought call the Naked Trader (link).

It explains all about the hidden costs and pitfulls like the spread and how you can be caught out. It also talks about tax and that sort of thing. It’s well worth a read.

Capital gains – Clue is in the name, it’s on the profit. Conversely if you did a lot of this, you could offset your inevitable losses against tax too.

If it is like my wifes share save scheme it is pretty simple and no admin for you. You pay a set amount each month for the shares over twelve months. At the end of the 12 months you can choose to sell them or keep them. If they sell at a loss the company reimburse you any losses (i.e worse case you get back what you put in at teh end of the 12 months)

This one works in that we’ve saved for 3 years and opted to buy the shares as the price has gone up. We’re now looking to sell them but realising that selling them might incur more cost than we first thought.

You have a CGT allowance (each) of £10,100 in each tax year.

Any gains over and above this are taxed at 18%.

So, if you buy at £10k and sell at £20k you have no tax liability. After April 2011 you can repeat the process again.

Cheers Mr Tall, we should be safe from that one then!

stamp duty is 1% I think, when you sell or buy.

Allowance £10,100
Rate 18% or 28% depending on your tax band

Might be exempt from CGT if it’s a approved scheme anyway.