It can take many years of struggling to grow your business to the point when you can sell it for what you had hoped. Yet getting it to that point is only part of the challenge. The next step is making sure you and your family can enjoy the benefits for many decades to come. But how?
Stephen Adair, Chartered Financial Planner and Co-founder of Broad Chare Partners, explains the importance of expert advice to create a solution tailored to your needs.
Building up a business generally requires very different skills to selling it, and success with the former may well provide only limited help with the latter. Before you even sell your business, you need to be sure that you’ve done all the necessary tax planning. Otherwise, you could lose out unnecessarily.
Once the sale has gone through, the question is what to do with the money. Leaving it in the bank will probably see it grow only very slowly; in fact, it may well cause the value to go down over time, due to interest rates trailing the currently high levels of inflation.
That means you might want to invest at least some of the money and the right investment strategy is critical in helping secure your future financial well-being. A financial adviser can advise on this pre-sale to create your unique investment strategy in preparation for the sale going through, to give you the confidence to then focus solely on getting your deal over the line.
A key consideration before you invest is to determine your capacity for loss and how much risk you are comfortable with. Once you know that, you’re in a better position to look across the different asset classes and diversify appropriately. That might mean investing in a portfolio of equities, government and corporate bonds and commercial property.
Another consideration is how much to invest. Ordinarily, it’s wise to keep at least some funds available, to cover short-term expenditure and for any unforeseen eventualities.
You may still need some income, which will mean either staying in work or ensuring you’re able to draw the right income from the sale money. After all, you’ll no longer receive any income the business used to provide for you.
You will need to consider different tax wrappers to ensure your income is tax-efficient and you might consider gifting part of your wealth to your children or grandchildren through a discretionary trust*, which has the added advantage of reducing the burden of Inheritance Tax on your estates.
In all these decisions, age is a crucial factor. If you’re still in your 40s when you sell up, you may be starting a new business venture immediately – and not need much of an income. You may also be keen to gift money to your children, in which case certain forms of investment will be particularly beneficial for tax planning.
If you’re 60, your plans may well look very different. You may not want to start another business, in which case you are more likely to seek to draw an income from the proceeds of the sale. Ideally, that income will enable you to have the lifestyle you have been working towards. You could use a pension to draw income. However, if you don’t need it, you might prefer to leave it intact for your children as a tax-efficient form of inheritance. In that case, you are likely to be investing for much longer, and might therefore want to take more risk.
On the other hand, if you are thinking about planning for school or university fees, you will probably be needing the money much sooner. With a shorter time horizon, you are likely to want to take on less risk.
In short, there are many life decisions that will affect what you do with the proceeds of selling your business. With the right advice, you can have a solution tailored to your needs.
Get in touch with Broad Chare Partners here (https://www.broadcharepartners.co.uk/contact)
The value of an investment with St. James’s Place will be directly linked to the performance of the funds selected and the value may fall as well as rise. You may get back less than the amount invested.
An investment in equities does not provide the security of capital associated with a deposit account with a bank or building society, as the value & income may fall as well as rise.
The levels and bases of taxation, and reliefs from taxation, can change at any time. The value of any tax relief depends on individual circumstances.
*Trusts are not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.