There are a huge number of benefits to attaching yourself to an umbrella company to administer and mediate your work when you sub contract with an employer, including acting to bring down your tax exposure in a totally legal and up-front fashion. If you’re self employed but contracted to one major business, you may need to consider going down the umbrella company route . In order to ascertain properly whether this option is the best option for your circumstances, you may initially want to be sure of two things: will you be financially better off if you attach yourself to an umbrella company, and can you do this without thoroughly upsetting and incurring the wrath of the Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs? To find the resolution of these two fairly important queries you ought to avail yourself of an umbrella calculator and make sure that you have a thorough understanding of IR35.

An umbrella calculator is an online piece of software, commonly found on the websites of umbrella companies for “hire”, that allows the user to enter their own fiduciary circumstances and a range of other factors, such as their hourly income , amount of billable hours they usually work and regular expenses like overnight hotel bills and subsistence when travelling on business. Other variables you might put into an umbrella calculator will include business mileage and any other genuine business expenses. The primary use of an umbrella calculator is to use these variables to find out whether a person will be financially better off working for an umbrella company or under contract as a self employed person. The Umbrella calculator looks at all of the variables against the prevailing tax code and works out a net saving should the person decide upon the umbrella company option.

As well as making use of an umbrella calculator, you should ensure you have a comprehensive grasp of and are totally compliant with IR35. IR35 is the name of a piece of British legislation issued to make sure that those who are set up to be hired by an umbrella company do not benefit unfairly from their change in situation. IR35 was issued in 1999, prior to which time those who were employed by an umbrella company could without fear of punitive action take their income as dividends , which were officially not liable for National Insurance payments. IR35 also acted to counter an umbrella company from being owned by different members of the same family, such that all of the owners could benefit from distributing the company’s income across each owner’s lower taxation echelons and personal allowances, so as to reduce their tax bill to the point of avoidance. Despite regular consideration and review by intervening British governments, IR35 remains largely intact and also is pretty much unchanged since its creation .

A recent eruption in the Icelandic Volcano has disrupted air travel across much of Northern Europe in the past few days.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers in Europe and around the world have been affected.
Scientists say the volcano is still erupting but producing less ash. Europe’s intergovernmental air control agency, Eurocontrol, said it “expects around 11,000 flights to take place today in European airspace. On a normal day, we would expect 28,000.” Of about 300 transatlantic flights that would usually arrive in Europe in the morning, no more than 120 made it over, the agency said.