Visions for new financial year

Give your private practice 20-20 vision with a new year, new decade financial review, says Ian Tongue.

The new year can be viewed as a fresh start to look at your business even if you are not at your normal financial year-end. 

Periodic review of your circumstances is the best way to ensure you are optimised for tax and managing taxation around your pension, which has become a particularly difficult aspect of a doctor’s financial affairs. Here are some of the common areas that you should be considering.

Trading structure

Usually, the most effective change to your tax burden is to consider your trading structure, particularly if you have a large self-employed private practice.

Your individual circumstances are important, as one-size-fits-all planning doesn’t work for doctors. The key variables to determine the optimum structure are going to be your spouse’s financial circumstances and whether you need all the money generated from your private practice at this point or whether you could live with accessing it later on. 

It is common to start off with one type of structure and change this later, as your private practice and circumstances evolve.