As I understand your situation I do not think you will not be allowed to carry the losses back against capital gains of prior years, but please do seek professional advice that is informed of your personal circumstances.

@All — I’d love to be able to answer these questions with confidence, but these are complicated issues which will very possibly need the attention of a specialist tax advisor who can look out for the particular issues in these domains.

Sometimes you have to pay professionals for advice, and spending a few hundred pounds with a good accountant – when it is regarding multi-tens of thousands of pound tax affairs – is a likely candidate. (As opposed to say, overpaying for mediocre fund management).

Fully applaud doing some research, of course, to get yourself up to speed first.

Note that property has particularly fiendishly complicated issues. But the tax man has put some decent information online.

This HMRC page introduces the basics of property CGT:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/cgt/property/basics.htm

This page goes into more detail about calculating CGT on property:

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/cgt/property/calc-cgt.htm

This site answers some frequently asked questions in more detail:

http://www.netlawman.co.uk/info/allowable-losses.php

Hope these are helpful.

I am not however going to be able to be drawn into complicated individual questions, mainly because I’m not qualified to give you specialist, personal, advice, even if I knew all the details of your situation, which usually has a strong bearing on tax matters.

To brutally paraphrase the great philosophy Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Well firstly I’d like to say how impressed I am with this site.. I’m a relatively young business owner who is starting to benefit from the fruits of my labour – the info on here looks perfect to help me invest some returns.

Anyway, this question’s not about me personally….I’m trying to flesh out a conversationI had at the bar last night..

A very close friend of mine’s father owns a farm in a legal partnership with other family members. The farm hasnt been doing too well, so to pay some debt my friend’s father liquidated a house for circa £200K that he personally owned two thirds of. The sale money went straight into the business account and the bulk was used to pay creditors on the farm business – the rest left in the farm account and has now be used in the same tax year – no real profit in the business . He took nothing for himself personally.

Does he need to pay capital gains on the cash he made on the property investment? I’m assuming he does, as a gain is a gain? – even though he didn’t profit from it and transferred it sraight into the business.

Poor chap has just had one disaster after another – asset sale after asset sale.

Also, the additional third of the sale was owned by the farm business partrnership. I’m guessing this is still classed as an asset sale and subject to CGT over the 3 partners? If it is I’m thinking it should be subject to the 10% entrepreneurs relief rate?

Thanks very much for taking the time to read.

* you go over the annual CGT limit for your total gains (the gains you made from all your profitable share trades, minus the losses from all the loss-making ones, over the year)

or

* if you dispose of assets worth more than four times the annual allowance (i.e. £42,400 for 2011-2012) over the tax year. (Note this is total proceeds, not just profit).

You would not need to declare a £100 capital gain if that was all you made in the year. (I think it’s useful to think of ‘capital gains’ rather than ‘profits’ to avoid confusing your thinking with income from other sources).

The gains are reported on supplementary pages of your annual self-assessment form. If you don’t usually complete one but have made declarable gains, then you’ll need to do so for that year.

If so, do I declare any profit, even as little as £100?

Cheers!