Last updated: August 2026 If your business needs its own premises — an office, workshop, warehouse, retail unit, or similar — there’s a route worth knowing about that most business owners never consider: having your pension buy the building, rather than the company or you personally. It sounds unusual the first time you hear it, … Read more
Last updated: August 2026 | Tax year 2026/27 Ask a lot of business owners what their retirement plan is, and the honest answer is often “sell the business.” It’s an understandable position — the business is usually the single largest asset most owners have, and years of work have gone into building its value. But … Read more
Last updated: August 2026 | Tax year 2026/27 If you run your own limited company, there are three main routes to get value out of it: pay yourself a salary, take dividends, or have the company contribute to your pension. Most director guidance treats this as a two-way choice — salary vs dividends — and … Read more
Last updated: August 2026 There’s a quiet drop-off that happens almost every time someone leaves employment to work for themselves, and it rarely gets talked about at the moment it matters. Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that pension saving falls sharply and immediately when people move from an employee job into … Read more
Last updated: August 2026 | Tax year 2026/27 Pension planning tends to focus entirely on SIPPs and private saving, and skips over something that’s often better value than anything a SIPP provider can offer: filling gaps in your State Pension record. For self-employed people especially — where profits can dip below the threshold that triggers … Read more
Last updated: August 2026 | Tax year 2026/27 “Self-employed” covers two quite different legal setups — trading as a sole trader, or trading through your own limited company — and the difference matters more for pensions than almost anywhere else in your finances. The rules aren’t just administratively different; the mechanics of what you can … Read more
Last updated: August 2026 | Tax year 2026/27 Most limited company directors know the basic playbook: pay yourself a small salary up to the personal allowance, top up with dividends, keep National Insurance down. It’s sound advice as far as it goes. But it usually stops one step too early — because it treats the … Read more
Last updated: August 2026 | Tax year 2026/27 If you’re employed, someone usually makes this decision for you. Auto-enrolment quietly puts a slice of your pay into a workplace pension before you’ve thought about it, and whatever’s left over might drift into an ISA if you’re disciplined. Self-employed, that scaffolding disappears. No employer contribution, no … Read more