Closing LTD and moving abroad

[soyoh30298]

Hello, hope you're doing well everyone.
I'm moving abroad in a few months which will lead to me closing down my LTD company. I already took the salary from April (£1,047.50) and have about £15,000 left (after paying corporation tax). I would like to use the remaining cash to pay myself a salary up to the personal allowance in order to save CT and also get one year of NI contributions.
My understanding is, that such a high salary at the beginning of the the tax year will cause a big tax bill (since HMRC is going to assume that I'll get this salary each month for the rest of the year). Is there a way to avoid getting overtaxed? Assuming this will be the last payslip (final FPS), will HMRC account for that and not overtax me?
Is that legal for taking the full salary in a single month and would I get into trouble?
Thank you

[northernladuk]

I was of the understanding you cannot pay yourself a salary upfront for work, particularly if you are not going to work it. Kind of makes sense really. The question usually comes from someone who has enough profit in the company to pay everything in April and then invest the personal money but thinking back to the threads the advice was you can't pay yourself upfront, you'd have to not pay yourself all year and do it retrospectively.

Same would apply to you I would think, particularly when you don't intend to even work it.

But then I don't have a clue so info above is pretty worthless. For those amounts surely it would be worth paying an professional to get it done properly. They might know something you've missed and actually save you money even on top of the fee.

[sadkingbilly]

have you asked your accountant?
you HAVE an accountant, i presume?

[WTFH]

Hello, hope you're doing well everyone.
I'm moving abroad in a few months which will lead to me closing down my LTD company. I already took the salary from April (£1,047.50) and have about £15,000 left (after paying corporation tax). I would like to use the remaining cash to pay myself a salary up to the personal allowance in order to save CT and also get one year of NI contributions.
My understanding is, that such a high salary at the beginning of the the tax year will cause a big tax bill (since HMRC is going to assume that I'll get this salary each month for the rest of the year). Is there a way to avoid getting overtaxed? Assuming this will be the last payslip (final FPS), will HMRC account for that and not overtax me?
Is that legal for taking the full salary in a single month and would I get into trouble?
Thank you

Your accountant should help you with this one, but you might be better to talk to Maslins on the best way to close your company down. They can also work through the figures and paperwork for you.

[Yuri F]

It's nobody's business how much you pay yourself in salary if you're company director (including efforts on planning dissolving Ltd) as long as it's reasonable (not millions) and is not putting your creditors (including HMRC via tax liability) at risk of not being paid.
Therefore rate you charge to Ltd for performing director's duty is completely up to you (proportionally to workload - if it's at the start of the tax year then be it), especially in such low end of scales (but focusing larger payment within single period - will expose you to higher NI liability than it would normally be for most accounting software).
All IMV.

[Protagoras]

Hello, hope you're doing well everyone.
I'm moving abroad in a few months which will lead to me closing down my LTD company. I already took the salary from April (£1,047.50) and have about £15,000 left (after paying corporation tax). I would like to use the remaining cash to pay myself a salary up to the personal allowance in order to save CT and also get one year of NI contributions.
My understanding is, that such a high salary at the beginning of the the tax year will cause a big tax bill (since HMRC is going to assume that I'll get this salary each month for the rest of the year). Is there a way to avoid getting overtaxed? Assuming this will be the last payslip (final FPS), will HMRC account for that and not overtax me?
Is that legal for taking the full salary in a single month and would I get into trouble?
Thank you

Yes, a large payment will probably trigger a revised tax code.

To fix this, you can just use HMRC's online service to enter an estimate of your expected annual income from each PAYE source.

So you just enter £12,570 (if you have the standard personal allowance) and the system will issue an updated tax code.
You can enter expected income for every PAYE income source that HMRC knows about.

[escapeUK]

My thoughts:

NI for directors is usually calculated on an annual basis.
If you are moving abroad who cares about a tax code here?
If you are moving abroad are you sure the income is not to be taxed under that country's rules?
Check for where your payroll allows you to set yourself as leaving in this payroll run. That I think will stop the logic of taking the figure entered as being a per month figure.

[Lance]

if you have less than £25k in the company maybe think about a strike off.
You will pay capital gains tax, which is lower tax rate than income tax. And may even be eligible for BADR which is even lower.