The tax year, four times over
The Other New Year
The Lord Chancellor's Breakfast is not a breakfast, and January is not the right month to sort out your money. The legal year starts in October, and so should everything else.
The Practising Certificate
The Journal
Plain-English writing on tax, pensions, reserves and protection at the self-employed Bar. Every piece is generic education (how the mechanics work, and what may matter), never personal advice or a recommendation.
What's left
The Pension That Becomes an Estate
For a decade the advice was to spend everything else first and leave the pension alone. From April 2027 that reverses, and a great many wills and nominations were written on the old assumption.
Silk, the bench, and stopping
Silk, and the Year After
The difficult second album is a well-documented phenomenon: the same talent, a larger audience, and considerably less time to work it out. Taking silk has a similar shape and rather better notice.
Money that isn't yours yet
Money That Isn't Yours Yet
A solicitor who mixes client money with office money faces the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. A barrister holding eighteen months of tax reserve in a current account faces nothing at all, which is not the same as it being fine.
The downside
Nobody Pays You to Be Ill
Every West End production carries understudies for parts that may never need them. The self-employed Bar is also a performing profession, and it has no equivalent arrangement at all.
Nobody is paying into a pension for you
The Ten Thousand Pound Ceiling
Beauvais Cathedral was built to be the tallest in Christendom. The choir vault collapsed in 1284 and it has never been finished. Ambition and structural limits do not always cooperate, which is roughly the position of a successful barrister and the annual allowance.
The tax year, four times over
The Slice You Forgot About
Britain lost eleven days in 1752, and the Treasury made sure it didn't lose the tax on them. That's why the tax year ends on 5 April. Another transitional adjustment is still working its way through the Bar's returns.
The tax year, four times over
Four Times a Year, Forever
The Exchequer kept its accounts on notched sticks for seven hundred years. Burning them destroyed the Palace of Westminster. Britain has changed how it records tax again, and the first deadline has already gone.