At last you can buy life insurance and get tax relief. The breakthrough results from changes in the Gordon Browns’ latest Budget speech but the tax relief is only available on a new special sort of life insurance policy. You can’t get tax relief on your existing life insurance policies.
These new policies exploit a loophole in the new Finance Bill and should result in savings of between 5% and 15% for standard taxpayers and around 30% for higher taxpayers.
But there are strings attached! You can’t add extras on to your life policy such as critical illness cover and the insured sum must be a fixed sum. Neither can you have a joint policy. Basically, it has to be a bog standard, level term, single beneficiary, life insurance policy.
Then there are more restrictions, but quite honestly, these are unlikely to pose a problem to anyone unless they’re very wealthy! You can’t have one of these special life policies if the annual contributions you pay into your pension plus the life insurance premiums, exceed 215,000 per year. Furthermore, if the value of your pension fund plus the payout on your life policy exceeds 1,500,000, the...