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[jamesbrown]

Right, but that's the nature of lending. The work involved isn't that closely related to the amount you want to borrow. Their fees are straightforward and transparent, and I don't think you can really ask for more than that. You can look at the Google reviews for recent reviews (FWIW). No slippage from...

[jamesbrown]

The thing about professional help is that you're going to pay for it, one way or another....

[jamesbrown]

Call Ryan and Katherine at Freelancer Financials. You won't be disappointed - you can find many other threads around here recommending them. No affiliation, other than having used them in the past.

[jamesbrown]

[jamesbrown]

Flights resumed quickly, so suity probably wasn't involved in this one.

[jamesbrown]

I hear the rain stays mainly in the plain....

[jamesbrown]

That's not going to happen with legal action underway. Again, I don't think there are any constraints on foreign ownership, merely that the umbrellas are UK based and have 75% of their operations in the UK. For those of us that don't know the people involved, we'll just have to wait, but it wasn't about...

[jamesbrown]

Same setup here. WD reds and a Synology NAS, cannot go wrong. Well, I mean, as NAT points out, there will always be disks that fail and there may be bad batches too, so you may get unlucky and you should never confuse redundancy and backup, but WD reds are pretty bulletproof in my personal experience....

[jamesbrown]

That's fair. FWIW, I agree that Lucy has built a well-deserved reputation in the contracting community, which was surely the basis for Clarity's success as a very small umbrella, not on many PSLs - Clarity is Lucy, let's be honest. Many of Clarity's umbrella employees were recommended to them, I would...

[jamesbrown]

There is a lot of "cope" among the people that are close to this world, IMHO. There is a much simpler way to mitigate the risk and that is to dramatically shorten the supply chains, not lengthen them. Either way, that wasn't my point, my point was about the long-term precarity of the umbrella...

[jamesbrown]

Bloody hell, earwigs just got a bit scarier ...

[jamesbrown]

To be pedantic, there isn't an Act, there is a draft Finance Bill. However, I did read the draft when it came out over the summer (and legal commentary surrounding it). I don't think the JSL is as straightforward as you are making out, i.e., a client is only a relevant party for JSL and hence liable...

[jamesbrown]

No, the agency is liable in the first instance (where one exists). The whole point of JSL is to allow for the recovery of tax from any party in the supply chain, regardless of fault, albeit with an order of priority. Sensible clients are (or should be) policing their own supply chains at this point,...

[jamesbrown]

Curious if they've been removed from the FCSA register. Perhaps pending enquiries. Lucy?

If true, some updates needed here:

https://clarityumbrella.co.uk/about-...ny-compliance/

I don't believe UK ownership is a prerequisite for FCSA membership, and Clarity remains...

[jamesbrown]

Hat tip to your superior dimwittedness. As discussed above and noted in the budget speech itself, these changes don’t affect traditional employer pension contributions, they only affect SalSac, which is irrelevant for a company director receiving dividends from outside IR35 income. Also, the choice...

[jamesbrown]

This is where the saucepan handle is stuck.

[jamesbrown]

Er, how would that work? I suppose you have the tax advantage of not having dividend tax, but eventually you will have the tax disadvantage of having dividend tax or capital gains tax, which is higher (currently, and even more so in April 2026). In any case, SalSac isn't relevant to a company director...

[jamesbrown]

Yes, this was made clear in the budget speech too and the prior briefing/leaks. They are targeting SalSac arrangements, specifically, not employer contributions in general....

[jamesbrown]

Not easily because there are anti-avoidance rules on the tax side, with a narrow carve out for the existing SalSac arrangements that will disappear, and issues on the employment law side too w/r to contract variations, and that's assuming you have an employer that wants the same thing (perhaps more...

[jamesbrown]

If you can afford to, it would make sense to max out your pension contributions between now and April 2029. I don't believe there was anything else that you could really take any steps to mitigate, it was mostly stealth taxes and small/random stuff.