The best way to get paid?

[boredsenseless]

Quick survey on what we think is the best way to take money out of a company to live on

[Mustang]

Depends

Interesting poll and I look forward to the results! As I am new I dont want to skew the result so I will not vote. Ultimately I want to take 2 large divis but at the moment I dont have enough personal capital to live off in the interim so I have to draw a market salary

[handsfree]

How will IR know how many times you gave yourself dividends? How will they know whether you paid the divis monthly, twice, or as a one-off payment?

[Durbs]

"How will IR know how many times you gave yourself dividends? "

Dunno, but believe me, they WILL know. I just acted on the advice of my accountant who said by far the best way is for me to take a 4K salary and draw dividends every 3-4 months, she said any more often and it'd attract unwanted attention.

[boredsenseless]

They will know as I believe the banks are obligated to report to the IR any transactions (or perceived series of transactions) occurring in Personal Accounts over the value of £10000.

[boredsenseless]

Also if you declare in your accounts a salary of 4000 and fees earned around say 80000, I think it might get them interested enough to warrant a little compliance visit to see what happened to the rest.

And then they get to look at you bank statements and hey presto!!!

[planetit]

They will know as I believe the banks are obligated to report to the IR any transactions (or perceived series of transactions) occurring in Personal Accounts over the value of £10000.

You could pay dividends of £10k a MONTH? Feck me I'm in the wrong business.

They won't know unless they are already investigating you. In which case the MIGHT consider monthly dividends to be salary. However one of the accountants on here said he had never seen it happen. Either way, it's best to play safe with dividends every 6 months.