So put on your poncho, whistle some atmospheric spaghetti western style music and prepare yourself for…

• Personal income tax allowances are on the up and will increase to £11,500 this April and are due to hit £12,500 by 2020. A greater personal allowance means you can earn more without any liability to tax – so this piece of news firmly sits in the ‘good’ pile.

• There was also some good news for businesses as corporation tax will reduce over the next few years with the first reduction, from 20% to 19%, happening in April with an expectation that it will be 17% by 2020.

• An individuals ISA allowance is also on the up going from £15,240 to £20,000.

• Transferring pensions overseas may be liable for a 25% tax charge but with a number of key exemptions. Hopefully this will mean that less individuals will get scammed into transferring their pensions abroad and reduce the amount of Pension scams which occur which is why we’re putting this firmly in the ‘Good’ bucket.

• Business owners who pay themselves a reasonable amount of dividends and those who own shares in a company will be negatively impacted by the reduction in the Tax Free Dividend allowance from £5000 to £2000.

• Whilst this is bad news the change highlights the need to ensure that you are extracting profits as tax efficiently as possible if you are the director of a limited company.

• This reduction will also have a probably unintended consequence for some investors especially those with dividend generating portfolios where there money isn’t held tax efficiently.

• Depending on the yield you could end up paying tax on the dividends with even a relatively small investment. If you’d like to see whether this has an impact on you feel free to get in touch.

• Due to increases in national insurance millions of self employed workers will end up paying, on average, an additional £240 per year. If that isn’t ugly I don’t know what is! Although the government would argue that those who earn less than £16,250 per annum will actually pay less.

• We also think the restrictions on many salary sacrifice arrangements employers use to retain, recruit and reward their best staff is a bit of an ugly move as we believe that rewarding employers which provide additional incentives to their workforce is the decent thing to do.