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Personal Tax
Your personal finances need an overhaul. You used to be prepared to take on risk, to invest and speculate. But now you are keen to rebuild your personal balance sheets.
The watershed may have been September 15 2008, the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection holding more than $600 billion in assets - 9/15 was the 9/11 of private finances. It was the moment when wealth preservation replaced wealth creation as the priority for many private citizens.
"Since the shockwaves of Lehman and other collapses, there are more people seeking advice and assistance about wealth preservation," Les Deering, of Bond Pearce's private client team, says.
"And with an increase in general taxation levels to come in the near future - and the current depressed asset values available - it creates a very favourable climate for the passing of assets between generations in a tax efficient way."
Bond Pearce expertise covers the gamut of private client needs, from personal taxation, through wills and estates, to trusts, residence and domicile issues. Many of the clients Les's team advises owning non-UK property or run family businesses.
"We understand that in essence we're dealing often with the personal worries and concerns of individuals," Les says. "It's not an exercise in legal manipulation but rather a search for legal remedies for the needs of individuals."
Those clients come from diverse backgrounds. It is common for Bond Pearce to be writing the will for one person with an inheritance tax liability of more than £10m while dealing at the same time with an estate worth £100,000.
"We have the complete set of skills at Bond Pearce that can be at the disposal of private clients to make their life less worrying," Les says.
His career is a microcosm of the breadth of Bond Pearce's expertise - personal tax, inheritance and capital gains tax, trust and charities' returns, non-resident property owning companies and non resident landlord returns.
"We advise and set up trusts and family charities, administer them and when appropriate wind them up," Les says.
"We draft wills and codicils. We prepare deeds of variation and partition. We are or have been trustees of family trusts and charities and directors of small non-trading companies."
These areas of the law and finance are often subject to change and revision by governments.
For example, rules for non-domiciled foreigners coming to live in the UK have been substantially changed. And UK citizens registered as non-doms will be forgiven for finding regulations affecting their status baffling.
"We fit advice to circumstances," Les says. "That may mean using onshore or offshore trusts to help family-run companies. Or it could be the most tax efficient way for non-doms to move or to buy property."
