How we saved a Tonbridge family business £8,800 through restructuring
Client J runs a long-established Tonbridge professional-services business trading as a Ltd company, with his wife managing the office and accounts full-time. He took all the dividends while his wife was on a low salary with no shareholding, so the family wasn't using both personal allowances and dividend bands efficiently, and there were no pension contributions.
We rebalanced the structure. We brought the wife in as a 50% shareholder reflecting her genuine full-time role, set both directors' salaries at the NIC-optimal level, split dividends across both personal allowances and basic-rate bands, and set up employer pension contributions for both as a tax-efficient extraction, documenting the roles and shareholding to reflect the genuine economic reality.