Be Excellent To Each Other

I will attempt to address this since I'm sick of having it chucked at me (MaliA was doing it back in January and Zardoz has just had a pop followed by a LOL from kalmar).

Apologies if this is TL:DR and I realise it's off-topic but to me at least it's moderately important, because I don't see how where I've ended up living has anything to do with my 'right' to comment on what's going on in London.

I originally moved over here in 1996 with Mrs AE, we'd met at Manchester Uni and were living and working over in Manchester - I was born and bred in Manchester, Mrs AE had moved to the IOM (from Salford) when she was four with her parents, but was back in Manchester for Uni (which is where we met). After I'd finished at Uni, MrsAE had continued with her studies whilst I was pulling £10K per year working at GAME (in Blackburn), which at the time was the highest paid job I'd ever had. As assistant manager I was salaried so couldn't earn any overtime, which made the 50-60 hours per week astronomically well paid on an hourly basis, even more so when you factored in 60 minutes travelling time each way.

Mrs AE's studies weren't going well, and I was fucking miserable, leaving the house at 6am and not getting back until 7pm six days per week. On top of that, Mrs AE's gran was taken seriously ill on the IOM.

Mrs AE and her gran were extremely close as to a large extent she'd been brought up by her gran, her mum and dad had worked ungodly hours running their own business for much of Mrs AE's childhood here on the IOM, and whilst they were never wealthy, they had finally managed to achieve a degree of material comfort, but at the cost of long, long hours (note - not tax evasion or the facilitation of it) - hence Mrs AE's gran often being her 'third parent'.

As such, we made the decision to move over here, I handed in my notice, Mrs AE jacked in her course, we loaded what we could into my dad's car and got the ferry over here.

Now at this point (and you'll simply have to take this on trust) I had no idea whatsoever about the IOM's status as an 'offshore tax haven' or anything else, I didn't really think about it at all to be honest, if you'd have asked me I'd have said it was like the Isle of Wight or something like that, just another county of the UK. After all, it used the same currency, there were no border controls, it had the same shops, it was by all accounts just an extension of the UK.

When we moved over here I immediately set myself up in Douglas as a specialist in tax evasion, earning £100K per year and driving a Bentley.

No hang on, I remember, I worked a procession of shit low paid jobs, doing anything and everything that would bring a wage in. One was so crap that my employer deducted tax and NI from my wages without ever, y'know, giving it to the government, as I found out when the tax office said they had no record of me being in employment for those few months.

Mrs AE's gran died not long after we got here, but me and Mrs AE had a flat and we both liked it here, after years of living in Manchester (often the very shitty bits, especially at Uni when we lived literally a stone's thrown from Moss Side) it made a nice change.

Bar work, cleaning work, shop work, any hours anywhere on the island I did them, there was no minimum wage back then and the bar work tended to be split shifts, all I had to get around was a beat up Honda C90 with a front light that hardly worked, riding back from Douglas (about 16 miles) at 2am in the morning in the driving rain and thick fog and fucking gales was brilliant. I fell off the thing more than once.

I applied for jobs constantly and finally got a half-decent job at a local video production company, (please note the videos didn't evade any tax), albeit at the very low end of the technical scale as a duplicator. I showed willing and took an interest in the VT editing side of things, and worked my way up through the ranks there and got enough experience to enable me to move into another company at a trainee rank but a proper technical role, and from there I've worked my way up the ranks again to the point that I earn a decent wage in a decent job (still no tax evasion though!) - but quite frankly I think I've paid my dues over the years, I've worked part time or full time since I was thirteen years old.

I pay the taxes and NI that are required of me by law on the IOM, and I've built a life for me and Mrs AE and now our child here for fifteen years, only the last five or six of which I've been what you might call 'pretty well paid'.

As such I'm not going to apologise for where I live, whatever the IOM's status as an offshore centre may be, I'm not sure how it's relevant to the comments I've made in this thread, I came here as an honest worker and I have remained so for all the time I've been here. The city of London as a 'financial centre' is one of the biggest fucking tax dodge enablers in the entire fucking world, does anyone who lives in London or contribute to the London economy therefore fall foul of the same 'rule' about what they can and can't post about without suffering mockery due to where they happen to live?

Anyway, enough said.

Huh. I had no idea it worked that way. I mean, I knew it was a "tax haven", but I'd never thought about how that worked in practice. I'd be, umm, something like five thousand pounds a year better off under that system (do you pay the same NI as the mainland?)

According to my last pay slip, 7.1% of my gross pay for the month was deducted as NI, is that the same as you pay? Total deductions (tax+NI) were 12.5%.

