This article appears as part of the Money HQ newsletter.
Putting your family first
When you’re in your 40s and 50s, you can sometimes feel like you’re financing three generations, not just one. Many people find themselves caught in the ‘sandwich’ generation – responsible for both their children’s future financial wellbeing and that of their parents. At the same time, you may also want to consolidate your own investments so you have enough money to enjoy your own retirement.
Making a multi-generational financial plan
Nowadays, more of us are thinking about financial planning for the whole family. Money is moving up, down and across generations.
Once you start to think beyond your own generation, you may discover your mindset about money changing.
Today, we’ll look at the practical ways you can start thinking and planning multi-generationally.
Are you using all your tax allowances?
We all want to save ourselves some money. So it makes sense to take advantage of the tax allowances that are right in front of us. Especially the ones we’re most familiar with, such as the annual £20,000 ISA allowance.
ISAs are simple, tax-friendly savings accounts. Cash ISAs make a good, tax-efficient home for rainy-day funds, and Stocks & Shares ISAs can provide the potential for growth from your investments. Growth that can help you achieve longer-term ambitions, from buying a new home to affording a good school.
ISAs make good sense for cross-generational saving too. Putting money aside in an ISA for long-term care costs for yourself or your loved ones, can take a weight off everybody’s mind.
Children get a tax break too
When it comes to giving your children a head start, opening a Junior ISA (JISA) for them means they can build up a tax-efficient pot of money. The maximum you can pay into a JISA is £9,000 in any tax year. This can be accessed at 18, or rolled over into a standard ISA.
It’s a great way to encourage children to save and get into good money habits early. This money might help with driving lessons, or living costs at university, or even go towards a first house deposit.
Our teenagers will have very different working lives to us, with portfolio careers and flexible working patterns. Giving them a financial head start can put them in a strong, stable position when they’re starting out.
Read more:
Money HQ | Why do we find it hard to save for our future self?
Junior pensions and pension tax relief
Many of us don’t think about our pensions until we’re well-established in our careers. However, any parent or legal guardian can open a Junior Pension for their child as soon as they’re born. You can usually only put up to £2,880 a year into a Junior Pension, and the 20% pension tax relief bumps this up to £3,600.
Those tax benefits mean that even small amounts paid in regularly can grow significantly by the time they retire themselves. Most of the tax allowances and tax reliefs you can claim are on a use-it-or-lose-it basis, so planning ahead is important.
How to pay less Capital Gains Tax
People often forget about their annual Capital Gains Tax (CGT) exemption too, which can also make a difference to the amount of money you have to invest, or save. CGT is the tax that you pay on the profits if you sell a property or asset that has increased in value. The current 2024/25 Tax Year CGT exemption means that the first £3,000 of profit is tax-free.
The amount of CGT you’ll pay depends on your tax band and the asset you’ve made a gain on. It’s well worth taking financial advice on this, as it is a complex area of tax planning.
Get Money HQ straight to your inbox every Monday.
Getting on top of CGT can make a real difference to your family’s financial health.
We spend much of our lives earning, saving and investing. But just as important is knowing how and when to start spending your money or using it to help other members of the family. Moving money around the family may also mean you lower your eventual IHT bill too.
Ben Stark is a chartered financial planner with over a decade of experience advising businesses and families. He is partnered with St. James's Place Wealth Management.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here