Not sure how it works in the UK but here you can claim mortgage interest relief and offset it against your tax bill, so as well as using Mrs AE's personal allowance (£9300) and my own (another £9300), we can offset £7500 of mortgage and loan interest against taxable income. It all ends up with the first £27.5K of my salary being tax free.

http://www.gov.im/treasury/budget/

Mind you, don't get too carried away with how much better off you'd be over here, general cost of living is higher, housing costs more, rents are higher, even basic shit like petrol and bread costs more.

On the plus side it's a gorgeous place to live, with pretty much zero crime beyond the pissheads at the weekend. The old cliché of not locking your doors when you go out actually applies, and the number of times I've gone back to the Scooby and realised I've not locked it are beyond counting. Once I'd left a £1000 laptop on the passenger seat and left it parked in Douglas overnight

So yeah, better than we lived next door to Moss Side

Whenever the IOM is mentioned, I think of the Fast Show sketches...

Wow, I'd be considerably better off. Although we probably have similar "allowance" loopholes here that I'm failing to take advantage of in the first place.



Sounds about like where I live now. When can I move in? _{with flis}

Mortgage tax relief (MIRAS) was ditched over here some point in the 90s.

It's not a loophole, it's on the front page of the government's treasury budget site after all and there's a very clearly marked box for it on the tax return form you have to do every year

It was actually £10000 per person last year but they've reduced it to £7500 per person for this financial year.

We still pay the old fashioned rates too, we never got the poll tax and council tax.

It is kind of a loophole but not in the way Kalmar states. Isle of Man doesn't want to collect a lot of tax off its residents, and so to do this, it has two options - a very low tax rate, or a higher tax rate with a lot of allowances that have to be claimed, so that everyones effective rate ends up being very low.

By using the allowance system, it hides those reliefs from the outside world, and reduces the risk of being deemed an aggressive tax haven. Unbelievably this system still seems to work. Switzerland has a similar mechanism- a high headline tax rate but a system which means for many corporates, you only pay tax on (say) 5% of income.

I've since read elsewhere that NI is the same, so there's that. But this:means I'm revising my "about five grand" better off statement earlier to "considerably more than five grand". Golly.

Relative to Wales, I could believe it. But relative to (say) non-horrible bits of London?

But we don't have a high headline tax rate, the standard rate is 10% and the top rate is 20%.

The first £10500 of taxable income is subject to the 10% rate, and thereafter all income is taxed at 20%.

20% is high enough to keep it under the radar though.

Under what radar?

The OECD seems happy enough with us.

http://www.oecd.org/document/3/0,2340,e ... _1,00.html

Well, that's what he means - it's not such a ridiculously low tax rate that it has nations demanding that it be closed down as a tax haven.

I had no idea it was such a tax haven, I honestly thought that was a joke, based on how it used to be in the 60s or whatever.

I don't know how much stuff costs in London

As a general guide a nice 1-bed flat here will cost you about £600-£700 per month to rent (crap ones are down at £400-£500):

House rentals you're looking at £750-£850 per month, although that will get you a nice one.

To buy you're probably starting at around £70-£80K for an apartment/flat and £140-150K for a house, £200K will see you in something a lot nicer though.

As a guide we've got a three-storey five bedroom Victorian mid-terrace and we paid £184K four and a half years ago, prices haven't moved an awful lot since then.

I'm confused as to what the point is then?

What's wrong with a government not wanting to tax its citizens until the pips squeak?

EDIT - Maybe worth splitting the IOM stuff out?

Umm, that's cheaper than where I live in South Wales (Cwmbran), and a lot cheaper than my nearest cities (Bristol and Cardiff).

Edit -- my three-bed terraced two-story ex-council-house with 750 sq ft of living space cost £132k six years ago and is worth about that now.

It becomes a problem if businesses start HQing themselves there for purely tax reasons - see Jersey as a prime example. I don't believe this is the case for the IOM, and I'd be interested as to why that is.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Jesus, i'm moving to the IOM!

Edited to add more context: Your rental prices are south east, but not close to London, your purchase prices are arse end of nowhere prices...

You missed one...

A split with no lock? What is the world coming to these days!

Bloody amateurs

No I didn't.

Also, I always split with no lock. Kalmar and DavPaz still have their training wheels on.

He calls it 'bareback'

Do these look cheap by UK standards then?

http://www.cowleygroves.com/2010/search ... ige=&sort=

I just remember my brother paying about £90K for a good-sized three bed terraced house in North Manchester (not a bad area either) at about the same time we bought ours.

Oooh, edgy and anarchic

Very cheap for the south east, about equivalent to Newcastle in my experience.

I think you might want to look at those house prices again, dude. You can't even get a first-time buyer 2 bed for £150k.

Two bed cottage for £145K:

http://www.cowleygroves.com/2010/proper ... p_ref=9290

AE - for context, living in Blackheath I have the bottom two floors of a house. Two beds, two bath, big loung/living room, near a station, average garden.

£1350 a month in rent, with no bills included (other than a gardener, oddly). Would cost well over 500k to buy.

I recently had cause to examine rental prices in the San Francisco Bay area. That's a spicy meatball. About 2x Curio's pricing, maybe more.

£1350 ?

£1350 ??

£1350 ???

*is glad he's northern*

Comparable to outer London, I reckon.

Yeah, but Curio's a mental. He lives in a gorgeous flat that costs a fortune, because he's a lazy arse and wants to live 3 feet from the train station.

His flat is very nice. But with his new pay rise thats 6 months rent paid off just with his rise!

Friend of mine rents his flat out in Ealing for £1,000 a month, that's 2 beds, living room and a kitchen on the first floor. He thinks he could get more for it, but is very happy with the current tenants so wants to keep them happy.

That's the thing, my house up north is rented out at £525 a month. I could easily get £575 a month for it now, but a single month of it being empty would take me a year to claw back. It just isn't worth the risk of putting the price up while you have a tenant in.

I'm in a London commuter belt town, off J4a of the M3. Here, rentals are £500–£800 for a two-bed flat. Our three-bed semi cost a whisker off £200k when we bought it five or so years ago; now, it'd probably go for about £230k, taking into account the housing drop. (Houses on the street were going for £260k+ at one point.) The IoM prices on that site look roughly comparable to around here.

fuck off do they, the first flat is a quid! Granted it has 0 bedrooms, in fact 0 rooms, but for a quid, you can't complain!
http://www.cowleygroves.com/2010/proper ... _ref=10607

Ok, so there are some places on the whole island available for that money but how about somewhere you would actually want to live...?

Take Gaywoods house now, an alternative here would cost about +£180k. The house Kov was looking to rent out for £525/pcm would sell for well over £200k and the rental would be £900/pcm.

The average house price is £270,000.

Income tax and personal allowances at that level are more of a benefit to the general population, which I don't think any other authority could try and legislate against. We have a tax cap for the truly rich, the most an individual can pay in income tax is £115,000 but there are only 75 people here who take advantage of it.

It's the other stuff, corporate tax and such, which give us more of a tax haven status.

For the price of my 2 bed ex-council flat, you can get a 3 bedroom house - in Santon though, no idea what that is like. The equivalent house would cost at least double in London.

The place most comparable, size and layout, to mine is a 2 bed semi, geographically, to me is on the market at £170,000. But has no garage.

Well we have other stuff here, there's a film industry and a space industry (no really) and we're quite big on e-gaming, and some kind of international shipping register too.

The idea is that we're not actually a 'tax haven' at all, the fact taxes are low doesn't necessarily make us a tax haven, the OECD don't seem to think so certainly.

I am still trying to rent it out.. i might have to drop the rental price!!

Fair point but we don't really have any truly bad areas here, I know Pully and Anagh Coar and maybe the Pondy have got a bit of a rep but seriously, they're like Butlins compared to some of the areas of the UK I've lived in. Certainly there's nowhere on the IOM I'd be worried about Mrs AE walking home by herself from/through at 2am on a Saturday morning (unlike in Manchester where I fucking bricked myself if she was 10 minutes late).

Besides which most of the 'bad areas' have been completely rebuilt in the last few years, the new Pondy looks mega-ace.

I'm not saying it's cheap to get a house here, but looking at the prices some other BEEXers are quoting, it doesn't look like we're scandalously expensive either.

That would seem to be APOD's point.

somewhat related. "Analysts say bank is unlikely to raise [interest] rates until 2013"

Forgive me but I'm still not seeing what the point is?

We're a well-regulated offshore jurisdiction that has low rates of tax for its residents and presents itself to the world as a good place to do business, and by all accounts is regarded internationally as a co-operative and responsible nation state.

It's not like we're Monaco or Liechtenstein or Andorra.

Good, our fucking mortgage is ruinous, especially since we're on a fixed rate of 5.75% until next year

And to think we paid for privilege of getting the advice to fix instead of go variable. Fuckers.

Ouch.

Well yeah, but why? What is it about the Isle of Man that's stopping tons of businesses flocking to it to set up HQs to take advantage of the lack of corporation tax, which is what they've done in Jersey?

The tax rates seem to be low enough that it would be a 'tax haven' for businesses, and indeed for individuals based on the cap on Income tax, but it isn't. Why not? Are there regulations in place preventing, for example, other UK individuals being domiciled in the IoM? Does it have some sort of restriction like individuals must spend 2/3 of the year on the island, or corporates must have 50% of staff based on the island, or something?